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June 22, 2009
Few days of seclusion…part 2!
I am neither a fan of Ramana Maharishi nor his disciple. He was destined to get enlightened and he did. And his way of negation doesn’t and will not suit everyone on the path of spirituality. “you are not your senses, you are not your body, you are not your thoughts, then who are you?” The statements sound exciting and easy but do not help you much in the longer run. You will keep asking “Who am I?” And the answer will remain the same, ‘You’ are ‘You’!
There is a beautiful Shiva Linga inside the Ramana ashram, where pujas are performed through out the day. Mantras are chanted, Vedic shlokas are read, and divine songs are sung. The energy and vibration indeed make you feel elated, but then I didn’t understand one thing. If Ramana believed in the philosophy of Advaita – meaning ‘seek God inside you’ – why is this Shiva Linga – an external factor - worshipped here with so much of religiousness?
Thankfully there ain’t any meditation classes or group therapies. You are just provided the place to live and are provided food on time. You are just left alone to do whatever you want to. You can meditate, you can read, you can move around, or just exist for the sake of it. The place is full of silence, and environment is serene.
There are two beautiful caves on the mountain just behind the ashram – named Skandasramam cave and Virupaksha cave, where Ramana Maharishi happened to spend many years in tranquility. I have had fantasized about meditating in a cave through out my life, and this was the first time I had an opportunity to really meditate sitting inside a cave. The experience was awesome – and God spoke to me! (Will blog about that some other day).
There is always a fear of getting attached in the process of detachment. The first day, you feel all are strangers hence feel better to be alone, the second day you keep bumping into the same people again and again and start exchanging smiles, and the third day you start to communicate with them. You are at square one again. New relationships and new friendships start developing – and you start to miss your ‘aloneness’ again. I need not reiterate the story of the saint who left everything to become a real ascetic, and had to start with having a pet cat to take care of the rats, which ate his loincloth.
I guess I stayed for the right period of time and three days were apt. I left before aloneness starts turning into boredom. And I left before I became ‘myself’ again in the new environment.
Posted by Kenni at June 22, 2009 11:56 AM
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