Jiddu Krishna murti, who gripped my mind for a significant part of my life with his writing and talks, said once " Relationship is the mirror in which we see ourselves as we are. All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth that is not related to something or other. Even the hermit that abandons the world and goes into some lonely spot is related to the past, is related to those who are around him. There is no escape from relationship. And in that relationship, which is the mirror in which we can see ourselves, in that relationship we can discover what we are: our reactions, our prejudices, our fears, depressions, anxieties, loneliness, sorrow, pain, grief."
May be Krishna murti, kind of excluded people like me, who had cataract in my inner minds' eye. Before I read Daniel Kahneman, I was not aware of theory induced blindness. And then there is emotion induced blindness.
The following pic from my good Bodhi sangha brother Inaki Roldos collection, 'https://in.pinterest.com/pin/261419953350887398/ , beautifully and succinctly captures the essence of what I wanted to convey or what state I am in.
This blog post was triggered by a conversation I had with Amma yesterday afternoon and which kind of continued in my dream yesterday night.
My mom is going for her eye surgery tomorrow at Narayana Nethralaya for a cataract. Though we, especially my sister, kept telling her to get her eyes checked , she kind of kept postponing it. As someone who reclaimed her freedom and herself, she is the last word for anything related to her, though she loves her children and family a lot. She retains the veto on anything related to her like America in Security council. But her inner sight, like the affective blindsight is very strong. We ( Amma , Sandhya and myself ) went to the hospital last Saturday and after all the check ups submitted application duly filled up for cashless claims for her eye surgery. As it is usual for the TPAs , after a lot of harassing questions , they kind sanctioned only a small percentage of the requirement. Though , we ( me and my sister) were ready to pay the required amount, Amma was quite insistent that she does not want that. Though she was talking quite mildly and lovingly, she did that with such a firm conviction and she did not want let go her new found self reliance at any cost. But she conveyed that to us, with out any ego or arrogance and in such a loving way, it would have been good training lesson to the top corporate honchos.
Just a few days back, I along with my son Rishi attended a family function. Not far away from home. A lot of close relatives had assembled there. One my uncle too was there sitting quite close to where I was sitting during that function. But in a classic case study of "mirror of relationships", we saw all others in that small hall, through each other. As if both of us did not exist, even in the form of ghosts. I did have a long conversation with my cousin (his son) for a very long time and later with my aunt.
IF egotism+arrogance+shorttemperedness+lackofgratitude managed to get a pair of hands, legs and a head, in my view, that would have his name on its forehead. Both him and my father xo( his eldest brother) were born in a quite a poor family. We had lost all our ancestral wealth , much before my father was born. When my grandfather had passed away in 1956, my father was barely 16 or 17. And he had to forego his own aspirations for higher studies and took care of his widowed mother and 4 siblings. And he did it with so much over sincerity and integrity like an ideal communist ( he was one till he died), he had hardly any money for himself or us. When he passed away in 2006, he had around 321 rupees in his Canara bank account. But the number of people in our small town, who had gathered for his funeral, had indicated the kind of selfless life he had led and the great impact he had made in his world. In a way, his siblings, owe him for there life and well being. In spite of that , I felt there is an utter lack of gratitude towards my father and me and that kind of angered me to no end. And the result of my own mind blindness.
I had written in LinkedIn bio that I am 1/4th (Quarter) Zen Monk. May be that was the spotlight, which helped me be aware of my own cataract in my mind's eyer. May be when I reach the Half Zen monk mark, I will be able to get rid of that and see the mirror of relationship with more clarity.
Aldous Huxley, one of the greatest thinker and author, once said about Alan Watts that " Alan is half zen monk and half race course operator ".
Guess I am 1 quarter Zen monk and 3 quarter …..….. . May be each one of you can fill that up for me from your mirror of relationship with me. (:-)
That is not a great question of any relevance at all, unlike 👎 the importance it is given to by many eminent philosophers and successful people .
U got to do every moment , what you got to do regardless whether it is known to you , you are going to live for a moment , a few minutes , an hour or even a few more months and years .
If it is early morning quiet hours of less traffic , Thara and I would have driven to Rameshwaram Cafe for a Masala dosa , or I would have made a good cup of masala tea for Thara and Siddapur filter coffee for Rishi… Would have cleaned dishes in the sink, dusted my bookshelf , gone to the loo or just sat near the window looking at the sky … Wonder how does it matter… That is what koan 7 in The Gateless gate teaches .
Let me buy insurance with a prologue, with due respect to you as a reader of this blog. Being compassionate is more important than readership and footprint.
Firstly , A Long-read warning. 3374 words. And I hope it will be worthwhile for you. You will find that out and decide for yourself , if you move beyond this line.
Then for many human beings ( at least for me ) Life is no sprint, 2 Min Maggie noodle fast food variety. It is a Marathon walk. Or “a very slow cooked over the wood embers” variety special dish. Like the Sunday sambar, my mum used to cook when we were young. It never used to fire our palates. But we were never ever bored of it. Though people with a stoic mindset, belittle our existence here in this planet, saying in the universal cosmic scheme things, we are miniscule speck in the endless universe and the number of years we spend here as living organism is so insignificant, in my humble view it is not so. Time is indeed a relative nonlinear concept.
Secondly about the readability ! I did struggle a bit to put this together . Even another reading of Minto’s Pyramid Principle did not seem to work. Like a Bee I had gathered many incidents, thoughts and knowledge nuggets over a period of time. At the end of it, I had given up on that front. So it is kind of inductive way.
Thirdly and lastly in this prologue, it is about our mortality (yes yours and mine !). It is not an easy topic to think about. And it was not since humans started their stint in this planet. All the religions are an effort to address this fear in human beings : about death and what happens after that to us. I would suggest to you, that your life will be much more cherished and more livable if you really consider the question of your own mortality in right earnest. One can’t become brave unless s/he delves into the pits of fear and face it. It is the yin and yang of it. Just imagine a world where only day exists , no night; no sorrow only joy; no sweetness, only bitterness and only life and no death !
It started with Anton. Anton was my neighbor at Mantri Tranquil a long time back and has been a Zen student at Bodhi Zendo much before me. We met after a long time at Little Flower Zendo , Perumal
malai. I was trying to recollect his face, when Sr. Chitra told me that someone had checked in at Zendo and was asking about me when he saw my name in the resident list for that week on the notice board. On that day at the evening Teatime, I met him. And one of the things he had shared was about the suicide of his neighbor at Mantri Tranquil. The poor fella was working at a Real estate firm for many many years before he lost his job. And quite tragically he chose to end his life the very next day, leaving behind his spouse and two young kids. Fr. Ama , our Zen master was present at the table. And later in his weekly Teisho ( Zen talks to students) he talked about life and death. What he said just got etched in my mind. He said to us that “Life is what happens to us moment to moment and how we perceive that and respond to it. IT is our duty and privilege to answer the questions Life asks us and not run away from it. “ I knew that he was well aware of my own life situation with many challenges in career and finance and felt he is addressing to me directly .
Though many who knew that person at Tranquil , was quite critical and angry at him, as someone who had suicidal ideation in my own mind during my own “depression” days , I was more empathetic to the deceased. Way back in February /March 2002 , Dr. Richard McHugh wrote on that black board in that training hall at Ashirwad , St. Marks Road, “Map is not the Territory” . The famous Alfred Korzybski quote. We don’t directly live and operate in this world. Instead, we create a model of the world in our mind , a smaller sample and often distorted image of the world and others in our mind, created mostly by our subconscious mind based upon our own beliefs, values and mindset. The world in general and all the people including you and me in particular are represented in that mind model. It won’t be off the mark to say that 8 billion people don’t live in the same world / universe . Rather we live in 8 billion different mind version of that “world/universe”. There could be some / many similarities of various parts of that mindverse . Or we would not be living together as a Community. But there are significant differences amongst us in that mind verses. How a person A perceives what is painful and tolerable and what is joyful is and can be very different from what person B’s mindverse. Remember the internet sensation of early 2000s The Second Life, where you can be a avatar in the virtual world. Our own first life is not much different from it.
A bit later in that year, as co-founders of Mitr, a Counselling initiative at Mitr we attended a week long training on Counselling by Dr Uttara. One of the important points we learnt at that workshop was the first question we had to pose to a client on suicidal ideation and how to respond to a Yes and No from them.
While we acknowledge the agency in each client , we will request them to make a call to some one whom they trust / love or the Counselor itself when they get such thoughts.
She also went on to teach us taught us that agency : in short the ability to make choices for ourselves. But unfortunately, due to our own skewed map of the world in our own mindverse, the menu of choices available to us could be very different. From Ford Model T car– Black color only choice to VIBJYOR rainbow. And with the concepts of hyper and hypo functional agencies, we often end up overestimating or underestimating our possible responses to the skewed mental map we have in our mindverse.
And quite ironically people who value most personal agency are the ones who don’t seek other’s help. They are just too certain about their own mindverses and choices they make. That is where the relevance of the title of this blog. And another aspect of it is the moment we discuss about our “thoughts” or be aware of it and reflect on it, we do gain the ability to distance ourselves from it. We start realizing our thoughts are just thoughts, it is not us. We can choose to act upon it or ignore it. Our personal freedom is solely dependent on that ability.
These were all theory for me till I could get a deeper understanding of it , when I myself was faced with that situation. I became aware of Tinnitus when I stepped out a plane way back in 2012. At first I though I got enlightened. But then Dr. Ravi Kaushik told me it is just Tinnitus. It could have been triggered by one of those statin medicines and there is no going back on it. I just got to learn to live with it. And I did learn to live with it till a bad experience at Work with my then Boss. That was during my NGO days. I was already kind of overwhelmed by guilty thoughts of ditching a well paying IT job to take plunge into a full time PG course at Education and NGO world. Sooner it hit upon me that it was a classic case of “the other side is green” disease. So one fine cold winter Bangalore morning, I woke up with the sound of two Boeing engines blaring at each of my ears and I just could not take it. Life simply was unlivable in my mind. Many a times life ending thoughts crossed my mind as sleep eluded my tired eyes and mind. To make matters more complex, the shrink, with whom I had consulted was an absolute believer in one’s personal agency. He discussed at length the pros and cons of medicines and let me decide whether to take it. Only thing the Dr. Hiremani and my good friend Guru insisted was to go for long walks, which I did religiously. And for each medicine prescribed had a 1 Terra byte worth of information on side effects and opinions in the web. 😊 .. As a last recourse, I reached out to Dr. Radhakrishnan , my childhood mentor and family Doctor and friend. He has been the go- to- Dr for me since the age of 15 and he does have magical quality of empathy in addition to medicine to cure any disease. He and his spouse are the most generous people who helped everyone. He was at hospital undergoing some medical procedure. And still attended to my call when he realized from his spouse that I am facing some “huge challenges” in life. He heard me at length and then suggested not to rely on medicines for long and try out meditation, walks and exercise and watching comedy movies. And to stop the medicine when I started feeling better. And that advice did the trigger of recover for me. Having a caring and compassionate family and a few friends just hastened and ensured the successful journey back to life. Sooner I was back at life. And it was that wonderful experience of being in that dark alley which made me me take my Zen meditation a lot more serious. It ceased to be just a stress buster for me and came out a spiritual path. Later , though I did face with more trying situations, I did face it with more serenity.
So a compassionate word or gesture from another being, is the magical potion which really opens up our mindverse with more possibilities and helps our own personal agency to make the right decisions. And often that is the distance , a rather short one, between life and death.
Again, one’s life becomes more meaningful, when one start being aware of the mysteries of death. I became aware of it when my own father , Sankara, passed away on 20 November 2006. Even when he was ushered into the operation theatre by a well-known cardiothoracic surgeon in Bangalore ( who said my father had one of the lowest risk rating in the Euro score), he was very calm and collected. After some four days he was the only one left behind in that 15 bed Surgical and soon he had slipped into the unknown as graciously as he had lived leaving us all behind. For some strange reason, as I stood beside his bed, as those attendants were cleaning up his body, I did not feel bereaved nor did I cry.. Tears came back to o my eyes much later. Soon after that, I had chanced upon a book titled “The Tibetan book of the dead” , among the piled up books, in the no longer alive "Premier books shop" @ Church street corner. And it remained one of the books I did not make much progress…
Deep sorrow and sadness stayed with me for another 6 years. In 2012 November, when I called up my mom , she said that day is a death anniversary of my father. I had forgotten about his death and then I realized he is living in his mind and there wont be an end to it.
And I wrote about it in my old blog the way I see that: “ Classic ends: immortal stories about mortal deaths”.
During these last 3- 4 months, there were many news about promising teenagers ending their life in the most tragic fashion. One was from my alma mater. A bright teenager who had his schooling from one of the best alternate education schools in India chose to end his life by jumping out of his hostel room. News reports said, the “Liberal” Uty had punished him for finding a cigarette packet in his room. ! At that rate, many of my Engineering classmates including me would have never completed our degrees- some 30 years back ! It was indeed a tragic story. When I read that story, I thought , it is important to remind the rest who are still alive, the best way to use the divine abilities “ ability to reflect and be aware of our thoughts and personal agency to choose actions and being compassionate to others and ourselves” is to give a Classic end to our wonderful life than tragic ones.
I became a chronicler of classic ends after that book “The Tibetan book of the dead” came to my shelf and I ended up writing a blog on it on 2011. Let me add a few excerpts from that blog.
“A few weeks back, one of my wonderful colleagues (who is really one of the rare species in the corporate jungle... a kind of Zen master or would be saint), told me it is really a nice book.. That brought that old dusty volume out of the book shelf into my reading list again... I also started jotting down the imprint I had in my mind from my readings on what else, classy deaths.. Here I am jotting down a few of them... I am retaining the original, for fear of killing the life in those wonderful lines...
The first one has to be one of the Americans I admire a lot.... Richard Feynman... When LA times, sent him an advanced copy of his obituary, he thanked the author but said, “I have decided it is not a very good idea for a man to read it ahead of time, it takes the element of surprise out of it.” He knew he was not recovering. He was 69. The cancer had relapsed. Pain had wracked one of his legs. He was exhausted. In one corner of his dusty office blackboard @ Caltech, he had written a pair of self-conscious mottos and a running list under the heading “To Learn”….. He had not accumulated much: A hand knitted scarf, hanging on a peg, a photograph of Michelle with her cello, some black and white pictures of aurora borealis, a van painted with chocolate brown Feynman diagrams. On Feb 3, he had entered UCLA Medical center again. His remaining kidney had failed. One round of dialysis was done. Feynman had refused further dialysis that might have prolonged his life for weeks or months. He told Michelle calmly, “I am going to die.”... He had anticipated his own death as he had shared with one his friends “You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible belief. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far I can tell. It does not frighten me.”
.. He drifted towards unconsciousness. His eyes dimmed. Speech became an exertion. He drew himself together, prepared the last phrase and released it; I had hated to die twice. It is so boring… Soon he was gone...
This one I got it from the Outlook obituary of Bhimsen Joshi... Saba Naqvi writes about the death of Mallikarjun Mansur, the saintly Hindustani classical singer legend from Dharwar. “. He had lung cancer. The doctors had given up. So his daughter was instructed not to keep him away from things he loved most. The last thing he asked for was a bidi to smoke. He was humming Raaga Jogia, almost inaudibly. His daughter placed between his lips a lit bidi. And his head rolled over. He was gone. I told this story to Bhimsen Joshi. He heard the story with a distant look, smiled and a tear rolled down his cheek.”
And continues in the same story about the Abdul Karim Khan.
“Singing at platforms links up nicely with a story from Abdul Karim Khan’s life or rather his death. On his way to Puducherry at the invitation of Sri Aurobindo, Khan sahib had a premonition that his end was nearing. He left the train at an unknown railway station, spread out his prayer mat and sang his last song. He died on the railway platform. The news was carried to Sri Aurobindo by the disciples accompanying him. “
Though I had penned this a few days back, was procrastinating posting it. May be a bit of reluctance from some part of my unconscious mind.
Then Last night , after we came back home after watching Aavesham , a Malayalam movie, Thara had send a one liner Whatsapp message though we were both sitting at the living room. She did not want to share it Infront of Rishi. The youth who had jumped out his balcony from our apartment tower day before , had succumbed to his injuries and passed away. He was a fine young boy. Quite tall , lean and athletic and quite smart looking. During my morning walk , he used to run and sprint from the opposite side. And he would run across me many times for every single round of my walk. He always had an over the ear headset and only time he would pause for a moment is to check on his smartphone. Maybe he was choosing the Music for his life. While I made it a point to wish every other walker and offer a smile and share a pleasantry, this boy I remember vividly, never made an eye contact. He was so focused on his runs, he just kept to himself and ran in his life and now with his life into his death.
When I woke up early morning, after a troubled night of sleep, Fr. Meath Conlan , a fellow Bodhi Sangha member’s advanced copy newsletter was waiting to be read in email inbox. And the below article is from that newsletter. May be just another coincidence … And it was on “Facing Life and Death”. Written by Fr. Ama Samy, my Zen master in his book “Fragrant grasses and Falling Blossoms”.
And I quote that verbatim to end this.
Wish you all a happy long life of less suffering and more joy and peace before a happier short death.
As one of Sanskrit slokas , I chose to learn by heart says:
Our life-choices and attitudes affect how we die, and our attitudes to our death condition our course of life. The end of life can come any time, any place. And it can happen also that our bodies are destroyed, minds ravaged, and spirits broken. Bodies and minds will be both afflicted and destroyed. It can be disease, and it can be perpetrated by some against others. It involves inevitably degradation and humiliation. It can be prolonged or can be put to an end soon. How will we face and endure this affliction? Viktor Frankl says if you have a meaning to your life, you can endure any torture. Meaning alone may not be enough….In the final analysis, it is not our efforts, exertions, management, and maneuvers that are our freedom, peace and liberation. It is the self that is the mystery of Emptiness, the mystery that is graciousness, that is our abode of peace and freedom. How do you realize this abode of peace and freedom? — Ama Samy, 'Zen, Fragrant Grasses, Falling Blossoms.'
"Can you remember you who are, before the world told you who you should be ? "
The famous quote by Charles Bukowski captures the essence of finding our original self in a nutshell. It is quite possible an early child event ( sometimes a slightly traumatic one as in my case) is one which shapes and makes "I/us" and shepherd and navigate our thoughts and responses to the World in general , ourselves in particular. It looses the strangle hold in us, only when we become aware of it and the way it has shaped our life so far and that is the "foot in the door into our mind" moment when we can start reworking on our psyche and soul to reclaim our original self from other-self. My reclaim-myself-mission got triggered in 2002 , when Dr. Richard Mchugh chose me a volunteer for NLP timeline exercise in his NLP class and it took me some 21 years to complete it with as a Zen student of Fr. Ama Samy. Maybe that was mixed emotion bittersweet event, when Mr. Mchugh did that exercise for me, it came out so vividly like a multicolor cinemascope movie in my mind. Now when i recollect that event in my mind , it comes out as quite hazy black and white, soundless and detached mode. In NLP parlance, they would say, i am quite done with it.
The way our brain amplifies or diminishes our experiences as it stores it as memories , through the process of generalisation, deletion and distortion , based on our perspective of the event is quite amazing. A few weeks back, i was facilitating the same NLP timeline exercise with one of my coachees. She could remember many many sorrowful experiences in her timeline very vividly while the joyful ones were a few and far between. Interestingly, while she recollected those events, she was still attached to those sad events, she still saw it happening thru her own eyes unlike her happy moments in life.
Coming back to my own "Damascus road" reverse event ( where Paul's transformation to Saul started !)....
I was all of 4.5 years old then. I am absolutely sure. It might have been during the last week of May or very early June. ALP School was not opened yet but the Monsoon was about to start. My parents advanced my date of birth on record so that - handful-trouble-maker is not at home at least during school hours. One of my uncle, then recently graduated & jobless (job seeking ) was stepping out of the house for his evening timepass with his friends. He said something to me and my brother , and i did reply something. Might have been quite disrespectful, it did trigger one of those outlier reaction of anger and violence from him. Though there were enough small sticks commensurating for a small brat available in a Kerala home, he chose to discipline a 4.5 year old, by folding a steel wire used to dry washed clothes and used as his batascoir. That was the worst thrashing i got in my life. Never before that or never after. (so far! and Thank Goodness🙂 ). My poor mother did try to stop it without much success. After my uncle left, she just held on to me and tried to stop my sobbing. I guess she herself was crying.
That is when monsoon rain came on that day and wiped my tears away. Old style kerala houses, do have those long veranadhas, wooden bench and wooden grill instead of the wall. It is kind of half open to the world and nature. When it rains, one can sit on those bench, resting one's chin on the wooden rail looking at the rain for hours. As the direction of rain changes and with some wind, one gets needle shower on the face too. It is quite hypnotically and can take one to another world altogether. It ended up being an anchor of joy and peace for me. There is a Zen koan which says , blood cannot wash away blood, and thoughts cant save you from more thoughts.... But i can tell you from my experience, raindrops from heaven can wipe away the tears of heart.
That was my first memory of the magic of monsoon rains, my psychotherapist.
Nothing in this world nourishes and freshen the thirsty, parched and sunbaked earth as Monsoon rain..and It is very difficult. not like almost everything about Rain.. that fresh smell of earth, the rhythmic sound beats as it pours on those mangalore tiles, small icy pellets of new rain and the feeling of it on the summer skin rashes, taste of black coffee and crispiness of jackfruit papad..
It offers the same therapeutic massage to hurt hearts too. It often starts with darkness even at noon. Absolute silence after the birds scurry back to their nest indicates curtain is going to up, before the light and sound show of Natures orchestra starts in God's own country.
A little later my father came home from his office and saw my plight . That was the end of joint family life for us. There is a Zen Koan parody, "How many drops of susu does it takes to spoil a broth of soup ??"🙂. The usual answer is one. That is applicable to family, community, organisations and countries.
Not long after that , we moved out of family home from the small town of Mannarkkad and relocated to a tiny village called Thenkara. Though the distance between them was just 5 km , it was kind of time travel to the past. To start with the electricity has not come to Thenkara ( it reached 3 -4 years after we moved there. ). School was a good 2 - 2.5 km away. There were just 3 -4 small shops out there. And there would have been just 4 -5 buses plying thru that village / day. And most interestingly Mathrubhumi newspaper came home only after 9 am. And in Kerala that is a measure of progress of a place.
But rain experience just got better. While Mannarkkad merely translates to the land of Earth + River + Forest, Thenkara in Malayalam literally means " Shore of honey". A land of fragrant grasses and falling blossoms. It was on the road to Silent Valley reserve forest and we just moved closer to it. There was another place within 2 km which was named as Aanamooly (which means where Elephant hums!). The tiny house which we lived in was atop a small hill. There was no wall/ fence / gate in front of the house. Rain, joy and peace came in more cheerfully unhindered. undeterred. There were two small waterfalls ( since we could hear the roar of one of them, my be they were not that far away. But i don't remember every seeing it in person🙂 ). We did have many in our age group in the neighbourhood. Though many of them did have real work to do at their home and fields, there were plenty of playmates. And to top it all , there was one Akshyapatra kind of jackfruit tree behind our house. The most tastiest jackfruits we had in our life ! It kind of took care the jackfruit needs of not only our home and but all other homes in neighbour hood and countless birds and squirrels. My mother made sure , we spent our summer vacations in making tons and tons of. jackfruit papad to ensure endless supply of monsoon snacks for her 3 children. And we did it as squirrels used to collect nuts.
After those years, life took me to places, where i had never dreamt off. Had experienced rain in Bangalore, Mumbai, Germany, England, USA , Oman , South Africa and even Saudi arabia. But they never had the charm of monsoon rains. Those phoren rains. smelt and tasted nothing like monsoon @ Mannarkkad. It was kind of half hearted to heartless. More like a bathroom shower.
A long time back during June of 2012. ( Monsoon times) i ended up as the only in patient/ resident of Poomully Ayurveda Mana for more than two weeks. It was one of those serendipitous moments in my life. During those times was kind of exiled to the deserts of middle east to make a living. It takes quite some time to get used to the endless horizons of sand dunes and start seeing the beauty in it too. (At the least i took a while !). As i was warned not to write any Blogs there, only outlets for retaining semblance of sanity were reading and listening to music. The book on. "Poomully Aram Thamburan " by writer, actor and TV anchor. V K Sriraman was one of the books i happened to read. Poomully Mana is a quite well known in Malabar. iPoomully Mana,( Mana is a Namboothiri family home ) has a history of more than 500 years. The members of Poomully Mana were famous as practitioners and experts in Ayurveda, Vedas, Yoga, Kalari (martial-art) and Music. When i had enquired about Ayurvedic treatment , i was told due to some legal disputes between partners they had closed it down. And a few weeks later, they called me and asked to come over. And i ended up as a lone resident in that ancient mana for 2 weeks during monsoon.
The resident Doctor used to visit twice a day with home made medicines. And usually the ayurvedic treatment ended during morning hours. And helper used to come up with food and as security guard for the night. Most of my time i ended up sitting on that cane chair, reading and just looking at the sky waiting for the rain.
It used to be quite dramatic , the way Monsoon arrives. It usually starts late noon. Darkness at Noon ! Absolute silence before the light and sound show of Natures orchestra in God's own country.
Even in that storm, an old lady used to come and light. a few lamps in that old dilapidated temple in front of the mana.
That was my first course of ayurvedic treatment... While those medicines, strict disciplines diet ( & starving😞 ) did cure my body, the monsoon rain did wonders to my heart and soul.
Soon after i left my Corporate job and took a plunge into the unknown. After almost a jupiter cycle of life of some struggle, some smile , some tears, some joy, some sorrow, some pain and some gain, i find myself at the same place four way junction in my life. And that kind of points to the fact, still i got to reclaim myself from myself, regardless the number of days at Zendo, the minutes of Zazen and. the number of Koans.
And this May /June i am planning to go to PErumalMalai to be with monsoon rain and my being. I may not have to go all the way back to where it started , Thenkara , like Santiago Paul Coelho's hero in Alchemist, to find it.
I was really looking to fill one of my empty weekends with some activity for Facebook showoff during my recent work related trip to South Africa. As someone who had read a bit about apartheid, I asked Terrence Ndaba friend, driver and comrade-in-arm in Joburg, the way to the apartheid museum in downtown Joburg. Terrence, one of the most customer centric professional I had met in my life ( who would tune patiently for a Tamil or Hindi FM channel for his Indian friends), suggested safari and game reserves. Though I was born and brought up near Silent Valley national park, nature held very little interest for me.
When the hotel tourist coordinator insisted “if u have not visited a game park here in SA u have not visited SA”, I started glancing thru their brochures most reluctantly. But then Krueger was a 3 -4 days sojourn and got immediately ticked off from the list. He told us about the private game reserves in Africa. And my own googling took me to “the lost world” of Lawrence Anthony and Adamsons.
I did visit the lion park near Joburg with Terrence on a Sunday and on the way back walked into a book store ( filled with books on Wild life) in Rose bank.
The first book I could lay my hands on was a gripping, funny and sometimes tragic story of Anthony’s life with huge but empathetic creatures called Elephants.. A former business man who happened to buy some 5000 acres for setting up a private game reserve, ended up as one of the most famous conservationists of recent times (especially after his successful effort in saving Baghdad Zoo). His “real” story starts when he was asked to accept a herd of “rogue” wild elephants on his ThulaThula reserve. He was the herd’s last chance of survival as the authorities were planning to kill wild beasts. “Elephant Whisperer” is Anthony’s story, how he could earn the Trust of Matriarch of the herd, Nana, connect with them, communicate them and live amongst them without harming the elephant herd or getting harmed for so many years.
To quote from a guardian article “And as he battled to create a bond with the elephants, he came to realize that they had a great deal to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom. Anthony has worked to rehabilitate them, to the extent that they will even come when he calls. Last month, we were granted a rare glimpse of the bond between Anthony and the herd. We are deep in the African bush when Anthony cups his hands to his mouth and calls: "Come baba, come girls." The elephants were last sighted a mile or so away, and for 10 minutes there is silence. Then, on the far side of a clearing, the trees rustle and the first giant grey head breaks above the bushes. Another follows, pausing only to rip a branch from a tree. Soon, as seven or eight of the herd approach, Anthony ushers us from open ground into the relative safety of the vehicle. Within seconds, the animals are poking their trunks through the open windows, their wrinkled faces and eyelashed brown eyes just yards away. We pull forward, and the elephants follow. Only when Anthony guns the engine do they give up the chase. “ It is that trigger which lead me to the animal (which includes incidentally homosapiens) world of trust and harmony.
The legend of the Elsa the lioness and Adamsons, absolutely captivating and most spiritual account of connect between humans and wild animals in the modern world. Joy, who had literally adopted Elsa, the orphaned lioness, painstakingly prepared the lioness for a life in the wild. And the lioness spent her time in the wild and came back quite often to be with her adopted parents. The most touching part of this real life story is when Elsa came back to the camp with 3 of her cubs as if to introduce them to their grandparents.
Let me quote David Attenborough “The Adamsons were both extraordinary people but they had a curious sort of tunnel vision. When we arrived, Elsa had disappeared after a fight with a wild lioness who was trying to oust her, and when Elsa turned up, Joy was over the moon – she cried out Jinja mbusin! Which is Swahili for ‘Kill a goat? Why didn't she love goats the way she loved lions?
A couple of hours after I arrived, I awoke from a siesta to find Elsa lying on me. She was very big and very heavy and had appalling bad breath. Elsa didn't take much notice of me generally, or of any human beings. She simply tolerated being cuddled by Joy. …..She was murdered in the end, by one of her staff, and George was killed by shiftas (local bandits). It's a sad story. “
For someone who lived among Lions and other wild animals, literally for some 50 + years, the tragedy of just not Adamson’s but human race was both Adamson’s got killed in their advanced years by wild humans and not by caring lions. (Elsa, Christian, Boy and many more of them…)
One of the common threads in both the stories was that of Trust and harmony. Only when there is trust between man and animal, there is harmony. Only then they connect and communicate. Trust does come from being trustworthy. The keyword is Being. But most of us try to become something which we are not and end up as incongruent.
I left the land of kind animals, to be among modern evolved humans, who were fighting it out in Tantri Turmoil over rather a trivial matter. Most of the emails smelt full of malice, like wild animals urinating in the forest to establish their territory. Just to warn the reader, stay off or get mauled. All of them had and showed off their long religious credentials and flaunted talismans like claws and teeth. In reply, the wise ones, tried to communicate rationally and businesslike. It was futile attempt to convince the unconvinced. They seems to be impervious of the fact that, even if Siddhartha, Gautama, who could transform someone like Angulimala had arrived on the scene, people might have demanded an Indian passport / or a Karnataka DL as identification and would have asked him to follow the process.
Time and distance bring in much needed objectivity and more light in the tunnel. We were all trying to convince without communicating, communicating without connecting, trying to connect with so much of trust deficit between people.
People seem to have forgotten the wise man’s saying “What u r speaks so loudly, I can’t hear u speaking”.The Adamson’s and Lawrence of this world knew this secret and went on to live with wild lions and elephants. Maybe we could also find the secret of living in harmony during this lifetime, without taking our own chances in the wild.
