Why Go On a Pilgrimage, Anyway?
I have come with my family to southern India to visit the ashrams of three twentieth-century yoga teachers. We are now at Ramanashram in Tiruvannamalai, a few hours inland from Chennai on the southeast coast. Ramana Maharishi lived here for forty years teaching mostly through silence, but also offering a powerful mediation practice of “self-inquiry.” When people asked Ramana Maharishi if Westerners should come to Arunachala to see him and his ashram and the mountain, he always said no. He would say, “There is no need to come. The guru is inside you.”
We come anyway. While the great majority who visit Ramanashram are Indians, one always sees a handful of Westerners and a good number of them have come to stay. One woman who approached us and invited us to come to her place in the countryside where a sitar player would be performing the next evening has lived in Tiruvannamalai for thirty years. Another older German woman we met came last year to live permanently. What brings them? Why come here?
I love the paradoxes of the spiritual journey. A Buddhist saying reminds us that “there is no where you need to go, nothing you need to do, no one you need to be.” Enlightenment exists here and now. Reality always in front of us. We don’t have to go off somewhere else to find it. The fourteenth-century Indian poet Kabir always made fun of “spiritual seekers” running around looking for enlightenment, not realizing that it exists already in their own hearts. The two enlightenment experiences that happened to me occurred at home. So why go to south India to the ashram of a guru who died in 1950 and whose teachings can be found in hundreds of books?
For me, one fascinating reason is that when I am at ashrams and sacred places, meditation becomes easy. I can’t exactly say why. The chattering mind just stops. There is a deep state of meditation called dhyana, a stage that precedes enlightenment experience, when the mind remains in an uninterrupted flowing focus on the object of meditation, “like oil poured from one pitcher to another.” It is a beautiful experience but usually difficult to attain and maintain. Here at Ramanashram, my mind settles into dhyana easily. I sit in the great meditation hall while Brahmin priests, men and boys, with shaved heads and bare chests, recite verses from the sacred vedas, part of a puja or offering to Shiva. I sit with eyes closed as the chanting resounds through the temple like waves on a beach. My mind settles down, riding the current of dhyana like a bird soaring without a beat of its wings.
Being around several hundred spiritual seekers also has a powerful effect, especially the ashramites, the resident devotees. Dr. Murti—whose first name I can’t remember—a former doctor, is in charge of accommodations. He left his practice twenty-one years ago to live and work here. With a deep rich voice and gentle smile he looks something like Harry Belafonte. The first time I came, five years ago, I had two conversations with him. I barely know him, and yet the thought of seeing him again was one of the things I most looked forward to in returning.
When I am with a spiritually-advanced person, someone who has been a long on the path, I have a strange sense of intellectual spaciousness, of our minds inhabiting a kind of bright open space, our two consciousnesses joining there. I can’t really explain it. I don’t mean a metaphorical space, but a kind of physical space. The content of our conversation doesn’t really matter. What matters is the union. I feel close to Dr. Murti, though I barely know him. Perhaps, I knew him in some other life.
You can witness this kind of intimacy in the meditation group I attend.
Every week we meet for meditation, chanting, yoga, and study and don’t usually have much time for chit-chat. Some people have come for months or even a year yet I know very little about their daily life and still feel incredibly close to them. I often wonder how this can be when we spend most of our time together in silence. The same thing happens at silent retreats. You spend a weekend or a week with a group of strangers, interacting with them but never speaking, and you end up feeling incredibly close.
The most obvious answer as to why we come to Arunachala is the one most easily dismissed as flaky and new-age-y. That is, until you have felt it: That the powerful spiritual energy of a true guru remains in a place after his or her death. Three of the ashrams I visit in India are ashrams of gurus who have already left their bodies, including that of my own guru.
The ancient Celts believed in what they called “thin places,” places where the veil between this life and other world draws thinner. Many of the cathedrals of Europe stand on these ancient Celtic thin places. In Yogic philosophy, the world as we see it is thought to resemble a movie on a screen creating an illusion out of the pure light of the projector. Behind this ever-changing phenomenal pageant flickering before us, the Eternal—sadchidanda—Being-Consciousness, Bliss—abides. The Buddhist insight that that Reality is in front of us and within us, and that we do not have to go off somewhere else to find enlightenment, is of course true. But perhaps, there are places where the veil between us and that Enlightened State is thinner, more permeable. Our minds are weak. Mantras, sacred song, ritual, poetry all help us touch the sacred that is already in front of us.
Enlightenment is an apocalypse, an unveiling. There are sacred places on the earth where the veil lets the light comes through.