Art of Living Silver Jubilee and the Golden Triangle - Feb 2006
The part of my trip that I expect may be the busiest and the most intensive is coming to an end. Since last writing I have spent a week and a half in Bangalore for the Art of Living’s Silver Jubilee celebration and I flew up north for a voyage around India’s “Golden Triangle” of tourism—Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. I managed to buy a real digital camera when I arrived in Bangalore and have, for all intensive purposes, retired my ‘spy camera.’ I have taken more than 700 pictures on the new camera and I’ve traveled about 3,000 kilometers since my last e-mail, but as I write that, I’m reminded of the line from the Tao Te Ching that the Beatles sang:
Without going out of my door, I can know all things are myrrh. Without looking out of my window, I can know the ways of heaven. Arrive without traveling. See all without looking. Do all without doing.
My most important travels have been sitting on my butt with my eyes closed. The first few days in Bangalore I was doing 100% seva (volunteer service). Of the first six nights I was there, I got 3 hours sleep on four of the nights. The last of which was the main registration day for International guests for the Silver Jubilee. I slept from midnight to three and worked a twelve-hour shift with no breaks when I woke up. As stress peaked in the mid morning, I yelled at someone who was making my work particularly troublesome, and as I began to reflect and relax after the fact, I was pretty much kicked off my position and told I had to go and do at least one of the following: pee, eat, or meditate.
After going to the bathroom, I sat on the hillside and started balling for a good fifteen minutes. (So, I guess I did kind of have a break.) The main feeling running through my head was this torrent of emotion, hiding under the shelter of the complaint: “Why does it have to be so hard to give yourself fully in service?” In the pinch of longing and devotion, I can feel a restless burning and a feeling that no matter how much I give of myself, I want to surrender more, to lay myself out completely for the ones I love, for the Divine. Then later, when these feelings pass, there is the burning crush of bickering egos and conflicting agendas, and service is the absolute last thing in the world I want to do. “That’s it for me,” I think, “I am packing up, leaving all this… I’m going to go meditate by myself somewhere.”
Sri Sri had instructed all of us to restudy the Narada Bhakti Sutras before the Silver Jubilee, so it’s particularly fresh in my memory—in his commentary, there are different paths to the ultimate goal of spiritual communion—service, devotion, meditation, and knowledge. In the Bhakti Sutras, it is emphasized that devotion, Bhakti, is the quickest and most direct way, yet over and over in the Art of Living, Sri Sri emphasizes the importance of seva. So that’s something I have to reconcile sometimes. “Why mess with second best?” Why not just work with devotion? The commentaries say in one sutra that the other paths that have been expounded by the sages all support the divine (devotional) love. So, that’s fair enough, I have long been able to justify doing service just as being a crutch for higher forms of yoga. Yet, as I write this, I am thinking how much seva is really something that means a lot to me. Nothing is closer to my heart than trying to change the world, so why let that be nothing but subordinate to some spiritual “goal.” This had all been mulled over and worked out, in some way or another, as I sat on the hillside next to Vishalakshi Mantap, weeping under the mid morning sun, on a beautiful Indian lawn adorned with the sweetest flowerbeds.
Arriving in Bangalore was quite an experience. After feeling like I was the only American in all of Gujarat, I came to the Bangalore Ashram and was almost inundated with multiculturalism. The Bangalore ashram had about a thousand people in it, also a stark difference from the twenty-person-strong Gujarat ashram. About 650 of those thousand were foreign nationals, mostly due to International Teacher Training courses. I met with great friends from across America and Canada that I usually see whenever I am traveling with the Art of Living. To my delight, I saw some great friends whom I had not seen since the summer as they were currently rounding out their own 6-month stays in India. (Ummm, yeah, “Hi Wiley!”) The pull back to “Art of Living-à-la-Americano” was so strong that when some of the Ashramites I had met in Gujarat came down for the celebrations, I boisterously ran to them to embrace. Noticing that they were cowering as I approached, I stopped myself and laughed and energetically blurted, “Oh, that’s right… Indians don’t hug!” It’s easy to lose myself in the celebration and the gathering of friends.
(Geography lesson: Bangalore is about 600 km from the bottom tip of India. From Bangalore it is pretty much the same distance to the Western coast of the Arabian Sea or to the Eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal. The Art of Living International Center (a.k.a., to a rickshaw driver: “Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Ashram”) is halfway between Bangalore city proper and the nearby smaller city of Kanakapura. This area of the South is raised high on a plateau (the Deccan) which is particularly true of Bangalore, keeping the area at a relatively cool 85 degrees-ish year round and making it so the monsoon isn’t too terribly bad.)
After the big ‘reception day’ our numbers were about five thousand at the ashram as we all took an International-participant meditation course for about four days. More came every day, so that by the last day of the course, the day before the Silver Jubilee commencements, we had doubled the original five thousand people. Housing was hectic…
%%%%%%%%%%%
It’s now been about a week since I wrote the first half of this e-mail, and I realized how impossible it would be to finish (and how long it would be if I did) long story short…. Bangalore was uber hectic and very amazing… everything peaked with the Silver Jubilee celebrations – a million people representing well over a hundred countries, all coming together to meditate and celebrate and chase down the elusive fish of enlightenment.
The silver jubilee had the Shankacharya of the South (one of the four “popes” of Hinduism), Sufi masters, Buddhist Lamas, great Rabbis, Muslim teachers and saints (including the President of the All India Organization of Imams and Mosques), a priest from the Syrian Church that runs a long history in India and the Archbishop of Delhi, (who sang “Happy Birthday” to Guruji and the Art of Living :) .
The King of Ghana came, former Prime Ministers of several European countries, the “Minister of Health” was sent from a few countries (and I wondered if this wasn’t to endorse AoL’s health benefits but keep hands clean from any negative connotations about the Spiritual side…), the Chief Ministers (heads of state) of many of the largest Indian states and, of course, the President of India, President Abdul Kalam. One great quote from the 19th, the pinnacle of the Silver Jubilee celebrations was from the Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands: “Art of Living is not the end, but it is the beginning, for everybody and everything.” The three day celebration took place in Jakkur Airfield, which the Art of Living rented for a couple weeks to set up, hold, and clean up after the event, bigger than any rock festival I’ve been to…. (I made a panoramic collage of the crowd in the early evening, download it and zoom in to fully appreciate!) The stage itself held 3,800 musicians and hundreds and hundreds of dignitaries every night. There were about a hundred video screens and I think the audience section went back about 1.5 kilometers, though I should probably get the actual numbers for you all. Every night we were graced with hands-down magical meditations and on the 19th, after Guruji led Sudarshan Kriya live, we chanted Om together, and almost everyone I talked to said they could literally feel the waves of grace going out to the whole world.
The next morning had a nice Rudram (vedic chanting to Shiva, one of the Hindu holy trinity) and then I was off to Delhi for my Agra and Jaipur tour. I saw a lot of beautiful and famous things there (pictures attached) but the highlight was really Ranthambhore National Park, where dozens of tigers inhabit the ruins of an old fort and the forests that surround it—totally beautiful. I took more than a hundred photos there in less than five hours. The tour was altogether too much for me, and though I missed seeing the Fort at Jaipur, I very much enjoyed that morning because I broke off from the group and toured Jaipur on my own. With a group of others, we found a magical temple on the rooftops of the Pink City, the heart of Jaipur, where people were offering corn and grain to Sita-Rama and then tossing them to the Pigeons, said to be the temporary abode of souls between lives. It was really magical to see the man throwing corn to the pigeons, and the woman who seemed to be in complete communion with them, calling them to come and eat. This quaint temple is probably my favorite one that we’ve visited on this trip. (I’m uploading at least two pictures from this temple—one is of the woman who seemed to guide the pigeons, and the other is of the pigeons on the rooftops of the temple complex.)
Later that day I managed my way up the tower that stands in the middle of the Pink City. From here, I could see the entire sprawl that is Jaipur and the fort walls that line the hill stations in every direction. Arriving at the top, I was surprised, since the Tower itself had seemed deserted and isolated, to find a boy already up there. Nonetheless, being above the bustle of India’s “shopping city”, my thoughts and restlessness seemed to be left also far below on the streets, and I was just stunned by how far I could see. The boy, 19 years old, asked me about American girls and how free they were to talk about sex and what Washington DC was like compared to Jaipur. He was surprised when I told him it was much smaller… he asked me which city I thought was prettier, and thinking, I really honestly told him that I thought DC was, which brought some nostalgia for me. By and by he told me the tower had been built so a rich prince could watch the woman he loved, who lived across the way, and I reflected on how humble we really all are in love, despite the insane acts we do.
Hawa Mahal, which I went to earlier that day, is itself designed like a crown of Krishna, and it is a gift to the women of prince’s harem. The women of that day were not allowed to be seen in public, so the design of the stone-latticed windows is of small openings angled downwards, so the women can look down and see the activity of the streets, but not be seen from outside. Keeping the theme of “gilded façade”, the Hawa Mahal is decorated only on the outside; the inside features unadorned, squared angles, like we might find in a modern television room, and simple, whitewashed walls.
Jaipur itself is, when you rise just a little above the streets, a sprawling palacial complex. Yet 75% of the palace has now been turned into markets, or slums, or empty trash yards, depending on which side of which wall you are on. Great gates mark your entrance into the original forted palace area, but they now simply denote the modern transition into a more condensed market place. Much of the heart of the royal palace is itself turned largely into a popular museum and the royal family (which now holds no real powers since India’s democracy) occupies just the most central of the living quarters.
(a LATE geography lesson: Jaipur is just inside of Rajasthan, about as far from Delhi as Agra is {which is in the neighboring state, Uttar Pradesh} )
The rough Jaipur-Agra tour landed us back in Delhi, and I found myself in a five-star hotel, a pleasant surprise that I forgot I had left myself when registering for the course. Living in the lap of luxury and waking up to a breakfast of fine cheeses and pastries, I was in great spirits for Mahashivratri day—a long Sudarshan Kriya with Guruji, all live, cleaned out my wavering health from the tour and the night was lit up with an amazing puja and satsang with at least a hundred thousand devotees. It was truly a wonderful and amazing night. (Attached is the fun, dizzying picture of people dancing during satsang that night) Beyond words, but somehow just an extension of the Silver Jubilee celebrations the week before. The next day I left for Rishikesh, a part of my trip that I had tried to plan ahead of time, but in actuality, it came together completely last minute… this has been the past week for me, but it will have to be another e-mail! :) Jai guru dev!
Without going out of my door, I can know all things are myrrh. Without looking out of my window, I can know the ways of heaven. Arrive without traveling. See all without looking. Do all without doing.
My most important travels have been sitting on my butt with my eyes closed. The first few days in Bangalore I was doing 100% seva (volunteer service). Of the first six nights I was there, I got 3 hours sleep on four of the nights. The last of which was the main registration day for International guests for the Silver Jubilee. I slept from midnight to three and worked a twelve-hour shift with no breaks when I woke up. As stress peaked in the mid morning, I yelled at someone who was making my work particularly troublesome, and as I began to reflect and relax after the fact, I was pretty much kicked off my position and told I had to go and do at least one of the following: pee, eat, or meditate.
After going to the bathroom, I sat on the hillside and started balling for a good fifteen minutes. (So, I guess I did kind of have a break.) The main feeling running through my head was this torrent of emotion, hiding under the shelter of the complaint: “Why does it have to be so hard to give yourself fully in service?” In the pinch of longing and devotion, I can feel a restless burning and a feeling that no matter how much I give of myself, I want to surrender more, to lay myself out completely for the ones I love, for the Divine. Then later, when these feelings pass, there is the burning crush of bickering egos and conflicting agendas, and service is the absolute last thing in the world I want to do. “That’s it for me,” I think, “I am packing up, leaving all this… I’m going to go meditate by myself somewhere.”
Sri Sri had instructed all of us to restudy the Narada Bhakti Sutras before the Silver Jubilee, so it’s particularly fresh in my memory—in his commentary, there are different paths to the ultimate goal of spiritual communion—service, devotion, meditation, and knowledge. In the Bhakti Sutras, it is emphasized that devotion, Bhakti, is the quickest and most direct way, yet over and over in the Art of Living, Sri Sri emphasizes the importance of seva. So that’s something I have to reconcile sometimes. “Why mess with second best?” Why not just work with devotion? The commentaries say in one sutra that the other paths that have been expounded by the sages all support the divine (devotional) love. So, that’s fair enough, I have long been able to justify doing service just as being a crutch for higher forms of yoga. Yet, as I write this, I am thinking how much seva is really something that means a lot to me. Nothing is closer to my heart than trying to change the world, so why let that be nothing but subordinate to some spiritual “goal.” This had all been mulled over and worked out, in some way or another, as I sat on the hillside next to Vishalakshi Mantap, weeping under the mid morning sun, on a beautiful Indian lawn adorned with the sweetest flowerbeds.
Arriving in Bangalore was quite an experience. After feeling like I was the only American in all of Gujarat, I came to the Bangalore Ashram and was almost inundated with multiculturalism. The Bangalore ashram had about a thousand people in it, also a stark difference from the twenty-person-strong Gujarat ashram. About 650 of those thousand were foreign nationals, mostly due to International Teacher Training courses. I met with great friends from across America and Canada that I usually see whenever I am traveling with the Art of Living. To my delight, I saw some great friends whom I had not seen since the summer as they were currently rounding out their own 6-month stays in India. (Ummm, yeah, “Hi Wiley!”) The pull back to “Art of Living-à-la-Americano” was so strong that when some of the Ashramites I had met in Gujarat came down for the celebrations, I boisterously ran to them to embrace. Noticing that they were cowering as I approached, I stopped myself and laughed and energetically blurted, “Oh, that’s right… Indians don’t hug!” It’s easy to lose myself in the celebration and the gathering of friends.
(Geography lesson: Bangalore is about 600 km from the bottom tip of India. From Bangalore it is pretty much the same distance to the Western coast of the Arabian Sea or to the Eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal. The Art of Living International Center (a.k.a., to a rickshaw driver: “Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Ashram”) is halfway between Bangalore city proper and the nearby smaller city of Kanakapura. This area of the South is raised high on a plateau (the Deccan) which is particularly true of Bangalore, keeping the area at a relatively cool 85 degrees-ish year round and making it so the monsoon isn’t too terribly bad.)
After the big ‘reception day’ our numbers were about five thousand at the ashram as we all took an International-participant meditation course for about four days. More came every day, so that by the last day of the course, the day before the Silver Jubilee commencements, we had doubled the original five thousand people. Housing was hectic…
%%%%%%%%%%%
It’s now been about a week since I wrote the first half of this e-mail, and I realized how impossible it would be to finish (and how long it would be if I did) long story short…. Bangalore was uber hectic and very amazing… everything peaked with the Silver Jubilee celebrations – a million people representing well over a hundred countries, all coming together to meditate and celebrate and chase down the elusive fish of enlightenment.
The silver jubilee had the Shankacharya of the South (one of the four “popes” of Hinduism), Sufi masters, Buddhist Lamas, great Rabbis, Muslim teachers and saints (including the President of the All India Organization of Imams and Mosques), a priest from the Syrian Church that runs a long history in India and the Archbishop of Delhi, (who sang “Happy Birthday” to Guruji and the Art of Living :) .
The King of Ghana came, former Prime Ministers of several European countries, the “Minister of Health” was sent from a few countries (and I wondered if this wasn’t to endorse AoL’s health benefits but keep hands clean from any negative connotations about the Spiritual side…), the Chief Ministers (heads of state) of many of the largest Indian states and, of course, the President of India, President Abdul Kalam. One great quote from the 19th, the pinnacle of the Silver Jubilee celebrations was from the Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands: “Art of Living is not the end, but it is the beginning, for everybody and everything.” The three day celebration took place in Jakkur Airfield, which the Art of Living rented for a couple weeks to set up, hold, and clean up after the event, bigger than any rock festival I’ve been to…. (I made a panoramic collage of the crowd in the early evening, download it and zoom in to fully appreciate!) The stage itself held 3,800 musicians and hundreds and hundreds of dignitaries every night. There were about a hundred video screens and I think the audience section went back about 1.5 kilometers, though I should probably get the actual numbers for you all. Every night we were graced with hands-down magical meditations and on the 19th, after Guruji led Sudarshan Kriya live, we chanted Om together, and almost everyone I talked to said they could literally feel the waves of grace going out to the whole world.
The next morning had a nice Rudram (vedic chanting to Shiva, one of the Hindu holy trinity) and then I was off to Delhi for my Agra and Jaipur tour. I saw a lot of beautiful and famous things there (pictures attached) but the highlight was really Ranthambhore National Park, where dozens of tigers inhabit the ruins of an old fort and the forests that surround it—totally beautiful. I took more than a hundred photos there in less than five hours. The tour was altogether too much for me, and though I missed seeing the Fort at Jaipur, I very much enjoyed that morning because I broke off from the group and toured Jaipur on my own. With a group of others, we found a magical temple on the rooftops of the Pink City, the heart of Jaipur, where people were offering corn and grain to Sita-Rama and then tossing them to the Pigeons, said to be the temporary abode of souls between lives. It was really magical to see the man throwing corn to the pigeons, and the woman who seemed to be in complete communion with them, calling them to come and eat. This quaint temple is probably my favorite one that we’ve visited on this trip. (I’m uploading at least two pictures from this temple—one is of the woman who seemed to guide the pigeons, and the other is of the pigeons on the rooftops of the temple complex.)
Later that day I managed my way up the tower that stands in the middle of the Pink City. From here, I could see the entire sprawl that is Jaipur and the fort walls that line the hill stations in every direction. Arriving at the top, I was surprised, since the Tower itself had seemed deserted and isolated, to find a boy already up there. Nonetheless, being above the bustle of India’s “shopping city”, my thoughts and restlessness seemed to be left also far below on the streets, and I was just stunned by how far I could see. The boy, 19 years old, asked me about American girls and how free they were to talk about sex and what Washington DC was like compared to Jaipur. He was surprised when I told him it was much smaller… he asked me which city I thought was prettier, and thinking, I really honestly told him that I thought DC was, which brought some nostalgia for me. By and by he told me the tower had been built so a rich prince could watch the woman he loved, who lived across the way, and I reflected on how humble we really all are in love, despite the insane acts we do.
Hawa Mahal, which I went to earlier that day, is itself designed like a crown of Krishna, and it is a gift to the women of prince’s harem. The women of that day were not allowed to be seen in public, so the design of the stone-latticed windows is of small openings angled downwards, so the women can look down and see the activity of the streets, but not be seen from outside. Keeping the theme of “gilded façade”, the Hawa Mahal is decorated only on the outside; the inside features unadorned, squared angles, like we might find in a modern television room, and simple, whitewashed walls.
Jaipur itself is, when you rise just a little above the streets, a sprawling palacial complex. Yet 75% of the palace has now been turned into markets, or slums, or empty trash yards, depending on which side of which wall you are on. Great gates mark your entrance into the original forted palace area, but they now simply denote the modern transition into a more condensed market place. Much of the heart of the royal palace is itself turned largely into a popular museum and the royal family (which now holds no real powers since India’s democracy) occupies just the most central of the living quarters.
(a LATE geography lesson: Jaipur is just inside of Rajasthan, about as far from Delhi as Agra is {which is in the neighboring state, Uttar Pradesh} )
The rough Jaipur-Agra tour landed us back in Delhi, and I found myself in a five-star hotel, a pleasant surprise that I forgot I had left myself when registering for the course. Living in the lap of luxury and waking up to a breakfast of fine cheeses and pastries, I was in great spirits for Mahashivratri day—a long Sudarshan Kriya with Guruji, all live, cleaned out my wavering health from the tour and the night was lit up with an amazing puja and satsang with at least a hundred thousand devotees. It was truly a wonderful and amazing night. (Attached is the fun, dizzying picture of people dancing during satsang that night) Beyond words, but somehow just an extension of the Silver Jubilee celebrations the week before. The next day I left for Rishikesh, a part of my trip that I had tried to plan ahead of time, but in actuality, it came together completely last minute… this has been the past week for me, but it will have to be another e-mail! :) Jai guru dev!
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