As I stood outside the souvenir shop, conversing with X1, I was struck by his intensity. Upto that point, I had not come across any other ashramite with the kind of intensity that was evident in his mien. I don't remember exactly how it came up, but at some point in our conversation, we touched on the subject of death. X1 said to me with considerable feeling, "Death is a joke. If anyone dies here, we have more than enough people to take the body out to the beach and cremate it, after performing the last rites." In his telling, death was not even a comma, much less the full stop that most people take it to be. I did not find his view or sentiment particularly jarring as the subject of death had come up in my own ruminations, over the years. The status of death, in my view, has evolved from an early glorification of its false potential as an antidote to the misery of life, to something bordering on irrelevance. X1 seemed to be on the same page as I was.
Later, on my return from India, I happened to mention X1 in a meeting with some local acquaintances (members of the Amma satsang). I was giving them a brief account of my visit to Amritapuri and told them that I met up with so and so from their country. Thereupon, I was treated to the view that X1 was a somewhat crazy fellow. "Do you know, he has even asked Amma for death?!" That was the clincher, in their view. Anyone who was not absolutely brimming over with the sheer delight of living must be a total lunatic. Edgar Allan Poe would never have penetrated their stony hearts with his famous lines:
Thank Heaven! The crisis,
The danger, is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last -
And the fever called "Living"
Is conquered at last.
With some effort, I managed to repress my contempt for their view and even feigned an expression of mild incredulousness. I asked, "Did he really do that?" But in my mind, I was not surprised at all. There was so much suffering in the world and a modicum of that was reflected in my own life. It was not hard for me to visualize that people might be driven to despair by their circumstances, even to the point of desiring death. I found myself at odds with their rating of X1 as inferior to some of the other characters (not yet discussed) who were seen to be more conventional and also 'cool'. Those other characters, like my acquaintances in the present instance, appeared to be practitioners of a brand of spirituality that involved bhajans (devotional singing), 'hanging out' and other soft options, with near zero effort aimed at integrating Amma's teachings into their daily lives. In my deeply felt but diplomatically unarticulated view, this kind of superficial subscription to spirituality was only marginally better than being hooked to MTV.
I decided immediately that X1 had to be a good guy, my kind of fellow, if these folks did not like him. I also guessed that the converse was likely to hold good ie. it might be a good idea for me to give their favorites a wide berth. I had nothing but the deepest respect for people such as X1, who engaged deeply with the questions of life and death, who experimented with their own lives out of scientific curiosity, with utter nonchalance and for whom spirituality was not a fad. On the other hand, my regard for 'devotees', who jetted from Japan to Switzerland to sing with Amma's choir but exhibited only pettiness in their daily lives was not very high, to put it mildly.
I realize I am being totally judgmental here but I have never claimed unity with Brahman (the superset of everything). However, I would like to qualify my judgments by pointing to the possibility of error. There is a possibility, however remote, that my reading of these people is totally wrong and they are really Jnanis/Bhaktas (those who have attained self-realization through intelligence/devotion) of a high order, who have just done an exceptionally good job of camouflaging themselves. If that is the case, I am guilty of gross ignorance and misrepresentation.
Om Amriteshwaryai Namah
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