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His voice resounds throughout the world for those who have ears to hear and, more truly still, he never ceases to reveal himself in the secret place of the heart But when will their words and their life give convincing witness that they have not merely heard tell of this Guru, but that they have, themselves met him in the deepest centre of their spirit? 'This meeting is what here we call 'darshana.' he said to himself. 'Darshana' literally means 'vision'. It is the coming face to face with the Real, appearing in a form that our human frailty can manage. 'There are the philosophical darshanas, the systems of thinkers which seek to approach the Real conceptually. There is the darshana of sacred places, kshetra, of temples, of holy images, murti, points where God, who transcends all forms, consents to appear under the manifold forms under which our human imagination, stimulated by faith, pictures him. Above all there is the darshana of the saints, which for those whose hearts are open is far more true. 'The darshana of the guru is the final step towards the ultimate darshana in which the last veil is lifted and all duality transcended. That's the essential darshana which India has pursued since the beginning -in which also India reveals her own secret and 'in revealing herself to you, reveals to you your own most hidden depths".' Long ago the rishis of the Upanishads had celebrated the mystery of the guru: Without learning it from another, how could anyone
know That? The brahmin who has examined the secret of the worlds Narada came before Sanatkumara and said: 'Master, teach
me.' 'First tell me what you know; then I shall know what to add.' 'I
know the Vedas, the Puranas and all.the sciences. I have mastered the
mantras, mantravid, but I am not Atmavid, I do not know the Atman I
do not know myself. I have been told, sir, that those who came to know
themselves were set free from sorrow. I suffer and am restless-, help
me to pass beyond sorrow.' 'All that You have so far learnt is only
words.' Then Sanatkumara led Narada to know the mystery of the self,
the infinite fullness which exists only in the self, and is itself present
everywhere. He made known to him the further shore, which lies beyond
the darkness. 3) Sri Gnanananda's age 'Then what about his age? Many people said that he was a hundred and twenty years old. Others, calculating by astrology, have made him out to be a hundred and fifty-three. But how could he possibly be so old? He was still so agile, walked so briskly, and himself drew the water from the well for his morning bath. He also enjoyed excellent health, directed every smallest detail in the life of the Ashram and supervised all the new building projects. On his face there was no sign of a wrinkle. Certainly, anyone looking at him would find it difficult to believe that he had reached seventy. Murugan Das then spoke: 'The guru is at least two hundred years old. I have heard him say that one day he was seated in samadhi near his hermitage at Anangur in the forest of Perambalur, when prince Navalu came there to hunt deer, but on catching sight of him, the prince was terror-struck and fled. How could that have happened, if he was only born in the last century?' 'He also knew Auveyar, the poetess of the Sangham, the sister of Tiruvalluvar.' But Auveyar lived twenty centuries ago! However, in all this, on what level are we operating? When a jnani speaks to us, do we ever know the level from which he is speaking.? No more than the prophet's vision of the future, can the sage's view of the past be pinned down to the chronology which measures the world of external events. He may be speaking at the level of the atman, which alone is real; or again, he may be using the language of ordinary experience, so that his words may be within the grasp of his hearers. The atman is not-born, it is everywhere transcending time and space. This particular form which we call the body of such and such a jnani, does not seem to him to be any more his own than all the other forms, human or whatever, in the created world. The very term jnani itself is misleading, because by definition it implies particularisation, and therefore a distinction between the jnani and the so-called ajnani- and that, in the light of the atman makes no sense. In truth, the one who has realized the atman is in every place and every time. He is the young Ramana running away to Arunachala, and he is the priest who gave him food on his way. He is the hermit meditating in the forest in the time of the rajahs, and he is the sannyasi who met Auveyar. He is Yajnavalkya who revealed to king Janaka the upanishad of being, and he is the rishi who in the first age heard the Vedas. Indeed, he is Shiva himself, seated under the banyan in the jungle, wearing his tiger skin and with his third eye annihilating Kama, Love the Tempter, who sought to divert his attention- Shiva who on another day, as Dakshinamurti, taught through his silence the four sons of Brahma in their ignorance of the highest wisdom. He is the Formless, the Not-Born, who in every form reveals something of himself and in every birth appears afresh. Vanya then said: 'what does it matter to us to know if Swamiji is fifty, two hundred, or even four hundred years old? Will knowing that, give us Moksha, salvation, the vision of the One who Is? What use is it to us to know what he was yesterday or what he will be tomorrow, to know where he was sixty years ago, or where he will be in a hundred years' time? Even when he speaks to us in human terms, appearing to us as he does at this time and on this day, for us he is first and foremost the one through whom we receive the word of liberation, the Lord's summons to what is within. Surely the essential thing for us are the words that he speaks to us and his look which penetrates our hearts? And as for the obscurity, which he allows to veil everything that does not belong to the present moment, that after all seems to be his way of impressing upon us his supreme lesson, which is that the only moment that matters is that in which we become "aware of our self.' 4) On Shiva Linga When you enter the inner Sanctuary that, of the Shiva Linga you can scarcely fail to be deeply impressed and to feel yourself carried off to the secret place of your heart. There is that bare dark chamber, separated by a long corridor, and sometimes by several ante-chambers from the mandapa where the faithful gather, and in the middle of it, the simple cylindrical stone with a rounded top which is intended to represent with the minimum of form the mystery of the Formless. The further anyone penetrates within the symbolical sanctuary of stone, the deeper he is taken into the sanctuary of his own being. There, indeed, at the heart of his own mystery is revealed in the essential darkness the mystery of God himself, and at the same time, the ultimate and original mystery of all that is. 'This is of course the mystery of God the Creator and of God who is Love, of God as he appears to us in his marvellous self-revelation in the cosmos and in his saving acts; but much more beyond all that we can say, know or feel of God, beyond our own personal vision of God, beyond all 'recollection' even of ourselves, it is the very mystery of God in himself, of God in his true deity, his unoriginate being, his ineffable nature. This no word proceeding from the mind can tell, no sound capable of reaching the ear can "express, no form visible to human eyes can reveal. In the sphere of what can be heard, the sign of God's ineffability is the Pranava (OM), the inarticulate vowel O(AU), the flattening of the primary vowel A- expressing at once the holy fear and the ecstatic joy prompted by entry into the mystery-which comes to an end in an indeterminate nasal after-sound. This is the OM, the final sound through which an attempt is made still to say something about God, once all the words and ideas conceived by the human mind have been discarded, before entering the definitive silence in which nothing more is said, apart from the eternal OM which no creature left to himself could ever hear. In the sphere of what can be seen and touched, the
Shivalinga is similarly the final sign of the One whom no form is capable
of signifying: still less of embodying. The Linga is at the same time
'with' and 'without form'. as is taught by the Tamilian Shaivite, catechisms.
It stands at the boundary between the Manifested and Non-manifested,
the last threshold, that can be discerned through sight or touch by
anyone who has sensed the presence of the essential Beyond, Parama Shiva-just
as he was revealed in the appearance of the linga of fire on the summit
of Arunachala. When the Hindu following the path opened up by the ancient rishis, sets out to discover the inner world-beyond every sound, every form, every word and every thought, and also beyond the necessary experience and taste of death and nothingness -he finally comes at the last frontier of time to the moment of that total renewal which for Christians is signified and realized in the resurrection of the Lord on the other side of his passing through death and hell. Man's definitive meeting with God is birth beyond death. No one can see God without dying to self. No more can he attain to his own self in its supreme and final truth without dying, and therefore without being reborn-in the very realm of God. That is surely what in their own way the Shivalinga and the shrine in which it is hidden are intended to convey and symbolize. The dwelling place of God on earth of which every temple is meant to be a symbol-must necessarily be the place of man's rebirth a mystic womb from which he issues as it were for the second time, reborn in the very depth of the divine Love--now as a son, beloved and chosen from-eternity, as the Christian would say, taught by the 'inward anointing' of the Spirit.
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