Chapter XVII: SATELLITE CALLS FROM KURUKSHETRA
So this was how it felt to surrender to the Lord! I had felt it in other ways in other times but never as the changing stream of consciousness I now began to experience. It was as if I were in a space craft which had long been voyaging through dimensions of time and light. At last I had begun to approach the heavenly being at the end of the journey and — as my craft drew close to the being’s great aura — I began to travel through many, many layers of inner sight at a speed faster than light.
Still afloat on a blissful cloud, I walked towards the ashram canteen for breakfast. Then, remembering that I had left my sandals outside the Mandir compound, I returned to find them in the sand outside. As I made my way back to the canteen I met a middle-aged Indian who quickly befriended me.
“Please call me S.N.,” he requested. “You are very lucky to be blessed with so many interviews.”
“Yes,” I replied with some embarrassment, “but where’s the catch?” my doubting Thomas left-brain responded silently. Somehow, it all felt too good to be true. Was Swami setting me up for a fall?
That evening, I entered the Mandir after evening bhajans. Before a huge, larger-than-life mural of Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, I knelt and prayed.
“Please help, guide and protect me through my own inner battles, my Lord,” I beseeched, prostrating myself before the altar and the life-size pictures of Shirdi Sai and Sathya Sai Baba. Getting back onto my knees, I crossed myself.
Now I began to understand why Indians found it so natural to prostrate themselves before the Lord. In the West, our conditioning is such that everything is sacrificed before the altar of ego and individuality. How difficult it is for most of us to give ourselves without inhibition to God. It is the same inhibition that, in our daily lives, divides and separates us, that prevents us from seeing the deity in others.
As we fall ever deeper into the depths of Lucifer’s pride and Ahriman’s alienation we seem to lose our sense of being human. We become trapped in a maze. That is the condition to which those dual aspects of evil reduce us. We forget how to bend our knees, to give it all back to the One who creates and destroys to create again.
Kurukshetra (‘the plane of body’) is everywhere and, as Swami reminds us, the battle takes place within. In the Kaliyuga the enemy is no longer ‘out there’ as it was in the time of the Avathars, Rama and Krishna. Today, it is also in here, within us. So, Swami teaches us to look within, to find the enemy. He teaches us to face the enemy with compassion as he once taught Arjuna. He shows us the way to liberate ourselves once and for all. By so doing we also liberate the enemy who, after all, is none but ourselves.
When I ran away from the enemy I ran away from myself. Now, Baba was putting me through an intensive course of learning to stop running and to surrender my ego to the Lord. He was teaching me every step of Nataraja’s dance — the meaning of looking beyond Maya’s illusory world of form. Looking back on those times, a year later, so much becomes clearer. Caught up in battle after battle as I was then it was not easy to understand the process of inner growth through which he put me. Most of the time it seemed I was doing the dance without knowing the steps or where they might lead!
The following day Baba didn’t give morning darshan. Instead, he came out early at about six fifty-five am to return to the interview room with a large group from Madras. No one knew what ensued but a devotee who was in the Mandir at the time told me that he had heard Baba “really laying into them.” Apparently Baba was very agitated that morning and was seen walking about with his hands behind his back talking to invisible listeners and beings.
I overheard an American say that he had felt a lot of pain outside the Mandir that day and that he had heard a woman shriek as if she was experiencing birth-pangs. All kinds of strange things can happen at Prashanti and Baba has been known to describe it as his ‘workshop’ which, of course, is exactly what it is.
The atmosphere within the ashram felt highly charged. What great changes took place that day among the souls of so many? It was a little reassuring to know that so many others too were going through the Divine Thresher’s refining process; that I was not alone on this trip.
Charles and I breakfasted together. I apologized for doing such an awful lot of grumbling and whingeing.
“When I first visited Prashanti,” he told me, “I used to get so mad that I just wanted to blow up the whole place!”
In true Findhorn fashion we hugged each other.
That afternoon I tried to call Bangalore from the small ashram Post Office but the difficulties of understanding and making oneself understood remained an obstacle. Though many Indians speak English I believe they continue to think in their own languages. Having been brought up in Asia I had never anticipated any difficulty in making myself understood to another Asian.
Now I found out otherwise as I found myself negotiating a minefield of karma. The old Postmaster was obviously still upset with me after all the rude things I had said about the Indian telephone system during the tedious days when I had tried calling Scotland. Apparently I owed him sixty Rupees for the calls although I had never actually spoken to anyone.
I decided to go to Public Relations to try and sort out the mystery. I was advised to return to the PO to resolve the problem there.
“If this proves impossible, I would advise you to pay the money and forget about it,” the Public Relations Officer told me. “After all, what is sixty Rupees to a Westerner?”
“A lot” I thought. My reserves were dwindling rapidly and I knew I needed to keep some money back for the return trip to Bangalore and Bombay. Here was one Westerner who wasn’t as rich as might be supposed!
The Indian telephone system is something I still do not understand. Besides that, ashram life was something of a mystery and, talking to old ashramites, I found it had always been so.
It seems there were at least two realities at Prashanti. First, there was the ashram organization and administration with all its rules and codes of behaviour. No different to any large community through which many hundreds of thousands pass each year. Every visitor encountered that as soon as he or she stepped inside the ashram.
We were all required to attend orientation on the first day and to learn about the basic framework concerning the ashram way of life. Though all that had seemed fairly clear at the time, I was yet to experience the difficulties which may be encountered if those rules were not kept to the letter. Everyone — Indians included — could sometimes experience ashram life as a maze of obstacles and tests. It seemed that, in order to get the God Experience, we all had to run through that maze and to become totally lost within it before surrendering the ego, giving up, letting go, taking several deep breaths and letting God take over.
Then there was another reality. When the Lord was in one’s heart and the distractions all around us fell away then, as often as not, the bureaucratic obstacles were circumvented or one learnt simply to soar over them on the wings of Garuda.
Prashanti was, in that sense, no different to life everywhere. On the one hand, each society has its set of temporal laws but, beyond that apparent reality, lies a much greater one where God writes and rewrites the rules. And God’s laws do not necessarily fit conveniently into Man’s scheme of things. To enter into that other reality is to understand with the heart and the inner eye that which the rule-book cannot provide for.
Sometimes within and sometimes outside the normal framework of coordinates that Reality is the Tao and can only be experienced in the moment as the living way. In so many ways, during each day of my life in the ashram, I began to understand this. It seemed as if a year of karma in the outside world could be lived through in minutes here.
© RW 1989
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