Probably as a result of making a posting on this Blog and Website about Tinnai Swami, I received two emails (reproduced below) from an Arunachala devotee from Australia regarding an experience he and a friend had on the day of the Mahasamadhi of Sri Tinnai Swami on December 7, 2003.
Mahasamadhi of Bench Swami and Comet
"I was camped up on the mountain the day before Deepam in 2003. The next day people came up in the afternoon to join us. They told us that in the morning, Bench Swami had Mahasamadhi.
We watched from a ridge on the mountain as the fire was lit on the summit. About 5 to 10 minutes after the Flame was lit myself and my Israeli friend saw a large comet come down out of the sky and into the mountain.
It had a tail that was very long and was breaking off the back of it, the tail went through different colours, red blue, green yellow − immediately I looked at my friend and said 'Bench Swami'.
Since then, I never met anyone else apart from myself and my friend that saw the comet .... I now recently met a German man who had also witnessed the comet from the roof of Sadhu Om".
When I responded to the Arunachala devotee from Australia, he sent the below additional information.
"The comet that we saw was nothing like a normal shooting star. It was so much bigger − about 50% the size of a full moon in the mid sky.
As it came down, it had a long tail that would break off the main section and it went through a display of colours as it came down − like through the rainbow. Red, yellow, white, blue, green.
We were camped near the cave that Omkar Amma spent time in back in 2002. From looking at the summit of the mountain and the Deepam flame, the comet came down just to our left and disappeared behind the ridge to our left.
It all happened very quick, but at the same time, strangely, very slow, maybe around a second or two at the most.
It happened 10 to 20 minutes after they had lit the flame. Both myself and my Israeli friend saw it from the ridge, and like I said, I recently talked to a friend, who saw it from the top of Sadhu Om’s place.
To those unfamiliar with Sri Tinnai Swami, I am posting below part of a moving narrative by Michael James on the life of this great sadhaka.
"Early in the morning on Deepam Day, 7th December 2003, a little-known devotee left his physical body in Tiruvannamalai, where he had lived for more than 54 years in the supreme state of atma-jnana bestowed upon him by the Grace of Sri Bhagavan.
The reason that he was so little-known, even among fellow devotees, can only be attributed to the divine Will of Sri Bhagavan, which can never be fathomed or explained by our limited human intellects. If at all any semblance of individual will could be attributed to this self-effacing devotee, he appeared to have chosen to live in such circumstances as would shield him from all but the barest minimum of public attention. Those who knew him respected that seeming choice and avoided publicising him in any way. But now that the human form has been cast off, I believe it is not inappropriate that I share with fellow devotees a little of what I know about him.
Sri Tinnai Swami
The devotee I am writing about was in
his former life named Ramaswami, but for more than 40 years past he has been
known as Sri Tinnai Swami, because he lived on and seldom moved away from the
tinnai (masonry bench) in the verandah of the house of the family of the last
Sri C.P. Nathan, who gave him food and shelter and attended to his few physical
needs.
Sri Tinnai Swami was born in Coimbatore on the 12th December 1912, in a family of lawyers and doctors belonging to the small Telugu Brahmin community of that town. As a young man he was employed for many years as a biochemist in Madras Medical College, during which time he married and had four sons. Until his mid-thirties there was no indication in his outward life of the great inner and outer transformation that was to happen later."
To continue reading about the life of Sri Tinnai Swami, follow this link here:
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