What relevance does the customary Lighting of the lamp in the Puja Room have in my life?

My mom was a working woman too, which essentially implies that she too had to wake up early in the morning, prepare and pack my breakfast, lunch, evening snack et al before she could light the lamp in the Puja room and dash to her work station located at least an hour’s drive away! Crux of the matter – Not a day or dusk has passed by without the customary lamp being lit.

The loving mom that she is, she struggles hard to sell the idea of lighting the lamp to me. I don’t criticize her notion, but I am totally unconvinced by her clamor of the ritual’s Benefit & the associated ‘Reason to Believe’. Her claim that it is important for us to remember God and hence light the lamp or that it is done to ward of the evil spirits falls flat in my ears.

That is when the reasoning that I had read in a book written by Swami Chinmayananda ‘Why do we? In Indian culture’ rushed to my mind’s forefront.

The Customary lamp captured on an evening at my abode
'Just the way, the light spreads overpowering darkness,
knowledge must too, overpowering ignorance.' 

‘Light symbolizes knowledge, and darkness ignorance. Knowledge removes ignorance just as light removes darkness. Also knowledge is a lasting inner wealth by which all outer achievement can be accomplished. Hence we light the lamp to bow down to knowledge as the greatest of all forms of wealth.

Why not light a bulb or a tube light? That too would remove darkness. But the traditional oil lamp has a further spiritual significance. The oil or ghee in the lamp symbolizes our vaasanas or negative tendencies and the wick, the ego. When lit by spiritual knowledge, the vaasanas get slowly exhausted and the ego too finally perishes.

A single lamp can light hundreds more just as a man of knowledge can give it to many more. The brilliance of the light does not diminish despite its repeated use to light many more lamps. So too knowledge does not lessen when shared with or imparted to others. On the contrary it increases in clarity and conviction on giving. It benefits both the receiver and the giver.'

The core of the tradition has been to educate commoners to respect knowledge & wisdom by comparing it with the true natural source of light. Somehow, in their quest to preserve the traditions, my ancestors seem to have forgotten the true purpose of the tradition itself. Can a man who has lost his identity stay on for long? Similarly, the tradition which has lost its essence when being passed through generations (like in Chinese whispers) fails to gain its importance or relevance in our everyday life today.

I haven’t been lighting a lamp, but I now know what the act tries to signify and convey & to me now that I know the science behind it, I find the act highly rich and extremely enriching in this silently competitive world. I shall hence try to light the lamp once in a while because, I believe that the anomaly it offers can be brilliantly used to explain the significance of knowledge & Humility.

I want the tradition to stay alive ;Who knows, someone else like me , centuries from today might get intrigued by the act and decide to decode its true meaning , just the way I did !!