X1 spoke to me of Amma with profound reverence. His veneration of Her, while unostentatious, was clearly very deep. When he spoke of Amma, his eyes would look into the distance and he would take a deep breath. At the risk of a little exaggeration, it may be said that I almost sensed the exhalation of incense from his nostrils; his homage to Amma was that vivid. He seemed to have virtually integrated Amma into his breathing. This was pranayama (yogic breath control) in practice, as far as I was concerned.
We made some small talk. He told me about his conditions of life as a brahmachari (renunciate) in the ashram. Life was obviously very, very hard. I asked if the food available to the inmates was the same as that available to the general public. I learnt that the Spartan fare that I had condescended to eat, in the spirit of 'slumming' while at the ashram, had been his staple for the last nine years. I was impressed by the austerity that implied. Clearly, the tyranny of taste had been overthrown in this territory. I told him about my own feeble (by comparison) attempts to introduce some austerity into my eating habits by turning vegetarian.
He responded to that by telling me that I should take care of my health and not neglect it. He described how he had been laid low by a recurring series of alimentary ailments, and how, over the years, he moved from a state of excess body weight to a state of near emaciation. His concern for me seemed to extend beyond mere politeness. He spoke to me like a brother. I don't know whether his compassionate attitude was a generalized phenomenon, or whether it was the result of some adventitious affection for me. Either way, I was touched by his solicitude.
His impressive spiritual credentials were trickling into my consciousness. I had a dim perception of some of his qualities - compassion, humility, focus, intensity and above all, Bhakti (devotion). Much later, on reflection, I would wonder at the miracle that Amma had wrought in this instance, transforming a man of the world into a man of God. Nevertheless, at that early stage, the realization was not fully embedded in my awareness, and I repaid the kindness of this spiritual brother with a coarse and insensitive question. I asked him: "You have been in this spiritual business for so many years now, you must be on Swami (monk) track, no?"
The moment the words slid out of my mouth, I realized that I had just been an incredible lout. Shame seeped out of all the pores in my body and fell to the ground in torrents but brother X1 did not seem to notice. The crassness of my query could not have been lost on him, but there was a deeper irony behind it that he could not have grasped, without some intimate knowledge of my situation. Here I was, a loser par excellence (to coin an oxymoron), a pot calling the kettle black. Actually, it was worse than that. I was a sooty pot all right but X1 was no kettle, more like a shining diamond in his context. I was guilty of applying a worldly model of success and advancement, a model that I have never mastered, to the spiritual arena. In my professional life, I had raised stagnation to the status of high art, having passed 10 years without securing a single promotion.
In his response, X1 magnanimously bypassed my insensitivity. Or perhaps, he was so far removed from the worldly paradigm, that my slip did not even register on his thinking. I found X1's reply to be illuminating on several levels.
Om Amriteshwaryai Namah
No comments:
Post a Comment