His Old Typewriter

He enjoys the sound of his old typewriter, the click and tik which makes the letter appear on the paper and a mirror image of the letter sculpted behind the paper.  Every letter he types sounds like the ‘cling’ of the coin when spindled in towards the sky and the minuscule gap where air pass is like the swish of the coin rotation in the air.  Why does it keeps growing, the sentences have to be broken down to lines and full stops and the machine has to be moved to right to roll the paper up ready for the next blank line to type the next line.  Though sometimes it is irritating, the sound of the swoosh of moving the lever to right gives immense pressure like the first few drops of rain that doesn’t pulls you out to get wet but triggers the petrichor.  The deodorant of the earth. He likes not commas, no apostrophes, no exclamation but just pure lines that give joys in typing.  He doesn’t write for typing but types for writing.  It is like the travel the gives pleasure along with the driving pleasure, like a dream inside a dream.  It breaks his heart to break his writing to paragraphs for his words are para-sponsored like sun shine from the sky, though it takes a night break but it is always a pure bless. He forgets his coffee and it becomes cold coffee when he drinks but he continues to ignore his dementia while writing.  It pains sometimes in the wrist and the forearms and hand’s knees then he shifts his speed to a slower one but his mind runs wild to stop him from stopping.  He doesn’t stop. He does not like to take his words back neither cuts the sentences with dashes or a pencil line.  He does not take back his words.  He believes it was supposed to be put on paper for some eyes to catch those words just like a message from up above.  A writer is a God’s own messenger.  The message may be for somebody near of sometimes for the writer itself.  His typewriter continues to run wild until he gets exhausted of typing otherwise the dawn, the forenoon, the mid-day sun, afternoon drowsiness, the twilight, the dusk, the night, the moon and the stars and galaxies will be recorded, portrayed, painted with love and care, sometimes with melancholy, in the paper.  He bleeds words and stiches his wounds with words.  His words are his knives and blades also his shield and scabbard.  His words are the pommel for his swords and also the guard for his knives.  He holds the rope of the guillotine; his words decide whose heads need to be cut off.  He writes his malevolence between the lines and sins in the metaphors.  He camouflages himself to expose his sins but those words sounds like it is all fiction and mirage in the mid-day road in the sun.  He creates no words for all that he writes are all mere repetition of hundreds of years what writes and story tellers have poured inside out. He does not mind when the topic gets diverted from typewriter to somewhere else.  He just types for the sake of typing.   It is like running, the run matters less than the intention behind the run.  It makes him stronger, strengthens his mind for the longer run.   The typewriter is like a drug to him for he does not like to stop earing the sound that every key makes.  He, by now might have understood the different sounds of different keys though it belongs to the same typewriter and the same hands that hits the buttons for hours and weeks together!  At some point in time, he stops and retrospect what he had done with his words.  He goes wild and on and on writing, imprinting the letters on the paper with every stroke of the keyboard. It was like a piano with different sounds in different keys and ends in making a good piece of music on the paper.  The love for the words and writing just not be seen in the sentences he wrote but the meaning which does not appears straight forward but hiding between the lines too revels that love. The love of impetuous words written just for the sake of writing.  He becomes venerable while writing when he talks to the creation to bring those words from the supramental force from the other dimension.  The malevolence becomes benevolence and the sins becomes deeds of reactions.  The ugly truths and thoughts are no more a fact but the imagination of the past, a delusion in which he lived. His writing is fast when his stomach is empty, his brain is empty, his thoughts are slower and when everything is filled then the paper remains empty.  Everybody things it is the thoughts that the writers turn it into writings but the truth is different totally.  As the thoughts are overflowing it blocks the words, it stops the truth.  The writing gets stuck between the walls of mind and brain, crazy manufacture.  When watching a movie, listening to a song, seeing a baby walk, looking at a beautiful woman, crossing a good smelling men, walking past a temple, a bookshop, or a dress shop triggers the idea of writing and even pulls up the words and metaphors to write as the beauty fills in the mind and vocabulary kicks-in in the brain, but when he wants to put that on in to paper those words and vocabularies gets scattered in air and merges with the quantum objects for only the eyes of the brain to sea and not the naked human physical eyes.  He sometimes goes to lucid dreams; half sleep and half awake and keeps typing those words in the paper for after few mins found that those words are beyond his control and those that were falling from the sky as to be dropped on the paper with no interpretation and no interruption.  Trance takes over the writing and sleep sometimes hijacks the writing, never mind, the writing continues until a human stop interrupting the stream of thoughts like a dam stopping the river to be used later but gets evaporated by the sun.  Also, the other problem is they never gets used in real time and stays stagnant as is and becomes unused and one with the sky from where it came from.  

I stopped here days back and picked a Fante’s book today morning and somehow, he brought me back to writing.  Before I started to key in the letters, I posted this writing into some Artificial Intelligence chat bot to check it I am on the right track of writing that suites the printer to publish.  When I asked for suggestion to improve, it listed out many suggestions to break my confidence but then when I asked for good things about this piece of writing it said the same thing which it suggested to change.   So basically, you will find what you look for in this virtual world of intelligence hacked to death. And another stupid thing I did was to ask that chatbot to compare my style with already famous writers and it compared my style with Viginia Woolfe which I have never read.  I know it is a wrong thing to compare one’s style with other for every letter typed, may be same, comes from a different experience, from different soul and different consciousness.  For me I know only one writer who stands tall amongst the world full of writers and it is Kahlil Gibran, the only one who had the guts to say “you may not understand half of what I say…” as if he writes for others but also cares less if it didn’t reach to their level of understanding.  Gibran, a beautiful, melancholic soul sleeping in beautiful, melancholic Lebanon. The only one who writes his soul out, put his melancholy in words and imbibes the same into the readers soul.  The one who introduced Ishtar to me, the one who made me fall for Selma Karamy, the one who made me cry for with his book “Broken Wings”.  I wish I could raise my standard of writings like my Gibran. 

Drunken Dreams!!!

This drink of sadness, the exhaustion, the solitude, and the feel of unworthy about everything around is dipping him into a deep trance, in the deep intoxication.  The dogmas he carried, the knowledge from the learnings from the texts, the literature, the feel that he is wise and the discipline to be disciplined all seemed delusional.  It was all mirage that the cognisance he gathered had given him.  There is no mirage and there is no reality or delusion, it is all the reflection of the consciousness.  He knows but the drunkenness that the exhaustion gave urged him to cross the border and throw all the illusion of heavy dogmas he carried into the deep sea and fish a whale, kill the fish and eat.

He was that water in the pond that never climbed the lotus petals but now the pond was filled with the wine and the water went high and intoxicated.  The water wants to climb the stem of the sun lit lotus and sneak upon the curve of the lotus to climb the soft petals and explore the bloomed old flower.  The water wants to reach the edge of the curved petals and stand there to see the Sun and laugh at it.  And with no harm, with no hurry, and taking all time in this world to claim down the ups and down of the inside, of the petals, challenging the sun to evaporate the water before it reach the pores.  He then wanted to stay there surfing around inside the core of the flower waiting for the sun to go down and the petals to close, one after the other, slowly as the night darkness the world and it becomes the night inside the flower.   No light, no air, only water underneath and the water itself inside the heart and soul of the flower. He then wishes to get absorbed by the flower itself and become one with it and run inside its every biological nerve and become unplugged from the lotus.  The next day when the sun wakes the flower up, he wishes to smile at the sun to find him and scorch him if he can.

The Sun know that before or after he is never different from the water and the lotus.  He is the lotus, he is the water, he is the wine and also, he is the Sun.  This reality is a delusion of the imagination, nothing is true and everything is true at the same time.  This universe is a dream that dreams about the universe.

He is truly drunk! 

He drank the drunkenness and the trance had engulfed him into the uncertain reality and revealed the reality of the uncertainty!  Does he know that there is no uncertainty and there is only one truth that he is an imagination of the dreaming universe.   

And This universe is a dream that dreams about the universe.

                                                                                                                                                [SK]

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

Swamiyee Saranam – 2

 

My way of prayer is to write for Him, about Him.  I’m not good with Hymns or Bajans, I’m neither a trained singer to melt in the song and pour on Him the music but I can write.  I can reach out to those who read, walk into their ears and slip into their heart and seed little of my experience about Sri Swami Ayyappan. 

The urge to see Him, to read that one word – Thathwamasi – written at the entrance of the shrine, to breath that fresh air of the century old woods intensifies as the days go on. I want to visit him with the heart of a toddler but I feel the impurity and maleficent cognizance I gathered all through out this life like a pond that consumed a big rock; ripples of past sins and splash of wrong decisions and muddy remembrance of the losses.

This penance of Forty-eight days, I believe, is a wait for those ripples to stop and mud to settle down in the bottom so that the purity of the water is reveled and the shine of the Sun enters the water to make the life inside to bloom. And the learning is that only when a rock is thrown it cleanses the water and makes it pure.

When scrolling the Instagram reels, I saw a video of toddler who is back from his Sabarimala pilgrimage with his father and has to take out the sacred Thulasi Mala off his neck and save it for next year.  The moment his mother touched his mala the toddler started crying hugging his father. I could hear him like many of the devotees who know that feeling or may be the pain to take that sacred mala off the neck.  The toddler begged not to take it off.  After hard efforts his mother took it from him and he broke down and cried.  What made him cry, I didn’t understand that moment that brings tears even though I have undergone similar situation in the past years.  Why does the soul urges for that penance which is not so easy though divine.  It does not end there, from that moment you take that sacred mala off from your neck, the timer inside you starts to count the days for the next Karthigai month to come. 

The purity I wanted is that toddler’s tears, he doesn’t want that sacredness to get off him, he doesn’t want that life close to Swami Ayyappan to end.  That is purity, that is the heart we are all born with but somehow we accumulate impurities from the dark souls and store it in our grey cells.  Like Osho says, enlightenment is not something which you attain, you're born enlightened, it is already inside you like a strained mirror, wipe the dust and you will find yourself, the real divine power, Swami Ayyappan, Sri Dharma Sastha, the Allah, the Jesus and whatever the name you give.  It is all within us, just allow the mud to settle down.  Thathwamasi.

                                                                                                                                 SK

Swamiyee Saranam -1

            It was almost a week passed since I have started my penance for this year’s Sabari Mala pilgrimage.  The state of being in penance is not easy nor the pilgrimage but one thing that stays wonder to me is that the state of mind that was waiting for this period of the year though it was a lot to stretch for the body; may be the soul wants to go back to the dense forest where it lived in free will or the power source sitting over the top of Sabarimala – Sri Dharma Sastha – is the real soul of the cosmos and we are just its representative caught in the illusion of normal life. I’m no venerated soul to come to a conclusion but the connection is so strong that it pulls us to its place – His Place - though it is not a cake walk.

Unlike last year it was not easy days before and after wearing the sacred Thulasi Mala.  Days had showed me Pain in the mind and body, insults, angers, perplexity, intimidation and what not!  The golden rule is to control your anger which was tested and I think I breached the rule. The next is love for all, the empathy and compassion towards every soul around but I failed even in that.  Ayyappan had put me in situation wherein I lost my compassion and empathy. 

I was worried about the environment and people; I was complaining about the situations in which I was put on.  Maybe I was expecting supreme respect from the people around just because I was wearing the sacred Mala and I was in penance.   My Ayyappan had decided to teach me humility, compassion and love so He wanted to test me by putting in situations wherein I had choices to stay patient or go wild.  I know I didn’t get through in His test but I stayed in between that state of being serene and becoming an animal.  I hope that I get a just pass mark from my Ayyappan.

I realaxed once after I came out of those situations and I saw His light in my daily prayers. It was dust over the mirror that shows you as a venerated person or an enlightened soul and only when the divine intervenes and pour water over that mirror you will see your real face! This journey is not searching something outside us, not something exist there calling you to reveal itself.  This is a journey that take you internally, realize the something that you were searching is not outside but deep inside you. This pilgrimage ends in a place where Sri Dharma Sastha, my Ayyappan sits on top of Sabari Mala to enlighten that what you have came looking for – Sri Ayyappan – is you, inside you.  The divine light, Makara Jothi is not on top of that mountain but inside you – Thathwamasi!