My Amritapuri Experience: Part 19

[Guest guest]

Continued from Part 18...

 

X1 also explained how being a Swami was not exactly the fun thing it

might appear to be from the outside. The Swamis, according to him,

were held to far tighter standards than the rest. Amma, in ways

variously subtle and gross, was constantly holding their feet to the

fire, notwithstanding the external glitter associated with their

senior positions in the hierarchy. In this sense, the prime

qualification for being a Swami was perhaps the ability to operate a

much higher threshold of pain than the average.

 

Our conversation chugged on. I had some questions for X1. I wanted to

know how an ordinary seeker like myself could find the vast bandwidth

that seemed to be necessary to bring my Guru upto date with all the

minutiae in my life. At one level, I d to the idea that Amma

represented the Universal and that as God, Guru and the Self She knew

all that there was to know. However this belief was more cerebral

than visceral and at another level, I felt an ongoing need to figure

out what I was going to say to Her in person and how I was going to

say it. The second level may have been lower, conceptually speaking,

but it was where I lived most of the time.

 

In his reply, X1 conveyed the same understanding that I had gleaned

earlier from talks with some other ashramites. The idea that Amma was

aware of every single thought and action, no matter how trivial,

appeared to be a bedrock assumption with all and sundry. For me

personally, the omniscience of the Satguru was a logical deduction,

arrived at through a conscious process of intellectual reasoning. In

my thinking, worship was meaningless unless the object of worship was

the Infinite. I figured that Amma as Satguru had to be a seamless

window into the Infinite, otherwise what was the point of going to

Her or any other Guru figure?

 

Being aware that my intellect was a weak one, I did not usually rely

heavily on the conclusions it generated and tended to place my trust

more in intuition, a faculty that, despite its mysterious black-box

nature, seems to be strong in me. It was intuition that brought me to

Amma and it is intuition, even now, which makes me clutch Her and

feel afraid to let go. Grace may possibly be a better term for what I

have referred to as intuition but I don't have a way of describing

it; all I know is that it exists and rules my life. Reason is an

ornamental artefact, generated by a secondary hunger for explanation;

it does not seem to be the primary driver of action in my case.

 

What I am trying to say here, in my usual roundabout way, is that the

conviction that Amma knows everything and that I do not have to say

much, was only weakly grasped in my mind, because it was chiefly

intellectual in nature. For the residents of Amritapuri that I

encountered, however, it seemed that Amma's universal knowledge was

at once, a reality experienced daily at the mundane level and also an

article of deep faith. At the time, I found it hard to digest this

view. In the course of our talk, I shifted my weight from my right

leg to my left leg and wondered if Amma had noticed that

inconsequential move from Her position, beyond visual range and

capacity, inside the walls of the temple where She was settling down

to give darshan. At that early point on my spiritual learning curve,

I was not very sure of the answer but today, after a couple of years

of sadhana and cogitation, I increasingly operate as if She does

indeed attend every moment of my life, no matter how trivial.

 

X1 pointed out my great and good fortune in having met Amma. "Now

that She has claimed you, just relax and stop worrying", he said. He

underlined the idea that Amma was in total and absolute control of

Her children's lives, among a zillion other things, by pointing to a

stray dog that was roaming the ashram compound, ten feet away from

where we stood. "Not even a dog can enter this compound without Her

approval and no one leaves here without Her blessing. Even the

postman who comes to deliver letters to the ashram must have earned a

lot of good karma or been associated with Amma in some capacity in

his past lives", X1 said.

 

In answer to my questions about how I should convey my concerns to

Amma, X1 suggested that I just approach Amma with a prayerful

attitude, keeping the most pressing problems in my mind, as I stood

in the line. To recast this strategy a little, in the light of my

subsequent insights into the sadhana process, one should let go of

all that one can drop and let stay those thoughts that will not

release their grip on one's mind, for that is all that one can do. I

cavilled in a small way about not having enough time with Amma to

convey whatever I considered to be necessary. X1 responded that even

the ashram residents did not get personal darshans with Amma more

than a couple of times a year. By that token, as a visiting devotee I

would be receiving more darshans in a week than he probably would get

in a couple of years. When I looked at it that way, my grouse gently

faded into admiration for the ashram residents who had renounced all

manner of physical comforts for the sake of those two darshans per

year. I marvelled at the intensity of their love for Amma, that they

could be satisfied with a scant couple of personal audiences with

Amma per year, and spend the rest of the year just being in Her

general vicinity, or when She was on tour, just go about their

duties, working and worshipping, and waiting for Her return.

 

My mind was struggling to make sense of all the new imagery. It was

as though I was a visitor from another planet trying to understand

the Earthly way of life. Life here had a completely different

foundation from what I had ever known. Renunciation, service, love

and devotion - I had encountered these values before but not in such

awe-inspiring quantities. Bhakti towards Amma, I was beginning to

understand, was the key. She was the pivot around which everything

revolved.

 

At just this point, while I was musing internally about faith, X1

drew my attention to a figure standing on a mid-floor on one of the

residential buildings outside the temple compound but within the

ashram complex. A short, dark Indian man wearing a 'mundu' (broad

white sheet) and white shirt stood there with a child alongside. "Do

you see that man?", X1 asked me. I nodded in the affirmative. X1 told

me that this person, a long-time devotee of Amma, used to live in

Gujarat. In the great earthquake, earlier that year or before, he had

lost his wife and son. His wife had been trapped under a beam in the

kitchen when the quake struck, his son went back to try and save her

and was trapped as well. Both of them sadly died, leaving this

unfortunate man and his daughter behind to pick up the pieces of

their lives. He decided to wind up his affairs in Gujarat and come

down to Amritapuri. His daughter was now pursuing her studies at the

local school. X1 said to me, "That man has real faith. No matter what

happens and how unpleasant it is, he retains his faith in the Guru."

 

I made a mental note that this was the kind of example that was

worthy of emulation. This was the kind of mettle that would be

required on the spiritual path. If I was to go the Bhakti route, and

I had already so decided, this was the kind of steel I had to weld

into my heart. It would take a lot of doing of course, and generous

dollops of the Divine Mother's grace but there was now a goal in

sight. I might never get there but at least I had a putative

destination and that was preferable to the weakly directional random

walk that had marked my spiritual quest before.

 

To be continued in Part 20...

Previous episodes blogged at

http://www.sulekha.com/weblogs/listingsbyblog.asp?pg=1&blogid=750

 

Om Amriteshwaryai Namah

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