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This extract is from Hidden Journey.
45.
Piggy-back Rides Do Not Get You Very Far
Madhu Tandan
Six months had passed since we had moved to the ashram.
The days now had a peculiar quality about them. There was no energy left to feel sorry for myself, or angry about anything. However, something kept me going. I don’t know what it was, but I sensed that it was apart from the ‘I’ that I knew myself to be. While tiredness can produce emotions like irritability, real fatigue, I discovered, quietens the normal reactive self.
One afternoon, while cutting the undergrowth near the temple bridge, some plant or insect disagreed with me. I broke into a rash. My legs and arms burnt and itched endlessly. After work I went home and had a bath. That aggravated the problem and the discomfort became unbearable. Rajeev put some lotion on the rash and gave me homoeopathic medicine, but the burning did not subside. It took two more days for the attack to abate, leaving me limp in its aftermath. In the days that followed I had to fight a peculiar lassitude. I felt apathetic, and all I wanted was to succumb to sleep, and not wake up for a long, long time. I then had a dream:
It is nighttime. I see a full moon reflected in a river. Aropa is rowing a boat upstream and I am sitting beside him. The night is quiet except for the sound of the oars slicing through the water. Aropa rows in silence for some time, then looks up and says, ‘Can you see that bridge?’
I look ahead and see a bridge that loops across the water like a semi-circle. Aropa says quietly, ‘After we cross that bridge you will be able to see the Great Men.’
I am taken aback at the statement. As we approach the bridge, I see a figure on top of it, raising a hand in greeting towards us. The face is hidden in the shadows, but I feel an immense love and luminosity emanating from him.
Aropa says, ‘That is him, the Great One.’
We cross over and go and meet him at the foot of the bridge. His face is bathed with a white calm, and I, instinctively, bend to touch his feet. He takes me by the shoulders and smiles. In his love-filled eyes I see the wisdom of aeons.
He says softly, ‘Hold on to that awareness. Pinpoint it within yourself. Don’t let go, for the road you are travelling on leads to something real. Keep at it.’
He talks with urgency about the Path, about the need for effort and the vicissitudes along the way. I feel mesmerized by his presence. Aropa stands quietly next to me, listening with absorption.
When I awoke, I wished I could have remembered all his words. Yet more overwhelming than the words was his presence. Who was this man who had been following my struggle all the way? Where did this shimmering luminosity come from? A luminosity that had nothing to do with face or features. His voice had washed over me with a compelling intensity born of love.
Later that morning I sought a private session with Aropa. Before I even sat down he said, ‘Something has happened, has it not?’
I recounted the dream to him. His face came alive, his eyes glowed. There was silence as he continued to look at me.
The dream had a transparency about it, like a film of light. Yet it was more real than reality itself. The Great One’s presence in the dream had invoked love and reverence. So human was that contact that I felt blessed by something otherworldly on that strange, mysterious moonlit night.
Aropa broke the silence, quoting from Arthur Hugh Cloud:
Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain.
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been, things remain.
And in that moment everything seemed worthwhile.
We were quiet again for a while, and then Aropa interpreted the dream: ‘Rowing upstream means keeping the struggle alive. These Great Men visit us sometimes, when we least expect them to, as though responding to the small core of sincerity in our strivings. At other times they grace our lives to encourage and reinforce our efforts. So hold on, as you have been told.’
A sense of well-being followed. Some experiences leave indelible imprints on the psyche, as though they are meant to be the needles with which we knit together our life’s perceptions. For me that night was one such encounter. For days I was puzzled by the what and how of the dream, but I could not bring myself to attempt a psychological analysis of it. I felt as though I had actually met this man on the bridge and the effect of that encounter had a lasting impact on me. His words of advice kept coming back: ‘Hold on to that awareness.’ They lent a new impetus to the practices I was following, raising them above the status of learned techniques. And with those words had come the quiet, firm reassurance that this Path did, indeed, lead somewhere. I felt a strength of conviction build up inside, and suddenly the Path became synonymous with a single luminous feeling—love.
The next afternoon, as I was going down to the fields, I saw Aropa standing outside the kitchen. He seemed absorbed in some work, so my natural reticence took over and I passed him by. At that moment, without looking up, he called out, ‘Come here.’
I went over to him. He smiled at me and then took my hands and looked at them. Taking out a bottle he said, ‘This is a mixture of beeswax and vaseline. It is good for cracked skin.’
He gently rubbed some of the mixture into my fingertips. I felt my body relax with the warmth of the gesture. I hummed all the way down to the fields.
‘Hold on to that Awareness … Don’t let go …’ I remembered the words often. July came, the fields had been ploughed and manured after the harvest, and we had been called to plant maize. We dug furrows in the dark earth with long-handled hoes and sowed the seed row by row, covering it with our feet as we went along. It took us over twenty days to complete the planting. Propitiously, just as we were about to finish, the rains came.
Inwardly I knew I was changing. I now understood better why Aropa had stressed that ‘service with love’ is the Path. In my dream Aropa had taken me to meet a Being who was Love itself. Love that gave without any self-consciousness. Just love. So large and all-encompassing, that it flowed naturally into everything. So huge that it took my breath away.
I searched for a connection between that love, emanating from a man bathed in moonlit calm, and the world I saw when I opened my eyes. The dream altered my vision of everyday reality. It now seemed immersed in this light of love. This light was there in the wee hours of the morning when we helped deliver a calf. How soft were its eyes, innocent and startled in the first glare of birth. One dusty light hung from the darkened beams of the cowshed, swinging in the wind; inside the cows chewed their cud, snorting an occasional welcome to the newborn. The mother licked her calf with vigorous, enthusiastic strokes, while Dane completed the drying by rubbing the calf with a sack. The heifer suddenly began to thrash around in an attempt to stand. Dane held her up but in a minute she collapsed in a jumble of legs. Outside the rain and wind serenaded this coming of life.
Something in the sight of this newborn calf, wet and trembling, evoked a rush of reverence in me. I saw it as undefiled; in its eyes I read a memory of its true beginnings.
The next morning the calf was put out in the sun and she stood uncertainly in front of the garage. She flicked her tail and her rickety legs tried to follow Lama, the cowshed dog. Only a few weeks ago, Lama had startled me when one night, on opening the door, I had found him lying in the bullock’s stall with his head on his paws. The one-ton-plus bullock was licking Lama’s back with slow, friendly strokes. Lama’s eyes were drugged with the pleasure of being massaged. The bullock, who with just one hoof could snap Lama into two, was bending over him with the tenderness of a soul mate. As I fed the cows their silage the heat of their bodies enclosed me in a sense of well-being.
I asked myself: aren’t these also expressions of the love I had beheld that night? Doesn’t reality reflect merely the state of our minds? How else could I explain my going into a rigorous maize harvest in September with such ea
se in my steps? We hacked at the tall maize plants, placed them in neat bundles and carried them on our backs. From the lowest fields we walked up in single file with the green leaves of the maize trailing behind like peacock tails, unloading them with a swish on the threshing floor.
At half past three, the chaff cutter would start and we hurried to take up our positions next to it. Aropa or Dane with two other men pushed the maize plants through the rollers of the chaff cutter. Rajeev and John walked briskly back and forth from the threshing floor carrying the next armful ready for chopping. Michael and Adam vigorously forked the straw into the heap of chopped maize and then shovelled the mixture into the baskets. Nanu bent down to lift the full baskets onto our heads. With the hill woman’s characteristic hip-swing we walked up the rickety wooden staircase which led to the four silos, and then dropped our load, returning from the other side to continue the relay system. After fifteen days of carrying headloads of chopped maize I couldn’t comb my hair.A small lump had developed in the centre of my head where the basket had cut in.
I saw Persis tap Nanu on the shoulder and say, ‘If your shoulder is hurting, I’ll do today’s night-watch for you.’ Another cow was calving and we took it in turns to check her out at night. This meant that Persis, combining her own duty with someone else’s, would hardly get any sleep. There was something about a community effort that made one’s own workload feel like a just contribution.
Care and concern were present in so many unexpected ways. It was there in the face of Tilu, the villager who had worked in the ashram since he was a boy. Now he was the foreman, his beard liberally sprinkled with grey. His gentle eyes looked sorrowfully at Rajeev as he said, ‘I hear your mother is not well.’
‘Yes, Tilu, she’s got cancer,’ Rajeev said.
‘What does the doctor say?’
‘It doesn’t look good. We went down to Delhi for a week to see her. It was difficult.’
Tilu stood looking down at the ground, nodding his head in sympathy. Finally he said, ‘Like me you’ve given your life to the temple. Your strength will come from there.’
They walked alongside, hands behind their backs, keeping perfect step. How come Rajeev’s youthful, impatient ones matched so well with Tilu’s more sedate steps, born from the wisdom of accepting the inevitability of suffering?
I saw care in Aropa’s eyes as he looked at John’s bent head in the evening session. John had hit a low and was trying hard to cope. Aropa continued to talk, but ever so often his eyes kept coming back to John who had hardly spoken in the last four days. Aropa’s eyes seemed to say, ‘You’re not alone. I walk with you whether you know it or not.’
If I could sense Aropa’s silent reassurance reach out to John, it was because I had been made aware of such a support through my dream. Perhaps it was from the time of my last dream that something began to loosen up for me. My hold on my fears, anxieties and hopes seemed to slacken as I realized how illusory these preoccupations are.
When Dane was going through a particularly difficult patch, he had gone to Aropa and told him, ‘I don’t think I can do the morning service any more. My thoughts are so negative that it would be an abuse of the privilege given to me.’
Aropa had said to him, ‘Why do you think you need to offer only the best to “Them”? Offer “Them” your hurts, anger and doubts. Since they are also a part of you, “They will” accept them.’
One day during the maize harvest I looked up and found to my dismay that Ambika had fainted with fatigue. Around the same time Michael, who was pushing sixty, had been protesting, not to participation in the work but to the volume of it. He seemed to be asking for an acceptance of limitations that age imposed on him.
In fact, we were all being pushed to the brink of our physical capacities. And though we empathized when it appeared one of us had been pushed too far, we did not protest but maintained our silence. This was a grey and confusing area, one that was the source of many a doubt. Did unquestioning belief command such a silence? Was this strenuous and demanding work to be accepted, irrespective of personal limitations of age and capacity?
One autumn morning, when I was about to wake up I heard the words:
‘There is a glow behind physical work—find it.’
I had lain in bed strangely charged by the thought. In pushing my body to its limit I had once crossed a threshold and had an experience which stands apart. I had had my dream of a Great Presence on a night when my body seemed to have been anaesthetized by fatigue. Now this new dream left me with a cryptic statement that there is a glow that can be found through physical work. Obliquely it suggested that the physical trials we were undergoing at the ashram were important to the ultimate goal we sought.
A few evenings later Michael asked Aropa, ‘What is the final attainment of the mystic? What does he “see”—a vision; a revelation; a light, or … what?’
I sat up straight. Others shifted on their mats, watching Aropa with interest. Usually we would be wise not to plunge headlong into a question of this nature, unless we wanted only a few grunts from Aropa. He was mercurial in this respect. He would put himself out to explain the mystical significance of the number seven one day, and then a week later he would react with total blankness when someone else asked the same question.
Luckily, this time Aropa plunged into the answer straight off. ‘What you have to appreciate is that your conditioning dictates what you see. The Hindus find their Vaikunt, the Muslims their Jannat and the Christians, Heaven. The inner worlds are plastic and reveal themselves in the form you expect them.
‘Take, for example, the after-death state. What we see there has a lot to do with our cultural or religious bent. I knew a dear old Bengali lady who had been ailing for some time and died at the age of ninety-six. A few days before her death, she sat up and in a moment of great lucidity pronounced that her husband had come the previous night and had taken her to see the house they would stay in after her death. Her description fitted the archetypal Bengali village, complete with the pond and well-fed cows grazing peacefully around it. The house she described was a traditional Bengal mud hut with a thatched roof. She seemed very content when she died.’
‘And I suppose had she been a Christian, she would’ve seen a different setting?’ Michael asked.
‘Possibly. The religion of your upbringing does tend to colour your scenario.’
‘Does this apply to what you see when you finally attain?’ Michael asked, adding, ‘This isn’t very encouraging, is it? You first spend your life searching for something, and then on finding it one would not know how much was subjective and how much was objectively true.’
‘That is the point,’ Aropa swooped down swiftly on Michael’s thought. ‘Do you want to see Reality as it is or as you expect it to be?’
‘Obviously, as it is. But how does one know the difference?’
‘By constantly watching and knowing the difference between your wants, desires, hopes and the essential you.’
‘Suppose someone is successful in distancing themselves from pre-conditioned images. What would they find eventually?’ Michael asked.
‘There is no standard mystical experience which I can describe. But in essence it is that you, as you know yourself, do not exist as you merge into the Universal Consciousness. There is no I and no you. No this, no that; no here, no there; no now, no then. There is no one to know and nothing to be known. There is no distinction of any kind. All is one. A state of utter incandescent unity.’
‘This experience … how does it happen?’ Persis asked.
‘How or when you arrive at that realization is totally unexpected. What is important is the constant questioning. What is the source of my awareness? What is the ground of Being? What is this mystery? This sort of questioning should be going on at the back of your mind all the time, whether you are eating, milking, digging or meditating.
‘No doubt, this questioning cannot be turned on to order. It is something that must genuinely perplex you, consume you.
When the effort is sincere, the experience will one day just happen. This may happen in meditation, or while you are sitting, or raking the muck from the cow stalls, or anywhere.’
‘Is that experience the end of the road?’ Adam asked.
‘I am afraid not,’ Aropa smiled ruefully.
‘What remains to be done?’ Michael asked.
‘The work never ends. You’ve experienced something enormous. The question is—can you live up to it and integrate it into your ordinary life? It is one thing to have this experience in an altered state and quite another matter to live by it for the rest of your life. For, remember, when you come out of that experience all your desires, compulsions and hang-ups don’t automatically vanish. You have to work at them by being ruthlessly honest in trying to bridge the gap between what you’ve seen and what you are. Seeing the unitive vision is only the halfway point. Being like it all the time is the other half.’
‘Is there any other way of experiencing this unity? Can someone else induce a state in you to bring this experience on?’ John asked.
‘You mean a short-cut? Why take the trouble to quieten your mind, why look at your motives? Why be consumed by an inquiry and a search which takes long years to produce answers?’ Aropa retorted with fire in his eyes.
‘What’s wrong in at least knowing for a fact that this state exists? Isn’t that better than merely speculating on it?’ Michael countered.
‘Mahadev told me that once Ma (Mahadev’s guru) induced a state similar to what she had experienced in one of her disciples. She did it without drugs, for she had that kind of power. After the experience was over this person said, “That was interesting. How did you manage it? Hypnosis?”
‘Two things became apparent from this. What for Ma was the culmination of her search, when given to someone, who had not quested for it, amounted to nothing. Whereas, if it comes after a long struggle, then this experience puts a final seal to your years of faith and inquiry.’
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