Guru Ramana - Memories & Notes, S.S. Cohen, #4

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III

VANAPRASTHA - FOREST OR ASHRAM LIFE

 

Thus began the pilgrim's Vanaprastha; its spirit slowly

crept into his hungry soul. For the body the new life washard, the change very drastic. A redeeming feature was thatin Ramanashram, unlike in other Ashrams, there were nocompulsions of any kind; no programme to be followed,no meetings, study-classes or bhajan to be attended, so thatthe body was spared the additional strain of having to riseat an early hour every morning, or be in a certain place at acertain inconvenient time, and so on. Bhagavan was themost liberal of Gurus in that at no time did he consider theneed to frame rules and regulations to control the lives ofhis disciples; nor did he believe in a common, enforceddiscipline, for he himself had attained the highest withoutthem, and had discovered the self-evident truth, illustratedby his own experience, that at the right time Realisationsurges up from within by a free impulse, like the buddingand blossoming of a flower.

 

While it is true that not all seekers are as ripe as Bhagavan

was, when the flood of Realisation suddenly inundated himin his seventeenth year and, thus, need a discipline totransform the desultory life of the world, to which they areaccustomed, into that of self-controlled yogis, yet thediscipline that is imposed from without can neither bear thedesired fruits nor endure. The discipline which is not known

 

to fail is the one which is self-imposed, constitutionallydetermined, and readily applied by an inner urge of theawakened intellect. Hence Bhagavan left his disciplescompletely free to mould their lives as best they could.

This physical freedom considerably helped me to tide over the firstfew difficult months of my new existence.

 

The whole month of February 1936 I lived in the Ashram

in a completely bare room with a sand-covered floor and palmleaves for walls and roof. In March I started constructing asmall hut for my residence in the neighbourhood of theAshram, as the next chapter will relate. No sooner was it readythan I moved to it. I hardly stayed in it in the daytime: mymind was wholly fixed on the Master. So I spent my daysand a part of my nights in the Hall, where he lived and slept.

There I quietly sat and listened to the visitors' talks with

him and to his answers, which were sometimes translatedinto English, particularly if the questioner was a foreigner ora north Indian - not always. His answers were fresh and sweet.His influence was all pervasive in his silence not less than inhis speech. To me in the beginning this was all the moreperceptible in the contrast it offered to the hustle and bustleof the life on which I had just turned my back – to the wastedenergy, the false values, the foolish expectations from idealswhich are in themselves hollow reeds, the dreary intercoursewith people with whom one has very little in common; tothe social rules which have been laid down by manygenerations of selfishness, convention and superstitions, notto speak of the mess of politics, of rank and wealth, and thebitter jealousy and hatred they breed in the minds of men. Itis small wonder therefore that Bhagavan appears to the serious-minded as a beacon light in an otherwise impenetrabledarkness, and a haven of peace.

 

 

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Guru Ramana - MEMORIES AND NOTES By S. S. COHEN