Climbing Chamundi Hill

by Ariel Glucklich

  At that very instant the god Vishnu saturated the person of the weaver and his flying machine with his own being—the weaver became Vishnu. He routed the invading armies, driving them noisily from the gates of the city. When his work was done, he flew back to the palace, into the arms of his beloved.

  “First Shiva, now Vishnu—you know, I never could figure out your complicated polytheism.”

  “Well, my friend, that’s a matter for another day; we are too far up the mountain now. But rest assured, this is a story about faith, not about God.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “In the previous story one-pointed consciousness was the subject: the simplicity that serves as the gateway to higher states of being. But this was not the river yet, not a flow. There is still discipline and will, and your experiences, though transcendent, are still isolated. Do you agree?”

  I was flattered by his tone, and I nodded, though I wasn’t really sure.

  “The move to the next stage is far more difficult, my friend. What comes after gateway consciousness is sheer terror, the terror of complete dissolution.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The move from one-pointed consciousness to stream consciousness feels like death, death followed by rebirth. Some people experience this movement as exhilarating. To you it will be sheer terror.”

  “But why?”

  “Because of your karma, dear boy, the stuff of your soul. It’s not that you are too passionate, though you are. And it’s not that you’re too judgmental and harsh—especially with yourself. Mere habits can be broken. You are carrying a load of pain that is so deep that it makes up your very fiber. Your American psychologists might say that this pain is locked up in the deep subconscious—but that’s not a very happy image—I never liked the basement metaphor. It’s more like DNA: substance mixed with form. Even the burn in your bare feet cannot remove the more essential pain. You come to depend on living this way, leaning on your suffering, using it to sort out the world into good and bad, right and wrong. The move to stream consciousness ends this old pattern—and so it feels like dying.”

  “How do you know so much about me?”

  “I know because you communicate it. Your nightmares for instance, those huge black snowflakes that drift down from a pale blue sky, threatening to swallow you. Night after night you wake up on the floor next to the bed, shivering in cold sweat, curled up like a fetus. They started long before your accident, when the flakes became fiery—no?”

  “I don’t see how you could possibly know about my dreams. That’s uncanny…”

  “This stage—if you make it this far—will be the worst crisis of your practice, my friend. Your brief moments of euphoria when consciousness settles down through meditation will be followed by something worse than even the fear of dying. In fact, I think death doesn’t frighten you enough. This will be more like absolute dissolution, eternal incarceration in a pitch-dark closet, psychosis.”

  “Eternal?”

  “Who can say how long? Certainly longer than you’d like. But listen to the story. Somewhere at the core of that crisis a faith will sustain you. Not belief—that’s too shallow. Belief is always about something: ‘There is a god,’ ‘The sun will rise.’ Faith is both more and less than that: a simple affirmation of being—optimism in the face of chaos. You have no idea it’s there, and you must face the terror before that faith opens up. When it does, you will be flooded with divine consciousness, a radiant grace.”

  “Is that moksha?”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course not.”

  We climbed quietly for some time, one step after another, slowly. Then I gathered the courage to ask, “What will it be like after I enter that new realm of consciousness?”

  “I can’t say, and if I could, I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if I did, you would end up creating precisely what I suggested, which would eliminate the miracle of grace.”

  “Are you saying there is no one objective way of experiencing this state of consciousness?”

  “It is different for everyone, and it can shift wildly. It is not even a ‘state,’ as you put it. The only thing that may be said is that unhindered consciousness obeys no rules. Some are immersed in deep love; others disappear to themselves without a trace. The possibilities are endless.”

  I lost track of where we were—possibly seven hundred steps up the mountain. A small wash ran directly under a thick banyan trunk on the left, exposing the tree’s lower innards. Two roots clung to a rock and kept it suspended above the ground in a space that was neither tree nor mountain. The sky above the tree now matched the gray of its trunk, and the silver leaves rippled like water.

  The old man broke the silence. “Listen to a story about mind. Mind only.”

  THE GIRL IN THE STONE

  This is a story I know only because I eavesdropped on a retelling of it by someone I respect, who was telling it to someone else. I can’t tell you with certainty that it’s true, but as far as my own experience goes, it does have the ring of truth. It feels authentic to me, but you decide. At any rate this is exactly how he told it.

  As I’d had enough of the madness into which my life had settled, I decided to renounce the hectic pace and find a quiet place to meditate. The only place I could go where no one would find me was a distant corner in the vast space of emptiness. There, using my imagination, I created a modest hut. Sometimes I meditated inside the hut; at other times I preferred to sit outside. Assuming a lotus posture, I quickly entered a trance state, and in a flash one hundred years went by.

  I was awakened from my trance by the voice of a woman. It was a sweet voice, but I thought I heard a strain of agitation in it. She was either singing or calling me. I roused myself and began to search for the woman, who may have been in some distress. I searched for years, wandering through entire worlds I had created in my mind. However, as I could not find her, I returned to the cabin to meditate. Soon I heard her playing a flute. Then she approached the place where I was sitting.

  She was a young woman with flowing black hair and a creamy complexion. Before I could speak, she started to tell me her story. “My name, sir, is Anjali.” Her black eyes shone at me. “I live at the very edge of the universe on a mountain that marks the border between the world and the nonworld. It’s a huge mountain with vast numbers of rocks and boulders. I live in one of the atoms inside one of the stones in that mountain—with my husband.

  “My husband has lived there for a long time—steadfast in his study of scriptures, disciplined in meditation. One day he realized that he needed a wife, so he created me in his imagination. I don’t know why he made me so beautiful—I am the most beautiful woman in our universe—or why he bothered at all. He has remained chaste, and I have never known the joys of domestic life…”

  “How is it possible to live in a rock?” I interrupted her. “How can you even move about?”

  “We can, sir. It’s a fact,” she waved her arms in excitement, showing just how much room there was. “And not just the two of us. There are cities and villages in the stone, and mountains and lakes. It’s a whole world in there, you know. But now you must help us,” she said suddenly, ignoring my reactions. “We’re facing a major catastrophe. Our world is about to explode into flames—a doomsday fire. We have no way of escaping. My husband failed to attain sufficiently high spiritual knowledge to free us, so we’re trapped in that place. Sir, you are a great man. Would you please come and show us the way out?”

  The fragrance of this young woman made me forget my meditation. Thinking about her impotent old husband, I agreed to go immediately. Of course, I had no idea what I could possibly do, but she was overcome with joy. The woman turned out to be a magician who could fly, while I drifted in her wake. In no time we reached the mountain at the end of the world. She took me to an ordinary round stone, but I could see nothing in it—no sky or earth, no lakes or planets or sun. All I could see was a tiny stone.

 
At first the woman was puzzled by the fact that I could not see her world, but then she remembered something important. “It’s an illusionary world; it exists only in maya. That is why you are not seeing it. You are spiritually so superior that your vision passes right through that world. Perhaps,” she suggested, “you should try to remember how such a world might have appeared to you in the past.”

  She was right—it worked. I could now see her world, as though in a dream. We entered it together, and she introduced me to her husband—an old man with fiery black eyes.

  The couple did not embrace or even exchange a glance. The young woman repeated her request that I teach her husband higher spiritual knowledge so that the two of them might escape the approaching catastrophe, but her husband cut her short. Looking directly through me, he hissed, “Great sage, I am the one who created this universe. I have even created you—just as you have created me. This woman is caught in her own karma—she is the victim of her own powerful traces from the past. As a result she constructed a world of her own in which I am her husband. Do not believe it for a moment! I am not her husband, and she is not my wife. The only thing you may believe is that today is in fact doomsday and that with it comes the end of my own karma. I urge you, good sir, to leave quickly. Go back to your own universe.”

  As soon as the man stopped speaking, he withdrew his senses from the world around him. Immediately, the world lost its solidity and form, flames erupted everywhere, and a flood of churning waters covered the entire space. As I stood there watching in awe, the world in the stone was reduced to a perfectly still nothingness.

  As I turned my head, thinking of the woman, I noticed that each of the stones around me was its own universe. There were millions of separate universes, each with its own history and geography. It was then that I realized that each universe was created by the mind of a single person.

  I decided to return to my cabin back in the corner of the empty space. However, when I got there, I could not see my body anywhere, although I had left it behind in order to fly with the woman. In its place, I saw a magician occupied in deep meditation, having taken over the cabin. He must have looked for a special place to meditate, just as I had. Furthermore, he must have possessed high discernment in order to perceive the cabin, which I had constructed out of the stuff of my higher reality—mind only. He probably assumed that I would not return, so he disposed of my body, taking it for a corpse no doubt. How dare he do that? What did he do with my body? Will I ever find it again? And my cabin, he’s trespassing there! In my anger I came up with an idea for evicting the intruder. I returned to the tumultuous world I had originally left behind and stopped imagining the space in which the cabin stood. As soon as I stopped imagining, the magician who was meditating in my space lost the solidity of his seat. He tumbled down to earth, landing roughly while still sitting in the lotus posture.

  He seemed stunned and a bit hurt, for which I felt instantly remorseful. Helping him brush the dirt off his clothes, I introduced myself and asked that he tell me about himself. We decided to return to that empty space together, where I was able to find my body and reconstruct the cabin. I made it large enough for the two of us, and we shared that place of meditation for a long time.

  “This is crazier than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; she, at least, didn’t make a cabin crash by stopping to imagine it…”

  “Yes, I agree. It’s all quite nonsensical. I’m afraid that’s unavoidable when you stand outside someone else’s mind, looking in. But once you get in, anything is possible. Can the madman be sure he is not a mystic?”

  “What do you mean? Usually that question is asked in reverse, you know.”

  The guide ignored my comment and said softly, “Would you tell me about that night in Varanasi, about six weeks ago, when your illness was at its worst? I believe that was something of a turning point for you.”

  “How could you possibly know about all of that?” I asked the old man.

  “I know everything about you.”

  I looked to see if he was serious, but it was hard to tell. I told him how absurd I found his statement to be—I wanted to know if he meant it.

  “Look at my staff.” The old man showed me the walking stick he had been carrying. It was too long for the small man, about six inches taller than he was. “Here,” he said, “measure it against your height.”

  I took the cane and placed it alongside my body. It was precisely my height. “Please keep the staff and value it. It was made especially for you and you’ve earned it.” He patted my shoulder as though knighting me.

  “But how could you know my height? Or about my illness in Varanasi?” I refused to accept the fact that he could see into my thoughts or memory—I had nothing but distaste for the occult. But I did remember the night he mentioned, and the depth of my fever. So I told him what I knew.

  The strange thing about all of this was, if Rony had not told me what I had done, I would never have considered that night unusual—at least not in the way the guide was implying. In the middle of that night—it was early in the course of my illness—I suddenly woke up feeling invigorated and almost euphoric. In the dark I got dressed and walked three blocks to a Durga shrine in order to thank the goddess for my renewed health. Her image was reclining within the inner sanctum, but that did not seem strange to me at that time. I approached and hugged her feet, kissing them with devotion, for I had nothing else to offer—no flowers or fruit. Durga suddenly stood up and rested her hand on my head in blessing, and I felt a deep joy warm my entire body. A loving force surrounded me and literally carried me away. In an instant I woke up in bed—it was late morning. Rony was looking at me from the other end of the room, smiling and shaking his head.

  “What a vision I had!” I said weakly. “You won’t believe it…”

  He laughed at this. “That was no vision, friend, or dream. In fact, you almost got yourself arrested last night.”

  “Why? Did it really happen? Did I really touch Durga?”

  Rony laughed harder, then doubled over in laughter. Then he came over and hugged me. “That was no Durga, buddy. I can tell you that.” Then he told me something bizarre; if it were not Rony, I would never have believed it. In my delirium I went to the landlord’s house and virtually assaulted Mrs. Sharma as she lay in bed next to her husband. Rony had followed me and managed to pull me back in time—it was my illness that prevented them from filing charges.

  The fever and the detoxification accounted for that vivid hallucination, so the doctor told me. But my visit with Durga still remains a true memory, while Rony’s account of my adventure was just hearsay. The very next day Rony announced that we were going south to Mysore for a dose of reality.

  The old man was laughing. “So perhaps you understand a little bit what I mean when I say that you are the product of my mind. I know it sounds like gibberish to you, but if you talk about it in the future, people will understand. Of course, in my world there’s a perfectly simple explanation for all of this.”

  “Can you please explain what you mean? I’m not enjoying this.”

  “Here, let me tell you another story. It may help you,” he said.

  RULER OF THE WORLD

  North of the renowned city of Mathura was a dense forest of nim, teak, and many other fruit-bearing trees as well. It was a lush place where a man could live with no fear of hunger or the threat of predators. Two hours’ walking distance into the forest one could find the small town known as Salim, next to which was a peaceful forest retreat named after Shiva’s wife—Gauri. In a modest but comfortable estate in the heart of the Gauri Retreat lived an elderly couple with their eight sons and daughters-in-law. There was nothing unusual about this extended family, which survived on small-scale farming and a bit of trading, except for one thing. The eight boys, though different in age and appearance, were psychically connected. Their mental bond was so strong that when one of them hurt, the others would cry. When another had a strange dream, all arose the next morning in a
daze.

  One of the boys, the youngest, one day saw the king pass by with his entourage of assistants and beautiful courtesans. He decided on the spot that he too should be a king or, better yet, ruler of the whole earth. Immediately, all eight brothers became inflamed with the same ambition. They all wanted to be ruler, each one the only lord of the entire world! Due to their modest station in life they realized that the only way to obtain such a lofty goal was through the power of spiritual austerities. All of them as one resolved to abandon their home and their wives in order to pursue a rigorous course of penances.

  That very same day the young men kissed their wives and hugged their parents. They left the women and elderly couple crying at the door, waved good-bye to each other, and then turned to eight separate directions. Feeling that their shared consciousness was an obstacle to the desired goal—sole mastery of the world—the brothers resolved to achieve as much separation as they possibly could. And so they marched vigorously for seven weeks.

  The youngest of the eight, whose name was Kundadanta, walked in a northwesterly direction for those forty-nine days. He finally stopped when he saw a majestic fig tree, as big as the mythical kalpa tree, set off from a cluster of ordinary looking beuls and ashoks. The trunk of the ancient ashvattha was twisted and braided like the sinewy limbs of an old yogi. Its branches spread high above, forming a shady canopy that covered a full acre. Kundadanta stared at this magnificent sight, smiling in delight. He spent the rest of the day preparing a rope out of the plentiful darbha grass that grew there. The next morning he slung the rope over an east-facing branch, tied the other end to his ankles, and hoisted himself off the ground. Hanging with his feet in the air and arms dangling below, he entered a deep meditative trance.