In my veins

You are in the sky I breathe
And in the earth I tread
And in the blood that flows
Turbulent through my veins...

You are in the Sun I wear
And the Moon I drink
And in the madness that spills
Unfettered from my lips...

I may be your slave, O Shambho,
But you are my prisoner...

On the boundary

On the sacred boundary
    Of life and death,
The absolute intimacy
    Of my breath,
I find you waiting
    And I fall
Into your embrace
    And dissolve.

Shambho!

Raindrop

Like a drop of rain falling
    Through the wide open sky
I fall through you in silence
    And watch emptiness go by.

I fell in love with you one day
    And even today I fall
Who knows where I shall land or if
    I shall land at all.

Where I might land some day
    It does not seem to matter
A drop is a drop while it falls
    When it lands... it's water!

*****

No, I have not fallen in love with a woman or anything like that! 

A conversation I had a couple of days back led me to the issue of being in trust. It is a remarkably tricky state to achieve. I am certainly not talking about trusting God or trusting fate or anything hocus-pocus like that. Imaginary props like that may bring some solace, but there is nothing wonderful about fooling yourself. I am talking about moving into trust for no reason at all. It is a very peculiar state of being and to touch it even for a moment is truly intoxicating. This is not about mental or emotional gymnastics - it is a completely different state of consciousness.

In a discourse during the consecration of the Linga Bhairavi Temple, Sadhguru talked about moving consciously into a state of trust.

"... I am not talking about belief. I am talking about moving into trust. So, how can I trust? The fact that you are sitting here comfortably (or not!) - that's trust. Because, you know there have been incidents where the Earth has opened up and swallowed people. There have been incidents where pieces of sky have fallen and people have been crushed to death. There have been situations - the very air that you breath has turned against you.... So you are anyway trustful... unconsciously. You are trustful unconsciously, unlovingly. I am talking about being trustful consciously, lovingly. That's devotion... Devotion is not fantasy. Devotion is not a belief system. Devotion is the sweetest way to be in existence."

It is could be very easy for someone to misunderstand what he is saying and think that he is talking about devotion to God. But he is not talking about trusting something you don't know. He is just talking about trusting existence. That does not mean that he is talking about believing that "everything is going to be fine in the future" - that would just self-deception. He is talking about just plain trust - based on nothing, demanding nothing. He is talking about trust that is rooted in the present, it is not concerned about the future. He is talking about falling in love with existence. He is talking about becoming a raindrop.

Falling in love with existence is very different from falling in love with a person. Falling in love with a person involves a lot of emotional nonsense. Falling in love with existence is meditation.

Guru Poornima

Like the moon that shines
   In the heavens above
Flawless is your beauty
   Untainted by my love.

*****

It is Guru Poornima today, and most people would think that it is the day to say something sentimental about one's Guru. But the madman I am so helplessly bound to is not very sentimental, most of the time anyway. So taking a cue from him, I will try to tone things down a little and take a clinical look at this peculiar relationship that people have with the Guru.

I have nothing to say about other spiritual masters whom I have never seen. And to be honest, I don't even wish to say anything about the one that I have seen. The idea of saying something meaningful about him is almost terrifying. And yet, I am going to force myself to say something. I am not sure whether what I say will be coherent. But that does not matter. I think most people who have been genuinely touched by Sadhguru's presence even for a moment are completely confused when it comes to verbalizing the experience. Yes, people break into tears and say a lot of sentimental things. I certainly do not wish to look down upon their expressions of emotion. But I think the confusion that precedes these sentiments is much truer expression of what is going on with them. I think the confusion occurs because we experience something that is intense and is yet somehow independent of our emotions.

The connection that people feel with him is not about being strongly attracted to his personality and it is not even about gratitude. My own life has been through many ups and downs (perhaps far more than normal) since I have come into his sphere of influence and I can honestly say that my sentiments have not always been  flowery. And yet, when I have encountered moments when I was absolutely at the end of my tether, he was there. Though this may sound sentimental, it was certainly not so in reality. When you are absolutely at the end of your tether, you are usually too tired to feel emotion. Hollow emotions cannot hold you up at those times. One needs rocks to stand on, one cannot stand on air. And so when I say that he was there, I mean that when I felt that I had lost everything, I found that I had still not lost him. Or perhaps it may sound more sensible if I were to say that I had not lost what he has given me. At those moments I was too tired too feel gratitude or love or to even draw any sort of solace from his presence, and yet, he was just there. Just like the sky and the earth, whether I acknowledged him or not, he was just there. It is not important whether I was able to use his presence to improve my lot. What is relevant here is that when everything seemed to have broken down, when my emotions were exhausted, I was still not free of him. He was there as a way of being. And by being that way, I survived.

I know that this does not explain anything. It is not supposed to. I just wish to say that what pours out of him, what we receive from him cannot really be measured or understood in terms of the outpourings of emotion that occur around him. He describes himself as a mechanic, as someone who just does what is needed. That may sound like a rather clinical, emotionless way to express what he is. And yet, it is fitting that he should be described in this manner. What happens through him is so rich that it does not need to be embellished with emotion. What it actually is, is still a mystery to me. In the immortal words of another great Guru, Master Oogway, "I don't know."

Master Oogway: "I don't know."

Drunkenness and Creativity

Drunk on half a drop...

People have said a great deal about the connection between meditation and creativity. I have only half a drop of meditation in my life. So perhaps I am not really qualified to speak about this, but I am going to say a few things anyway since that half drop has been enough to get me drunk. And when people get drunk, they start talking recklessly, don't they? Can't be helped. They can't be blamed for it. Blame the one who gets them drunk.

People think that meditation relaxes the mind by silencing it which makes it creative simply because the it starts seeing things that were hidden by the clouds of chaos. While this is essentially correct, it is a little too simplistic, too easy to misinterpret. And the reason for that is that typically, we do not have any idea about the incredible depths of relaxation that are possible. I certainly do not claim to have experienced those depths in their entirety. And what little I have experienced has certainly not been because of my own efforts. I have simply been fortunate enough to have caught that half a drop from the fountain of Silence.

To be able to step out of the well-beaten paths of everyday thought, one has to first stop walking on those paths. Creativity is the ability to create something genuinely new. For something to be genuinely new, it cannot be born out of just a superficial reorganization of what one already has - it must be born out of absolutely nothing. It must emerge from the void, from Silence. Then surely it stands to reason that for the phenomenon of true creation to happen through us, we must first step into Silence.

From my own meagre experience, I would like to say (not that I have any right to say such things, but I am drunk!) that what happens in Silence is far more than the simplistic explanation that I have mentioned above.

Silence has a life of its own, an intelligence of its own.

So then can one employ meditation to become more creative in the arts, sciences and all the other nonsense that we indulge in? I would say - no, that is not how it will work. One cannot enter Silence with a motive. Motives are loud things. One must leave them behind before one can enter Silence. And then one can only wait in the womb of Silence for new things to be born. Sometimes they may be the things that we are looking for, sometimes they may be something entirely different. All we can do is allow them to manifest through us. The Silence lives on its own terms. We can only allow it to live through us. As it is, what it has much more to offer that we can ever ask for. So it is no loss to leave our little demands behind. They will be satisfied in ways we can never think of (we are just not creative enough on our own).

All we can do is be drunk, even if it is on just half a drop! All we can do is offer ourselves to the magnificence of Silence, to its glorious creativity.

Moments

Just like a squirrel

Opening up nuts

I open each moment

Looking for you.

Guru Pooja

Isha Foundation has been conducting a Guru Pooja Training program in Pune this weekend. It is being conducted on the premises of the University of Pune. I have been attending the program as a volunteer and it has been an extremely rewarding experience.

I went through Guru Pooja Training in November 2011 at the Isha Yoga Center near Coimbatore. That had been an overwhelming experience at that time. Of course, this time I already knew beforehand about the kind of madness I was going to descend into. But that has not made the experience any less overwhelming.

In my last post, I talked about how Linga Bhairavi is "my greatest embarrassment" - I would never be able to explain Her to the "logical" crowd that I associate with. Well, Guru Pooja is another one of those embarrassing things. Not everyone reading this might know what Guru Pooja is, so I should probably say something about that. However, I simply do not have the courage to explain it in my own words. So here is a link.

Even without going into the details of what Guru Pooja is, I can certainly talk about what I experienced today. As a volunteer, apart from doing the few odd things that required to be done, I spent all day with the participants, doing what they did. I have been drowned in the Guru Pooja chant all day. That probably sounds like the kind of activity that might numb the brain. It is possible that it might numb the brain if you are not really aware of what you are doing. But when done with awareness, it certainly can do some truly marvelous things to you.

Today, as I went on with the chant, I realized something in a very deep way. What I realized is not some kind of an elusive truth - it is really just a bit of common sense that would not surprise anyone at all. And yet, just because you know something does not mean that it has penetrated the depths of your being. Sometimes, the simplest of truths come back to you in very deep ways. That is what happened to me, and what I realized was this - when you chant something like that, you have to chant with your entire being. That may not sound like much, but that is because we don't know what it is to do something with our entire being. When you chant something like that with your entire being, when your entire system comes alive with a strange new intelligence and bends its will on a single utterance... and when what you are uttering is something like this chant, some truly amazing things can happen.

Now I could spend a lot of time talking about those "amazing things that can happen", but what truly overwhelmed me was those few moments when I was chanting with all (or almost all?) my being. What a rare and exhilarating feeling to be in one place, doing one thing. There is truly nothing like it when all the pieces of your being are facing in one direction. Perhaps it takes something like this chant to make it happen. What a blessing it would be to go through life like this!

What miserable people we are! For a moment, let us forget about all the spiritual/philosophical nonsense that we have burdened ourselves with over the centuries. How about just the simple idea that whatever we do, we will do with all our being? We will not drop any of our desires. If we want something, we will desire it with all our being - body, mind and soul (whatever that might be). If you want something, your mind should desire it with all its force. Your body should reach out for it with all its strength. But as it happens, when we desire something, even our mind is not entirely with us. It is already thinking about how we may not get what we want. So we long for it. What a pathetic way to be! To long for something is truly a sin. Either you go ahead and reach for it with the whole of your being or you don't. If your entire being were involved in the act of reaching for something, you would simply not have the time or energy to spend on longing.
 
How many of us can be like this? Whatever way of being one chooses for oneself, that choice must be absolute. It is the only way to be. Perhaps there are people like this. I have certainly seen some people who come close to being like this. I would like to be like this. It is good to get a taste of that possibility once in a while.

I am sure that does not sound like a very profound truth, but as I said, what matters is how deeply one realizes it.

Babbling baby

The middle of the night,
Mommy sleeps.
The moon peers in
Through a shaft of light
And lights up the crib
Where Baby sits
Alone in his world
And babbles on...

*****

I remember listening to Sadhguru chastising people about how scattered they are, about how hard he has to work to bring them into the Here and Now. I remember feeling ashamed of myself as I heard him, and yet I knew that my energies were shamelessly dancing across half the globe. It is really unfortunate that we have so much energy. If we did not have so much of it, we would not waste so much of it. Of course, if we did not have energy, we would end up falling asleep since becoming meditative requires energy. I would like to think that being meditative does not require any effort at all, but I do know for a fact that going in that direction requires some effort. It requires effort to realign these million pieces of myself until they all face the same way.

And yet, scattered though we are, there come those rare moments of blessedness when we are struck with just the right amount of ennui - not enough to cause depression and make us stop living, but enough to cause us to stop looking. Looking! That original sin through which we turned outward to begin with! A stunted little consciousness looking out through two little windows into a sea of nonsense! Just the right amount of ennui so that the eyes close and we enter our own inner world.

No one else. Just a very private world, like a crib illuminated by a shaft of moonlight. No effort to meditate, just a profound silence caused by being where you really, really want to be. Here! Oh, what a wonderful place Here is!

To just be Here... to not make an effort to meditate... to not make an effort to become silent... to just babble incoherently without the obligation to make sense! What an ocean of silence lives in the nonsensical words of a baby!

Tonight I sat in the dark, in front of Bhairavi, the room just lit by the lamp of the gudi. Her immense presence filled the dark room... (She does not sleep!) That is when I saw that baby, babbling in the dark.

Jai Bhairavi!

Post-Samyama

Post-Samyama... anyone who is associated with Isha would need no explanation for this term. But for those who do not know, Samyama is an intense eight day yoga program conducted by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev at the Isha Yoga Center near Coimbatore. It has been over 3 months since I attended this program and I would like to write about how life has changed since then. The term post-Samyama is quite apt since, as anyone who has been through the program would know, life does change quite dramatically within those eight days.

Of course, it is not possible to speak about what is actually done during the program - partly because it is forbidden to speak about it, but mostly because what happens there is far beyond my understanding anyway. But I think it would be quite appropriate to speak about some general impressions.

As I said, most of the things that happened there are far beyond my understanding. I certainly ran into some difficulties during the program. Physically, I had prepared myself as well as I could have. But then I caught a cold which lead to a fever. And yet, despite my illness and a million other limitations, fortunately what happened there was so huge that I could not escape it. Perhaps if I had prepared myself better, perhaps if I had been psychologically more stable, I could have gotten much more out of it. But there is no point in thinking about that. What matters is that, even with all my limitations, he managed to drag me, kicking and screaming, through a transformation of some sort.

Impressions of Samyama -
Over a thousand people meditating in silence. A man with a white beard and fiery eyes walks among them. Even in that silence, his presence bears down on everyone with the ferocity of the wildest of storms. Sometimes, nothing seems to happen. And sometimes the air crackles and another dimension of life pours in out of nowhere. It is as if he is everywhere at once, there is no escaping him. He is ruthless and almost impatient about our limitations, and yet his compassion shines through his willingness to carry on. A thousand souls, whether they know it or not, whether they believe it or not, are carried to the doorstep of a completely new possibility of life. And after this superhuman effort, he just goes on...

I cannot say much more about the program apart from these vague impressions, but much can be said about how my life changed afterwards. During the program, participants are initiated into the meditational practice called Samyama. I don't know how much I missed during the program, but this practice is the greatest gift I have ever received from anyone. And he gave it to me even though I was so obviously unworthy. It makes no sense to thank him for this. Thanking someone, expressing gratitude is, in a way, a form of repayment. That would make no sense here. It is far better to walk through life being in his debt.

Those who are close to me would know that I went through some very trying experiences immediately after the program. Everything in my life was changing and still is changing with such rapidity that under normal circumstances I would have fallen apart. Through all this, the practice of samyama meditation has served as a lifeline. I will not say that I have not suffered at all. But through all the suffering there has been an undercurrent of silence, and at times even laughter! When I say that there has been an undercurrent of silence, words cannot really convey what that means. It has not been the silence of an empty room. It has been the deeply nourishing silence of life at ease - the kind of silence that carries fire in its belly.

I have begun to experience life with heightened sensitivity. For instance, I recently read the book "Krishna - the Man and his Philosophy" by Osho. It is certainly an extraordinary book. But an extraordinary book can be read in very ordinary ways and then it amounts to nothing. I do know that the very way I read this book was a consequence of Samyama. And as a result, it came vibrantly alive for me. The words poured into me like liquid laughter and Krishna seemed to come alive in a very deep sense. Krishna has always been a character that I have been fond of. Yes, Hindus worship him as a God, but there is no denying the fact that no matter how we pretend to "believe in him", he is just a character in a story for us. And he is a character that we think we know very well. And yet, after I read this book, it was as if I was drowning in something completely new. Of course, that is the greatness of Osho, but I would have never been this receptive to it if it had not been for Samyama. Perhaps this is how people felt when they participated in "Leela" - the program on Krishna that Sadhguru had conducted some years ago in the Isha Yoga Center. 

So intense was that experience that I automatically took to writing. Now, like many other people, I have been guilty of writing atrocious poetry(?) as a child. And I mean, really bad poetry - the sort that later makes you wonder what your parents were doing when you were up to something like this. But that was long ago and I have been sufficiently embarrassed with myself to not want to try anything that rash. But what happened here was truly amazing - the poetry, if I may call it that, poured out of me in one swift motion. Experiences come to us in many ways, but I never really experienced anything in the form of a picture or a song. And yet, that happened to me. One night I was drowned in a powerful image (and no, I don't mean that I saw visions or anything stupid like that) which I turned into a short story called "Radha's pots". Some days later, a song poured out of me, one that I titled as "Radha's song". I am not sure how this would rate as poetry, but for once, I was not embarrassed! Perhaps that is because I don't really see myself as having written any of it.

And who knows what else...