His Presence is The Presence…The
Presence that the entire creation is indebted to…The
Presence that is the source of our life and
sustenance…The Presence that is the Final
Destination of everything…Students are the special
lot, special pick, who were given the boon to draw
the best out of His physical presence…and when they
let out the whiff of ‘His Presence’ to the world, it
spreads around engulfing everyone with the Fragrance
Of His Love…His Light…Read on ‘The Presence’ by Dr.
Sunam Gyamtso Tenzin, who was conferred with a PhD
in esoteric Buddhism from SSSIHL after completing
his pre-university, undergraduation and Master’s in
Bhagawan’s Institutions.
“How did you know about Swami?” is
perhaps one of the oft repeated questions that a
devotee is asked. This has a few other variants such
as “How did Swami come into your life?” (Of course a
wrong question because He never came from elsewhere,
He was always there); or “How or why did you become
His devotee?” (Of which most of us are ignorant
since the answer would be as abstract as “Why did He
pick me?”) One can be certain that of the teeming
millions that throng the hallowed grounds of
Prasanthi Nilayam, each individual has diverse and
unique experiences to narrate about the way in which
he or she was brought into His Divine Fold. It is
astounding to note this variety and diversity of
experiences created by Bhagawan, emblematic of the
adage – Ekoham Bahusyam.
Despite these varied entry points,
what inevitably follows the first initiation is the
phenomenon of transformation. Whoever is thus
brought in His Presence and proximity, begins to
drift away from his age-old egocentric moorings to
the yonder regions of selflessness and love. A Sai
Sadhak recently made this admission in a radio
interview – “The first change was in the tone and
tenor of my speech. My once caustic tongue suddenly
took a mellow turn. I could no longer be mordant and
abusive in my newly acquired tone.” What happens
thereafter in this joyride of individual
transformation is something that cannot be described
in words. It has to be experienced first and then
understood.
In many cases such understanding
dawns much later in life when one reviews the past
sequence of experiences in retrospect and then
realizes that the difficult times that had been then
ascribed to Bhagawan’s ‘wrath’ or ‘wanton
negligence’ were but shadows cast by His Hands
lifted to save and liberate. Another savant put it
in a cruder but matter-of-fact way – “All of us
devotees in varying measures are but transformed
rogues.” It is only to guide ignorant humankind
along the pathway of righteousness that God has
taken a tangible form and name SAI – the confluence
of Service or Karma, Adoration or Bhakti and
Illumination or Jnana. Transcending His Name and
Form, SAI is the universal abstraction that embodies
the way and the goal, Transformation and the
Transcendental Awareness of His Presence.
I am presenting here a select
repertoire of real-life experiences that veer round
the phenomenon of Transformation. The objective of
these narratives is definitely not to present
another thesis on His miracles, which He often
describes as His ‘visiting cards’. Miracles happen
every moment in and around us. We only need ‘the
eyes to see and ears to hear them’. The purpose is
to juxtapose these with the phenomenon of
transformation – the evolution of a devotee’s life
through these miracles. We are all living
testimonies of His ‘Miracle of Transformation’. But
how do we know that we are transformed or undergoing
the process? Well, the external symptoms are a
change in one’s attitude towards others, feeling the
inner pricks of one’s conscience and being able to
heed those pricks, being aware of the need to be
free from vices and addictions, discovering a new
fillip to sing His Glory and help other fellow
beings in a spirit of selfless love and compassion.
The inner experience is a sublime and profound state
of ‘being in charge’ again, of being pure and
immaculate, of being closer to one’s own identity,
of feeling His omnipresence or living all the time
in His Presence.
I had a rare experience as a
student in Brindavan. A number of students perhaps
inspired by the array of Swami’s cars, had got the
impression that Bhagawan was fond of new cars. At
one time Swami sent off a small team of four senior
students-turned lecturers to Singapore to receive
and bring a new Mercedes Car that a devotee had
offered to Swami. All four of them were given
identical suits and hats and even a set of travel
gear with strict instructions to receive the car and
return home. From the moment they set sail for
Singapore, Swami would spend a good part of the
evening Bungalow (now Trayee) Session giving running
commentaries on the movements of His four stalwarts.
One evening, a flushed and excited
looking Swami suddenly declared – “My boys will come
today”. For the votaries of the
Swami’s-fondness-for-cars theory, this appeared to
be the absolute confirmation of their belief.
Despite a prolonged evening session, the expected
harbingers didn’t arrive and Swami after remarking –
“Kya Kar Sakta Hai” (What can be done?) took Aarthi
and retired upstairs. This happened the next evening
too. On the ensuing day, Swami ‘predicted’ that the
foursome would not come and took an early Aarthi.
Soon after that, around 8 pm, our dear lecturers
arrived with their priceless consignment, a deep
green colored sparkling car. Bhagawan virtually
rushed downstairs and blessed the car describing its
various contours and even went on a nocturnal
test-drive till Segehalli.
The critiques cast by the boys
that evening on this phenomenon could have made a
fat book. The next day, Swami didn’t ride the new
car as expected and in the next few days, He left
for Prasanthi Nilayam in His old car. Ultimately a
senior devotee prayed to Swami to reveal the mystery
of this car-phenomenon. Swami said –Many people
mistakenly think that I have a weakness for cars.
Yad Bhavam Tad Bhavati is My answer to that. My
fondest cars are – Chamat-kaar (miracles), that I
perform to bring about Sams-kaar (transformation of
individuals), which results in the transformed
devotees taking to the path of selfless and loving
service Paropa-kaar, which ultimately leads to
Ishwar-Sakshat-kaar or God realization. The
world had to learn two things from this phenomenon –
firstly that He is the reflection, resound and
reaction of our own thoughts and beliefs,
uninhibited by the conventional definitions of God
that we are all used to; and secondly that Bhagawan
only cares about our transformation and nothing
else.
Another occasion, on the brink of
despondency, I fervently prayed to Him and He
promptly responded. I was then a pre-university
student. “Kaheko castor oil face?” (Meaning why do
you look downcast) He asked in His inimitable way. I
was alone with Him in the interview room at
Brindavan. With a sudden lump in my throat, I told
Him that I felt a void within me since the time I
had seen revered monks in the Rumtek Monastery in
Eastern Sikkim partaking of animal meat and liquor.
Their hypocrisy had turned me into a non-believer
and that I was disillusioned and confused. The next
moment, as I was gazing at His Lotus Feet and the
hem of His Robe, He spoke two sentences to me in
chaste Tibetan that had me spell-bound. For the next
20 minutes or more, He spoke to me about
Chagya-Chenpo or Mahamudra, most of which I didn’t
understand. But the sum and substance of the
teaching that I gathered was that, accomplished
seers are never affected by the mundane attributes
for they are beyond the bounds of dualities. For
them, any matter is only a conglomerate of the five
elements, be it meat or vegetable, stone or sand,
water or liquor. It was wrong on my part to doubt
and criticize the acts of such eminent potentates,
instead of observing my own spiritual progress. It
was as though a veil had been lifted from my clouded
psyche.
The sequel to this experience
continued 13 years later when He created the most
conducive circumstances for me to undertake doctoral
research in Esoteric Buddhism in His University. As
I delved through the Tantra doctrines, realization
struck me that way back on that memorable morning,
He had indeed initiated in me the Mahamudra Tantra,
the basic Tantra practised by the Karmapa School of
the Kagyudpa Buddhist lineage of which Rumtek is the
second highest seat. A misanthropist had been
transformed into a persevering seeker that morning,
although the fact remains that even such close
revelations have made little dent into my stubborn
ego. The ‘process’ is still on, and He has never
given up on me.
The year was 2002 and the occasion
– His Divine Birthday. We had acquired a patch of
land measuring approximately 20 acres in the
mountain fastnesses of south Sikkim in the vicinity
of a tiny hamlet called Majitar. On the sacrosanct
day, a dear brother of mine and I spent the entire
day amidst the sylvan surroundings of this land
along with a select group of fellow devotees, doing
the Bhumi Puja for the construction of Bhagawan’s
School and Divine residence in Sikkim. Late in the
evening, the two of us had the opportunity to
participate in the Birthday Celebrations at Namchi,
the district headquarters of south Sikkim. It was
almost 9 pm when we left Namchi for Gangtok. As we
reached an uphill tea estate called Temi-Tarku, we
came across a large gathering of devotees braving
the prevailing darkness and cold.
Seated underneath a makeshift
shed, they were ‘celebrating His Birthday’. The time
was a little past 10 and the winding stretch of road
looked desolate. This was the only time that these
people most of whom were garden labourers living on
the edge of poverty, could afford the time for the
celebration since all the day hours are spent in
bone-breaking labour to earn two morsels. We sat
there enraptured and transfixed seeing them sing
Bhajans around a beautifully decorated altar. Every
pair of eyes sparkled with the joy of inner
contentment and spiritual awakening. No one could
have been richer and happier and wiser than those
devotees of Swami who epitomized the biblical maxim
– ‘Blessed are those who haven’t seen and yet have
believed’, for almost all of them had never been to
Prasanthi Nilayam and seen Swami in person.
A German devotee while trekking in
Dzongu, an exclusive reserve for the Lepcha tribe in
northern Sikkim, found a group of these people
seated around a campfire singing folksongs and
sipping swigs of chang – a country brew. What
flabbergasted him was a mural painting known as
Thangka that depicted Bhagawan wearing a Tibetan
robe, bearing mongoloid features and seated on a
throne. He learnt from the group that they regarded
the persona on the Thangka, gifted to them by a
fakir, as their native God of hunting.
A handsome looking kid with a
gaping hole where his right eye once belonged sat
with his father in the second class coach of the
Madras-bound Coromandel Express. They were labourers
from the Takdah Tea Estate in Darjeeling. The father
told me that he was going to Prasanthi Nilayam to
offer his only son to Bhagawan in gratitude. With a
bit of prodding, he told me that his son had once
fallen from a precipice while trying to save his
sister and had his right eye impaled on a fence.
Somehow he reconciled with his son’s fate. Sometime
later, his son contracted some disease in his left
eye which had turned red and swollen. The village
witch-doctor ascribed the malady to the play of
malignant spirits. He inserted tiny particles of
crushed glass beads in the boy’s eyes and beat him
with a stick to exorcise the spirits. As a result,
the boy bled profusely and lost complete vision of
the left eye too. The aggrieved father blamed God
for being merciless and scooping up a handful of ash
from the hearth, smeared it on his son, consigning
him to the mercy of Kirateswara, their family deity.
That night, the boy dreamt that Bhagawan (whom he
recognized instantly since he had been attending
Bhajans in the neighborhood), wearing a white gown
took him in a car. At a wayside cottage, Swami
ushered the boy inside a room and made him lie down
on a table. Producing a sharp instrument, Swami
thrust it into the boy’s eye. Pus and broken glass
particles began to ooze out of the damaged eye. The
boy woke up to find that the intense pain was
completely gone. His shirt was sodden with the
flowing matter. The next morning, he narrated this
to his father who gingerly removed the bandage to
find his boy’s eye intact and healed. Now dear
reader, please don’t start wondering why Swami did
not heal the other eye too. He alone is conversant
with the karmic logbook of every individual. A
miracle is but a matter of 100 percent faith in
God’s Power and Mercy, verily as Jesus told the
blind boy – ‘Thy faith has healed thee’.
A lieutenant colonel of the Indian
army on peace keeping mission in war-torn Jaffna in
Sri Lanka had a last minute ‘intuition’, a tiny call
from within to stop the bomb-raiding of a house that
was suspected to be a hideout of the Tigers.
Instead, he asked his men to cover his flanks and
went alone to the house. As he kicked open the front
door, he was taken aback by the sight of a neatly
framed life size photo of Bhagawan adorning the
opposite wall. Hearing some shuffling noise coming
from the adjoining room, he threw caution to the
winds and ran inside the room to find fourteen
little petrified children huddled up together. Those
children were rescued and sent for rehabilitation.
Once during my college days, I was
watching in silent admiration the students sprinting
and jostling to gain a vantage place inside Trayee
Brindavan for the evening session with the Lord. The
elders normally kept a distance from the stampede
lest they be knocked down by the young enthusiasts.
As the youngsters settled down within the sacrosanct
precincts, I too entered with the other lecturers
and took a rear corner place. The Lord then took His
seat on the regal swing and quite unexpectedly
called out – “Where is Sikkim?” In all my vanity, I
replied – “I am here Swami”. He looked at me
wistfully and commanded – “Why are you there at the
back? Come to the front.” The sea of humanity parted
and made way for my pompous self to approach the
throne. “There was no place in the front Swami”, I
replied. Bhagawan disapprovingly looked at me and
pointed to one of the boys seated near Him – “How
did he find a place here then?” I said – “Swami he
ran faster than the rest to gain that place”. At
this Swami rebuked me – “Couldn’t you too have run?
Did you think that you were granting chance to the
juniors since you have already been emancipated?” I
was speechless. I had already understood the
purport.
The message in between the lines
was that every sentient or insentient being is
pining to find that coveted place – proximity or
merger with the Creator. The quantum of inner
yearning is proportional to one’s effort –
figuratively projected in the present context as the
act of running and hurrying to get that ‘place in
the front’. The quest and effort cannot be slowed
down or stopped until the goal is reached. Chastised
and penitent I faced Swami with tears of gratitude
when He further asked me to move from His left flank
where I had found some place to stand, to His front
directly facing Him and then with a chuckle, He
remarked – “Yes this is the correct position – as
you look into my eyes now, you can see your
reflection in there as much as I am reflected in
your eyes. How could that happen when you move away
from My Presence?” The Lord continued – “I am the
Immovable and Unchanging Principle. You are the ones
who are transient, being caught in the vortex of
Karma Bandhan. Thus it is for you to either come
nearer or draw away from My Presence. Until you give
up your ego and experience the underlying unity
between Me and you, I will just be the Eternal
Witness, far and distant.”
That night I had no hunger or
sleep. Till day break I kept contemplating on this
ethereal experience. Again and again, I was
fascinated with the word ‘My Presence’. I had to
capture and drum in His Presence in the very core of
my being so that I would always feel Him close by
wherever I would be. It was a splendid feeling of
qualified nondualism Vishista-Advaita that the
Master had made me aware of in those few fleeting
moments in His immediate presence. What a pity it
was that having spent more than a decade with Him; I
was still the most consummate ignoramus, limiting
His Presence only within the bounds of His Name and
Form, forgetting His Omnipresence. To feel such
proximity with Him, the Lord has given us the
immortal mantra of CIA or Constant Integrated
Awareness.
Years turned into a full decade
since I left the portals of our University in
Prasanthi Nilayam. Living a value-oriented life in a
world of aggressive professionalism and corruption
has been and continues to be a challenge. Yet He
gives the strength and the courage to face
challenges. There are umpteen moments when I feel a
strange void within me, a feeling of being alone and
left out. I was overwhelmed with such an experience
one evening in the year 2003, as I was engaged in my
prayers. “Have you forsaken me? Am I on my own now?”
I cried out. The pages of the book Jazbaad written
as a tribute to Bhagawan by Prof. B.P.Mishra was on
the harmonium in front of me. The page open before
me contained the beautiful song ‘Mere Sai Mai To
Anaath Hoon Mujhe Daas Apna Banaiye’ – My Sai I am a
destitute, make me Your Servant. In a matter of
moments, a lilting tune welled up from deep within
me to fit this most exquisite lyrical tribute. In
utter ecstasy I sang the song which I realized was
set in Raag Jhinjhothi.
What a way to reassure me that I
would not be dumped. I could feel His resplendent
and reassuring smile, His very presence. In the
past, every time He gave me a song, I would wear out
the impact of His Presence in a trice and then feel
possessive and boastful about the composition
thinking it to be mine. This time the feel was
different. The experience simply taught me that if I
want to be in His Presence, I had to dwell in His
Presence – “I in You and you in Me” as He tells us
quite often.
II Samasta Lokah Sukhino
Bhavantu II
Home
