Many months ago in Part 14, I announced with needless flourish that I would return to the chronological flow in my narration. Life intervened, and I found myself unable to maintain the posting routine that I had set for myself. I now return to post with your kind indulgence. However, I feel the need to deviate from my stated intent to stick to the time-line of events. In any case there is no gripping story to tell; all I have to offer is a jumbled collection of impressions. There may not even be any audience; it may all be in my head, but that is another matter. For the present, I shall hang on to the soothing fiction that there is a readership out there. So no matter how we proceed, chronologically or thematically, be warned that tedium is likely to be your companion as you hack your way through my thicket of words.
In the next few episodes, I plan to profile some of the individuals I came across during my stay at Amritapuri. Although my interviews were impromptu and weak in direction, some subjects ended up leaving indelible impressions on my mind. On the whole, I came away with a deep respect for and serious appreciation of the ashram life. My objective in this exercise is going to be nothing more than simple portraiture. In meetings that were totally unscripted, I came across a number of individuals, some of whom I found to be remarkable. In fleshing out these impressions I plan, in the main, to place before you the same basic views that I experienced first hand. Expect occasional light commentary but no other garnish with this offering. Elements in these portraits that grate may be ascribed to the impurities in my lens ie. my own biases and judgments.
"De Darshan Ma, Devi Ma
Ambe Ma, Bhavani Ma"
I am listening to this bhajan (hymn) as I type. The invocation seems appropriate. I hope She will guide me through this post. I don't even know if I should be here. From pillar to post, that is the story of my life.
I was introduced to a brahmachari (male renunciate disciple). Let me call him X1. The ostensible reason for my being introduced to X1 was a degree of commonality in our countries of origin/domicile. He hailed from country A and was now settling down in India, while I had migrated out of India and was now domiciled in his erstwhile country.
X1 had been with Amma for nearly nine years at the time of my encounter with him. His age was about the same as mine in biological terms, but reckoned in Amma years, he was clearly my senior. On my probing, he told me the story of how he came to be with Amma. When he was 25ish in his original country, he was a regular young fellow. Whatever ‘regular’ is usually taken to mean. He had not been particularly inclined towards spirituality although his parents were old-line religious, Hindu traditionalists. He himself had led the ‘good’ life with girlfriends, alcohol, sports and other ‘fun’ things being the order of the day. There seemed to be no overt intellectual component to his personality either in his rendition of the past, or in the present where I stood absorbing his account. I envied his lack of intellectual baggage. For much of my life, I have forced myself to carry a ton of stuff - impressions, analysis, doubts, theories and what not. It is only recently that I have come to savour the virtues of travelling light, like a business passenger. Carry no check-in luggage, only a handbag with the bare essentials - that is the new paradigm, but I am still working towards it.
One fateful day, in the 25th year of his otherwise average and prototypical (of the average middle-class young adult in any country) life, X1 happened to accompany his family to Amma's darshan program in his city. X1 and his brother dropped their mother and sister off at the darshan venue, while they waited outside by their car. They were 'cool dudes' then and were not about to go in and hug any 'Guru' character. They barely even knew what was going on inside the program and did not really care. All they knew was, "Not our scene, man!", and that was enough.
The mother and sister had gone into the hall and there seemed no sign that they were about to come out any time soon. Smoking and fidgeting with his car-keys, X1 had been waiting for them to come out, so he could get on with his life. Growing more impatient, he put his cigarette out and walked towards the entrance of the hall, to try and locate his family and discover what was holding them up. At the precise moment that he entered the hall, he saw a diminutive woman dressed in a white sari enter with him. They were both poised to enter the hall at nearly the same instant. She looked at him and he looked at Her and that was it. She was Amma and he was zapped! He told me that in that very instant he knew that he just had to be with Her, that it was his destiny to follow Her. I marveled at how such solid certainty could descend unceremoniously on the shoulders of this young man, who had shown no signs up to that point of being a fit or even likely receptacle for such Divine Grace. This was a real-life example of life turning on a dime, an expression that I knew previously only in a hackneyed, proverbial sense.
The contrast between X1 and my own life could not be starker. There were similarities too, but we shall look at those later. Here I was, frittering my forces in efforts to understand the world, applying my puny intellect to squeeze a layman's understanding out of Bell's Theorem, how the quantum world decoheres into the classical world and such other arcana, and what did I have to show for all my intellectual exertions? Not a thing! And here on the other hand was X1, presenting a study in contrast. He might not care for Schrodinger's Cat or tingle at the thought that mind might not just reside in the brain but also be found in the body ('Molecules of Emotion' by Dr. Candace Pert. Psst, I don't want to preen here, I confess I have not read the book either) but he knew which end was up! I prostrated to X1, in my mind.
Om Amriteshwaryai Namah
