To Clean or Not To(o) Clean

Shivpuri Colony

near BHU, Varanasi

I am on house arrest.  Not only from leaving India (Fulbright contract does not permit grantees to leave during the grant) but from leaving my house.  Since yesterday, the waters of Mother Ganga have moved inward and now they have come past my doorstep to the first step up.  Floods happen. In this part of Varanasi, the last huge flood that entered into homes here was twelve years ago.
One child tells me, “This is nothing for us Kashi-bashis. We have floods regularly. It is part of living near Ma Ganga.”

The water below beckons me to come swim in it. There is no electricity, and the humidity is very high. Noone wants to move in this heat. 

I decide to use the day to shift the energies by cleaning my home.

Since I was a younger child, I learned that cleanliness is next to Godliness. This struck me deeply somehow, and I began to do little projects. I would clean my closet, neatening all my little clothes and trying to fold them as they were kept in the big stores. I would empty out one of my mother’s drawers and replace everything, finding little boxes to organize all the things she kept, trying to figure out what they were.  Sometimes I would go to the kitchen, though parts of it were strictly forbidden. I would reorganize the flatware drawer, or organize my mother’s pan drawer, or her plastic containers collection.  This provided me some sense of order in the disorderly and somewhat chaotic world of the Naxalites in Bengal, and later in the chaos of being brown in a white America.

As I grew more conscious and spiritual, I learned that cleaning can be used to link to the powers of flow in the Universe. In a course during my days on Wall Street, called Cycles of Abundance, I learned that the Universe will bring in wealth where there is flow, where things are clean. The stagnant energy of a space that has remained untouched will not be kissed by the entry of the abundant gifts waiting from the Universe.

So I would clean one nook of my home each week. I noticed that if I did not clean one week, it seemed less successful. I toyed with all the psychologic, placebo, and superstitious possibilities. But somehow, I began to feel strongly that something was indeed happening with this cleaning ritual.

To test it, I asked my patients who were in financial distress to clean one nook per week and to see what happens. They would return, telling incredulous stories and glee, with what had dropped in from the Universe.  I began to assign homework to my students, to clean one nook per week or more frequently, and to be open to opportunities. They would return with stories of sudden additional income, return of lost items from random sources, invitations for trips, and job interviews. It was not always money, but it was the Abundance that money would be used to purchase.

The task of cleaning is so beneath many people. They consider their level and their status to be compromised if they carry a broom or wipe a floor. My mother would say, are they sooo clean, do they not excrete, why then do they expect that the Universe should clean up their mess?

The karma of cleaning is described in the ancient texts.  The yamas and niyamas describe how to be in union with our bodies and souls. In the niyamas we learn the principle of saucha, which is the conscious choice to be clean in the world, to clean around us, and to be pure inside in thought, and in practice.

There are two types of people in the world: those who are clean and those who are unclean, by choice or by ignorance.  As I wander the campus of BHU, I wonder if some sort of Gandhian movement could be started by those of us who are clean, an activism that would promote all of us to be aware.  I imagine young men and women marching the roads of the campus with brooms and jharus and shovels and cleaning cloths, demanding that BHU buildings, bathrooms, classrooms, staircases, and the grounds around it to be attended better, as they walk by napping peons, police officers, and building attendants, chanting, “If you don’t clean our campus, we will clean our campus. If you don’t clean our city, we will clean our city.  If you don’t clean our land, we will clean our land.”  I tell my new friend Jyoti of this idea; her friend scoffs at it, saying we can clean and she will watch and supervise.  She is the second type of people; we are the first. 

I ponder the resistance to clean that is so abundant in old cities.  Then, I lapse to a world I will never see again: Princeton University, New Jersey, one of the most beautiful campuses in the world, my father’s favorite place in the world.  We had walked the grounds one early morning when he taught me that only in the atmosphere, vision, and smell of a clean environment can the mind of a student be fully inspired and open. Only then can the Universe pour in its deep, abundant wealth. I carry this from my late father as I kneel down with my wet cleaning rag, sweat on my brow, and begin to mop the floors.