Alluring

Himalayas!


Poets have sung its glory. Saints have sat in its caves and river banks. The seekers went and found their enlightenment. Village folks also live their life there, grazing cattle, cutting wood. Tourists go to stare in awe and wonder at the snowy peak. Trekkers climb and mountaineers try to conquer its heights. But for me, the sight of white snow against the black rocky slopes of the Himalayas, the blue sky behind and the sunshine adding to the aura never fail to send waves of joy, inspiring my being and lifting my spirits. Ever since I went the first time to Rishikesh, Uttar Kashi, Gangotri and Gomukh and the second time to Rishikesh, Badrinath, Kedarnath and Haridwar, it's always a feeling of wanting to go there again, of being there - though I wonder why.
I recently read in an article in The Hindu about why such places as the Himalayas, Kailash Manasarovar and many other places in the world that people visit for its spiritual power. The earth in those regions considered holy have a certain kind of free elements present abundantly. When the traveller enters the region, he is engulfed in its presence. There is an atomic exchange that happens. What I am goes out and what is there gets in to me. This is the secret of inspiring. Spire has its roots from Spirit and InSpire means to experience the spirit within.
While it is not required that one can know the spirit only by visiting the Himalayas, what you see is what you are. In the crowded world out below, all we see is pollution, corruption, crowded thoughts assaulting from all around, disease, poverty and just about everything we do not want to be reminded of. But up there in the mountains, there is silence, space, nature, serenity, calmness and tranquility. So we become all that we see there. So it is a lure of the breathtaking heights that eternally draws me up there again and again....

Picture: The peaks of Kedarnath, behind the Jyotirlinga Temple.

Flowing through: The Mandakini meanders and gushes through the Kedar Valley.

Sunday...

A glimpse of light...

A very auspicious day it was. Sunday - when I got to see what it means when they say light. A day for contemplation when there was nothing official to do, resting and restfulness. Clarity on what it means to be. When the past was burnt and the future there was none, it was a deep summer nap when nothing existed. In a half waking state, I had a glimpse of what the Masters call Light. As if through a chink, when the surface of the being crumbles into luminous shreds, getting absorbed in a massive light. A light that is whole and complete. The one who sees it also gone. There is just light which is much brighter than what we call day. No heat but just light. And that is what has got many names - substratum, consciousness, Om, God, Allah, Jesus, Buddha, Tao, Zen, Being, Living, Nothingness...as many names as there are people to say them. Thank God, the animals and the plants were not speaking! And that's all. There's nothing more to it than just light. Everything that is around is just light in different states of being. What else can I say? That's all there is. Light. And beyond....nothing.


Pic:- The morning rays of the sun streaming through the temple dome atop Parvatamalai.

Sri Lanka

The Verdant Teardrop

Just an hour from Chennai by flight, I reach a foreign capital. The Bandaranayake Airport's Green Channel welcomes me as a foreign national into a country that I feel very much at home. I am talking of Sri Lanka where I spent four five days recently.
Just like the green view of Kerala, there is nothing that I miss along the three-hour drive from Colombo to the hilly Kandy region. The Maruti 800, Alto and Wagon R, Bajaj Autorickshaws, Lanka Ashok Leyland Buses all go to make me feel that Sri Lanka is part of the Indian landmass, just separated by a stretch of water called the Indian Ocean. It has retained the essence of India. The name for a river in Sri Lanka is Ganga. So the Mahaweli river is called Mahaweli Ganga.
Everywhere I turn, there is a Buddha seated in meditation, around road bends, on top of hills and in the temples. Sri Lanka is a land where Buddha is celebrated with a national holiday on the new moon called Poya Day when the Buddha's teaching was supposed to have been brought.
The value of freedom of thought, speech and action - I learnt in Sri Lanka. Owing to the political situation, one has to carry their passport or the national identity card even while going on morning walk, to a temple or to buy something from the neigbouring shop!
I immensely breathed in the air of Sri Lanka. It felt good. Freedom is after all a state of mind and I wish all becomes well soon - for there is so much beauty that the whole world should know!

Sivaji Euphoria

A mixture of matter and spirit

My going to Sivaji - the Rajni Kanth block buster, on the first day of its release, was as much a miracle as many a scene in the superb entertainer.
I am seeing a movie, amid an euphoric audience showering rose petals on the screen each time The Boss appears in a very important scene, and I should say I enjoyed every moment of it, like never before in the last few years.
Rajni Kanth has kept the spirituality of Baba hidden from the direct view of the excited audience. But in Sivaji, spirituality is encased, or rather showcased in a series of positive thinking, with matching scenes on the welfare of the country and how the four principles of Sama, Dana, Bedha and Danda is used to bring the wrong-doers to book.
It may be the same old story of good versus evil and that truth alone triumphs in the end. But it is a story well cooked and served with dollops of cream and frothy chocolate in a regal fare of grandiosity.
The message is subtle. It goes in the last dialogue of the film when he flings the leit motif one rupee coin which lands right on the villain's forehead (A one rupee coin is traditionally placed on the forehead of a dead body in these parts of the country) and says Sivaji, the Boss: "Even this you cannot take with you!"
Though the scenes may be truly far fetched and can happen only on the celluloid, the Director has constantly created a positive image of seeing the country develop. That fills the heart of not just the die-hard Rajni fanbut any ordinary viewer who gets energised by the enchanting scenes of faith in life and the ability to not be moved by the ups and downs, the travails and joys and how not forget to wink or share a quiet joke in the midst of a bloody fight too.
An enjoyable film indeed!
- Swahilya.

How do I wish

happy birthday...

How do I wish someone beyond time
A very happy birthday
How do I fix a date of birth
For one who has been for ever
How will I meet someone at a place
For whom space is home of his consciousness
Where can I search for a person
Whose form is emptiness
Though I look at something to speak to
He disappears saying he's nothing
Though I know 'tis my folly
To look for someone in this place or that
When often I'm reminded
That It is within me
But still as long as I breathe
As long as I can see and hear
Along as I have to touch to feel
As long as I smell to know the fragrance
I am bound by days, time and place
I am bound by customs and traditions
I am bound by culture and manners
I am bound by my feelings and emotions
And that will last till I breathe my last
So 'tis ignorance to ignore or try to forget
That I exist on earth in form and name
This is to wish my Guru Swami Akshara
A very very happy birthday.
- Swahilya.

(Picture: Swami Akshara near an anthill at Yelagiri, while on a morning walk recently.)

Periyar - the source of his strength

Periyar

I finally got to see the movie about the most famous and controversial personality in the history of Tamil politics. Periyar, is indeed a great movie, with a job well done by actors Sathyaraj and Kushboo, directed by Gnanarajasekaran and music by Vidhyasagar.


Only when I saw the movie, did I understand the background that has been the basis of making Periyar what he was - a source of inspiration and support for all his intensity and actions. Not many may be aware that he grew up listening to Sanskrit chants and mantras, arranged at home by his devout Naicker parents.


The movie shows how the angry young man was driven out of the house by his father when the public complained to him about the son's iconoclastic activities. He then went to Hyderabad and joined a Brahmin twosome to Kashi. In Kashi he has a dip in the holy Ganga - a river that has inspired many a human who has turned a saint on the Indian soil. He has a small stint in a Mutt where he was invited to do some work and promised a meal a day. And what happened after his return to Erode is history. But his innate capacity to organise, question authority, to speak convincingly on issues close to his heart and be his own self at all times have all been a sequel to the divine inspiration that turn of circumstances chanced to give Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker. After all, both the theist and atheist fight about god and no god from the very consciousness of their being which is God!

A spiritual picnic

Camp Yelagiri

It was a spiritual picnic and my second trip to cool Yelagiri - just away from the sizzling heat of sweltering Chennai. The uniqueness of this trip with my Guru, Swami Akshara was that it was just the going, being and coming with the Master at Yelagiri was the experience. A walk around the mango orchards of the resort where we stayed, being in tune with nature, the lush prosperity of fruits and flowers, the trekking up a small hill behind the estate and the convivial talk with the few other members who went together. It was a trip where there was the time and space to be in silence and quietude and a memorable one at that.

Wisdom through silence: The Master at Yelagiri.

.soulmate.

.soulmate. launch

A thought that has been on my mind for a long long time, inspired by my Guru, Swami Akshara. It is .soulmate. a magazine that will report events happening in Chennai city to begin with and go national and international as time goes by. But, big projects have at first a soft and silent launch. And this is through .soulmate. It will be an online space covering events and people - touching all aspects of spirituality. It will talk of the different paths to a life of meditation, that leads to the one source of being in awareness. Your feedback, ideas and articles are welcome. They may be sent to swahilya.soulmate@gmail.com. Namaste.

What to write

I really don't know!

I made sincere attempts to create a new post since my last one in January. But for some reason nothing happened.

I visited Tiruvannamalai, an energy field in south India's Tamil Nadu. It was a short unchartered trek very early in the morning and I had a darshan of the temple town from above.

I continue in my tranquil mode, reading, meditating, doing my work, working out, practising Yoga. Actually, I have nothing else to say and I don't know what else to write! So till then...

Tranquil...

...Vision


Since January, I seem to be blessed with the knowledge of the means to remain in touch with my essence, to remain in that tranquility. It happened through withdrawing from the desires with the world outside, being with books, music, chanting and learning and enjoying the fundamental notes in my many musical instruments, the tampura, veena, keyboard and the mridangam.
I am delighting in being in the Saraswati state of consciousness, learning, reading and writing. I am in love with the notbooks, pens, pencils, colours, paints, brushes, all objects of matter that are the means to a liberated state of mind.
This morning, spending a tranquil Pongal and the beginning of the new Tamil month of Thai, which ushers in auspiciousness into people's life, I was chanting and I realised that every activity on the Earth or anywhere else, is just the conversation between the Consciousness and the mind.
The Consciousness provides the support for the mind to raise itself from itself, perform a specified task of thinking, working, speaking or resting, for a specified period of time - and then fall back into its own self. Everything, animals, birds, insects, non-living thing and human beings, fall in this dialogue between Consciousness and the Mind. They are too not different, but just the unmoving and dynamic states of the same self.
And in keeping with a Tamil proverb, 'Thai Pirandal Vazhi Pirakkum,' meaning with the birth of the Thai month, the way is born. In me, it was a way from the untruth of differences, to the truth of consciousness, from the darkness of emotions to the light of the one elemental unmoving stillness and from the fear of the impermanent to the confidence in eternity. Asatoma Sadgamaya - Tamasorma Jyotir Gamaya - Mrityorma Amritam Gamaya. Om Shanthi Shanthi Shanthihi. (The picture is of the Ganga Arathi at Rishikesh.)