To My Great Guru, I Pray.

It has taken me a long time to realize just how much I have not understood your presence in my life. I have come to a point where I feel hopeless and insignificant, where I realize you had come to touch my heart twice before and I failed to catch those moments. And now I try again, to reach out to you in desperation, in shame, and with all humility. I have come to detest the very nature of the limitations within the realm of being born human and at the same time I look for any sign, any hope that can make me rise up to you again. 

Getting to be your disciple has been a blessing, its not achievable to many and I had the luck. I have seen you just once from a distance, when I was a little girl giggling around not realizing the moment I was going to miss. It was when you departed that I seriously felt, I wanted to just come away with you. I lost that moment then but you reappeared again in my life, this time with greater trust, with greater love, with greater teaching. You initiated me, and I learned, I fumbled but I believe with all my inadequacies and flippant attitude, you gave me a precious gift and I kept it close to myself. 

The time has come again and the echo for your divine grace grows within my heart. Time is running out and as I live, every passing breath just yells at me echoing how wasteful I have been. I have immersed myself into reading about great saints, about the divine grace that they have been blessed with and the more I sink into that world the more I realize just how far fetched it is to reach from where I am. And yet, this miserable self will try, try as much as I can, to make myself ready for you to reappear and shower your grace upon me. 

There is so much to say and yet words fail me. Am I ever capable of getting there, I dont know, but the hunger grows. I have begun to question my existence, my purpose, my being with respect to spiritual capability. I realize deep down how difficult it is to tread your path but do I have a chance? You taught me to have faith in you and yet I fear you. You taught me discipline and yet am flippant. You taught me humility and I felt I owned you. You taught me dignity but I can feel my worhtlessness grow. You taught me to surrender but I held on to my ego. 

Am back, a hopeless mortal, at your door step requesting you for another chance to teach me again, to shape my path of realization. I find no pleasure in other mortals, I find no pleasure in material gain. I am fast losing interest in the pleasures of life, I just seek your divine grace. I know there is still time, time for me to give up this lifestyle. But meanwhile is there a chance that I may be blessed with your grace again. 

To my Great Guru, I pray. 

When Lord Jagannathan Entered My Life

I am not completely aware of Krishna consciousness, and neither have I spent too much time trying to understand Vaishnavism. Maybe its time to start. Krishna made his intriguing presence felt when I started to learn more about Kali and Tantra. Thanks to my son's die hard concentration and irresistible attraction to Little Krishna, Lord Jagannatha grew on me subconsciously while I sat through repeated serials of the Divine boy on television. I found myself falling for that child, for that little village of Brindavan and all his companions, Balarama, Madhu and Subhala. With my son's new found emotions gripped by these imaginary beings who ruled his head day in and day out, I came to realize subconsciously that they were as real to me as they were to him. 

The Lord sends his messages in strange ways and in each way, I found myself sinking into a pool of deep emotion of Love, call it Bhakti, call it what ever you like. An email fell into my mailbox, with a picture of Krishna/Kali and a question - Guess who this is? With that started my next hunt, what is the Krishna association with Kali. J C Joshi's innumerable comments came flashing back to me. His whole volume of belief left behind as pearls of wisdom with the comments of my various blogs echoed back in my head well after his physical body turned history. Who really is Jagannatha?

I penned my last paragraph of a book I plan to publish sometime in the near future and realized that I, who assumed herself to be a great follower of Shiva and Shakti, had given a lot of attention to Jagannatha unconsciously in my story. I sat back to think of all the temples I had visited, it was Tirupati that had overwhelmed me the most and make me weep profusely, every time without fail. The atmosphere, the energy, the silence inside the sanctum, and his form left me in a pool full of tears. The last visit of taking my son there had proved fatal in this divine love affair. But somehow, the form that stuck in my head as the divine Krishna is Jagannatha. From that little child I would love to cuddle to the divine lover, Krishna conquers my mind in every form. 

And then he played his divine trick again in a dream, and the Ras Lila enveloped my thoughts, divine love in the eyes of the "knower" can make the emotional doer do a lot of things. A line from Sri M's book echoed in my head, when it comes to Jagannatha, we take the form  of the divine lover, that's the only state of consciousness one can reach. And in the dream he came, as a singer of divine song, as the one who plays sweet notes in his flute. A face so gentle, so handsome and yet distant beckoning me to come forward and touch him, experience him. The intoxicating sounds of his beeja mantra echoed inside my head, his searching eyes oozed the emotion of warmth, the emotion of longing, the emotion that beckoned me to just accept everything he wanted, thoughtlessly, helplessly, completely emotionally. 

I stood on the floor, in our world, my thoughts caught in his web as the beeja mantra echoed on, I could feel the weakness in my knees. I could barely hold myself for a surge of energy just headed upwards towards my heart, towards my head and I felt myself swoon in sheer bliss as I felt my consciousness fade from the real world. I clung on crying out for help - Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya - O Vasudeva, O Shankara! Hold me, for I am unable to hold myself. 

I realized how difficult it was for me to come back to the real world that minute.