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This post is the perfect one to start the new year. I did watch the live broadcast of Presidential inauguration, including the meaningful recitation of the young poet, which marked the new phase that may affect the life of many Americans.

Looking at the picture of the post for the first time, the simple, innocent and indigenous looks of the woman in the painting as well as the incongruity of the jars and their contents was obvious. I did not appreciate that a jar was empty.

When I read the whole text of the post, I looked again and tried to explain the meaning of empty jar. My thoughts started running as usual, in philosophical and spiritual directions.

I recalled an episode in my life more than six decades ago. I had organized an art exhibition for the annual day celebrations of my medical college in 1958. One of my colleagues wanted to exhibit a painting and when he asked me for the theme, I left it for his own judgement. Next day his painting won the first prize. When all other exhibiters have painted something, this colleague of mine had painted just, ‘nothing’. It was a blank clean sheet of white paper signed in one corner and duly framed. It is the caption that captured the imagination of everybody, it simply said, ‘the soul’. Looking back now, I can decipher the message, that there is always a place for the apparent yet unseen ‘void’ everywhere, in time and space. In life too, the importance of nothing, leaving once in a while, the canvas of mind and body, clean, pure, unetched, and serene, cannot be underestimated. Perhaps that is the purpose of meditation, and even the definition of salvation, when mind is withdrawn from everything, just leaving the void which can be filled with the ecstasy of enlightenment, the brilliance of the supreme knowledge.

Coming to think of it, even The Creator has emphasized the importance of void. The creation confirms the concept of absolute versus relativity. If some-thing has been created, no-thing too must exist. The universe therefore has plenty of void, unknown, antimatter, dark matter, whatever scientists call it. The importance of known can only be appreciated in the background of unknown.

There is another dimension of the empty jar in the painting. It conforms the continuity. It shows that the destination or the end point is yet to be reached. There can never be an end to anything, there would always be something beyond to look for, to hope for, to live for. The void, the space, the empty jar indicates that living problems perhaps are better than the dead certainty.

Indian philosophy of the path of devotion too confirms the importance of journey more than that of reaching the destination. While the path of devotion makes you keep looking at, and thinking of, the Supreme Power, the path of knowledge leads to merging your identity with The Supreme. While later is The End, leaving no more empty jars, the former is The Path holding empty jars to fill with the knowledge and beauty of creation.

In many ancient cultures, it was a tradition to always leave one place unoccupied during feasts, one fully served plate set aside, for the ancestral souls, or as an offering for the unseen but omnipresent Supreme.

The emptiness, the void, the Shoonya, the concept of Zero or nothingness is perhaps the greatest gift of Indian culture to the world.

To answer the prompt for the reflection therefore, I would prefer to leave the last jar empty, that will give me the hope, the impetus, and the purpose in life, that of attempting to fill it with selective good thoughts and deeds, with positivity and joy.

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