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Excerpts from the book:
Guru and Disciple
 by Swami Abishiktananda


 The Gnani is one who has penetrated to the source of his being and has realised in the hidden centre of himself the mystery of God in his self-revelation. He alone in truth is in possession of himself and he alone can truly give himself-, he alone can love completely. Nothing can ever give itself out, unless it is distinct, separate. God's transcendence is the very source of his immanence, 'transcendence' and 'immanence' being in the end only two human words which endeavour to indicate that the supreme is at once beyond and within, that Being is at the same time rupa and arupa, Form and Formless.

Vanya thought about the faithful whom he had watched that evening, as they prostrated before the sacred stone. It seemed to him that these faithful themselves constituted the Shivalinga, and perhaps with greater truth than the stone in the visible sanctuary. Who prostrates, and to whom does he prostrate?

If this body is allowed to die and this mind lets itself disappear, it is precisely in order that there may finally emerge, all alone, out of the original matrix now at last attained, the 'pure sign' which is symbolised by the stone standing at the centre of the 'place of rebirth' -with every joy surpassed, and all peace transcended, as long ago the Buddha taught. For, in order that the sacred linga may be revealed standing in the centre of the cave of the heart, it is necessary that all should have been given up and transcended,

peace, the feeling of peace, and even the thought of peace,
joy and the thought of joy and every feeling of joy,
all thought and taste for what is within,
the thought and the taste of being oneself, myself,
and the thought of having renounced all thought,
and the taste of having renounced every taste...

Then only the lotus springs up and blooms, its leaves in contact with the water, yet never wetted and then the bees come to drink deeply of its nectar. Vanya went on to think of all the devotees who had so often prostrated before him, including that very evening in the mandapa of the temple-as if the robe which he wore made himself the very sign, linga, of the mystery expressed both in the glorious linga of fire on the crest of Arunachala and in the humble stone linga hidden in the sanctuary of this village temple:

Shiva prostrate before Shiva,
Shiva holding out his gracious hands to Shiva,
all the Iila of Shiva...
and equally the galaxies revolving about each other in infinite space,
and the electrons which dance, disperse and reunite, at the heart of the atom,
and the protons in the nucleus which split and explode,
and the people who blow up the earth by reuniting them- all that, the lila of Shiva and his linga -
and the fathers and the mothers and the children,
and all the different nations,
and man become one with woman, Shiva-Parvati..
He then dreamt that someone was asking his name, that he was refusing to tell it, that the other insisted. and that finally he said:
Who are you that ask my name?
Who am I, of whom you ask it?
What is the meaning of this request?
Is not everything the lila of the Lord- you and I, and all that we say? the mystery of his appearing in the very depth of the Self, Shivalinga.. OMI

5. On Meditation - Dhyana - The One Essential

For Sri Gnanananda, dhyana, meditation, was the one essential spiritual practice. For him it was the royal road, the only effective way of arriving at the realisation of the Presence in one's own depths. One who truly wishes to attain to that has to sacrifice everything for silent meditation - depending naturally on how far he is free from family or social responsibilities. Having once provided for the elementary needs of the body, food, hygiene and sleep, he should only have a single goal and a single occupation - to practice meditation in the very depth of his being.

When Gnanananda was pressed to explain in rather greater detail what he meant by dhyana, he readily did so by means of short rhythmical verses in Tamil which he never tired of repeating and adding to.

Enter into yourself
to the place where there is nothing,
and take care that nothing enters there.
Penetrate within yourself
to the place where there is no more any thought,
and take care that no thought arises there!

There where there is nothing- Fullness!
There where nothing is seen- the Vision of Being!
There where nothing more appears- behold, the Self! That is dhyana!

A young Tamilian arrived one day at Thapovanarn. He had come from quite far off, and his plan was to find a room in the town, to come at set times to receive the guru's teaching and to apply himself to meditation under his direction. He explained his programme to the Swami, and added that he would take advantage of his free time to learn Sanskrit. Sri Gnanananda at once interrupted him:

"There is no need for you to worry about finding a room or a hotel. You can perfectly well stay here and have your meals here. You will then be completely free to meditate as long as you like. As for learning Sanskrit, listen to me. They say there are fifteen hundred languages throughout the world. You will begin by learning Sanskrit, then you will want to learn Marathi, Bengali, then Chinese and so on. Your mother-tongue is Tamil, isn't it? You must have read the Tirukkural. Well then, do not such and such verses (which he quoted) contain everything necessary for the spiritual life? And besides you also have in Tamil the Tevaram, the Tiruvasagam. and so many other works left.to us by the saints of days gone by. The Vedanta itself has been translated into Tamil. You have in your own language all that you need to teach you about the true knowledge. Why waste your time in learning a mass of useless things: when only one thing is really necessary? If you truly want to attain to dhyana, far from trying to learn anything new whatever, what you need is just the opposite - that everything you may have. learnt in the past should leave you and vanish, never to return.'

One day Vanya asked him whether a certain amount of tapas, austerity, was not essential, at least as providing support, for the authentic practice of dhyana. 'Take your own life,' he said, 'your solitude, fasting and so forth while you were living in the mountains of Kashmir, and later on, your time as wanderer, going from one end of India to the other. And surely, at least for one who has taken sannyasa it is a duty to live in the poverty and total non-possession which tradition has to his calling?'

'Dhvana alone matters' replied Sri Gnanananda. 'Everything else, whatever it may be - tapas, solitude, vigils, fasts, non-possession - is secondary, and has no direct connection with "realisation". The only thing that counts is to free yourself from everything that prevents you from devoting yourself exclusively and -completely to this silent interior meditation. Even sannyasa itself is not essential. This ochre robe that we wear is much less for ourselves than for other people. The kavi colour acts as a direct witness and reminder to everyone that he who has taken it is one set apart, and that therefore they should not divert his attention with worldly talk, but rather assist him in every way in his life of solitude and close converse with God. A uniform is worn for others, not for oneself. The door keeper or the, bus conductor would do their work just as well if they wore a white dhoti like everyone else. But their special dress shows everyone that they are the people to approach for certain things. It is the same with the dress of the sannyasi to whom people come to ask for help in spiritual matters. As for the policemen's uniform, it serves to keep anyone who feels like committing a crime at a respectful distance and to make him stop and think. Does not the robe of a sadhu have something of the same effect?'

Another time, when a party had come to have his darshana, Sri Gnanananda was repeating his favourite verse, 'There where there is nothing...' Some of the visitors started to comment on it in Tamil and English with varying degrees of pedantry. One of them proposed translating 'nothing' as 'void'. It was explained to Gnanananda that 'void' in. English corresponds to sunya in sanskrit 'But why, he asked, do you want at all costs to give a name to what, by its very definition, is devoid of all possibility of being named? As soon as you give a name to not-being, that which is not, you automatically make it into some thing. As soon as you give the place where there is nothing the name of "void", you are putting something there- and so you have to start all over again.'

Later on, when Vanya recalled this conversation, he admitted that he had never previously understood as he then did, the Buddha's teaching about the need for our meditation to be successively purified. We have to leave behind the place of thinking, then that of joy, then that of peace; next, in more advanced meditations, we have to leave behind in their turn all the negations which have acted as supports in leaving behind one stage after another, until we have passed beyond every affirmation and equally every negation, and have entered the total silence, in which one who has reached so far is no longer aware of being silent - since he has passed into the akasha of the heart, the 'super-space', which can no longer be circumscribed or Iocalised.

 
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