Ash and Lil do India - Blog 7 - A Pilgrimage to the Sanskrit Town

A Pilgrimage to the Sanskrit Town

Our group is very diverse, but having said that, there is only one Asian woman; all the rest of us are white. We are aged from about 50 to 80, with a couple in their 30s. There is a subset called Initiators, funnily enough half of whom are Asian. The Initiators have spent three months in the Himalayas learning the Vedic teachings and meditation so they can spread the word, because the theory is that if enough people meditate, world peace will follow.

The problem, of course, is that the people who need to meditate the most never would, as they don’t think they need any form of self-improvement, nor do they seek a universal truth.

The Initiators are the same age as my children and display the same sort of resigned acceptance that, while we as their elders might think we know something, we don’t.

Of the group, my favourites are Sigourney, who had a mother-in-law like mine who said dreadful things behind our backs but never to our faces; a builder from Tasmania who has inspired his entire team to meditate and wears stubbies while everyone else floats around in traditional garb and pashmina shawls; and an opera singer called Brad, who was in a school play and a master said, “Wow, you certainly can’t act, but you can sing. Go and be an opera singer,” and that master changed his life.

There is also a wonderful woman whose father took her to India as a child and they lived on $1 a day. He never sent her to school, as he tried to find a following for a religion only he followed.

We all sit at random tables at mealtimes, and sometimes I worry that no one will sit beside me, but this doesn’t worry Lil in the least, which is yet another sign she is further along the road to enlightenment than I am. Thom says worrying about whether people like you or not is juvenile, but he says it in a philosophical way.

We are off today to visit a sacred Hindu pilgrimage town called Devprayag. This town is famous because two rivers—the Alakananda and the Bhagirathi—meet here to form the holy Ganges.

When he was in India as a young lad, Thom had stopped here on his pilgrimage to a town called Badrinath. He says that if we look out the windows of our cars, we will see the path he took on this journey, which he made with a sanyasi monk (a person who renounces all selfish desires, works for the benefit of the world, and finds spiritual liberation through detachment and meditation).

The story goes that one day Thom happened to sit beside this monk and casually asked him what he was up to, and the monk said, “I’m about to walk to Badrinath.” Like Henny Penny in Chicken Licken, Thom asked whether he might come too. The monk replied, “If you come, you must wear just your robes, flip-flops, and a blanket—no socks or money.” Thom agreed, and off they went for six weeks on a perilous little track that winds around the base of the mountain, where tigers, cobras, leopards, and elephants roam. In fact, a cow was eaten by a leopard just a week before we arrived in Rishikesh.

Sanyasi monks can’t beg or transact with anyone for food. However, the local people know the ways of these monks, and in all the little tea houses the locals order just a little extra food, which somehow makes its way onto the table of the monk—and in this case, Thom. The part I liked most of Thom’s story was that when he decided to bus back to Rishikesh from Badrinath, the driver did not ask him for money for the fare. As Thom tells it, this was a Pinocchio moment for him when he realised, “Wow, I’m a real monk!”

It takes two hours along a very winding road to get to Devprayag. When we arrive, we walk down 200 big, uneven, jagged steps and across a swinging concrete bridge. We have to try and change behind towels so as not to offend the locals, and then walk over some slippery rocks to dip three times in the freezing water. Everyone but me seems to be having a high old time, but I am out of sorts and go to lie in our car. The driver sits in the front while I lie in the back, and he burps and farts until I get out. They have a way of getting you to do what they want you to do.

We then stop at a restaurant where a nice cow comes up to me and asks if I wouldn’t mind scratching her head. Lil joins in, and the day is better. Sharing life with cows is actually very calming. The dogs and cows are looked after by the villages and wear coats in winter, and both the dogs and cows seem to go away to do their business, as it isn’t anywhere! I love the dogs being able to roam around with their buddies and explore their world. It must be so nice for them to think, What will I do today? instead of I wonder if I’ll be taken out for a walk on a lead today?

I am moaning to Lil about all the driving, but she is starting to get the blissful look of the Initiators, and I think she is further along the road to enlightenment than I am. She always saunters when she walks, falls asleep straight away anywhere and everywhere, and knows instinctively if people are good or bad. Thom talks about the competitive element in his relationship with the Maharishi, and I feel this a bit with Lil. She is so positive, and I decide I will stop complaining so that I don’t give her the opportunity to marvel at what I find annoying. The next thing I know, she’ll be at the base of the Himalayas, training to be an Initiator and pronouncing her mountains “Him-ar-lee-as.”

Thom’s Teachings – Evening Lecture

Thom talks about how it was foretold to him that he would be in prison. Believing that you decide your karma, he turned this foretelling into a positive thing and went and worked in the prisons. He would have himself locked into the prison for two weeks at a time, and over eight years he taught the prisoners how to meditate. He said to them, “The universe is a state of mind. Each person has his own universe, and you brought your universe into prison with you. You can see prison as a cage, or you can find your enlightenment here. You don’t have to worry about lunch or dinner.”

He says he was always the goofball of the family. He vanished at 16, and his siblings could never accept that while he was away he turned into a world-renowned guru. They didn’t visit him for 35 years—their kid brother who had been in hospital for a year alone when he was 10. I admire Thom that he can rise above the pettiness that drives us to make little of ourselves in order to be liked or to conform. He says just because certain people can’t relate to the new you, you must not step down from your conscious state. He says with meditation you are always moving to a higher state, and you must stay there. It is the stage of enlightenment that you have reached that you will come back at. When you have reached total enlightenment, you are at one with the cosmos, so you just stay in that state after you have shed your earthly body. I think this means when Thom dies he will be the same, even though he’s not here in an earthly body. He’ll just be floating around forever. There’s a part of me that quite likes this flawed old world, so I think I want to reach near enlightenment and keep coming back. I am not at a level to discuss this with Thom yet. I am still in meditation nursery school.

In the Q&A, a ballet dancer in the group asks Thom why she can never dance as she imagines she can. Thom says he taught Nureyev, who told him, “My consciousness takes me places, and by the time I reach the place my consciousness has taken me, it has moved on somewhere else. You can be the most brilliant dancer on earth, but your consciousness is always demanding more of you. Your mind will always be ahead of your body. As dancers, we like the applause, we take a bow, but we’re always thinking we could have been better.”

We finish the evening listening to a recording of a famous singer who came to visit the Maharishi unexpectedly. There was a huge commotion when she came, and the Maharishi and his followers thought it was the black-and-red-faced monkeys fighting, but it was the singer’s 2,000 fans who followed her everywhere she walked. The Maharishi threw himself at her feet; they both tried to bow lower than the other, threw necklaces over each other, then sang together, with Thom taping them on his VHS—one hand holding down the record button, which was broken, and the other clasped by the famous singer.

Thom finished by saying we are all searching for God, but quantum physics proves the searcher creates what he is searching for, so we will find what we are looking for inside ourselves.