Letter #1 - Confidence in Arunachala
“When we enter on the spiritual path we come with substantial baggage. Our deep-rooted fears, our unreasonable expectations, our blindness, and our folly. We think we are nearly there and that only a few advanced teachings remain between us and the holy grail of realisation when all bow down to our superior knowledge. As we discover to our grief it is not like that at all. Quite the contrary, we are in a muddle and do not know north from south."
We all seek certitude. From the moment we are born, we seek comfort and the confidence that that which gives us nourishment and security will always be available. Ideally, we first seek it with our mother’s loving breast. We seek it in the strength of our father’s arms, he who lifts us up and carries us. We seek it in the comfort of a warm cot from where we begin to dream our lives ahead and try to make sense of what we just experienced in an ever-changing and puzzling world.
We are always on the search for that which is utterly reliable and unshakable. We could say that our life is a series of lessons; we learn the hard way about disappointment, betrayal, regret, and sorrow. These are interspersed with moments of quite often unexpected pure joy, contentment and love.
When I was a boy, I looked first to my father and later to heroes in history who could offer me lessons and guidance on how to conduct my life. It started with Hanibal who dared to invade the mighty Roman empire at its very heart. His courage in crossing the Alps with elephants, and his resilience in the face of constant adversity inspired me but his ultimate defeat and his taking poison to avoid capture showed me he had feet of clay. Next was Napoleon but that quickly faded when I saw a sketch of him being hit on the foot by a cannonball. He was not invincible as I had imagined, hopping around on one foot. For years after that, I sought another hero but could not find one that satisfied my increasingly wide knowledge and discrimination about the world. My mind became clouded and progressively distressed.
In despair, I look elsewhere by traveling to other countries partly to escape and partly in a desperate effort to locate someone or surely something that would salve my heart. An encounter finally arose at Surakata or Solo in Java, at the house of a cultured Javanese man, Pak. Suyono. He has a small library for spiritual seekers who had clustered at Solo to practice Sumarah, a Javanese form of meditation and not to be confused with Subud. In his library was a booklet,
Ramana Arunachala by Arthur Osborne. On the cover was a photograph of an old man naked except for a loincloth sitting on a rock in front of a hill. He smiled benignly as he confidently held an upright walking stick in one outstretched hand.
I did not think much of him. In my arrogance, I thought he had everyone fooled. My disdain had no limits. Little did I realise that he was the one who would eventually save me from myself.
It was a year later that I first looked upon Arunachala and sought sanctuary in the ashram of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. The intermission between that first meeting in Solo and my physical arrival saw many of my passing fancies and delusions crushed. Not least of which was that peculiar sense of superiority young males exude of being gifted for any task. In other words, an idiot. All that kept me going was the indubitable conviction through a vision that occurred some months after that first ill-starred meeting in the private library that I was on the right path.
The arrival at Arunachala was not the culmination of a search but the foundation. And the first beginning was the recognition that I knew nothing. A terrible ordeal followed in which a remorseless force created one humiliation after another until I said sincerely in despair, “I don’t know.”
When we enter on the spiritual path we come with substantial baggage. Our deep-rooted fears, our unreasonable expectations, our blindness, and our folly. We think we are nearly there and that only a few advanced teachings remain between us and the holy grail of realisation when all bow down to our superior knowledge. As we discover to our grief it is not like that at all. Quite the contrary, we are in a muddle and do not know north from south. All our previously acquired knowledge is much like a song we cobbled together, only we cannot remember the words in the right order. We know some ‘good’ bits that we can sing loudest with conviction but how we got to that fragment by a series of mumbles and vague out-of-tune stilted sounds is beyond our comprehension. It is a jumble of rubbish and wise words and we do not appropriately know how to apportion the words in the right order. It is all rather unsatisfactory and depressing.
To go forward we must dissolve the second-hand song and start again. We start with the very staples of any successful spiritual search. Do not lie, do not steal, do not slander, do not take advantage of others, do not hurt others… all our elementary spiritual training is learning what not to do. It is a negative process that can be boring and seemingly fruitless but it is necessary. This stubborn grey landscape we travel through does contain those odd serendipitous moments when the sun shines and gives us hope before once more the curtain is drawn and we are stuck with our small-minded behaviour.
Though everyone’s journey is unique there are certain stations on the way which are collective. Whether one is a Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, or Buddhist, there are universal principles applicable to all humankind on the spiritual search.
The language may be different, the clothes may be different, the education may be different but if we scrutinize it carefully, the fundamental principles are one and the same. The various signposts given by the great religions may be in a foreign script and the terrain unfamiliar but all paths lead to the one summit. There are those who argue that is not necessarily true but we will save that for another essay.
When I arrived at Tiruvannamalai I did not know of the greatness of Arunachala. It looked like a large pile of barren rocks. It was said to be the earthly manifestation of Lord Siva. Mount Kailash may be where Lord Siva resides but Arunachala is the supreme manifestation of this universal spirit.
As time went by the significance and power of Arunachala became more readily recognisable. And it was only when I started to let go of my numerous preconceptions and let’s face it, plain ignorance, that a new confidence arose that all would be well.
And this proved to be true.
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