Soon after arriving in India I went up the mountain into the Aravali Ranges to learn about Raja yoga. There were only a few Westerners there and it was like entering into a special world.
It felt like stumbling across a kind of Shangri La, or a lost community of yogi’s, but this one was overlooking the Rajasthani Desert. And when I first got there, I met a friend Arjun and we started walking to Nakki Lake and back in the mornings. But. in what was another culture shock for me, he started holding my hand as we walked, and then swinging it, just like I was his girlfriend. And sometimes he fondled my hand if he felt extra close.
And I could feel myself tensing up a little, and then I started having a cross-cultural argument with myself about what was appropriate. But Arjun was a beautiful person with a most wonderful innocence, and I thought I have to go along with this, and who knows, one day I might even get to like it, but it felt like boundary crossing, and I was really hoping that no-one was taking any photographs of any of this, because if they ever got out, I would have to stay here, and would never ever be able to go back to Western Australia.
One day on one of our walks I saw a questionable property called ‘The Sheratone Hotel’. Which wasn’t quite like any of the other Sheraton properties I had seen before. It only had about four rooms and usually in the Sheraton Hotels they had better lobbies than that. Anyway, it was probably better not to think about it too much. Another time I saw two men (who carried pales of milk up to Mt Abu from a village further down the mountain) who had decided to have a sleep in the middle of the road just around the corner of a bend.
They had taken off their turbans and laid them down and were now sleeping on them. When cars came around the corner they had to swerve to miraculously miss them. I was thinking that is probably not the best place to sleep. These days I might say that was a very ‘right brained’ thing to do. But at the time it seemed like one of the secrets of settling into India, you have to realize that there is some kind of secret hidden order in the chaos.
Then I met Surya who ran the kitchen (he had once been a university lecturer and scholar or something like that). And I started speaking with him for many hours about everything to do with yoga and meditation. He was a wonderful teacher. There were different kinds of yoga he said. Bhakti yoga is a devotional yoga, a yoga of love, love and devotion, maybe. Karma yoga is a yoga of action. Then there was gyan yoga for the people that were into the knowledge of yoga. We spent hours and hours in that kitchen talking about things. One day he just looked at me and said ‘‘Ýou - Psychology’. I think he was trying to say that is your area. Anyway, at the time it was very significant for me.
Slowly I began to realize there is a whole language for the inner world in India that has been handed down through the centuries. They had a language for the soul and the sacred. The early morning meditation was called ‘'ámrit vela’(the time of the nectar) and sometimes the ‘brahm muarat’(the time of the very beginning). And I started to have many experiences in meditation. And India started to take a place in my heart. And I began to see India more like the ‘Great Mother’. Nowhere has better sunrises and sunset’s than India. And i started to get a feeling towards the ancient wisdom of ‘Bharat’.
Many years later I heard Stan Grof call it a ‘technology of the sacred’. There is a technology of the sacred in India that has been handed down through the centuries. And Carl Jung said something like the sacred can show up in the most unusual places where you least expect, and that is what happened to me, the sacred was showing up where I least expected in India. Anyway, I try not to sentimentalize India too much, but after the initial culture shock had worn off, and I started to sink into it, I started to love India. And I would say, it isn’t possible to go to India and to come back the same person.
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