dolphin darshan

i spoke to my mother the other day and she told me, she and my brother's family had decided to spend new year's day at the baltimore aquarium, and that she particularly enjoyed the dolphin show. i was amazed at how each one of us in the family had had dolphin darshan with out any prior arrangement on new year's day! what is this but grace...

but that is not the end of the story though. i walked past amma's room the other day, and i only i recall the contents of my mind at that moment for it was relevant, except now i don't remember it...i look up and for the first time see the windows of the balcony open and through the window, what do i see, but a poster of two dolphins jumping out of the water, like i had seen not a few days earlier.

love.

Happy New Year! 2009

it is 15 years to the day since i first left india. and now i am back, and am in the ashram. more than a bit dazed, not quite sure as to what i am doing here, but sure that there is nowhere else to be other than here. so that is the larger context, i suppose, not being sure, being 'here'.

as the day crept on, and my dazedness thickened, i was reluctant to go to my room to rest. amma was giving darshan. i had traveled half way across the world, two planes, a brief pause at an aunt's place and life, a train ride and an auto ride later, here i was at the ashram.

amma had said, come! and i had. but what now?

i go for darshan. no acknowledgments, no conspiratorial winks, no nods, no sign of the context of my coming, nor content of my being.

finally i arrange for a friend to wake me up around 11:30 and go to rest. i fall into a heat-infused, jet-lagged, exhausted heap and wake up a but rested, yet still removed from it all.

out in the amma-verse, there have been all kinds of performances...and i am slightly bitter, for i had so longed to be here, to spend new year with mother, especially the year past, and here i was now, and was not even able to be present for anything! the exhaustion in one thing at the physical level, but it is steeped in the soul level also.

a young indian-american man sings a beautiful rendition of 'lean on me'.

and then amma starts to sing. mata rani. and i am seized. literally seized by the All. my heart lifts, and i am on my feet, with radhika, my italian friend, and we are ELATED. amma sings another refrain, and i am bodily lifted off, soaring, four feet into the air...and can not simply translate into words, the sheer and utter upliftment of the moment, leaping joyfully, twirling in the air, a joyful dolphin whose element is the air.

which is what i see the next morning at the beach, and never have i seen them leap so high off the water, as they did that fresh morning, fresh day when the year was brand new.

ego principle

what is this 'i' when all is you?

what is this 'you' when all is me.

the notion of boundary is popular in the western cultures. and the opposite is true in the east. clearly one needs a notion of 'self' apart from all others to function in society. but how much of this 'self' is needed? how rigid should be that boundary? 

one of my very first questions that i wanted to ask amma was 'who am i? and what is my dharma?" 

very unique questions clearly. no one in the history of life has ever wrestled with these questions. so i never asked her. for the very reason that it was clearly a 'big' question, if not the biggest question, and i suppose i didn't feel that question fit in with the rest of other questions which were somehow more specific and particular as opposed to mine being very 'abstract'...such is the nature of the mind that deflects artfully, for who better than amma is there to ask that question, and was my question really that abstract, considering the suffering i undergo in my ignorance and not knowing?

as is often the case the mind goes all wooly when i turn my attention to it. it would much rather zone out on the web reading some worthless news item or another. it makes regular rounds. ny times, bbc, and guardian...the staples. my mind can blend and hide from itself for hours in these sites. anything other than bringing the focus back onto itself, this moment, as it is...

what is it so afraid of facing? what is it that it wants not to pay attention to? what is it that keeps it away from me? 

the idea of no-self is quite celebrated, especially in buddhism. but i think this my non-self is just self cloaked in non-ness, and not really that no-self that buddha would approve of. 

this morning as i sat and brought that mind into this moment for a brief flash while at the very same time held the question, who am i?, what i got was that i am...wow.

it is true, there is nothing left to say.

yet, the silence is not THAT one.

it is more the stunned repose,

the caught in the headlights,

version of the thought mode.

water drop on lotus leaf,

this soul doesn't quite

sit well in this poor body.

the soul needs a permeable membrane.

or the one ocean where the water drop

might giddily loose all its boundaries.

tear drop by tear drop,

i too, drop into that ocean

not too readily.

This moment

 This moment, that precious drop of nectar.

This moment, the mother lode of mystery.

This moment, the eternal evasion.

This moment, the emotion....

dry, tentative, gasping

yet, gingerly

i step

into

it.

Om Amriteswaryai Namah!

This is my first venture into the world of blogging. I hope to give vent to that which builds up inside in this path to self. The desperation, the determination, the destitution, the elation, the ecstasy, and as Georg Feurstein would say, the enstasy...all that. Admittedly, i have not experienced the positive end of the spectrum in a long time, i must admit! For now, all i have got is, FEAR, distraction, distortion, dejection, the good stuff.