Monsoon Song

The whole atmosphere is filled with the wild croaking of toads in the pond by the side of my window. For days in this hot summer of 2011 , I fall asleep with the chorus of toads in the pond and the crickets in the trees around. The garden is greener than ever, with flowers of yellow, red and pink all around. The occasional rain that pours gives more greenary to the leaves in the garden in front. It is as if the whole nature is preparing for something, like they prepare a bride for the marriage. I am sitting silently by my window , watching the darkness outside and listening to the chorus , trying to figure out a meaning out of the chorus…but it is just a music, with no meaning…but it has a symphony and at times everything, the toads,  becomes silent for a while, then this silence is so penetrating. I sit for meditation again. Within few minutes , as I focus from the nares to my navel, I start feeling my body losing its boundaries and expanding above and sideways, it always happens so and I was not surprised …what surprised me after a while of watching inside was that I could no longer hear the outside croaking of toads and singing of crickets. Rather, I felt I was in a vaccuum and the sounds were there far away and I had a space of no sound between me and the outside chorus going on. Then something beautiful happened. Out of nowhere, I started to hear a ring in my both ears, the ringing was like the sound made by tibetan bowls..i wanted it to last for a while so that I can find their source but the harder I tried , the softer they became and finally faded and suddenly the outside sounds were all around me again. It was a strange evening, more so because I had to go through a very traumatic emotional event that morning ….but it seems the depth in sadness is more deeper than that of happiness…that day I felt like I swam to the depths of myself which I had never swam before…

Do you really want to be free ? - Osho on Freedom

He asked me again, “ Do you really like to be free?.....are you free from your place, from your parents, from your profession, from your lover….? ”  …and I kept silent….i realised where I was and it was the second time in recent times I have been confronted with these questions. The previous time was in the Shivapuri mountain during my dialogue with Om baba and this time Tathagat swami , one of my dearest friends, teachers was asking me, looking at my eyes….as he was asking I was witnessing in my mind, my bondages, some material and alive and some abstract and unseen…..i started asking myself, why was I living….if the purpose was to learn few more things, earn few more money, buy some house, fall in love with some women, have kids with her, go out on vacations, go out on meditation camps once in a while and let myself drift slowly towards the destination which is death , then i am already a  living dead.....a corpse waiting for my cremation...

For experiencing even a glimpse of meditation tremendous energy is needed. For those who have never come across the futility of this kind of life which is a slow drift towards death, the question of seeking , of meditation never arises. They live their lives, and they are happy with their families, with their job, with having to earn and then spend on the pleasures of life and on the difficulties of life that come interspersed with the occasional pleasures...…for those who see the transiency in these shades of life, those who get bored with the repeating routines of life start their inner journey. But even with that inner search , there are laws, as the whole journey is about energy and energy moves with certain laws. Many of us who spend our valuable time out of our busy schedule, in doing some kind of meditation never take care of these subtle laws of bio-energy. We spend months , get nothing but some peace, some good relaxation and then either drop it or change to other techniques. There are two basic things to know- one is to accumulate energy inside us so much that it becomes a dynamic bomb inside us and next thing is to stop the wastage of energy thru many holes in our being, that we have managed to create for ourselves.

We get energy from food some of which goes to our physical body and some of which goes to our vital body . We breathe in air and prana which nourishes our vital body. There are many ways by which we lose this energy. It is lost by wrong exercise, wrong thinking, wrong feeling.....all in all a wrong way of life…When energy is accumulated in the body thru right awareness, right exercise, right thoughts and right feelings, this energy needs to move, i.e. either flow up or flow down…and this is when the intensity of the seeker comes in….the question whether one really wants freedom , really wants to realise the truth becomes pertinent …if the fire , the thirst is there then the energy will explode…but most of us are bondaged in our own ways….and many of us in the West still take meditation as a tool to make our lives balanced, joyful and to add to the harmony they have with their family and with animals and with the nature…….meditation surely will do that for them….but it is like using an aeroplane as a bicycle to ride on the road…..the flight of the body to bodylessness and the flight of mind to thoughtless Samadhi is simply in the myth books as far as the Western views on meditation is concerned…

I take a deep sigh. I close my eyes and see my mom who still thinks that I have ruined my life not settling down with someone and have a stable life…I see my father who is happy that his son became a doctor and not a painter or a musician writing and singing for the little money to get food and shelter….i see my friends who are waiting for me know what subject I will take after 3 yrs for specialisation, as if not studying after Masters degree is a crime against oneself. ….I look at myself who has been away for months, from someone I was was in love with and still fall sleep remembering her every night.....I feel chains all around and they seem to be, all created by me and for me …….and then I look at my Master , his luring eyes , telling me , urging me, scratching me from inside , to take the jump, to die and never come back as the old me.…I am gathering courage, I know if I am brave it can happen now and here , but still I feel like that little bird who just opened her eyes through the cracked egg-shell,watching the sky, so vast, but has no courage to spread her wings and fly….i still ask myself, do i really want to be free ?

Meetings with Babajis and Sadhus : The inner and the outer world

Once I heard Osho say , wherever you taste an ocean it will have the same taste. And my experiences with people of the path to realization have given me the same impression. Reading Krishnamurti or Osho or Shivapuri baba I find the same explained it many different ways, they indicate the same through their own understanding…the containers differ according to them but the content they talk about is the same….

Recently , due to the immense devotion of my beloved, Swami Arun towards Shivapuri baba, I decided to know this man …..i had seen his pictures and the glow and bliss in his face even at the age of 130 yrs attracted me to pursue him….Following him, I went to the hill-top of the Shivapuri hill where it is said he lived for many years after his enlightenment and his travels around the world…..

It was on the day of Buddha Purnima, the birth-day of Gautama the Buddha that we, I and my  friend Ganga, chose to go to the place on the hill-top where the baba had lived…..we didn’t know the route but we had asked a few sannyasins who had been there before…After about two hours of uphill , already the serenity of the jungle, the sweet chirpings of the jungle-birds and the humming of insects hiding around the bushes filled us with a peace and tranquility we never imagined….we had still 2 hours up and we could imagine how amazing it would be there at the top….

For the last one hour of walk we met no one except birds , and this made me wonder if anyone was there on the top….we hadnt carried much food except some packets of raisins, a loaf of bread and some sweets made of lapsi , but Ganga was insistent that we should fast if there was no food and fasting would be nice for meditation as well….i was not ready for that intense meditation as her, but hoped somebody would be there at the top……There were roads bifurcating , and we had a hard time choosing which to take, but we were both following our instincts and we were talking about swamiji, about Osho, about life , about relationships and this made our journey very easy and comfortable…..

After about two hours in wilderness, we arrived to a place with a water reservior and a shiva statue in between the reservior….we were on the right path and after five minutes we reached an ashram….we were welcomed by a baba who was meditating in a dark room with wood-fire burning inside…he was Om baba….we were pleased by the reception…it was not yet dark , so we decided to climb up the hill to reach the top where Shivapuri baba had stayed……it was a half an hour walk up-hill …..as we reached the top and sat for meditation, white mists came dancing from the skies and covered us…for a minute or more, I felt I was floating in the clouds…and then they left , and I felt I was engulfed in their presence….i thanked the shivapuri baba..…..then we did a kirtan and then went down to ashram again…on the way we meditated for a while in a tree hole…the base of the two huge trees had fused and somehow made a huge cave inside them , where another baba, Todke baba had meditated for 40 yrs…we felt a very calm and soothing energy inside and were in silence for a long time inside the tree…..i indeed felt in close contact with the energy of the Shivapuri baba there inside.....let me quote some teachings of the remarkable god-realized man , the Shivapuri baba –

“Since we have our bodies to maintain, we have to perform duties –

i) Personal duty – To keep the body fit we have to use our external organs and we should use them wisely; that is we should use them as much as necessary. Seeing, hearing, speaking, touching, eating should be done only to the proportion required for the body and mind; no extra use should be made.

ii) Obligatory duty – Since we cannot live alone and need help of others, society is required. We have our duties to the family, to parents, children, to the society.

iii) Professional duty- Since we have to maintain ourselves, we must earn something and much take to some profession according to individual taste and capacityBut we should spend on owr own account only as much as necessary and use the balance for other purposes.

We must establish our life first by performing these three duties. Those who desire to realize the truth should make the moral and physical disciplines of three duties secondary and the spiritual discipline, namely Meditation, primary. Those who like to enjoy a happy life only should make the first three duties primary and meditation secondary.”

It is quite clear from my understanding of the words of Osho or Shivapuri baba or Krishnamurti that the human mind in itself has the quality of a mad horse and if we want the horse to guide to the stable , i.e. if we want to go beyond the mind , we need to tame the horse first, we need to work upon the horse first although the horse is not necessary at all for us…..and for this taming shivapuri baba talks of Right life, which constitutes sticking to fixed duties in life , performing them with reason instead of emotions and having no like or dislike for them, i.e. having discrimination in all actions and all emotions encountered by one. Osho also talked of purification of body, purification of thought, of speech, purification of the heart and of charities , of donating ones knowledge to help seekers on the path, donating 10% of the earnings  to the needful, and to the mystery schools….and we all know Buddha talked of samyak aahar ( right food ) , samyak byayaam ( right exercise) , samyak bichar ( right thought ) etc…they are not leading us to enlightenment or realisation but they are helpful to keep us in balance and harmony and tame the mind so that we can ask the mind to sit aside whenever we want.

We stayed in the ashram in the hill for 3 days. I lernt a lot from everybody and every thing there. I was inspired by Ganga’s one-pointed desire for enlightenment…I would joke that her very desire was the barrier but she couldn’t help otherwise. I also lernt a lot from Gaurishankar baba..he was 25 yrs but had left his home a few yrs back after some visions of deities start coming to him in his dreams. He had travelled to different places in India in search for answers and had come to the hill on guidance of some deity , as he said. I took a brief interview with him, and was quite skeptic about his experiences when he told he talks with the crows and the mouse and regarded them as messangers of God. But anyways, he loved the cows, crows and mice and used to feed them everyday..his love for the animals reflected on us too…he was very happy to get chance to feed the two of us , and I was inspired a lot by his overflowing love to everybody and everything in existence. The next day when me and Ganga were just wondering if the Om baba who lived in an another ashram nearby would ever come out of his meditation room, he appeared in our ashram. He sat in front of the fireplace where me, Ganga and Gaurishankar were sitting , feeling the warmth of the wood-fire in the cold and wet jungle. He looked at me with peircing eyes and looked at my mala. I could see a thought running inside him after he saw my mala. I then was prompted to trigger the baba, and I knew Ganga would also like to hear his views. We started our conversation in Nepali and I would translate in english to Ganga later.

I asked Om baba , what is your path ? He told me his path was that of a aeroplane. He asked me if I knew it. I honestly said ‘no’. He was more furious at my ignorance but it had no fire in it. Rather I felt nice when he was furiously looking at me, I was then and there, mind was still..i felt confronted by a Zen Master…..a subtle fear but trusting completely that no harm could come howsoever. He explained to me about the path of a pedestrian, about path of a car-driver and about the path of a aeroplane and that it is the fastest way to realisation of the self. He stressed on 24 hour continuous flow of meditation rather than 1 hr or two hr meditation per day. I then asked him, if he is in 24 hr meditation, he can stay in the city with his family , why he had to live a solitary life in the wilderness…he told me that the city gave him a lot of stress, the family gave him a lot of tensions and if he wouldn’t go down to put his hands on fire, he has known it once and abandoned it out of underrstanding…it convinced me…but still , it felt his spiritual life was not challenged , I asked him after 20-30 yrs of stay here , now he could easily go back and not get disturbed, but I saw a fear in him towards the usual social life…..he said about dropping everything, dropping every desire , then only coming to the wilderness and not coming to the wilderness to drop desires…when I looked into myself, I felt I had hundreds of desires still and I am not yet ready for the wilderness and aloneness that he was so much enjoying. He had a glow in his face and a presence around himself that could be felt from a distance. I finally asked him if he had become one with the divine . he honestly told me it hasn’t happened yet. He is waiting and watching. It was so beautiful. In the evening when I was translating it to Ganga, I went into contemplation myself, of the bondages I have in my life, of how fragile my will is , how I am influenced and disturbed for days when somebody I love doesn’t act the way I like…I felt faraway from the goal…..

I have been reading Shivapuri baba since my return from the shivapuri hill-jungle and he is penetrating me each day. I can clearly see where we Osho sannyasins diverted in the name of freedom , we almost tried to tame the mad horse with the electric shock, i.e. we are hoping to get a pure mind out of dynamic meditation alone but it is never going to happen. Discipline of the body ( by learning from the experiences of ones body, discriminating the need of the body from the need of the mind, giving a fixed schedule for sleeping eating, playing, disciplines the body) , discipline of the mind ( Shivapuri baba says- by dropping the negative i.e. doubt, fear, crookedness, greed, anger and adhering to positive – truthfulness, compassion, forgiveness, chastity, fearlessness and charitability according to the need of the time and situation and with the flexibility to change) and discipline of spiritual life through self-remembering or through meditation is needed to tame the wild horse called mind. Then only meditation begins.

As I am passing my days of waiting here before my work begins in an hospital in US , I travel everyday watching me and watching around. Everything in my life that has given me pain has come from my ego and further has strengthened my ego by my reaction to it. And every good times, be it of the ecstatic moments of holding hands with my lover or of the joy of being sucessful in any job I had taken , every pleasure , every joy had been of the ego and for the ego….every pleasure gave way for pain and every pain lasted for a while and then the desire for pleasure was there automatically….i can see it clearly and yet I know I can become a victim of the vicious cycle very unknowingly…and hence the need for awareness of everything in and out, of meditation, has become very important for me….to come out of duality of existence, of happiness and sorrow, of hate and love, of anger and compassion , of life and death will be the most difficult thing for me in days to come….and yet the me,  making effort to come out ,  is the ego itself…so the insistence of my Master Osho on let-go, as they say in Tao, wu wei.

Osho on the Mystic Shivapuri Baba

"All the scientists, even the great ones, have proved foolish in many ways outside their specific field. They behave childishly. Bennett was a scientist and mathematician of a certain standing, but he wavered, he missed. He started looking for another master again. And it is not that he remained with Shivapurieither…. Shivapuri Baba was a very old man when Bennett met him. He was almost one hundred and ten years old. He was really made of steel. He lived for almost one and a half centuries. He was seven feet tall and one hundred and fifty years old and still there was no sign that he was going to die. He decided to leave the body – it was his decision. Shivapuri was a silent man, he did not teach.

Particularly a man who had known Gurdjieff and his tremendous teaching would find it very ordinary to be with Shivapuri Baba. Bennett wrote his book and started searching again for a master. Shivapuri Baba was not even dead yet. Then, in Indonesia, Bennett found Mohammed Subud, the founder of the movement called Subud. Subud is a short form of Sushil Buddha-Dharma; it is just the first letter of these three words. What foolishness! Bennett started introducing Mohammed Subud, a very good man, but not a master…nothing even compared to Shivapuri Baba; no question arises about Gurdjieff. Bennett brought Mohammed Subud to the West, and started introducing him as the successor to Gurdjieff. Now this is utter stupidity! But Bennett writes beautifully, mathematically, systematically. His best book isShivapuri Baba. Although Bennett was a fool, even if you allow a monkey to sit at a typewriter once in a while he may come upon something beautiful – perhaps a statement which only a buddha could make – just by knocking the typewriter keys here and there. But he will not understand what he has written. The first book is by Bennett, an Englishman, a perfect Englishman. The book is about an absolutely unknown Indian mystic, Shivapuri Baba. The world has come to know about him only through Bennett’s book. Shivapuri Baba was certainly one of the rarest flowerings, particularly in India where so many idiots are pretending to be mahatmas. To find a man likeShivapuri Baba in India is really either luck or else a tremendous work of research. There are five hundred thousand mahatmas in India; that is the actual number. To find a real man among this crowd is almost impossible." Osho
  Chapter 16 - Books I Have Loved

"Just a few days ago I was reading the memoirs of a very rare man. He was a saint who died a few years ago. He lived for a really long time – almost one hundred and forty years. His name was Shivapuri Baba, Shivapuri Baba of Nepal. In his memoirs he tells a story. When he went to Jaipur a very rich man gave him a box full of notes, hundred-rupee notes. While in the train he looked into the box; it was full of notes and he wanted to know how many notes he had. So he started counting. In the compartment there were only two persons, Shivapuri Baba, a very old ancient man, at the time he must have been about one hundred and twenty years old – and an English lady, a young woman. She became interested. This old beggar was in the first class and was carrying a whole box of one-hundred-rupee notes?" Osho
Chapter 3 - Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol. 2

"This happened twice…again a few years later. In the East this is called “the transmission”; the energy can jump from one flame to another lamp which is dying. Even though such great experiences happened to him, Bennett was a wavering man. He could not waver and betray like Ouspensky, but when Gurdjieff died, then he betrayed. He started looking for another master. What a misfortune! – I mean misfortune for Bennett. It was good for others, because that was how he came to find Shivapuri Baba. But Shivapuri Baba, howsoever great, is nothing compared to Gurdjieff. I cannot believe it of Bennett. And he was a scientist, a mathematician…only that gives me the clue. The scientist has almost always behaved foolishly outside his own specific field." Osho
  Chapter 16 - Books I Have Loved 

"An idea came in her mind. She jumped up and said, “You give me half the money otherwise I will pull the chain and I will tell them that you tried to rape me.”Shivapuri Baba laughed and put his hands to his ears as if he were deaf. And he gave her some paper and said, “Write it down. I cannot hear.” So she wrote it down. He took it and put it in his pocket and said, “Now pull the chain.” Osho
  Chapter 3 - Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol. 2