Swamiyee Saranam – 5

I was standing in the queue for a long time in the famous Kamatchi Amman Temple in Kanchipuram. The queue didn’t move as the doors were closed for some special poojas. It was a crowded queue with multiple lines moving towards one door destination and to my left was the open space which is the walking path and the other side of the path was the temple garden with steps like larger seating place for the devotees to sit.  Everyone was busy walking, talking, chatting and few climbed those seating place to sit and talk and few sat down to eat the Prasadham (food offered in temple).  When the entire environment was noisy there was one soul who was sitting in lotus position before a hibiscus plant under the shadow of big willow tree.  She looked serene, undisturbed, effulgent and meditative.   She should be in her early twenties, lean and fair with her hair untied wearing peach color salwar which made her look like a venerated one with her sitting position.  Her phone was on her left lap and she it checked once in a while.  It seemed like she was chanting some mantra looking at her phone.  After a certain time, I guess it should be almost thirty minutes, she went into utter silence, didn’t cared about her phone or the surrounding.  Generally, during penance and wearing thulasi mala, we are told to look at any women as Mother and should call them “Maligaipuram” (the name of the deity in Sabari mala) and treat them with utter respect.  And this young woman looked to me as if the deity of the temple in which I was in, the Kanchi Kamatchi Amman, itself came out and sitting in the garden.  The queue started moving after forty-five minutes and she got up from that place and came down to the pathway. 

Once she was in the pathway, she looked normal as everybody else around, nothing had changed but she suddenly she looked normal to me. And she walked away and vanished in crowd.  ‘The doors are opened and the deity is back to her place’, I thought. 

We had a good dharshan and came out with Vermilion and flowers in hand.  The young woman in her lotus posture was totally out of my mind once I entered into the Garbhagriha, the Womb Chamber of the temple, but once we came out to circumambulate and when I crossed the very place where she was sitting, now there was another person, a man in his mid-thirties, was sitting in lotus posture with is eyes closed and meditative hand mudra.   He looked to be in deep meditation searching something deep inside himself.  And what made me wonder is the place he was sitting.  The same tree’s shadow and the same Hibiscus tree was behind him. It was a garden of around hundred meter and nobody other than this man was meditating or no other place made anybody as serene as this particular spot.

Some places really connect us to the internal God within us.  Those places differs with intensity and radius of the aura.  You end up inside that radius either accidentally or lead by a Guru who had experienced it already.  I think that answers why ‘Sabari Mala’,  why ‘Swami Ayyappan’ and ‘What Thathwamasi is’.

Swamiyee Saranam Ayyappa!!! Guruve Saranam!!! Swamiyee Saranam!!!

    

                                                                                                                                    SK

Swamiyee Saranam – 4

                         I was sitting in the last row of a cramped and crowded room next to a small kid and her father.  It was an Ayyappa Swami Bhajan session and group prayer in the house of a Ayyapa Swami comrade.  I especially went to see him sing and listen to his devotional voice.  The kid next to me was sitting on her father’s lap keenly observing everything happening around her.  I could feel the uncomfortableness her father was feeling sitting there and when asked he said he had an injury in his leg and could not sit comfortably and seating his kid on his lap for a longer time was giving is inducing pain.  I asked the kid to sit on my lap for sometimes so that her father can relax. She refused.  She didn’t move from her father’s lap. As the pain increased it induced anger in him and he showed that on his kid, but she didn’t react to his anger.  The prayer started and the singing was loud.  I asked her again to come to me.  For a second she looked at me and then she looked at the Swami Ayyappan pendent in my thulasi mala.  She held the my swami’s pendent it in her hand as we sit without shirt in the prayers and said ‘Ayyappa’.  ‘Yes’, I replied.  ‘Ayyappa looks beautiful’ she said.  I don’t know what to respond.  I took her from her father’s lap and comforted in my lap.  She turned the pendent and looked in to the image of Swami in both the sides of the pendent and she said the same phrase.  All I could say was ‘Yes’. 

                       The beauty She saw in Him, the peaceful, pure, and childish beauty she saw in Him is only kids could see, I guess.  The bajan was louder with drums, when I though she could fear the sound, she was enjoying the songs and ambience.  The environment was devotional and calm amidst loud singing.   All I saw in her was undisturbed calmness.  When the Guru Swami asked a Kanni swami to lite the lamp set below the feet of Swami Ayyappan, the Jothi, the flame glow bright and iridescent. 

                      Sitting on my right lamp she bent to her left and was observing something while I was busy singing along with fellow comrades.   Slowly she pinged my chin to ask something.   I bent down and her mouth so that I could here her in that loud ambiance.  

‘Why is that shaking’ she said.  I didn’t understand what she was talking about.  I looked at the direction she was showing.  All I could see was Ayyappan in Harivarasana posture and a lamp below His feet. 

                    As if understanding my perplexity, she said ‘why is that flame in that light shaking?’  I looked at the lamp and could see the flame waving right and left and I thought it was wind’s work. I told her the same but she was not convinced.  She said ‘then why all other lamps are not shaking?’ and she was right it was only that lamp below His feet was shaking, very different from other lamps.  I don’t know what to answer again.  Kids could see what the so called well learnt, all known, grown-up, and cognitive adult eyes could not; never. She pulled her father’s neck and asked the same question.  Her father thought for a second and said ‘it is Ayyappa and He is dancing’ that answer satisfied her and she was happy.   She didn’t wait for another second and immediately said ‘I want to touch Ayyappa’.  Now her father too was stunned and didn’t know what to answer her. 

‘Wait for the pooja to finish and you can touch him’ I said and she turned to her father to affirm the same. 

I didn’t see her and her father once the prayer was over also, I didn’t know weather she had touch Him but I, for sure, know that Swami had touched her.

                                                                                                                                                SK

 

Swamiyee Saranam – 3

 

            It has been three weeks of the forty-eight days penance and this year was unlike last two years.  It took 3 whole years to understand this process or maybe it is the starting stage to understand the rest of the understandings to come. For the past three years it was all wonder, I was questioning ‘why this happens, with all hurdles the urge to go back to Him never diminishes’ ‘why people are like this, devoted to the core to Swami Ayyappan’ ‘what does this sacred mala that roles on the heart does to a human being’ and ‘what makes a aged Guru to bend down and touch the feet of a - kanni swami – devotee who takes up the pilgrimage for first year’.   I didn’t know if I could understand all but I could see through the people with the first layer cleared from my eyes.  How many such layers has to be cleared to see the Swami Ayyappan inside the other? Only He know.   Does the eighteen years of pilgrimage, that makes a devotee a Guru Swami, clears all those layers? Or is it the deadline given to clear all the layers of illusion ourselves to see the divine everywhere, inside everybody, especially inside us, and to understand the true meaning of Thathwamasi – You are the real what you are searching for and what you came to Sabari Mala!

        Last night in the group prayer session, which happens every Saturday in the Ayyappan Temple, as soon as I entered the temple, I removed my shirt and got blessing from the Guru Swami and sat down to wait for the session to begin and devotees to gather for the prayer.  A lady called me with utmost humbleness, when I though she wants to me to help her in arrangement for the prayers session, she asked me to step on to a bronze plate and she washed my feet with water and the with milk and again with water, then she applied Sandal and applied vermillion (kum-kum) and gave me hand full of rice mixed with turmeric and flowers.  All this time I could not control my tears, don’t ask me why; I simply do not know! She bent down and touched my feet for my blessings. With a miniscule spiritual knowledge and a heart of a common human being, am I eligible to bless a fellow human being! was the only thought running in my mind along with the tears running down my cheeks. Holding my mala that was rolling and pressing my heart, I prayed to Him, to my Sastha, the real authoritarian to bless her, with all my heart the only thing I could do. I blessed her with the mixture of rice and turmeric and flowers she gave me.  This gave so much heaviness in heart that all along the prayer the tears didn’t stop.

        I saw the usual devotees along with an old woman in her sixties who was singing along with us.  I could see she was wearing the mala for the first year along with her grandchildren.  I found no difference between those kids and her as she was like a kid singing straight from her heart and dancing, shaking left and right with her praying hands; pure and innocent soul.  Looking at her made me to ask myself the only question, ‘Am I eligible even to sit here next to those pure souls?’ And I know the answer immediately as if it came from the up above, from the Ayyappan; I’m here to become one such pure souls to become eligible to bless my fellow human beings.  Thathwamasi!

                                                                                              -SK