Independence

When I first arrived at Arunachala most of the Westerners coming on Pilgrimage seemed to be here as a result of their association with advaita and/or the sage Ramana Maharshi. But now everything is changing and it seems many Westerners are coming for Arunachala.

On arriving I stayed at Sri Seshadri Ashram and whilst there spent my time either at the samadhi of Sri Seshadri Swami or at Ramana Ashram. It wasn't until I left the Ramana Nagar area to live in the surrounding countryside that my access to Arunachala became more of a direct one and not one via someone else. And very happy I am too for the change.

'Don't put the key to your happiness in someone else's pocket'.
[Swami Chinmayananda]

Arunachala Venba

'It stands as an insentient Hill. Its action is mysterious past human understanding. From the age of innocence it had been within my mind that Arunachala was something of surpassing grandeur. .. . It drew me to it, stilling my mind . . . Thou dwellest in different religions under different names and forms . . . Thy unity permeates the diversity of beings and religions . . . nothing can keep the soul from returning to its Source . . . O Arunachala, Self, Ocean of Bliss.'

[Guru Namashivaya]

Wood Apple

Many of the fruits, foliage and herbs found around Arunachala, have medicinal and ayurvedic properties. In spite of what large drug Companies would like us to believe, most major life saving medicines are in fact derived from common and organic substances. Arunachala is replete with a profusion of such natural life enhancing fruit and foliage.

A tasty favourite with monkeys is the Wood apple, or Elephant apple (because the fruit resembles the skin of an elephant) commonly found on Arunachala Hill. The unripe fruit is considered to be a useful astringent in diarrhoea and dysentery, and the ripe fruit (which is edible) is prescribed for afflictions of the gums or throat. The fruit is called Dadhiphala in Sanskrit, as its taste is compared with that of Dadhi or coagulated milk. The leaves are aromatic and carminative.

The fruit is cold, dry, refreshing, astringent, cardiacal and tonic, and is a useful remedy in salivation and sore throat, strengthening gums and acting as an astringent. Sherbet made from the fruit increases appetite and has antidote properties.

The pulp applied externally is a remedy for bites of venomous insects; if the pulp is not available then the powdered rind of the fruit may be used. It is also prescribed to relieve bowel afflictions. The fruit when cultivated, reaches a diameter of approximately four inches. Rural folk pound the leaves with curds and apply the mixture to the whole body as a remedy for heat of blood supposed to be caused by bile.

Thus the Wood Apple is multi functional and effective, and this is but one small item of the many indigenous ones that are prevalent around the Hill. What a pity so much is being forgotten so quickly! More info on fruits and herbs to come.

Going Solo

Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality.
[Michael Ellner]

One of the most important aspects of Arunachala, it's easy to go solo! Arunachala is the Guru and you don't need anything or anyone else while here. This sacred site has lured saints, sages and pilgrims since ancient times. The great ones among them (e.g. Ramana Maharshi and Seshadri Swami) always thought of themselves as Arunachala Devotees not Gurus. Ramana would say that one didn't even need to do meditation or prayers whilst staying at the Hill. That it was enough just to be here as even when asleep the power of Arunachala transforms and inspires.

Nowadays it's getting fashionable for Gurus and Satsang teachers from the West (and India) to come and set up their stall at Arunachala. Some like Sri Nannagaru are genuine but others are a total waste of time. So, don't be nervous to come without a group or teacher. This is a happy place to fly solo as it is the one place on earth where one can truly talk to God heart-to-heart without the necessity of a Guru (in form) to mediate with the Divine!

NABARD

Nearly 20 women self-help groups, identified by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), put up stalls at Kumaran Anugraha Marriage Hall, Chennai on Thursday September 14 at an exhibition which will run until September 23.

The ladies from Tiruvannamalai and other Districts, came with items from their native places. The goods range from a wide variety of jute products from Tiruvannamalai, soft toys, agarbathi (incense) and decorative items from Kancheepuram; saris from Madurai; fancy terracotta items and dolls from Villupuram and Dindigul; wood carvings from Sivaganga and quantities of pickles and spices from Namakkal and Yelagiri.

NABARD, spent Rs.109,000/- (US$2,400) to organise the display festival at Chennai. The Chief Manager of the Exhibition stated at the fair's inauguration that NABARD gives funding and a marketing platform at such Trade Festivals to women groups.

An organisation set up by a German group called Shantimalai Trust has been vigorous in establishing successful women self-help groups in the Tiruvannamalai District for over 20 years. Many of the self-help group items are exported to the U.S. and Europe and include: cotton bedding, quilts, clothes, embroidered saris, handmade paper, ethnic dolls, wood engravings etc. The products are of the highest quality and are sold in superior overseas outlets.

Anything to help empower women in this country is to be welcomed. Sadly this is still a chavinistic country where women are firmly pushed to the side or at least into the kitchen! If you travel about in the evenings through any village you will find the gents with their beedies and chai (homemade cigarette and tea) at the tea-stalls chatting outside while the ladies (including very young girls of 7 or 8) carry home huge pots of water from the village water pumps.

Even on constructions sites; it is the women who do the dirty, hard labour like breaking and carrying stones and sand, while men train and work in the more comfortable, highly paid spots i.e. plumber, carpenter. Sadly it is virtually impossible for a lady to break into training for such work.

Definitely life and opportunities have improved for woman in the Cities but not so in the villages; and after all India is still a country of a million villages!

Personal Sadhana

Such beauty, such inner magnetism, cannot be adequately explained or described. Arunachala may simply be, for some, the true inner pole of the Earth, as Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi so often asserted. Such devotional outpourings are reminiscent of the hymns of Prophet Isaiah in another context:

'Rejoice for Jerusalem and be glad for her
All you who loved her . . .
That you may suck and be satisfied
With her consoling breasts,
That you may drink deeply with delight
From the abundance of her glory.
For thus says the Lord:
Behold, I will extend prosperity to her like a river
And you shall suck, and you shall be carried upon her hip
And dandled upon her knees . . .'

One does indeed long to fill oneself, greedily and in great gulps, with the milk of loving-kindness, wisdom and enlightenment, from those stark stumpy paps of Arunachala, to be dandled upon those accommodating slopes and ravines, to allow the burdensome ego to dissolve into the bliss of its Oneness!

[Alasdair Black]

Cotton Mill

A newly-built AKCT Cidambaram cotton mill was recently opened at Mangalam village, Tiruvannamalai District. Which is very good news both for the industry and local employment, however one hopes stricter standards are observed to prevent nasty water pollution which is often the result of the cloth dyeing process.

Cotton prices and financial disincentives caused such a serious slump in the local industry that several mills were forced to shut down. However, a recent relaxation in taxes on power looms, handlooms and spinning mills and also the scrapping of excise duty in the industry have now successfully reversed the slump.

We love our cotton. People quickly learn that no matter how sheer or light-weight a man made fabric may be, nothing beats the comfort and coolness of cotton during the hot season. I remember one summer I insisted on wearing cotton-mixes (synthetic plus cotton) and ended up with dreadful heat boils on my face and body. When I went to the skin specialist the first thing she told me was, 'Wear cotton!'.

Thereafter I was a radar for noticing other peoples heat boils and I observed that in every single instance the person was wearing cotton-synthetic mix outfits. Wearing synthetics in India during the hot season is like going out in a plastic bag. So, if you are planning on coming please bring lots of cotton clothing, you will be glad you did!

I AM

My Name is I AM
(anonymous)

I was regretting the past and fearing the future.
Suddenly my Lord was speaking,
'My name is I AM'
He paused. I waited. He continued.
'When you live in the past with its mistakes
And regrets, it is hard. I am not there.
My name is not I WAS.
When you live in the future with its problems
And fears, it is hard. I am not there.
My name is not I WILL BE.
When you live in this moment, it is not hard.
I am here.
My name is
I AM.'

Monsoon preparations

Tiruvannamalai Municipality recently convened a District Disaster Management Committee to discuss precautionary measures to be taken to mitigate possible flood situations during the October-December Northeast monsoon season.

In this respect PWD officials were requested to prepare materials such as gunny bags, wooden logs and sand to repair possible breaches in water bodies. Public Health Officials have been requested to ensure the availability of sufficient quantities of medicines in the case of monsoon-related illnesses and fire and rescue service personnel have been asked to ensure such resources as rubber boats and ambulances are available throughout the monsoon period.

The Municipality also ordered that Control Rooms should operate round-the-clock in Tiruvannamalai Divisional Offices throughout the October-December Northeast monsoon season.

I can't remember the Monsoon season previously necessitating such extreme precautions as rubber boats; but maybe our local officials have decided to prepare for all contingencies! It certainly seems like the rainy season nowadays is much more rainy. Our big natural reservoir, Samudra Lake, overflowed last season with rainfall being the highest in the last 20 years.

Also parts of Tamil Nadu had so much rain and dampness, that the usual tropical fruits like banana and papaya rotted on their leaves and trees. Maybe soon the UK will be cultivating mangoes and we will be harvesting strawberries, yummy!

Update

Been having some blimps with my computer this week and have decided to get everything sorted out in one go hence am sending this from a local email facility while my own computer is at computer hospital getting a new Windows installation.

As to news on our Arunachala website:

www.arunachalasamudra.org we should should have the colours and formatting taken care of within the month. We are not taking the site down while we redesign, so please be patient with our interesting page colours, while the work proceeds.

After the Website facelift is complete, we will continue to develop the website to include an Inspiration and Information section, and hopefully make Arunachala more accessible to people that don't have a strong Hindu connection. Advaita and Hindu mythology are beautiful, enriching and fascinating principles BUT When all is said and done, sometimes it is easier to make a connection with the Divine using ones own tradition and history as the access point. In this respect this Blog welcomes any and all questions about Arunachala.

The Arunachala Grace Newsletter will be coming out at the end of this month so if any readers wish to sign on for their free subscription, please check out the left hand margin of this Blog for the Newsletter subscription sign-up.

Am currently preparing a new montage entitled Arunachala Friends, so if all goes well with the computer update, the new montage should be posted on this Blog within the next few days.

Operators!

I suppose there is a certain expectation that spiritual people, who supposedly dedicate their lives to spirituality, should perhaps be more expert in living with greater integration between thought-word-action. Unfortunately as well as Gurus sometimes turning out to be big disappointments, there are plenty of professional sadhakas who are a disgrace to their lineage. Here at Arunachala the professional sadhaka from the West is becoming a more frequent visitor - and with this upsurge of dedicated seeker, little stinkers are also beginning to turn up.

From my own experience I got cheated big-time by an American lady over a land arrangement here at Tiruvannamalai. She is a long term Sri Sathya Sai Baba devotee who has been living at Swami's Puttaparthi Ashram in Andhra Pradesh for over twenty years. So, I don't have much patience with listening to foreigners complaining about 'rogue' Indian dealers - from my own experience there are some rather dreadful foreign operators out there too!

I suppose it's like the saying, 'when a thief sees an Angel - all he notices is his pockets'. So even here at Arunachala the occasional stinker makes it through the radar - and instead of the Glory of Arunachala, all they can see is a different kind of opportunity!

Cola Protest

It was announced on Wednesday (September 6th), that The Federation of Tamil Nadu Traders Associations plan to observe October 2 as Pepsi-Coke Protest Day.

The Federation believes that the overseas Cola Companies have been encouraged by the Government to develop a monoply on the market via tax exemptions. The upcoming protest is also against the introduction of Value Added Tax (VAT) in Tamil Nadu, which the Federation believes will only give support to foreign companies opening up retail outlets in India.

I'm curious as to what is going to happen in the protests. More information as it happens.

Sadhu Bath

Being a Sadhu is not an easy life. Although there are several places available for daily sit down meals; like Yogi Ramsuratkumar Ashram, Sri Seshadri Ashram, takeaways at Ramana Maharshi Ashram and rice breakfasts at the Palakothu Tank, still there's not much chance of tea, coffee, fruit, biscuits, and the essential Sadhu prerequisite of biddies (home-rolled country style cigarettes). Also no nice bed and for most of them it's sleeping rough in the open and taking very publics bath at one of the many water tanks dotted around Tiruvannamalai.

A lot of these sadhus were in fact regular people like teachers, government bureaucrats or railway workers who on retirement decided to take up the life of itinerant sadhu. This is very much in line with the Hindu tradition that sets out the four stages of a person's life; student, householder, solitary, sannyasa (renunciant).

It must be very difficult at a late age, after a lifetime of the usual comforts, to give it all up and live on the streets, sleep on the roads, beg for your food and have to put up with abuse from harsh foreigners; who invariably whine, 'Well, if you're a sadhu; why do you need money?' Such nagging folk should definitely NOT be allowed to leave their homeland under any circumstances!

Looking Good!

Each full moon there is scurry of activity all around the mountain with hordes of merchants coming into town with their array of various bric-a-brac, fortune telling robots, green coconuts, holy pictures and books, fruit stands, candyfloss wagons and all the rest of the paraphernalia.

It's all for the crowds of Pilgrims who come to Arunachala specifically to do Poornima (full moon) pradakshina. Shrines around the Hill are given a special smarten-up, are beautifully garlanded and readied for a lot of admiring looks from devout, pious pilgrims. This nice Lingam shrine is a small, rather insignificant one; but for Poornima, definitely done up to the nines, and capable of stopping anyone in their tracks!

Arunachala News

This month we have started posting Arunachala narratives and photographs on a new Blog www.arunachalanews.com which we are authoring on behalf of a U.K. Company, Syntagma Media. We certainly hope our information reaches an audience through Syntagma Media that would not otherwise have the opportunity of hearing about Arunachala.

Great care will be taken not to duplicate posts and photographs, so once you've finished reading here, why not check out: www.arunachalanews.com

Bhuta Lingams

In India there exists five famous Lingams based on the elements (bhutas): Fire, Earth, Wind, Water and Ether (Sky). The Bhuta Lingams are said to be places where Shiva manifested himself as the natural elements.

Each of the five Lingams are situated in celebrated Temple Towns, and are as follows:

Tiruvannamalai: Fire Lingam

Kanchipuram: Earth Lingam

Kalahasti: Wind Lingam

Tiruvanaikka/Jambunath: Water Lingam

Chidambaram: Sky (Ether) Lingam

The Shiva Lingam denotes the primeval energy of the Creator. It is believed that at the end of all creation, during the great deluge, all of the different aspects of God find a resting place in the Lingam; Brahman is absorbed into the right, Vishnu to the left and Gayatri into the heart. The Shiva Lingam is also a representation of the infinite Cosmic Column of fire, whose origins, Vishnu and Brahma were unable to trace.

My Experience

Before I shifted to Arunachala I had been residing at the Puttaparthi Ashram of Sri Sathya Sai Baba and it was in fact Swamiji himself who told me to move to Tiruvannamalai. At that time I didn't know much about this area except for information from the wonderful book 'In Search of Secret India' by Paul Brunton.

But once I arrived here, I quickly learnt that Arunachala represents the Fire Lingam and that it's meant to burn away the ego etc. That actually had been my experience with Sri Sathya Sai Baba, and the whole time I had lived at his Ashram it felt like I was living on the edge of a simmering volcano; hot, hot, hot!

It was only when I came to Arunachala that things changed. And the raging heat of my Puttaparthi days stopped and curiously it felt like my mind was immersed in water. That feeling has never gone. For me Arunachala is cool, quiet, watery and peaceful; like an air conditioner blowing inside the mind.

One day when I was telling David Godman (the writer) this story, he remarked my experience was interesting and reminded him that during his course of interviews with Annamalai Swami in preparation for writing the brilliant, 'Living By The Words of Bhagavan', Annamalai Swami said that his first impression (which never altered) of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, was one of coolness!

My point is sometimes people experience Arunachala as 'cooling' but most ALL experience Arunachala's extraodinary stillness and peace.

Hospital News

I've been keeping this story to the side meaning to post it as it encapsulates so much of the drama of living in India and in particular at Tiruvannamalai.

However, yesterday evening I was reading the 'Drudge Report' online about two Rainbow travellers in Colorado. The two men on seeing discarded, rotten fruit lying outside a Produce Supplier, jumped the compound fence to get at it. Suddenly, whoosh! And everything unravelled. Now they are currently each serving 6 month prison sentences for taking discarded, rotten fruit! Initially, when I read the headlines, I assumed it was an Asian farce and was astounded when I read on and learnt it actually happened in beautiful Colorado.

The point is, my hospital story doesn't sound that weird anymore! All of a sudden crazy seems being out there! Anyhow here's the story: A patient was beaten up for refusing to give a bribe to an employee at the Tiruvannamalai District Government Hospital.

Apparently, after Siva (a farmer) sustained injuries from fireworks at a Temple Festival, he was rushed to the Government Hospital where employees demanded Rs.50/- (U.S.$1.25) for dressing his wound. Siva, the farmer told the hospital workers to complete the dressing and he would arrange for the money later. Once the work was finished, the farmer promised he would get the money from his relatives after they arrived at the Hospital.

Irked by this, one of the employees forced Siva into a room and beat him up. It is said that the employee was drunk and scolded the other hospital workers for treating Siva without first receiving bribe money.

Apparently it is not uncommon for employees at the Tiruvannamalai General Hospital to demand bribes from patients, including accident victims. I suppose a Hospital sometimes isn't the best place to go to when you're sick! Pity!

Flashy!

This photograph is taken outside the Big Temple's walls (you can see part of a Tower on the right-hand side). Let's hope this fellow has a successful day because what he's wearing looks none too comfortable!

Kumar Family

This is a family known to most Western visitors to Arunachala. The lady is Beate from Germany, the gent Kumar her husband from Tamil Nadu and the little girl their daughter Janani. They run the best email facility in town and are an important resource for foreigners with; airport pickups, booking tickets, changing money, renting videos and providing lots of additional software computer services. If you're planning on coming over you can check them out at their website:

http://www.shantionline.com/

Nandi

Shiva Temples always have some kind of statue (vigraha) of Nandi, the bull; Shiva's vahana (or vehicle). Vah in Sanskrit, means to transport and in Hindu symbolism, the Vahana is also the symbol of the deity. Nandi, the bull, represents strength and virility and also means 'joyful' (from the Sanskrit root, 'Nanda').