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