Fw: [MillionPaths] Anna-Marie - a wonderful grace story

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- viorica w

MillionPaths ; NamoRamana

Monday, July 28, 2003 5:11 AM

[MillionPaths] Anna-Marie - a wonderful grace story

Harriet: All this talk about Ramana Maharshi has reminded me of

something else that I wanted to ask. We started off this afternoon

with a question about why Maharaj isn't the topic of memoirs, at

least book length ones. A few people have written short accounts, but

I have never come across a full-length book about living with him.

Many of the Ramana Maharshi books are filled with stories of

miraculous events that seemed to be taking place around him. Many of

his devotees tell stories of how faith in Bhagavan changed their

lives or somehow, in an improbable way, transformed their destiny. I

know that Bhagavan himself disowned all personal responsibility for

these events, but that didn't stop people writing them down and

attributing them to Bhagavan's grace.

I suppose my question is, did similar things happen around

Maharaj, and if they did, why did no one ever bother to write them

down?

David Godman:

I don't know how common such events were, but I know that they did

happen. And if similar things did happen to other people, I really

don't know why those who know about these events don't want to write

them down.

Let me redress the balance by telling one very long and very

lovely story.

At some point in the late 1970s I was asked to take a South

American woman called Anna-Marie to Bombay and look after her because

she hardly spoke a word of English. Her native language was Spanish

and I think she lived in Venezuela, but I have a vague memory that

this wasn't her nationality. I was planning to go to Bombay anyway to

see Maharaj, so I agreed to take her and look after her. Very early on

in our journey – we were still in Madras – I realised that I had been

given a bit of a basket case to look after. Anna-Marie was completely

incapable of looking after herself, and was incredibly forgetful.

Before we had even managed to get on the train to Bombay, she managed

to lose all her money and her passport. By retracing our steps, we

eventually tracked them down to a bookstore near the station.

Miraculously, the manager had found the purse and had kept it with

him in case we came back looking for it.

A few hours into our train journey from Madras to Bombay

Anna-Marie went to the bathroom. On Indian trains that means a squat

toilet which is just a hole in the floor with footrests on either

side of it. Anna-Marie was sitting there, doing her business, when

the train jolted on the tracks. Her glasses fell off and disappeared

down the hole in the floor. It turned out to be her only pair, and

without them she was more or less blind. I realised this later in the

day when we stopped at a station further down the line. Anna-Marie was

standing on the platform when the train started to pull out of the

station. She made no move to get on. When I realised what was

happening, I jumped off and pushed her onto the moving train. I had

already realised that she was having trouble seeing things, but I

didn't realise how bad things really were until I discovered that she

couldn't see a moving train, with about twenty-five carriages, that

was about ten feet in front of her. I knew that my first priority,

once we got to Bombay, would be to get her a new pair of glasses. I

remembered that there was an optician quite near to Maharaj's house.

I had noticed it on previous trips while I was waiting to catch a bus

to go downtown.

Early the next morning, as soon as the shop opened, I took her in

to get her eyes tested and to get her some glasses. The test took a

long time, partly because of Anna-Marie's deficiency in English, and

partly because the optician couldn't work out what her prescription

was.

After about half an hour he came out and said, 'She needs to go

to a specialist eye hospital. I can't find out with my instruments

here what her prescription might be. There is something seriously

wrong with her eyes, but I don't know what it is. Take her to "Such

and Such" Eye Hospital.'

Whatever the name was, I had never heard of it. He started to

give me directions, but since I didn't know Bombay, I wasn't able to

follow them. This was when the first 'miracle' of the day happened.

It was to be the first of many.

'Don't worry,' said the optician, 'I'll take you there myself.'

He closed his store – there were no assistants to man the counter

while we were away – and we set off on a walk across Bombay. We must

have walked over a mile before we finally arrived at the hospital. He

took us to the office of an eye surgeon he knew there and explained

that his instruments were not sophisticated enough to work out what

was wrong with Anna-Marie's eyes. He then left us and went back to

his store. I have encountered many acts of kindness in all the years

I have been in India, but I still marvel at this shop owner who

closed down his store for a couple of hours and then went on a

two-mile round-trip walk just to help us out.

The eye surgeon set to work on Anna-Marie's eyes. Even he was

impressed by how complicated her eyes were. He tried her out on

several machines and gadgets, but like the optician before him, he

failed to come up with a prescription.

'What is wrong with this woman?' he asked. 'How did she end up

with eyes like these?'

I shrugged my shoulders. 'I have no idea. I barely know her and

she hardly speaks any English.'

We went off to a different part of the hospital that, to my

untrained eye, seemed to have bigger and fancier machines. This new

combination of equipment finally came up with a reading for

Anna-Marie. Our curiosity had been piqued by this long complicated

process so we tried through sign language and the few English words

she knew to discover how Anna-Marie's eyes had come to be so

peculiar. After a few false starts she realised what we were asking.

It turned out that she had fallen out of a building in South America

and had landed on her face. Having watched her behaviour and

activities in the previous two days, I found this to be an entirely

believable scenario. I don't think I have ever come across someone

who was so accident-prone.

Her eyes had been damaged in the fall and had been stitched in

various places. As a result of this surgery there were places on the

eyeball that had a very eccentric curvature. This accounted for the

first optician's inability to work out what she needed. Even the big

eye hospital took almost an hour to figure out what she needed.

I got to talking to the eye surgeon and discovered that we had a

mutual acquaintance in Tiruvannamalai. In fact, he knew quite a few

of Bhagavan's devotees. Like the optician before him, he decided to

take us under his wing.

'Where will you go to get this prescription fulfilled?' he asked.

'Well, the first man we went to, the one who brought us here, was

very helpful to us. I would like to go back to him to give him the

business since he was so kind to us.'

'No, no,' said the surgeon, 'he only has a little shop. He won't

be able to fulfill an order like this. It is too complicated. I will

take you to the biggest optician in Bombay.'

He too closed down his office and took us on another trip across

Bombay. As we walked through the front door of the store he was

taking us to, everyone jumped to attention. He was clearly a very

respected figure in the eye world.

'These are my friends,' he announced, waving at us. 'They have a

difficult prescription to fulfill. Please do it as quickly as

possible because this woman can't see anything without glasses. She

is virtually blind.'

He left us in the hands of the manager of the store and went back

to the hospital. The manager's big, beaming smile lasted as long as it

took him to read the prescription. He put it down on the counter and

started to talk to us very apologetically.

'Normally, we keep lenses for every possible prescription here in

the store. We have a huge turnover, so we can afford to make and keep

lenses that we have no customers for. Sooner or later somebody will

come and buy them, and everyone appreciates the fact that they can

get what they want on the spot, without having to wait for anything

to be made. But this prescription is such a ridiculous combination,

no one would ever think of making it or keeping it. Until I saw it

myself I would have guessed that nobody in the world had eyes that

corresponded with these numbers. We will have to make a special order

and that will take a long time because the glass grinders are out on

strike at the moment. Even if they go back to work, it will probably

be weeks before we can get them to make an order like this because

they already have a lot of pending orders. I'm sorry, I can't help

you, and nobody else in the city will be able to help you either

because this prescription is just too unusual for anyone to stock.'

This apology took about five minutes to deliver. While it was

going on one of the boys from the store, who obviously didn't know

any English, picked up the paper and went to the storeroom to look

for the lenses. That was his job: to pick up the prescriptions from

the front office and find the corresponding lenses in the storeroom.

Just as the manager was coming to his conclusion, the boy reappeared

with two lenses that exactly corresponded to the numbers on the

prescription. The manager was absolutely flabbergasted.

'This is not possible,' he kept saying. 'No one would make and

keep lenses like these.'

He finally adjusted the impossibility by saying that someone must

have ordered these lenses long ago and had forgotten to collect them.

Because we had been declared friends of the great and famous eye

surgeon – we had only known him for about two hours – we were given a

massive discount and about half an hour later Anna-Marie walked out of

the store wearing what I was absolutely convinced was the only pair of

spectacles on planet earth that she could actually see the world

through. Now, was there a miracle in there, or were we just the

fortunate recipients of an amazingly serendipitous sequence of

events?

'I' decided to pick the initial optician who agrees to close down

his store and take us to the one eye surgeon in town who happens to be

interested in Ramana, who then takes us, against my wishes, to the

only store in Bombay where lenses can be found for Anna-Marie. I am a

bit of a sceptic, and in my jaundiced opinion there are too many good

things in that sequence to be attributed to chance alone.

My own belief is that when you go to the Guru, the power of that

Guru takes care of any physical problems that may arise. He doesn't

do it knowingly; there is just an aura around him that takes care of

all these problems. We never even told Maharaj about Anna-Marie's

glasses. When we set off that morning, I just assumed that she had

fairly normal eyes and that within half an hour or so we would be

able to buy some glasses that would bring the world into focus.

This was not the end of the story. I told you it was a long one.

Anna-Marie was sitting with Maharaj every day for about a week, but

of course, she couldn't understand a word of what was going on. There

was no one there who spoke Spanish. Then, one morning, she appeared

very red-eyed and I asked her what was the matter.

'I was up all night,' she said, in very broken English, 'praying

for a Spanish translator to come today. There is something I have to

tell Maharaj, and I need a translator to do it.'

Later that morning, as we were all sitting in a café on Grant

Road in the interval between the end of the bhajans and the beginning

of the question-and-answer session, we noticed a new foreign face at

an adjoining table – a woman who was reading a copy of I am That. We

introduced ourselves and discovered that, surprise, surprise, she was

a professional Spanish-English translator who worked in Bombay and who

had recently come across Maharaj's teachings. She had decided in a

general sort of way to come and visit Maharaj, but only that morning

did her general urge translate into positive action. Anna-Marie, of

course, was over the moon. The translator she had spent all night

praying for had miraculously manifested on the next table to her

about fifteen minutes before the question-and-answer session started.

We all went back to Maharaj's room, curious to find out what

Anna-Marie wanted to say to him. This is more or less what she had to

say via the translator.

'I was living in Venezuela when I had a dream of a mountain and

two men. I found out soon afterwards that one of the two men was

Ramakrishna, but for a long time I didn't know who the other man was

or what the mountain might be. Then, last year, I saw a photo of

Ramana Maharshi and realised that this was the second man in the

dream. When I did some research to find out more about him, I soon

realised that the mountain in the dream was Arunachala. In the dream

Ramana Maharshi looked at me in a very special way and transmitted a

knowledge of his teachings to me. He didn't do it verbally. He just

looked at me, and as he was looking, I just felt that he was filling

me up with an understanding of his teachings, a knowledge that I

could articulate quite clearly, even though no words had passed

between us. I knew that I had to come to India to find out more about

him. I persuaded a friend of mine to bring me here, even though I knew

that Ramana Maharshi was no longer alive. I knew I had some business

here and something was compelling me to come. While I was in

Tiruvannamalai I heard about you, and I knew that I had to come and

see you as well. That same compulsion that made me come to India to

find out about Ramana Maharshi has made me come here as well. I don't

know what it is, but I knew that I had to come.'

Maharaj interceded at this point: 'What were the teachings that

were transmitted to you in the dream? What did Ramana Maharshi tell

you as he was revealing his teachings in silence?'

Anna-Marie talked in Spanish for about five minutes without any

translation being given by the interpreter. At the end of that period

the translator begin to explain what she had said. We all sat there,

absolutely dumbfounded. She gave a perfect and fluent five-minute

summary of Maharaj's teachings. They were quite clearly not Ramana's

teachings but Maharaj's, and this woman was giving a wonderful

presentation of them. I think it was one of the best five-minute

summaries of the teachings I had ever heard. And remember, this was

from a woman who was on her first visit, someone who had had very

little acquaintance with Maharaj's teachings before coming there that

day.

Maharaj seemed to be as impressed as everyone else there. He

stood up, took Anna-Marie downstairs and initiated her into the

mantra of his lineage by writing it on her tongue with his finger. I

mentioned earlier that he would volunteer to give out the mantra if

anybody wanted it. If someone asked for it, he would ordinarily

whisper it in his or her ear. This is the only case I know in which

he gave out the mantra without being first asked, and it is the only

instance I know of in which he wrote it with his finger on a

devotee's tongue. What does all this mean? I have absolutely no idea.

I have long since given up trying to guess or rationalise why Gurus do

the things they do.

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[Guest guest]

, "Gloria Lee" <glee@c...> wrote:

>

 

This is one of the most powerful stories that I have heard. It just bowled me

over. Thank you.

 

> -

> viorica w

> MillionPaths ; NamoRamana

> Monday, July 28, 2003 5:11 AM

> [MillionPaths] Anna-Marie - a wonderful grace story

>

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