Passing Time

Monday November 8th/ Tuesday November 9th

My new friends have traveled and will be away for a few days. Premal, has gone into the seclusion of deep meditation and prayer.  I am alone for the first time in weeks, and I am completely at odds with myself.   I go into town, in hope of finding some distraction. I have a brief chat with Ram, but today he is busy and has no time to indulge me in lengthy discourse.   I head over the bridge and find myself at the Ganga View. I lounge around for a while and eat a leisurely lunch. But, I am restless, the absence of company makes me moody.  I find this surprising, as I am generally at ease in my own company.  At the root of this is a sense of being rudderless.  I am ready to move on and having very limited funds, leaves me with a distinct feeling of powerlessness. 

I head back to the ashram and meet up with Michael.  He invites me to join him on the roof for yoga practice.  He is young and athletic and so gravitates to the more physically challenging  form of asthanga yoga. He insists on teaching me some if the balancing postures, which turns out to be a quite comical as I have neither the the agility nor the physical strength required.  Conceding defeat, he left me to my own  gentler practice of hatha yoga.    We remained on the roof till the sun receded; the evening chill signaled that it was time to make our descent to our respective rooms.

This evenings meditation brought me a temporary peace, but this is quickly eroded by a growing restlessness. I  am concerned that my bank card may be delayed as I am unsure how reliable courier service is here in India.   After dinner I head to my room, to escape into a book, but even this is short lived.  I am in bed by 9pm and very quickly I am asleep.

The days are bleeding into each other, and I can hardly distinguish one from the other.   It is Tuesday morning, and I make my way to the Ganges river, maybe she can wash away this melancholy that clings to me.  The water is cold and I must force myself to plunge in, immersing my entire body.   I experience a spasm of shock and tremble uncontrollably for several minutes. Soon my body has acclimated to the temperature and the water feels warm.  I have come to offer my prayers to the river;petitioning Mother Ganga to cleanse me of unwanted emotions. My secret hope is that in an act of great benevolence she will dispel the karmic debts that I am holding.  My prayers, co-joined with that of countless others, now rest in the basin of this centuries old practice.      

 Lunch today is suprisingly good and I make a point of complementing Chitta. Inspired, perhaps by the good food, one of the monks who has been here for a couple weeks, again broke his silence, and entered into an animated philosophical discussion with those of us in present.  Later that afternoon, I left the ashram intending to find a secluded corner at the German cafe where I could read and while away some time.  En route, I ran into my friends, they were back from their trip, and so we arranged to meet up this evening at their apartment.  I arrived at 4:30pm to find Hari alone.  He ushered me in and served up lemongrass tea sweetened with honey.  He explained that the others had to run an errand would be back in a short while.   So we we talked mostly about his life.

The apartment we are in is a temporary rental for one month, and so the living room is bare, with the exception of a single futon mattress on the floor.   I recline next to Hari, as he tells me his story.  He is one of five siblings, and very early in life he was exposed to mysticism and spirituality by his grandfather who was held to be a saint.  He remembers as a child, listening to his grandfather's discourses with the many seekers who came both to study with and be healed by this man.  His family was not rich, but they lived had land and enjoyed a comfortable life style.  He was an A student throughout school, but on arriving at university he quickly became disillusioned and decided to drop out.  He started his own venture, and established a small manufacturing firm. Within a few years the company had grown to employ more than three hundred employees. Hari had all the trappings of wealth and wanted for nothing. But he was constantly plagued with a sense of disquiet, and his material success brought him little or no satisfaction.  

One day whilst driving home from a company meeting, he heard a voice in his head say "what are you doing?" In that moment he knew that he had to change his life.  He immediately dissolved the business, but it would be nearly two years before he had a clear sense of direction. In that time he simply drifted, traveling around India. Then he had a clear impression to go into seclusion and meditate.  He did this over many months for weeks at a time and in his travels he met Yog. Together they entered into six months of seclusion in the jungle, living in complete silence.  It was a profound  and transformative experience for him.   One that tested his sanity and his resilience, but he was compelled by his own inner spirit, and in a sense he was powerless to do otherwise.

Dharamasala in the Himalayan mountains, many hundreds of miles from where he was.  On arriving, he checked into a guest house, and in the morning encountered the woman who had been the object of his thoughts for the past two weeks.

He did not question their meeting.  He learned form her that that day at the cafe she had had a an argument with her boyfriend and a few days later they had split up and she had made her way to Dharamasala alone.  Hari was not sure if he influenced these events, but having met the woman at the center of his focus, he now felt free of the desire.  He spent two weeks in her company before returning to seclusion, but at no time did they share any sexual intimacy.  The power of his singular focus upon this woman, was seemingly the catalyst for these inexplicable events.  This was only one of the many experiences that he had, many of which compelled him to battle with his own demons and know a kind of madness.

At the end of six months, he had gained may insights into the workings of the human mind and the nature of our existence.  He had gathered all of this he said, from nature itself, and so much of what he discovered aligned with the mystical principles he had learned so long ago at the feet of his grandfather.  He has temporarily emerged from out of seclusion to share with others like myself what he has learned, but he does not consider himself a teacher.  Hari asked me to tell people to embrace their darkness. Darkness he says and I paraphrase, is the source of everything.  Light itself emerged out of the darkness.  How then can we make the self discovery, if ourselves if we don't embrace the very source of our existence.  If you should experience sadness, then allow the part of you that is awareness of the sadness, to be happy that the mind is sad; experience this sadness fully without attachment.  The watcher is always present, and through the breath you bridge the gap between awareness and the unconsciousness of habituated patterns of behavior. 

Hari does not consider himself a teacher, and shy's away from the idea of teaching large groups of people. He knows that he will have to go back into seclusion soon as his spirit is pulling him in that direction. And he finds himself overly sensitive to other peoples energies.  Hari is just Thirty four, and he possesses a wisdom, understanding and compassion, that is way beyond his years.  Speaking of his family he tells me that some years ago his eight year old sister was lighting fire crackers in celebration of Diwali and her clothing caught fire. By the time family members had put out the flames she had suffered severe 3rd degree burns. She died that day.  It was he said, very pragmatically, simply an act of fate. "There is in nature stability and within that stability exists instability and all is in balance.  And so tsunamis occur as an expression of the instability that is inherent in the very stability of nature."

More than an hour has passed, and Hari and I are lying face to face with our fingers interlocked.  I feel an out pouring of love from him, the intimacy we share in this moment is beyond the realm of sexual desire and holds a beauty of its own.  This communion through touch is not uncommon in India.   when we have been out as a group and Yog has held my hand as we strolled along, and interchangeably, held that of Hari and of his girlfriend.  It is also quite commonplace for men to hold hands as they walk along he street, as a way of communicating friendship and camaraderie.  Something that is an anomaly in our cultural lexicon.  Even if it is that I am enjoying this intimacy because I am a foreigner, I fully embrace the experience;welcoming the touch that I am so starved of in America.   And I am left wondering why it is that men and women don't share more in this way, outside of sexual relationships.  But then I guess it gets complicated.