Centenary Reflections

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At the outset I thank Nancy for this opportunity for self-reflection, and to hold a mirror before my mind’s eye. “We live, as it were, in a hall of mirrors, and cannot know in advance which door is to be open for us to escape into a still better prison.” (Autobiography p.624) A quote by Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind, “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as we all are.” Chance brought me to the Gurukula for the first time in 1979, and it was by Chance that I heard Guru answer my question about yoga that evening. Upsurging billow of wonder! I had never heard anybody speak with such clarity before. My experiments with life had not resulted in new discoveries, but led to the dungeon of confusion. Here was the alchemist, the magician, who clearly knew what he was talking about. He was ontology incarnate, with an aura of here-and-nowness, pervaded with love and compassion.

 

Over the next couple of years there were comings and goings, carrying out errands for Guru and making friends with the western disciples staying at the Gurukula, who continue to be my dearest friends even today. I wrote a letter to Guru Nitya asking if I could join the Gurukula. I have lost his letter, but his words continue to reverberate in my mind: “In the Gurukula there is no coming and no going. Wherever you are you can function as a Gurukula gadfly.” He also mentioned that I was welcome if I was a misfit, which events have shown to be an apt sobriquet. Recently I wrote to my good friend Peter Oppenheimer that I was trying to “fit in.” His reply was prompt: Guru Nitya declared 50 years ago that we were all misfits.

 

By 1983 I was able to drop my worldly obligations and present myself to the Guru. He did not hesitate a moment and began dictating an article for a magazine. It was with seriousness that Nancy promptly handed me a pen and paper and as Guru spoke I put pen to paper and later typed my first dictation, “A Parable For The Educated.” Having passed the test, as it were, I became the regular scribe for English class notes (when western disciples were absent) keeping pace with Guru’s voice, and then reading the contents back to Guru at the end. Sometime in 1986 he deputed me to buy a computer. In those pre-email days word-processed classes were saved on floppy disks and then snail-mailed to Nancy at Bainbridge for editing. Save files as .rtf was the instruction.

 

I am living in the town where I grew up, and so there are a layers of juxtaposed memories against the common backdrop of verdant hills and misty dales: pre-Gurukula, Gurukula with Guru Nitya, life in Fiji, and return to the Gurukula after Guru Nitya. The happiest days were with Guru Nitya, listening to his gentle voice as he took us on a magic carpet journey of word wisdom, the travels with Guru in Kerala, north India, and also Singapore and Malaysia. It was in Fiji that I cut my swami teeth, applying what I had learnt, and gaining a certain amount of independence and experience. When I read my correspondence with Guru while at Fiji. I realise how much Guru Nitya had done for me, putting up with my failure in India, and then opening the doors to the world by the opportunity in Fiji. He put up with the letters I wrote to him, mostly tantrums, and patently addressed the problems I seem to face. It took two weeks for mail to reach India, and so we had a regular exchange of letters every month. The Fiji experiment did not work for me because of the tense political situation there, and my need for deeper study. By the time I returned to the Gurukula in 2001, Guru Nitya had attained samadhi. Returning to the Gurukula initially felt like a retreat from the battlefield, laced with a sense of insecurity and disorientation as India had changed following the economic reforms of the 1990s. (Manjankorai villagers looked obese rather than under-fed). Until 2012 Swami Tanmaya was incharge of the Fernhill Gurukula and I had freedom to do my own thing. I had opportunities to travel abroad and meet with friends. But once swami left Fernhill I filled the void and was put incharge, I needed self-discipline, deeper study of Narayana Guru’s teachings, training of my intellect, wider reading, while learning to manage the day to day running of the Gurukula, plus anchor the annual Gurupujas. I found myself being responsible for the Fernhill Gurukula, a place where Nataraja Guru and Guru Nitya lived and taught the most wonderful classes. I am acutely aware of my role as a caretaker, with the good fortune of temporal freedom and a bounty of contemplative literature. The Gurukula means more than just the buildings. Guru Nitya wrote, “Gurukulas are not housed under roofs. It is a precious throb in certain hearts which are thirsty for rare values.” There are many voices. There are devotees of Shree Narayana Guru who kowtow with religious devotion before the photo of Narayana Guru, there are admirers of Guru Nitya who flock to his samadhi, there are humble disciples of Guru Muni Narayana Prasad, and senior disciples of Nataraja Guru, including Guru Freddy.

 

After basking in Guru Nitya’s expansive presence, having received my name and an informal initiation into sannyasa, I find myself on the path of continuous effort and contemplation. The early days of physical hardships are past. Now the challenge is to understand the psyche, which in a country like India has many subterranean currents and undercurrents that pulse and throb in unpredictable ways. Nataraja Guru described Kerala as “criss-cross cultural patterns sufficiently complicated to confuse saner people.” One has to cast all these particularities and varieties into the crucible of Guru’s Wisdom and remould them into Unitive Understanding. Guru Nitya introduced me to Nataraja Guru’s works when he asked me to read the manuscript of Autobiography of an Absolutist after we had published The Psychology of Darsanamala. Proof reading the manuscript further familiarised me with Nataraja Guru’s style, and initiated a curiosity and interest in studying and pondering over his writings.

 

Narayana Guru continues to be an enigma to me. I still have not been able to fit him correctly in the wisdom context. My hope is that by understanding Nataraja Guru, I will get a window into Narayana Guru. This takes me to the roots of the living experience itself. In his Autobiography Nataraja Guru writes, “Life is a silvery mist of a process of becoming in which each participates like a big fish in mid-stream, sometimes waving its fins, but mostly carried forward by the flood of the universal and eternal flux, in whose matrix life lives and moves.” Most of the time I live in a state of unknowing, and am quite wonderstruck that life unfolds and flows as it does with very little interference from my side. It as if there is no “doing” and everything is “done.” Guru Nitya once wrote to me, “The invisible, the unknown and the unanticipated seems to have more resources than the transactional verity of the perceptible world.” I must acknowledge that all through my post-Guru Nitya transitions, Guru Muni Narayana Prasad has been a bedrock of support and kindness.