Part 24: Never Mind Nirvana, Try Panchakarma

I am going to skip ahead a couple of days in my itinerary, to when my solitary stay was terminated by the entry of a flat mate. I had been warned when I took the room, that I could have it to myself for the first three days, but that I would have to share it for the remaining couple of days of my stay. Notwithstanding my foreknowledge, I was still surprised when the appointed day rolled around and I heard a knock on my door in the morning. My guest had arrived.

I sized him up quickly. Thoughts of the unknown do inject some excitement into my imagination from time to time, but when it comes to sharing a room with some unknown character, I am a shade circumspect. I was a little leery of rooming with some weird wacko. Who knows what types there are out there? Anyway, he passed my instant visual examination and entered the room. He was tall and presentable with short blond hair, not at all scruffy looking. I learnt that he worked as an air traffic controller in a Scandinavian country. I am tempted to give him a glamorous name like Thor*, but my dear critics tell me that I play around too much with words and other literary tricks, so I shall stick to the insipid algebraic notation I have been using so far, and call him X4 instead.
(* The Vedic-Indian counterpart of the Norse Thor is probably Indra)

Well, that was interesting. My life must have passed through the airspace and hands of several air traffic controllers over the years, but I had never actually shared a room with one. I wondered what brought him to Amritapuri. I asked him and sat back, expecting to hear some story connecting him with Amma. It turned out he had not even heard of Amma - the Satguru, Saint and Mother to millions. By virtue of my self-declared status as sadhak and devotee, I fancied that I had a special spiritual connection with Amma, but this man’s connection with Amma, it transpired, was merely physical. He was there for Ayurvedic rejuvenation therapy, I was told. He had done his due diligence on the internet and discovered that the panchakarma clinic in the ashram at Amritapuri was the best value for money proposition available at that time. I mentally awarded myself 10 brownie points for being more evolved than he was. A not so Humble Worm after all!

There was only one bed in the room which I had already occupied. There was a spare mattress. Although I didn’t really want to take the trouble of transferring my bed linen to the mattress on the floor, I politely offered to swap places. He was nice enough not to take up my offer, so I stayed put while he unpacked around his mattress. Later on, when I learnt that he was many years my senior in age, I felt bad at my churlishness. Hindu tradition inculcates deep deference for age, and my self-indulgent behavior was clearly in flagrant violation. But the damaging deed was done and the bad karma already incurred, so I decided to move on. After a shower, he was ready to step out of the room to track down the panchakarma clinic on the ashram grounds. I had a rough idea where it was located and guided him according to my knowledge. So we stepped out together, then I went my way and he went his.

Late that evening, after dinner, we met up again in our room. We were both reclining on our mattresses, preparing to hunker down for the night. Some small talk was exchanged. I gathered that he was 50 years old and divorced. I commented that he did not look that old at all. At first glance, I had put him down at 30+ but even later, when to my mild surprise**, he stripped down to his underpants preparatory to sleep, the sight of ever so slightly sagging muscles did not cause me to raise my estimate of his age by more than 10 years, to around 40. Although I had intended it as a purely factual observation, he took my comment on his relatively youthful appearance as a compliment and seemed genuinely pleased. He was definitely very fit. There was no doubt about that. No flab and no tummy tumbling over the waist.
(** because I rarely, if ever, sleep in my underwear and definitely not when I am in company, unless it is with the wife, in which case, clothing is occasionally optional. But, I figured they probably did things differently in the West, or at least in Scandinavia.)

He told me about his panchakarma experience^. Apparently, they make you drink gallons of oil and clarified butter (ghee) and also pump oil through all your orifices. Then you have to evacuate all the oil you were made to take in, by throwing up and moving your bowels. You get to do this many times. Then when you’re totally pooped (oops, pun unintended), you get a vigorous massage in a tub of oil, I think. With the possible exception of the massage, the rest of the program didn’t sound like much fun to me, but my Nordic friend seemed to have relished the experience. It made him feel good, and his body was really toned up, he said. It was interesting, that I had a seemingly higher reluctance to undertake this kind of wet Ayurvedic treatment, despite being immersed in the tradition, relative to X4, who was clearly delighted to drown in a tub of oil, even if, traditionally in super cold Scandinavia, they probably don’t see a tub that often. On second thoughts, let us upgrade that from interesting to weird. It is like that other weird thing in my life: although I spent several years in Kerala, a scant few hours away from Amma, I never knew or cared about Her while I was there. I had to go several thousand miles away overseas, before I met Her and developed a longing for Her. Who can say why things happen the way they do? Every child asks such questions but few adults have answers.
(^ This is also described in a book titled Amma & Me written by an Amma devotee called Manoharan Chace who lives in Amritapuri.)

Om Amriteshwaryai Namah

Part 23: There's A Green Light In Your Head!

Did I suggest somewhere in the previous episode that X3 resembled a kondatum, a dried twig? Perhaps I ought to take back that characterization and replace it with milch cow, as my hapless protagonist can surely be milked for another story at least.

I happened to quiz X3 on his sadhana (spiritual practices) and he told me that he had been practicing kriya yoga (a breathing technique used in meditation, see 1 & 2 for more information) for very many years. He said that in the years when he had been laid low by unspecified afflictions, kriya was the thing that kept him going and eventually returned his health to a semblance of normality. I filed this information away under Health Science in my brain, after briefly toying with and rejecting the idea of filing it under Humour. The takeaway lesson seemed to be: No matter how bad it gets, don’t stop breathing! Obviously, the irony and hilarity of this moral was not lost on me.

I enquired whether his longstanding sadhana had resulted in any unusual states of consciousness. I asked him with a wink whether he had come across Nirvikalpa Samadhi yet, or perhaps that other puppy Savikalpa Samadhi. He took my ribbing in good humour and said that he was far away from such exalted states. However, he claimed that he did have one unusual ability. My curiosity piqued, I asked him what it was. He told me that he could see a green light in the area of the Ajna Chakra (a spiritual energy center roughly correlated with the center of the forehead). I told him that was really cool and tried to find out more about the nature of this green light. Was it bright like a halogen lamp or was it like an LED (light emitting diode)? I asked him if he could see my green light as we spoke. He clarified that the vision only appeared after he entered a state of deep meditation, about 20 minutes into his routine. Furthermore, he could not see anyone else’s green light, he sheepishly explained; he could only see the one in his own forehead and that too when he had his eyes closed.

What a bummer! I would have been really tickled to obtain third-party verification of my third eye. I suppose it was not to be. There was no real reason to expect that encounter to be very different from the general run of my life which had been anything but a smooth drive through green lights. The reality was red lights and traffic violations with the odd DUI thrown in. For the most part, my life’s journey has felt like riding the wrong way through a one-way street. I just sit behind the wheel in terror, not knowing when I am going to be blown up by oncoming traffic.

The most recent example of a red light is the removal of the one constant in my post-Amma life. Under severe work pressure, I have been forced to discontinue my meticulous practice of japam (chanting of a mantra). I used to do over 40 malas (rosaries) per day and had just crossed what seemed to be a landmark: 5 million in cumulative japams but Amma appears to have had enough of my counting games. With a grumble, I now move to a new regime where I will perform japam on an ad hoc basis, whenever time permits. No more counting. No longer will I need to update the cute little spreadsheet, complete with bells and whistles in the form of graphs and diagnostic statistics, that I used to maintain to track my score. Yesterday, I closed the account with a red line at the bottom and a note saying “Account terminated”. I feel like a child whose favourite toy has just been snatched away.

I am unsure whether the loss of this prop represents an advance or a decline. All I can do now, I suppose, is to stop counting and start chanting in every free moment. May ad hoc turn into ad infinitum by Her grace.

Om Amriteshwaryai Namah

Part 22: Lalitambika Knocks A Lady Of The Night

After that tragi-comic excursion into my unexpressed (to X3) thoughts, we return to the main story. We observed how, half a decade of construction notwithstanding, the man’s delicate defenses were swept away by the deluge of desire. He drew up a plan to have a romp, a sexcapade outside the ashram. I found his choice of Kurukshetra (specifically, the theater of war in the epic Mahabharata and, in broader terms, the allegorical battlefield where we all fight our inner demons) a tad intriguing. I could not conclude whether it was a surviving shred of principle (a reluctance to commit the ultimate sacrilege on hallowed ground) or mere pragmatism (the ashram, after all, is no nightclub) that drove his choice of locale.

The decision made, he waited for his chance. It was soon time for Amma and Her group to set off on another tour. X3 planned to take advantage of the lighter workload^* at the ashram in Amma’s absence to push his plot forward. (^*That was then. These days, there may be no lean season anymore with the exponential growth in ashram activity, including tsunami relief and other projects.) He was a little squeamish about revealing the finer details of his scheme. Not that I pried. His reticence was probably a good thing; it may have spared me a fight with another fit of laughter. Nevertheless, I guessed that a night on the town with a strumpet or something on those curvaceous lines was what he had in mind.

His unfolding tale made me ponder the link between desire and action. Desire, truly is the precursor to action. Action ingrained becomes habit. Habit hardens into drive. Drives accumulated over lifetimes turn into vasanas. What a tangled ball of string!
A quotation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5 seems apposite:
You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.

Here was our hero – a man with an idea. There was, of course, a twist to the tale. Unlike Archimedes, who discovered the physical principle of buoyancy, our protagonist was poised, paradoxically, to illustrate the law of spiritual submergence.

What force can stop an idea whose time has come? An Act of God? We shall see...

On the day before Amma’s scheduled departure, She met with all the permanent residents of the ashram on an individual basis. This was the cherished moment of the year for most residents, their personal darshans with Amma being normally limited to a maximum of one or two per year. Our man with a mission was also looking forward to the encounter, but for a different reason. He wanted to see the beloved Avatar (incarnation) off double quick, presumably in order to launch his own incarnation, in the red light quarter of some neighboring town. I should stress that his planned departure from the ashram mores, was less a case of disrespect or rebellion, and more a matter of temporary insanity. The blinding effect of untrammeled desire must have given rise to a kind of tunnel vision, focusing on the plan at hand to the exclusion of everything else.

Not that he loved our Lalitambika^* less, but that he loved his other ladies^** more!
[Notes: (1) ^*Appellation for the Divine Mother (2) ^**Of the night]

Amma was receiving Her children one by one. When his turn arrived, X3 strode nonchalantly forward, little imagining that this was to be an audience like no other. Instead of the gentle banter that had been the staple of his previous meetings, he was battered by the biggest shock of his life. Amma gripped his skinny arm above the elbow and shook him like a leaf. X3 enacted it for my benefit, by trying to shake me the same way, but he only ended up shaking himself. I am quite scrawny as well, but next to the slightly built X3, I loom like Muhammad Ali, which may explain why the shaking recoiled.

Amma impaled him with a piercing glare and said, in Malayalam:
Eda e ashramam makkalude choreyum verpum kondu indakide anu
Ethine nashpikyan sammadikilya
Nende manas neyandrikyan pattilyengil ivude vittu pogam
Translation:
This ashram was built with the blood and sweat of my children
I will not allow you to destroy it
If you cannot control your mind, you may leave

It was like being struck by lightning. A billion volt bolt burning your brain. I imagined it must have felt like that. Even listening to his story second hand, I felt a current move up my spine. Needless to mention, our friend was stunned witless. As he walked out of the darshan room, he realized that he had just been operated on by a cosmic neurosurgeon. There was nothing to say. More important, there was no longer anything to do. His carefully fleshed out plan was reduced to a heap of ash on the pyre that Kali^* lit. But, wonder of wonders, he actually felt good about it! (^*Another name for the Divine Mother)

As a sadhak (spiritual aspirant) struggling to gain control over a clutch of unruly vasanas, I have generally believed that it is necessary to undergo the pain of renunciation, in order to win the big prize of nirvana. In the light of this story, I had the insight that it is not the giving up but the constant grasping that hurts. Of course, it was only a momentary flash of wisdom that would not last. For the most part the sensory express chugs smugly along, but once in a while it takes a curve too quickly and gets thrown off the rails. At such moments, the heaven of the senses is revealed to be hell.

Here then was the story I had longed to hear. X3 had provided me with direct testimony of Amma’s omniscience. Given the clandestine nature of his enterprise, he had not breathed a word of it to anyone. There was no way for anyone to know what he was up to, without tapping into his thoughts. If true, his story rocked for sure. When the early euphoria from listening to his remarkable account subsided, I felt the need for a philosophical excavation. In subsequent episodes, if appetite exists, I may examine the meaning I have mined in the years since then.

Om Amriteshwaryai Namah

Part 21: The Urge To Mate Doth Dominate

After much rest and reflection, an itinerant devotee returns to the trail. In the intervening months, Mother has written a few more words in this loiterer’s book of life. Her words do not yet sum up to a full sentence; not even a subordinate clause, barely enough for a phrase perhaps. Despite Her terseness, a hint of intent is now apparent to this actor, an insignificant extra in Her cosmic production. If one believes that the merest doodles of Mother’s Mont Blanc (metaphorical pen) represent entire epics in the lives of Her animations, my attempt to decode the Divine hieroglyph may not be totally unfounded. The task would be a lot easier though, if Her script were less scarce. Did I just wish for a sentence? How dumb can this devotee get? Isn’t life sentence enough?!

I’m done waffling. This fool may not be able to approach, even asymptotically, the succinct speech of Sakshal Saraswati (verily the Goddess of Learning) but he will try not to drool.

Continuing in the surreal vein of the previous episode, this one and the next will record a somewhat magical meeting with another ashramite, a gentleman - let us call him X3. In the course of my talk with X3, I grumbled about the lack of any direct demonstrations of Mother’s omniscience or other extra-sensory powers in my life. X3 responded by sharing a snippet from his story that spoke to my concern. Our gentleman friend had been living in the ashram with his wife for close to a decade. Both in their late sixties, husband and wife were wedded as much to seva (service) as to each other. Their advanced age and the Amritapuri force field (only half tongue-in-cheek here) probably accounted for the bulk of their dedication to service, but the fact that they were childless may also have had something to do with it. While barrenness was no issue (pardon the evil pun), X3 did have another problem, and the story he proceeded to narrate revolved around this.

His tale began with a dose of personal history. He told me that he had led a dissolute life as a young man. He said that he was too ashamed to talk about his many vices, but that chronic womanizing and drinking had cast dark shadows over his life, in early adulthood. In middle age, the excesses of his youth caught up with him and he was laid low by serious health problems. He declined to spell out the nature of his ailments (my guess: some horrible STDs), but indicated that they were severe enough to force a change in his lifestyle. The spirit was still willing but the flesh was too weak, apparently.

He trudged on for another twenty years, fighting illness and recidivism. The battle was stiff and results were mixed, however, until he finally landed in the A-Zone (A=Amma) at the age of 60 or so. From that point onwards, the force field took over and the tide turned. Over the next five years, as he buried himself in work, he found his noxious old vasanas (tendencies) being slowly extinguished. Despite the glacial rate of change, the transformation was near total. In his words: “You cannot imagine what kind of a man I used to be (depraved) and I could not have imagined the kind of man I have now become (reformed).” He put it all down to Mother’s grace and in response to my expressions of doubt, he went on to illustrate the palpable nature of this grace, underlining the idea that it was not wispy, wishful thinking.

After around five years of the reformed life, in accord with the guidelines for householder devotees including celibacy on campus, X3 fell victim to an unexpected revival of his most vicious vasana – the urge for illicit intercourse. It began as a mildly mischievous thought, a mere ripple on the surface of the ocean, but quickly turned into an unstoppable tsunami of desire. The pain was so poignant in the description of his predicament, that I could not but sympathize with the miserable fellow. After all, I know from my own experience that the powerful L force (lust) is one of the fundamental forces of nature, ranking right up there with the other four forces (strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetic and gravitational forces for those fond of physics) in the Unified Field theory. And while I subscribe, in a general way, to the theory of ojas – the idea that sexuality and spirituality are antithetical to each other, and have made definite, if slow^* progress in my tussle with testosterone, I can surely empathize with the plight of millions who may presumably be moving in the opposite direction. (^*At the rate of scant inches per year, doubtless I will be able to eradicate the erotic from my consciousness in a zillion lifetimes.)

Despite my sincere efforts to commiserate mentally with X3’s difficult situation, I came close to convulsing with laughter when I tried to visualize our friendly sexagenarian as a sexpot. I thought, in Malayalam:
Aal kanda kondatum bole irikyum
Pakshe kalikyan takkali venam
Malayalees, I trust, will get my drift though my metaphors are unconventional. A rough translation for non-Malayalees is as follows:
The man looks like a dried twig
But wants to play with a juicy tomato

Although my sides were about to split, I realized that laughter would have been cruel at that juncture. With superhuman effort, I managed to avert an explosion of mirth. I forced myself to remember that while the body ages, desire does not.
A verse from Bhartrihari’s Vairagya Shatakam makes the point:
Balirbhimukhamakrantam palitenankita shiraha
Gatrani shithilayante trishnaika tarunyayate
Translation: There are wrinkles on my face because of old age. All the hair on my head has turned white and my hands and legs have turned loose and feeble. But my hope is like a young and beautiful damsel. Everything else may cease and get destroyed but hope and desire rage eternally young.

And in his Shringara Shatakam, Bhartrihari cuts, through rotting flesh, to the very bone with:
Krishah kaanah khanjah shravanrahitah
Puchchviklo prani puyaklinnah krimikulashtairaavrittanuh
Kshudhaa kshaamo jeernah pitharakkapaalaarpigatah
Shunimanveti shvaa hatmapi nihantyev madanah
Translation: Truly, Kamadeva (God of lust) does not spare even the dead. Even an old dog which is weak, one-eyed, lame, single-eared, bereft of a tail and afflicted with wounds full of pus and infecting worms, cannot contain its carnal desires and stalks a bitch throughout the day.

Om Amriteshwaryai Namah