From Cartography to Cosmology: A Spiritual Awakening
In this evocative memoir, Chitra Gopalakrishnan explores the profound tension between a writer’s identity and the path to spiritual awakening, revealing the beauty of letting go to find cosmic intelligence.
The toughest part of clinging to my memories and imagination would not be the tenacity it would call for but the loneliness of the encounter.
My struggle would lie in an inability to share my remembrances with anyone. In a manner, a writer should, with the artful use of inventiveness, colour and attention to detail.
Yet erasing them like they never existed seems worse, right?
Confused? Let me explain.
As a writer in my sixties, turning to spirituality as an anchor as also to savour the profoundest of human experience, I know I will soon have to let go of my memories and imagination, the two pivots, the two capabilities on which a writer’s life and impetus rest. I know I will need to forgo these proficiencies, which allow me to talk about everything that beats in my heart, in order to leap across the chasm and to cross over from cartography to cosmology.
“These are among the many physicality’s of the ‘self’ that will hinder your spiritual awakening,” says my guru, who lives in south India. I have left my home in New Delhi to seek him out at his leafy, tree-lined ashram on the outskirts of the state of Karnataka.
Why spirituality?
“Boredom with the seduction of money. Imbalance in every sphere of life. And an increasing realisation there is a language for me beyond my current dialect,” I reason in my memoir-styled article for a lifestyle magazine.
In my daily-maintained journal, which I update with great care and perseverance, I write, “The thought of whether I can create images and emotions that catch the effervescence of daily living, suffused as it is with its roils, fears, uncertainties and exuberance, when in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, perturbs. The fear that my writer’s soul will disappear, be nullified, as the sacred spaces take over, is real.”
In another entry, on another day, I worry, “After all, what can I, as a writer, say of this space of equanimity? One that knows no time, space, impermanence, emotions, death or sin? Mystics and philosophers alike note that words are inadequate and insubstantial to describe this space. So even, by some incredible feat, if I do manage to be evocative, how much of my even temper can my readers bear? How much wonder can I show for this stupendous newness? Also, when I reflect on the vastness of the universe, will my humdrum cosmic location seem insignificant and my words meaningless?”
Too much to think of. To agonise over.
I lean to my guru for help.
“The intellect and imagination of the brain combined with memory, not only of this life but of millions of years put together, create the identity that shapes you or what you believe to be you. But, remember, these are gathered entities and not you,” my guru begins as an explanation.
“To enter the state of cosmic intelligence, you need a mind without memory, a space that disconnects from the bounds of intellect, morality, time, space and, in fact, everything you know so far. To arrive here, you first have to get to a state of wakefulness, to a state where you hear the very delicate tuning, and then develop an ability to learn how to read tracks that resonate with that place inside. Only then can you graduate, in stages, to a place where you get the Whole. This vastness will then dwarf all imagination, speculation and understanding as you now know it,” he explains.
“Believe me, you will learn more in seconds than in years of study or through rigorous modes of scholarship,” he adds. His laugh follows. His whole body shakes in merriment.
As I begin my journey to un-see imagination and memory as tremendous possibilities and attempt to bracket them as limitations and boundaries all I can manage is a muddle.
My imagination and memories mix with fuzzy future visions. This in turn melds into another emerging consciousness.
At the end of all this, I have is a circus going on in my head at all times. Some impressions keep me radiant, others tear me apart and my past, present, future and altered consciousness swirl in a giddy, uneven ride.
“I have learned if you must leave behind your reminiscences and people and places and thoughts you have lived with and loved, that if you need to bury your yesterdays, todays and tomorrows, you must leave it in any way but a slow way,” says co-disciple, Rajan, with studied seriousness.
My guru guffaws. Loudly. His dhoti flutters with the motions of his body.
“The Beyond, as you all like to call it, though it is not so, is not as nearly as far away or inaccessible as you think. You need not agitate to get to it or try to access it in the way that Rajan has described. Its joyfulness will not arrive when you are in a state of flurry but when you are in a disposition of calmness, in tranquillity, inside out,” he says.
He adds, “After you have mastered your senses and your pre-dispositions and you get to the state of wakefulness that comes with the crossing of the boundaries of the ‘self’, time and space, you will be wrapped around a consciousness that is within you and yet without. You will be within its living presence, without warning, in a flash and with no pre-adventure.”
After a long, deliberate pause, as he waits for us to get what he is conveying, he says, “Brahma’s bliss will happen ordinarily like the switching on of a light bulb. The real nature of existence, the drift of the universe and its timelessness, will come to you come in quietude. It will not be an act, an idea or even a quality. It will be one beyond all that. It just will be. This you will intuit is the root of all life, the very basis of creation and the founding principle of the world.”
As if reading my mind, he says, “Don’t worry this space is far more animated, dynamic, bright, picturesque, interesting and unusual than you imagine. You will have a lot to write about, even if you think your words are deficient.”
I will still be a writer, I exult.
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