Namaskar - Oct 09

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