Part 5: Meeting Ms. Maya

Once I had made my big decision (to clean or not to clean, that had been the question), I went about executing it. I swept all the rubbish into the corner where the termite mound was located and cleared some habitable space for myself. It took me over an hour but it was not physically exhausting. Just tedious. Then I entered my version of hell - the terrible toilet and went about cleaning a bucket and broken mug in it. I also poured lots of water all over the place to clean it up, since I had no brush or other implements, to do the kind of job that really needed to be done. It occurred to me that things could have been a lot worse in a dozen different ways, and that I should be grateful for being spared a higher level of difficulty. For instance, what if there had been no water in the tap? Having grown up in parts of India where water is rationed, I was well aware that 24-hour water supply is only a dream for many people. At the end of it, I washed myself and then returned to the room.

Using newspaper sheets to cover the ground and some of my clean clothes (the change I had brought along) for a pillow, I laid down and prepared to sleep. My earlier feelings of inadequacy were gone and in their place now was a quiet pride. I had done it! Old Mr. Ego rearing his head again in a different guise: the hurt hen had morphed into a confident rooster. What a transformation in my attitude and outlook an hour of working had wrought! This had to be Maya (illusion). As I lay there musing, I noticed that I was starting to get attached to the very same room I considered to be a dung-heap not so long ago. Starting to think of it as "my room" even. The termite mound was still there in the corner but some of the cobwebs in my mind had cleared.

I went over all that had happened so far, in my mind, with a view to uncovering any lessons that might be embedded in my experience. The main theme that came to mind was: Talk is cheap; action is what counts. As I explained earlier, I have often made much of my being a sadhak around the house. Most of the time when I talk up my sadhana in this manner, I am kidding, but I now realized that there was something rotten at the core of my humour. It was really the ego, masquerading as humour, that had encrusted around the seed crystal of my pride in renunciation, my pride in being more spiritual than those around me. I guessed that while I had been cleaning my room and toilet, Amma had been doing the same with the toilet in my mind which, as far as I knew then, had never been cleaned before.

I also felt, at some level, that none of what had been happening in my life in the run up to this visit to Amritapuri was an accident. I had a strong sense then, which reappears from time to time, that the seemingly chaotic events in my life were all part of a deterministic scheme, a plan. Of course, it was also abundantly clear that I was several yugas (eons) away from figuring out what that plan might be. With these thoughts and others, I dozed off, imagining my head placed at Her feet, as is my normal practice.

Om Amriteshwaryai Namah