Arunachala
“I feel so happy. Everything inside is full of happy,” I said to Remedia.
“You face look alive. Not like you dead. In Singapore you look like dead people. All white and sick. Like zombie. Now you looking good.”
“Yeah. As soon as we got to India, I got alive. I feel like I can move here. Like I can do anything I want.”
“I floating here. The energy from Arunachala make me float.”
We had spent the day looking at houses within walking distance of Sri Ramana Ashram. The last one of the day was best. It was way down Post Office Road in a field behind Yogiramsuratkumar Ashram.
The brand new house had two bedrooms, two baths and a large rooftop that we could see Arunachala from. Rent was a hundred Euros a month, or 6,000Rs including utilities.
I had two significant dreams that night—my first in awhile.
In the first dream I was sitting in a modern school talking with my friend the principal. Two students were with us. As the conversation evolved, I found myself explaining an important issue to the students.
“I want you to do me a favor,” the principal said after the students were gone. “Come to work here. You have a very relaxed, comfortable way of teaching that puts everyone at ease. I want you here.”
I found myself seated in a classroom with twenty or thirty adults.
“I wonder what the Principal’s gone and done now,” I heard someone say.
I realized that it was time for me to stand up. I moved to the front of the classroom and immediately a barrage of all kinds of spiritual questions came at me from the room full of mature students.
In the second dream, I was sitting in a parked car overlooking the ocean. A shiny sports car came by going very fast.
I drove my car off the bluff. As I was falling towards the ocean, I could see black rocks lurking beneath the water and huge waves pounding the cliffs.
The car landed and I thought, “I better get out before it sinks.”
In the water I began swimming very fast with extremely powerful strokes. I could see white foam from breaking waves washing high on rocks and cliffs as I swam for a distant sandy beach.
Suddenly I felt sand beneath my feet and, surprised that the beach had come so quickly, I stood and walked onto land.
Helene, a French friend living in Kuala Lumpur, came to spend a week with us the next day.
Remedia enjoyed Helene’s very alive presence immensely. They climbed 1,700 meters to the top of Arunachala for a fire ceremony, went around its base and visited ashrams and gurus.
I accompanied them to a darshan with Siva Sakthi Amma, the same woman Jasper had gone to see so many times. The night before going, I dreamed of fighting with a woman who was trying to kill me. The night following darshan, I had a different dream with the same theme--a woman was trying to kill me.
At darshan itself I went very deep into a new space that Helene and I talked about in the auto rickshaw afterwards.
“She is so beautiful. So full of grace.” Helene’s face crumpled as she fought back tears.
“Yeah. I got the same thing. Infinite grace.” My head felt like the entire universe could fit inside it.
“We are like that!” Helene said emphatically. “We are all exactly like that!”
“Yes. We just didn’t realize it yet,” Remedia said.
Siva Sakthi Amma was the woman of my dreams who was trying to kill me. Her grace was destroying my ego.
It was the final day of Helene’s visit when they walked around Arunachala. To walk straight around the fourteen kilometer path usually takes three to four hours, but, in spite of having started early in the morning, it was very near dark before they returned.
:”How are you?” I asked Helene to our new house.
“I’m sorry we took so long,” she said a little anxiously.
“You look tired. Are you?”
A small smile broke out. “Yes, but it was very good. We were gone a long time.” She knew that I depended on Remedia because of my disability.
“It was OK. Remedia brought good food for me before she left. I was fine. How was the walk?”
“It took so long because we didn’t just walk past everything.”
“Oh. So you got to experience some things.”
“Yes. We stopped to meditate in all the caves and saw all of Arunachala’s chakras. The weather was perfect. The clouds stayed high so that we could see the mountain the whole time. Sometimes it looked like an elephant or other animals.”
“Yeah, the weather was good. No rain all day.” They had gotten soaked the evening they had climbed Arunachala for a fire ceremony.
“In one of the caves a woman meditated for seven years. I sat in one where I was up above Remedia and our guide. Afterwards Remedia asked me if I had been able to follow the meditation they were guiding me through. I knew that they had been doing this, but my mind had gone into another vast place. It was like I wasn’t there, but I was. It was the energy of the cave that I was in. It was…it was…” She shrugged a very eloquent French shrug that said that her experience had been beyond words.
I was reminded of Jasper saying that it was impossible to put these experiences into words. They had to be lived.
