Escape into Life : Memoirs of Saint Lucia

It often surprises me when i remember my childhood days, every once in a while a relative would visit our parents and ask me what i would like to become when i grow up, their expected answers clearly visible in their faces and my dilemma of having to at least answer them in front of my parents. And the funny thing is after 30 yrs i realize the most important discovery that to do nothing in life is the greatest doing.

 This winter there were 3 snow storms in the last 3 weeks. The last one had just visited us a day ago leaving Danbury all white and dark. It was one of those not so busy ICU days. We had a mortality this morning and witnessing the family members cry out at the loss of their loved one had infiltrated all of us there but as the day passed everyone got used to it, as an usual ICU day. Here in ICU, every day people pass away and every time it happens there are cries and sobs from the heart, often touching me, making me visualize my own day, as death is the only reality after life, everything else is ever changing, from one 'now' to another 'now' with millions of possibilities in each 'now'. I was talking with a Surgery resident Rachel who asked about my weekend plans and as we were discussing how post-ICU days pass by sleeping and waking up to eat and then sleeping again, we touched topics about doing nothing. Rachel was used to doing something, going to the city the whole day and sleeping the minimum hours, and she told me it was a skill she learned as surgeon. And i had to tell her about my one month i spent not so long ago, a month doing nothing, a month in a little village in the middle of no-where, a month in saint lucia.

The month in Saint Lucia became more and more beautiful as days passed by, in contrast to the busy ICU days. It was early January, after the first week of 2014, we had seen a couple of snow-falls already in Danbury, we had made plans to escape to this tropical island almost a year ago and despite not being able to take our little Ava with us, we were already imagining ourselves on white sands beneath palm trees.We had rented a studio with kitchenette, thanks to our friend Manoj who actually had inspired us with his facebook pictures of the place where he stayed teaching medical students for a year.It was minus 8 celsius in NY city the day we took our flight. Getting off the plane in st. lucia with all our layers and down jackets and being welcomed with warm air was quite a surprise. We were soon surrounded by 10-12 local people all asking if we need taxi. We decided to walk to our hotel, not knowing how far it was, we were told five minutes walk, but it turned out it was five minutes by taxi. Nonetheless we walked and soon we came across the ocean alongside the road, the water hit the rocks ashore and splashed us with cool mist, out first welcome and our first touch of love from the ocean. As days passed by this love grew deeper, the bond became stronger.

 It was a small village in the island. The only place with an international airport in the island.The very first day we went out to the nearby ocean by the reef which was five minutes walk from where we stayed. Finally my little bird was happy, she blooms in the ocean, she merges with the ocean and her happiness reminds me of my happiness when i trek to mountains. In the days that followed, we took public bus and went around the island( which was 200-400% cheaper than the taxi), visited a big city, Castries, where we bought fruits, vegetables, groceries and were surprised to find a subway restaurant. We visited a Nepali friend who lived in a tourist-rich place called Rodney Bay, had some Nepali lunch with his family and returned back to Vieux Fort. We then went to nearby beach where we swam, relaxed under palm trees. We found a beautiful village about 10 mins drive north, Laborie, where we spent some of our most beautiful days. And there were days when we just stayed indoors, watching movies and sleeping. It used to rain for 5 minutes and then the sky was clear for a few hours and then shower for 5-10 minutes, the tropical weather was hard to predict but the rain was always welcomed in the hot sunny days.


One of the beautiful experiences was visiting a Rastafarian in La Tille waterfalls. He had lived in the nature reserve for many years now. He was vegan as he was a Rastafarian and spending time with him, talking about his views about religion, about corporate culture which he called ' babylon' and about the ultimate heaven 'zion' was all very very interesting. He was blended with the trees around, he loved his trees and wanted to touch their branches as he walked around, the touch he said was healing, was connecting him with the nature. He was the man Osho talked about in his discourse on Bauls, the 'adhar manus' the original man, the natural man. I remember OSHO talking on nature and he reminded me of it.

Osho says “If you live with nature — with trees and rocks and the sea and the stars and the clouds and the sun — you cannot be unreal, you cannot be phony. You have to be real because when you are encountering nature, nature creates something in you which is natural. Responding to nature continuously, you become natural.” He has a waterfall by his hut, has coconut trees, banana trees, sour-sop tree, mango trees and almond trees around.He was telling that his friends who studied with him have become lawyers, doctors, politicians and sometimes visit him for a few hours to dip in the waterfall and tell him that they want to live in peace like him but don't have time.He was living in the nature, he rises with the rising sun and sleeps with the rising moon, he had an air of peace around him, he was perfectly at peace and happy with himself. 

We spend some days hiking up the hill, Moule-a-chique which would then give us a view of the whole island, the horizon and the blue ocean meeting each other. Our hike was playful, birdie would take pictures of chickens, of trees, collect leaves, her childlike innocence and playfulness and my insistence to reach the top of the mountain always made the trip wonderful despite an hour long uphill hike. And the view from the top was the reward, the vastness of the ocean, views of both the Atlantic ocean and the Caribbean sea were amazingly beautiful. Our days were unplanned, we would just go out take a bus and spend the day either on a village beach swimming or go out exploring new places, one of which led us to the great Pitons. And riding back in a truck from the Pitons along a windy mountain road, an adventure to remember for long.

When i was telling Rachel about our days in St. Lucia she told me places like these are great if you want to do nothing for a week or two. And thats exactly we were planning to do. To do nothing for as long as we could before we had to return back to normal life, which as i look again and again isnt so normal. We are born, we grow, we study, we acquire skills to make ourselves happy. Humanity isnt so regressed that we live just to survive, to eat, make love, sleep and indulge in thoughts of future plans. We live to be happy and blissful. And all of us are pursuing this happiness, we look for it in our relationships, in our job, in our possessions, in our career, in our goals and we plan and then chase all our life to realize we had it all along, had we not chased for it we would live with it. Our days in Saint Lucia not only reminded us of how beautiful life can be, just living, waking up, cooking, walking to the ocean, swimming, sleeping, being one with the nature, with the trees, the ocean the sun...our friend Manoj had warned us that it will be boring after a week, and i realized after a month that i finally was accepted by the ocean, its waves, i began to feel safe, an unknown trust surrounded me when i met her..
i began to feel the oneness with the ocean, it was suddenly a joy, a constant invitation to merge in, and it was already time to leave..the oneness will invite me again and again, the same ocean in different banks, we are lovers now, we will meet and depart to meet again, at some shore, in some life...

Osho Mala , Sannyas and Laborie Village

It was a hot day, we were lying on the white sands after a short swim in the blue Caribbean sea. I was learning to stay afloat and was remembering Osho's "floating-dying meditation" . Everything around was alive, the deep blue sea, the coconut trees dancing in the wind, the village was quiet, occasional local passerby would hint at us with smoke asking if we would enjoy marijuana , I would simply say no and would be pushed back to my past memories, those days of zero gravity and the day when it happened in meditation. I come back to herenow, to the vastness of the sea and begin to wonder- what pulls somebody into meditation? is meditation a hobby or a necessity ? is it a philosophy or religion ? or is it an urge, a tremendous curiosity to find the unfoundable, to delve into the mysteries of life and death, a constant itch to solve the unsolvable like for those professors in search of the Higgs boson particle.

I remember when I had my first meditation camp. It was about 10 years back. Right after I returned from the ten days silence retreat I had to keep the experience within myself for many weeks. I was not convinced I would make sense to any of my friends. They would have understood peace of mind, concentration of mind, praying to god for brighter future but how would they take if I said I was in two places at the same moment, I looking at myself from a distance, what would they think If I said I am happy without a cause, the silence floating and sounds would be like ocean waves on the vast sphere of silence and would they have been motivated for meditation if I had told it was a feeling of utter completeness as if I didn't need to study or achieve further, life was happy then and there? 

Things have changed since my first experience of silence. Life has taken me through many twists and turns along its road, and friends have come and gone. I am now surrounded by sannyasins who have

become friends , meditators and followers of Osho who carry the sharpness of mind that one feels while reading any of Osho's books, and friends who carry the love and compassion that one sees when one looks into eyes of Osho..but I still get questions, why we meditate? do we know why sannyas? why Master ? why commune? why red clothes ? why mala ? the questions that were there ten years ago are still there and now being part of world of meditators the questions have become more deep and specific. These are not my questions, these are questions asked of me, over and over again by friends and sannyasins...

I remember listening to Osho in Hindi . The discourse was later translated to English and published as the book-"Hidden Mysteries". Somewhere in the beginning of the book he said,  "Suppose we have a key in our hands. We cannot directly understand the purpose of it from the key itself, nor is it possible to imagine from the key itself that a great treasure is likely to be revealed with its help. There is no hidden indication in the key regarding the treasure; the key itself is closed. Even if we break it or cut it into pieces, we may find the metal of which it is made, but we cannot learn anything about the hidden treasure which the key is capable of revealing. And whenever such a key is preserved for a long time, it only becomes a burden in our life.........It can be understood this way. Radio waves are passing by all around us, but they cannot be picked up without a radio receiver. Tomorrow, if there was a third world war and if all technology was destroyed but somehow a radio receiver was luckily left intact, you wouldn’t want to throw it away. Though you know that you can’t broadcast, or tune in to any program, or even find a technician to repair it, you wouldn’t want to throw the radio away.

After several generations in your family, if anyone were to ask the use of the radio, none of your family members alive then would be able to reply. They might only say that their fathers and their forefathers were insistent on its being preserved, so they continue to keep it. Their forefathers never told them what it was for, they don’t know its use and so it is of no help to them; even if that radio is dismantled nothing could be known. By opening the radio it couldn’t be known that some time in the past music and talks could be heard through it. The radio only used to act as a receiving station for some happening elsewhere, but it could pick up the waves and act as a medium to present them as sounds to listeners".

24 years have passed since Osho left his body. I am not sure how many hundreds of years will pass since this world will see a master so fearless and radical , so compassionate and rational as Osho. His teachings are so multidimensional that often his followers catch only one dimension of his teachings and lose the original sense of the teachings. Rational thinkers and sannyasins with western set of mind often see the scientific dimension of his teachings. I have often caught them saying- " You can wear a

mala and robe, it is your choice, a matter of individual freedom" And there are sannyasins who see mala, robe, pictures of master, rituals, temples as keys to unlock the mysteries , they don't want to discard the key because they still have the lock, rest of the sannyas world are carrying keys or threw the keys away because the locks were lost in time and space. They are condemned as 'devotees' and criticized for trying to make Osho movement of meditation into an organized religion. I can see Osho's efforts from the 1960's, his attempt and his dilemma and later how he reluctantly started "sannyas". It was for him synonymous to restarting 'temples', 'rituals' , the same thing that was happening all around in the name of religion. His challenge was immense. there was every possibility that his sannyas, the mala, his picture in the mala would some day be turned into either part of an organized religious rite of a dutiful devotee or a matter of individual freedom. But it had to be started, it was a key whose lock was around, Osho was the lock and he still is.

Unfortunately very few of his disciples knew it before he left his body and what happened after he did and is still happening is nothing but a big joke. Carrying around an old radio without the knowledge of radio waves or frequency to catch a music station will only be heavy weight around the neck. Many sannyasins rational enough threw the old radio and are happy about it and write daily in media blogs and Facebook about Osho himself reducing the need for wearing mala. They find many discrete
cuttings of his talks to support their ideas and would make a lot of sense. But the radio waves are there, will always be there, and radios will always be made. Masters have come and will come in future, they will have different ways to show how to connect to those waves but the game between master and disciple will continue, the ritual will continue, it has to continue, the mystery & the Master, the urge to merge with the oceanic energy-field, the mala and sannyas , the mad intoxicating experience between Master and disciple...