Namaskar - Oct 09
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The breakthrough came with an old<br />
childhood joke and a mantra. Anything can<br />
happen when one meditates! My sister and<br />
I were big on jokes when growing up, quite<br />
notorious, inventing some, memorizing all.<br />
The joke that came to mind was, How high<br />
is a Chinaman? To which there would be<br />
various attempts at a guess or our friends<br />
would disdainfully deign not to answer<br />
such a silly question. The joke lay in the fact<br />
that this was not a question but a<br />
statement, (Hao Hai is a Chinaman!) that,<br />
by virtue of being a statement, merited no<br />
answer. Perhaps, similarly, ‘Who Am I’ was<br />
really a statement and not a question that<br />
could be answered by the normal, everyday,<br />
coarse, thinking mind. I also remembered<br />
one of the 1000 names of Lord Vishnu,<br />
one of his abstract or transcendental names,<br />
is ‘Kah’ meaning ‘Who’ (and also joy and<br />
happiness) in Sanskrit. Could ‘Who Am I’<br />
or, in Sanskrit, Kah Aham or Koham really be<br />
a statement that comes from a realm beyond the normal, thinking mind? Could the<br />
statement itself signify our divinity which is our real nature?<br />
spiritual heart propels untold saintly acts of<br />
kindness and willing self-sacrifice and is the true<br />
source of creativity<br />
Towards the end of each hour-long meditation session, Claudiu would remind us to<br />
surrender. That was perhaps the hardest part for me. The word ‘surrender’ had always been<br />
a googly. What does it mean to surrender? It seems an essential ingredient of any spiritual<br />
practice and it’s such a grand and glorious word. At the word ‘surrender’, my mind would<br />
get super agitated. An unending stream of questions would crop up and I’d often end the<br />
meditation feeling exhausted.<br />
The breakthrough came in a session when we were asked to meditate on the Sanskrit<br />
Mahavakya Tat Tvam Asi (That Thou Art). Thoughts of the following nature, pertaining to<br />
That Thou Art arose, who or what is<br />
saying these words? To whom? What is<br />
That? We speak of a world of apparent<br />
duality, but there seem to be three, not two<br />
elements here, namely the one who is<br />
saying ‘That Thou Art’, the entity to<br />
whom this statement is addressed and<br />
third, That which this entity is supposed to<br />
be. This was day eight and I felt my entire<br />
retreat had been a waste and I had<br />
understood nothing. My mind desperately grappled with this contradiction till it finally<br />
admitted defeat and gave up. It was such a relief to just sit without expecting answers,<br />
without expecting light bulbs to go off. Perhaps to surrender is to give up and to stop<br />
wanting to figure things out, to stop wanting to be in control. There must be degrees to<br />
which one can surrender, but if even a small act of giving up control can bring so much<br />
relief, total surrender must be wonderful beyond belief.<br />
I love learning languages, the sound of words, stringing them together, playing with<br />
words, rules of grammar, exceptions to rules. Sometimes, words and grammar have come<br />
to my aid during meditation. The French word, reveiller, for instance. The root verb veiller<br />
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