36 Hamsa Johannus de Reade A private house 30th January 1981 |
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Mr. N. is confused by the kind of Interview-talk I had with David Godman; it’s not the kind of cosy conversation he thinks I’m looking for. I assure him I want to give an accurate portrayal of all aspects of the path and not to sugar-coat it. David Godman’s clear-headed honesty is more important to me than he thinks. But he is unhappy. He is even unhappier when he learns I have met someone outside the Ashram who has agreed to give the next Interview but who is absolutely not on the official list… How could you arrange it? — he is protesting — I’ve been with you all the time? After telling him that the same Power that propelled David Godman to the Ashram and is still looking after him could perhaps also be looking after me, we strike a deal: Mr. N. is to accompany me to my secret rendez-vous. He’s ecstatic, I’m ecstatic, we shall all be ecstatic. With Mr. N. present what can go wrong?
We are taken into the Dhakshinamurti shrine room, placed in comfortable chairs, given cool drinks — and before Mr. N. asks the first question, Hamsa nods his head very slightly. I press the recording button: we are off…
Interview 36 To start, I will say I was born in Java which was then a Dutch colony. My childhood was spent there but I went back to Holland for schooling. But my earliest memories are of being white amongst a mixed Melanesian-Indonesian population who had been mostly forcibly converted to the Muslim religion while keeping many of their Hindu customs and traditions. We as whites were supposed to be superior and looked down on the indigenous population as a little more than monkeys but less than us. It came as an interesting shock later to recognize Hinduism as the older culture. Of my 53 years I have spent few in Holland although I have lived in Italy and Switzerland. Where did you spend the
war years? He was to become your
teacher in India? In 1936 he had toured India as a young man of 33 but in the style of the British Raj with a huge seven-seater car, a cook, a secretary, a boy to open doors, and a man to cut wood and carry water at stop-overs. While travelling in this style at Bangalore, someone told him: There is a wonderful, crazy old man living at Tiruvannamalai whom you must meet. He went. It was Ramana Maharshi. Within 24 hours he knew his search was over… he had found his <a href="javascript:popUpWindow('../glossary.htm#Satguru',100, 100, 550, 80)" STYLE="text-decoration: none;">satguru</a>! He gave up his careers, his ambitions, and settled here at Tiruvannamalai. The climate didn’t, however, suit him for an all-year round stay. He found a property by the sea in Kerala from where he came to see Ramana regularly. He did further writing and produced his great work: The Revelation in the Wilderness, consisting of three volumes(1) on comparative symbolism, born out of a panoramic flash of the symbolism of the world. He became acquainted with much of the material through a colleague, Dr. C.G. Jung, whom he in his turn had encouraged to visit India in 1938. Jung got as far as Madras but never visited Ramana because he had already seen the deep brown eyes of a small saint, and according to Jung, it wasn’t necessary to see more. All this is documented in Heinrich Zimmer’s: The Way to the Self, with a foreword by Jung himself. Ramana must have left
the body just before you arrived. In India, Mees was better known as Sadhu Ekarasa. He took me to Tiruvannamalai, but purposely didn’t say anything about the Hill or his great teacher. He knew I was a keen psychologist of 24 not interested in religion. I saw all sorts of strange things going on in a place called Ramanasramam: people prostrating to a heap of earth and stones — the grave of an old man… I could have been interested in anything else but that. The conversation was beyond my field of interest. I asked Mees: How long are we to stay in this hole? He just said: Let’s see — may be a day or ten! I replied: Good grief! — ten days here? Later I looked up at a brownish-greyish heap of boulders with sparse bushes, a sort of thing in between a hill and a mountain, of which I didn’t know the name, and more or less shook my first saying: For God sake, what am I doing here? I began wondering was this why I had given up my career? And I was far from satisfied by what I had seen of India so far. Then a strange thing happened, and since I’m not psychic and not interested in these things, it struck me as doubly funny: this hill-mountain hit me in the chest — plonk — like a rock. I was breathless, speechless, thoughtless. I went to the Ashram and told anyone willing to listen to stop prostrating to the grave for I had discovered something really wonderful, and it was That Hill! People laughed mildly, and someone said: But this guru buried here came here because of that Hill. I did some rethinking about the buried man: If that Hill had spoken to him and had already spoken to me, he couldn’t be a complete fool… let’s see what more we have in common. I became interested in his teaching; within 24 hours things clicked and I knew here I would find the answers — perhaps the one answer — to the one and only question worth thinking about. In a nut-shell, that still is the position today. You have since dedicated
your whole life to Ramana’s way? Muruganar, the poet and Ramana’s first disciple, confirmed this indirectly when-after eighteen years of praying, dabbling, toying with Who am I? — I asked him: “After all these years of searching for the answer there seems to be no progress.” He smiled and said: That is sadhana! But your response to
Ramana’s teachings must have changed your whole life. In mentioning the shaktis
of Ramana, may I ask who you had in mind? She had come to visit
Bhagavan’s Ashram? After another three days, Mees and I again took leave to go to Trivandrum by car, and a day later she was there. Then after another three days with her, we took leave for the third time in ten days to go to our place by the sea. The next day we received a telegram saying she was coming to visit us. She stayed some time, and from then whenever I was short of Ramana’s direct assistance and I called for help, it was invariably provided by Anandamayi. In at least a dozen instances I have met her by just arriving casually at a place she would be arriving at the same day. That helped me to see her as the shakti of Ramana. Can you recall any of
the personal stories that Dr. Mees passed on to you which illustrate his relationship
to Bhagavan? You have been so closely
associated with these great teachers, I wonder if you yourself are now teaching? Since Ramana has said: It’s not necessary to improve the world; it’s perfect as it is… you don’t see it as such — Where is the ambition to do anything of importance? So now you will ask what does my day consist of? Well — I will say: some work, some gardening, keeping in mind the Chinese proverb that he who wishes to be happy for three days kills his pig and eats it; he who wishes to be happy for three months, marries; he who wishes to be happy for all his life becomes a gardener. So I suppose gardening is an activity that doesn’t completely exclude the introspective business of watching who is doing. Then there’s some writing; some prose or poetry now and then bubbles out, so one watches that. One speaks, one sees, one hears while exercising a mild attempt to keep the four types of silence: that of speech, seeing, hearing, and the essential one, thinking. Ramana’s teaching inevitably brings one to the exercise of how to act without thinking about it. Under those circumstances little activity is possible. One then comes to understand by way of humility that it’s impossible to follow the guru’s advice. That humility fortunately lies close to the center of all desire, which is the desire to surrender. The way to know is at the same time the way to surrender; the way to surrender is at the same time the way to love because that love is the Self’s love for Itself. Well — this takes place during most days. Dr. Mees, my beloved and respected teacher, put all that down in a poem called: The tear-drops in my eyes, I offer. Having thrown away a
brilliant career to live the life of a sadhu,
is there any advice you can pass on to others? It is only out of deep grief that the desire for
unconditional happiness is born. And those who desire that unconditional happiness
can learn from the United States and Sweden, which both have the largest national
per capita income, and which at the same time show the largest percentage of
suicides, drug and alcohol addicts and people admittable to mental institutions.
This shows that he who has bet on material well-being and has won it finds he
has nothing! In this sense, St. Paul said: We should serve in the oldness of the letter but in the newness of the spirit. It’s the newness of the spirit which can be rediscovered when we find the inner meaning of tradition and religion incorporated in the collective sub-conscious and popping out in our own personality. In that we can find guidance, because the sages who have rigged up ritual, mythology, mystic literature, tradition and religion knew how to reach us according to our individual temperament and have taken us in the direction of where we really wanted to go in the first place. So instead of throwing everything overboard, I would advise a re-evaluation of the world’s traditions and religions. If a person feels the need to go beyond the one into which he was born, there’s no necessity to be converted. Ramana said clearly when people expressed the wish to become Hindus: When a Christian says: Yesterday I was a Christian but now I want to be a Hindu, it only means he has understood neither religion. But is there any progress
at all without a spiritually realized guide? This is the highway to relaxation; in other words,
not to take despair, if ever it should come, seriously. Ramana has also said:
Despair and the ego itself is in the Self — there can never be anything
out of it! It’s our choice whether to choose the despair that goes with
seeing the ego, or shifting the attention to the Self, and experience the ego
as a funny accessory… a clown.
I leave Hamsa moved and grateful to that Power that drew me to him. But dear Mr. N. is now even more confused; we are walking away in silence until he remembers to tell me our tea with Mrs. Osborne is cancelled. As we return to the Ashram, someone hands me a note — we have been followed: Don’t leave Tiruvannamalai without seeing Sadhu Om. It’s signed…H. Perhaps a little intrigue is now called for. There are no Interviews for my last day here so Mr. N. is taking me up the sacred Hill to see Ramana’s early Ashram and he is telling me — at every step — how peaceful it is. I can think of better ways to do this pilgrimage than with a guide. We see the Ashram — Yes, very lovely. We walk down — Yes, lovely views. We call on the French lady — Yes, only for a minute… She says: Get hold of Kirsti, she will give you a fantastic Interview. I am leaving tomorrow morning and everyone is now telling me about the unofficial list…however, unknown to Mr. N., I am to be taken to see Sadhu Om a little later. We arrive back in the main Ashram in time for the langar lunch, so I ask Doris Williamson about Kirsti. She is a girl from Finland, and Doris says she can get hold of her later. At 3.45 I slip out of the Ashram. In a nearby farm-house on the upper floor a young Englishman talks to me about his guru — a direct disciple of Ramana. The guru comes out — humble, aware, sparkling: it is Sadhu Om. One is automatically filled with happiness in the presence of a high being. The mysterious young man who has brought me — H.’s messenger — is asking the Sadhu question after question. The Sadhu is all attentiveness, listens, reflects, smiles. The advice poured out is the advice, the teachings, of his own great guru, but it comes out fresh with tremendous living force. That’s the advantage of the living guru: there is direct, personal contact, however low we are, however lost, however hopeless. Mr. N. is now seriously unhappy to find I wasn’t in my room as I try to creep in, but when he sees the book I’m carrying — I was able to buy part II of Sadhu Om’s: “The Path of Sri Ramana” — the cat is out of the bag. I know where you’ve been! — Mr. N. is admonishing me. What can one do? It’s a difficult moment, I can see it appears that I am being ungrateful for the help I have been offered. Come — I say putting my arm through his — Mrs. Osborne can’t give us tea… right?...but I can. Smiles: Peace: Friends again. But Kirsti arrives. She is so Finnish I can’t understand her lovely whispers. She’s sweet and gentle, and she pitches her fascinating Finnish tones so low, I know if I try to record her I won’t be able to use one word. But she is lovely, and Doris did her best, and Mr. N. is now slightly past caring. Nothing to do but smile, so we all smile. We are heading for ecstatic mode again. I love this place. In the morning, after handing over my donation, I am given old copies of The Mountain Path. And as I leave, here comes Lynn, the Australian interior designer who is still on her way to see her guru, Sai Baba. I tell her I am leaving for Baba’s Ashram right now. Lynn will spend two days here first then we will meet at Baba’s. So goodbye Lynn, see you there soon! |
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© Malcolm Tillis 2006 |