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!!!

    

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