Why, oh, why? This pain in the heart…. But is not everything His Will? So I offer You this pain of mine, and until I am able to offer everything to Him, I am not completely surrendered…. The vibrations are too strong sometimes to bear. The body is under suffering. The mind stopped working and there was much giddiness.
A sound of banal Indian pop music suddenly came from somewhere.
And it enveloped me with memories of the hot time full of unspeakable torture. But was it not His Will too if I was tortured like this? Is not EVERYTHING ABSOLUTELY His Will?
4th December
AT SUNRISE a large bank of mackerel clouds was all along the whole range of the snows. It stood low over the very tips and was of a lovely pink. Trisul and the Wall did not become golden as usual but coral, and the snows far away and the hills below were shrouded in bluish, light mist. It all looked like one of those famous watercolors of tender tints.
6th December
WAS THINKING THAT SOON I will be leaving here. Then I remembered the Sound. I could not hear it. Went out. It was a still, warm night.
Sat down on my doorstep. There was such a silence; it was warm, the sky so particularly luminous with stars. The snows, just a dark grey wall on the near horizon. The Sound had changed. It was no more like a melodious roar in the distance. It was so high, like many electronic sounds, all flickering, crossing each other, mixed up, and so high that it must be ultrasonic. I could hardly hear it; it was difficult to follow. Signals from space? Music of the Spheres? Heaven knows….
8th December
THE SOUND HAS CHANGED for the last two days. It is “Electronic” now. Slept till seven. Missed the sunrise. Do Jap all the time. Was deeply lonely this morning. But soon a great vibration started. And all day such peace… such stillness… can do nothing; only lie on the bed and do Jap in utter inner stillness….
May God give me the strength. May He guide me. In five-and-ahalf months my work will begin. To go on till the end of my life. His work. Work, work, work, without expecting any result or reward or any fruit. All is so still within the perfect Silence of Nothingness in the heart. And jap is easy, and goes on all the time.
10th December
ONCE MORE I HEARD THE SOUND as a magnificent chorus of unearthly voices. I was told that the Sound sometimes manifests itself like this.
But now it is again as it was before: a melodious roar. Somehow I was glad. It was as if an old friend had returned. I missed it; I don’t know why….
11 th December
LIKE A PERFUME RISING from the innermost center of sweetness is this still joy…. All stillness, all peace…. And the heart keeps singing His Name, singing as though to infinity in utter tenderness.
12th December
THE SUNSET WAS DIFFERENT this evening. Some small clouds were standing for hours in the afternoon just touching the tips of the peaks. They became pink. But the snows themselves remained grey; only the hills below became deep orange-pink. There must have been clouds where the sun was setting, in the west, behind the hill; they threw shadows on the snows. A little later the clouds moved away higher and those touching the snows became grey as if melting in the shade, but the snows remained coral. I sat outside. The heart full of peace and His Name… and I remembered when as a child I used to get up very early and stand at the window in my nightdress watching the Caucasian peaks getting pink, one by one at sunrise. Each time I experienced a deep feeling of wonder, of a joy so light, so ethereal, welling from within. I must have been about ten years then. Only now do I understand what this feeling was, comparing it to the present one I have now. Often I had this feeling, all peace, all joy; I did not know what it was, of course. I lost it while growing up and the world with its Maya closing tightly around me. Had forgotten it altogether.
There was no afterglow. The snows remained yellowish, livid. I closed the door to go to bed to pray. But after a few minutes I happened to glance out of the window while preparing myself to go to bed, and I saw that the snows were blue… I opened the door and went out. The sky above the snows was not pale grey as it mostly is, but of a transparent kind of wedgewood-blue; the hills below were of deep misty-indigo. But the snows were blue and remained so. It was lovely. I stood outside for a while, enjoying the feeling of deep peace.
You are displaying your beauty because soon I will have to go, beautiful mountains. And very probably I will never see you again… not from here at any rate…. Then I went to bed.
91 Samarpan (Surrender)
14th December, 1966
WALKING A LOT AROUND THE HILLS, drinking in the beauty. The days are golden and warm. But the nights are bitterly cold. Soon, so I was told, the storms will begin; soon the weather will change. But now, I walk and look. Dug out a small pine tree, will take it with me to London. And many seeds from the plants of the Ashram garden.
And the magic nights, the moon pale, mysterious light, reflecting on the white walls of the Ashram. And the flute player in the village.
And the jungle and the smell of the pines.
I walk about much, so much. Loving the hills and the snows and the people. Soon… I will go. And there will be no regret.
The Sound is here always… I wonder if it will remain when I am not here anymore? Will I hear it in London or anywhere else? Who knows?
15th December
THE REALIZATION that every act, every word, every thought of ours not only influences our environment but for some mysterious reason forms an integral and important part of the Universe, fits into it as if by necessity so to say, in the very moment we do, or say, or think it—is an overwhelming and even shattering experience.
The tremendous responsibility of it is terrifying.
If all of us only knew that the smallest act of ours, or a tiny thought, has such far—reaching effects as to set in motion forces which perhaps could shatter a galaxy….
If we know it deeply and absolutely, if this realization becomes engraved permanently on our hearts, on our minds, how careful we would act and speak and think.
How precious life would become in its integral oneness. And this, I think, is as far as the human mind and heart can go.
It is as far as I can go at this moment in time where I am standing now. And I think that this is the ultimate Goal of Mysticism. This experience can become only deeper as we progress; it cannot become more.
It is wonderful and frightening. The responsibility of it is terrifying and fascinating in its depth and completeness.
The perplexing insecurity of being unique and the profound consolation of forming part of the Eternal Undivided Whole, the knowledge that we all have the absolute right to it and can achieve the realization of this wonderful meaning of life: one is quite simply part of it all….
The smallest grain of sand, myself and all else, part of the great magnificent chord echoing forever….
This was, I think, what Christ had meant when he said: “Let our eye be single.”
To have a single vision of wholeness.
After this realization which comes upon one slowly like a thief in the night, we still look the same to others, behave apparently in the same way. But the inner quality has been transformed, has changed so much that the world is not the same again. Nor can it ever be the same.
This is as well as I can express it, but there is much more to it which can never be said, for no words exist to convey the full meaning.
I have to leave it at that.
For it is a perfectly balanced, mindless state.
Glimpses of it I had increasingly already when with Guruji; especially in Part 2 the intelligent reader will find allusions to it scattered here and there, and one will be able to read in between the lines.
Very acute it became after Guruji’s passing away, so that I couldn’t reconcile the torment of the heat, the mangy dogs roaming the streets, stone-throwing children, the sweat, the smells; for they were That too…. And the only thing to do was to run away into the solitude. It was here in the stillness of the mount
ains that it gradually crystallized itself—no, crystallized is not the right word—it “distilled”
itself from a different dimension into the waking consciousness.
From now on I will have to live with the Glory and the Terror of it…. It is merciless, inescapable, sometimes nearer, sometimes receding into the distance, but never far away, always just around the corner on the edge of perception; a throbbing, dynamic, intensely virile, intoxicating “Presence” so utterly joyous, boundless and free.
But “Presence” is not the right word either; I am helpless, I give up, I don’t know how to express it.
For to put it in words seems almost a blasphemy .…
16th December
ALL I KNOW IS that the goal will be always receding, “for the Beloved can never be known.”
17th December
THE GRASS AND THE FLOWERS are silvery with frost every morning. The garden begins to die gently.
Walking a lot. Sunny warm days. All around the hills there is a sound of bells ringing. Suddenly from around the bend will emerge a string of donkeys walking daintily on the narrow mountain paths, loaded with kerosene tins full of pine resin. This is the time of the year when the resin is collected.
When I first arrived in Almora in ‘61, I saw it; there every pine tree had a deep incision and under it a tin was fixed to collect the slowly oozing sap. They were slowly bleeding to death; some had already three or four wounds around the trunk, bleeding slowly. They had already hardly any needles at all; some were clearly dying. But still they sang in the wind, standing straight, the tall trunk looking russet in the sunlight.
And still they were friendly to human beings; they gave freely, while dying; there was no resentment in the tree.
Deodars (Himalayan cedar) are not friendly to humans, neither are chestnut trees (red Indians even say that one could get blind if one slept under a chestnut tree), but pines are so friendly. One needed only to come near it, to put one’s hand on its fragrant bark, to feel that the tree does not mind you at all; quite on the contrary….
You are bleeding, I was saying to them, and love was in my heart, when I sat under them looking at the crowns swaying high above me against the deep azure of the mountain sky. Many a time I just sat with them, relaxing in the fragrance, they singing around me, and deep was the oneness. I know; pine trees can love.
Here in the Kumaon hills not every pine is wounded, but many are. That’s why we have the charming sound of bells coming either from one or the other direction of the slopes of the hills, the grey, patient crocodile of donkeys or mules, each a bell on its collar, a few foresters walking with long sticks beside. Often I stood aside and watched the fragrant procession pass by. The delicious strong smell of pine resin. The smell of animals and of men in their leather or wool garments. The forest around, the snows shimmering in the background, and the whisper and the song of the trees all around….
Goodbye, days of peace, days of wrestling with myself. Days of incredible beauty of nature at its best, days of glorious states of consciousness wherein the divine heart within myself was the divine heart within the cosmos, when I knew the meaning of oneness because I lived it. Yes, Guruji, you did not deceive me. You pointed qut the way and now the way has taken hold of me, fully, irrevocably.
And when the broken window pane was repaired and new glass was put in, for days my room smelled of fresh pine resin. The putty the workman used was made with pure pine resin.
It seems incredible that such a precious substance could be used to bind the putty; but it was, for here it is the cheapest binding substance, given to men free of charge by the generous pines who pay for it with their lives….
29th December, 1966
Vedic Sadhak Ashram, Tapovan
LAST NIGHT THE SUN WAS SETTING serenely in the sea of clouds of liquid gold. We had a little rain during the night. But now the morning is clear with feathery clouds towards the north, the hills of . Mussoorie. Here the sun is setting in the plains behind a line of trees or very low hills, going down in utter serenity, the colors of the sky dying away gently. I am here since the 21st December. Left Kausani on the 20th. The journey with several changes from bus to train in Kathgodam, then in Barelli, was tedious and long. Waiting a long time in ladies waiting rooms for the connections, and it was cold.
The last weeks in Kausani were very disagreeable. The Ashram underwent repairs and was being partly rebuilt. Noise, people coming and going, workmen all over the place; no peace at all. Patel arranged for me to come here; he is a close friend of Swamiji who is the director of Tapovan Ashram not far from Dehra Dun. It is a lovely place only 3,000 feet above sea level, so it is much warmer. It is very different from Kausani; no stately pine forests or dark deodar groves, but a thick jungle of mostly sal trees commencing on the slope of the hill behind the Ashram.
The sal tree is closely connected with the legend of Buddha—he was born under a sal tree, preached his first sermon amongst the sal trees in the Deer Park, and died in between two sal trees, his head to the north. It is not a very high tree, with large, roundish leaves, and it does not give much shade. But a forest of sal trees is lovely, has a fragrance and an atmosphere of its own. It is said that the sal tree has Sat and Chaitanya—intelligence and life. Its branches are not very outspread; the whole impression it gives is of a slender tree reaching upwards, rather like a poplar. Here we are on the first Himalayan foothills facing the endless plains of India towards the southwest. To the north rise abruptly the grey and steep hills of Mussoorie forming a plateau over 7,000 feet, on which this hill-station is sprawling around the smaller hills, covered with pines.
It is a rather large plateau and in the night the heights above seem to be adorned with rows of sparkling diamonds, stars fallen from heaven, the lights of the houses and of the street lamps.
In Kausani my room was facing the east; here my veranda faces the west.
This Ashram is a large one; it can accommodate many people.
Most of the rooms are in the main building, quite at the bottom of the hill, where also the common dining room and kitchen are situated as well as several courtyards, and a temple where a perpetual fire is kept alive, and twice daily Yagna Havan (fire sacrifice) is performed with chanting of Vedic Mantras, reading of the Vedas, and where the daily Kirtan is held.
On the terraced slope of the hill are several very well built bungalows, each having one or two rooms. I have the smallest bungalow under an enormous peepul tree. It is an historical tree; when the Nepalese surrendered to the English (there are remains of a Nepalese fort on the top of the hill, two miles from here), all the women of fallen soldiers burned themselves alive on the place where the tree is now. Sati sacrifice, it is called, the burning of the widow. It must have been dreadful. One can imagine them all, young and old, walking voluntarily into the huge pyre singing mantras. There was a little brick temple to commemorate the event. The snake-like roots have completely enveloped and burst it asunder. And the tree itself grew all around it, and in the trunk one can still see embedded part of the small dome clinging as if growing out of the bark.
I measured the width of the trunk; it is forty five feet in diameter.
Peepul is a variety of a wild fig not fit for human consumption but very much liked by crows (saw it in Adyar ), and especially bats. For a long time in the night I could not make out the noise which was going on in the branches of the tree; I thought they were monkies. But one day when the noise was very bad I went out with my torch and shone it into the branches. Many dozens of fruit bats took off and flapping noisily vanished into the dark. They are called here the flying foxes; they have a wing span of about two feet, and during the day they sleep in the caves of the Mussoorie cliffs.
From my veranda the view is grand. To the right rise, like an enormous natural fortress, the hills ofMussoorie; lovely, rich jungle covers the hills immediately around the Ashram where even bamboo grows. Right in front is a dried-up bed of a river, all pebbles and boulders, and very low hills,
like soft dunes covered with rich vegetation. To the South are the plains, and dimly visible in the distance the first houses of the suburbs of Dehra Dun. And at the back of the jungle rising up the hill one can hear foxes bark in the night and the hysterical laughter and the wild screams of jackals.
We are here only a few miles from Dehra Dun. As in Kausani there is here no electricity; we have candles or lovely oldfashioned brass kerosene lamps. Dehra Dun and Mussoorie have electric light. To go shopping is an expedition: one has to walk for over a mile in the dry river bed (I shudder to think what happens during the rainy season! ), then stand on the road and wait for the bus which passes every hour, and takes one right to the bazaar in the center of the town.
The Sound stayed with me, in spite of the occasionally noisy nights filled with animal noises or the distant roar of the motor cars.
Sometimes I heard a strange mournful singing all around my bungalow and I wondered if it was the mantric chant of Satis still resounding in the atmosphere when one after another they went into the fire…. And another strange phenomenon: I wrote above that a chanting of the Vedas is performed here twice daily. I attend the evening service, but in the morning it is too early for me. So I listen to the chanting from my veranda looking at the hills and the sky, the trees and the jungle. It is so uplifting.
But I soon noticed to my surprise that after the chanting has finished, and I see the Swamis dispersing to their dwellings, the chant is repeated, is going on softly in the atmosphere, in the air around, as if echoed, continued by some beings, some voices in the air. I found it lovely and moving and was waiting for it every morning, and it never failed to repeat itself….
STAYED IN THIS ASHRAM until the beginning of January. Then had to go to the nearest branch of the agent of Barclays Bank which was two days journey from here; some muddle arose because of the transference of my pension. When I returned, I did not go to the Tapovan anymore but to the Shahanshah Ashram where I stayed till I had to go home to England.
This Ashram is at the other end of the plain of Dehra Dun, right under the steep rocks ofMussoorie. The dear Swami Govindananda, Miss Asha and her delightful grandmother, and the Kirtans. Every evening when the sun was going down softly behind the houses of Dehra Dun in the distance, the lovely voice of Swamiji accompanying himself on the harmonium, my long walks in the sal forest around the hills, my heart so full of the words of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: “I am the fragrance of the earth, I am the brilliance of fire,” etc. ringing in my mind. I lived at the bottom of the hill in the guest house; the Ashram was on the top of the hill; many steps were leading to it. The boy’s school, Swamiji himself, and the whole atmosphere of the place with the Tibetan village just nearby…. I was so happy there, so deeply happy… and I stayed there till the end of March.
Daughter of Fire Page 98