The Artistic Yoga Podcast
The Artistic Yoga Podcast
The Mountain Logs Day 8A - The Thawing Of The Glacier
The Char Dham means “The Four Stations”. Why “The Four Stations” is because it is not just a reference to the four places in Geography. It is also a reference to the four stations of artha, kama, dharma and moksha. The four stations of a well lived life namely acquiring of prosperity or means, fulfillment of desires and passions, living a life of coherence with Nature, Nature out there and one’s own nature, and finally the station of transcendence where you get established in your own sense of being.
On this pilgrimage, the four geographical stations of Gangotrti, Yamunotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, the pilgrimage seeks to get insight into the truth of these four stations of life through a combination of physical and mental effort, emotional aliveness, openness to the spirit and surrender to Nature.
It’s quite beautiful, profound, intense and transforming. It’s unique as a pilgrimage, as an experience and breathtaking in its conception.
In the following Episodes, Dr. Bharat Thakur takes you along this pilgrimage over 10 days, sharing the daily logs and some insightful blogs that will have you want to experience the Yatra for yourself.
Episodes
- Day 0 .. Rishikesh … A Little About Yatra
- Day 1 .. Breaking The Trance ..
- Day 2 .. Night at Barkot .. A Lovely Day, An Uncertain Night … Initiation Into The Yatra
- Day 2 blog: Legends of Yamunotri
- Day 3 … Trek to Yamunotri .. Night at Barkot .. Living The Mountain Life ..
- Day 4 .. Travel to Uttarkashi .. Prayer .. An Intimate Of Happiness ..
- Day 4 blog: River of life ..
- Day 4 blog: We go to Gangotri next
- Day 5 .. Gangotri Darshan and back to Uttarkashi .. Immersion At The Source
- Day 6 .. Travel to Guptkashi .. The Critical Period ..
- Day 6 blog: Yamunotri to Kedarnath
- Day 7 .. Trek to Kedarnath .. Crossing The Threshold ..
- Day 8 .. Kedarnath Darshan .. The Thawing Of The Glacier .. trek back and travel to Gupt Kashi ..
- Day 8 blog: Kedar .. The Field
- Day 9 .. Travel to Gurudwara .. The Pause ..
- Day 9 Blog: Road to Badrinath
- Day 10 .. Darshan of Badrinath .. Arriving At The horizon ..
- Day 10 Blog: Nar Narayan … The Ancient Archetype Of The Student
The Thawing Of The Glacier
In the mountains descends a soft hazy mist
Like the perfume of a prayer sung far away
A cold sweet wind blows on our eyes closed
The fluency of the heart moves like a chant
THE INTIMATE EYE
We have climbed almost 2000 meters in a single day. That’s quite an achievement. Many of us have probably had less sleep than normal but everyone looks fresh. It's overcast here, makes the mountains feel so close.
Yes they do feel really close, the walk, the air such proximity to magnificent peaks
And the silence.
Now it's time to do a few small things, just to absorb all of this. One thing is to experience, another thing is to absorb. Sometimes we need a little help to absorb.
Sometimes we feel that everything sacred is just Nature but nature is just not what we see. we too are.
The trekking seems to have removed layers of covering. The mist may be hiding the peaks right now but I can see a bright sun shining on so many faces here in Kedarnath, each human being is as much a part of the glacier, the rocks, the heights, the air maybe we just wear some coverings.
Some of the coverings we wear are quite beautiful, yet, when the soft hazy mist lifts, we see the majesty, the purity, we know the mountains are a part of us, how do we see ourselves in that way.
Every sight is not thronging our physical eye. When we visualize something, we create an image internally. It is not even that, it is a far subtler eye, its an intimate eye where your eyes are open, your eyeballs focused on infinity, a mountain peak helps you practice that gaze, how much of the beautiful Kedarnath dome is its beauty and how much is it the intimate eye, can’t be sure.
Isn’t this the eye that sees the vision of a poet because somewhere this is an eye we share.
We will now head for a communion with the Kedarnath deity, a naturally formed rock inside the sanctum of the temple.
THE RITUAL
What exactly is a communion?
The dictionaries say it means to share one's intimate thoughts or feelings with someone, it is the purpose of prayer to communicate to be in touch.
It is also used in the sense of communing with nature on the bank of a stream to feel close to, to develop a rapport, to empathize, to feel togetherness, to identify.
In archaic French “comuner and comun” means "to find the common ground to talk intimately.
We do this with our little children, we develop a small ritual with them, like when you want to put the little child to sleep. There is a sequence we follow without fail; a favorite story is told over and over again. Every time the same expressions sound so fresh, we know the pauses when your baby snuggles-in a little more. We know when she is going to say, “and then and then what happened” and we know when she would have started to fall asleep.
We do this with our old elders too; coffee to be given at a particular time with a particular accompaniment in a particular mug in a particular way by a particular person.
This has probably evolved naturally and it reflects a deep understanding.
In an elaborate study conducted by Anna Zisberg, Phd., and others of the Cheryl Spencer department of Nursing, Haifa, Israel titled, “contribution of routine to sleep quality in community elderly” where 96 elderly were studied. It was found that these old people who had trouble with getting sleep, when they were put on a daily routine before they went to bed, the same ritual every day, they could fall off to sleep faster, had improved sleep quality, no matter how old they were or what backgrounds they came from. The activities that made a big difference were basic physical activities like bathing and so on.
Whatever the form of the ritual is, it becomes intimate and it seems to connect you within the sounds, words, actions shared between the child and the parent are intimate but if we look at the pattern underneath, it will be a similar pattern for most children because we all share the same physiology and at a deeper level, it is about what is common to all of us.
Rituals are simple repetitive steps that we follow to be able to get into a kind of a trance where we are able to ‘tune in’ at a deeper level.
THE ART OF COMMUNING
Communing means to occupy a ‘common space’, it’s a process of becoming aware of what is common between me and the object of my commune, it could be my friend, a teacher, a stranger, a dog, a tree, a stream, a rock, or a star.
This is about realizing at the very depths, what we share through archetypes, subtle mental formations that are common to not just humanity but also with Nature itself.
When we get drawn to an animal, it could be a horse, a goat, or a parakeet, there is a time of familiarization. In this period, we have to give many cues to the animal to put it at ease that we are safe, we don’t mean harm and once that happens, a ritual gets established between the two and by following that ritual we connect.
The process is one of tuning in and it takes a while but once we get tuned in, the communication can be amazing.
Some people can commune so beautifully with animals, thoughts and emotions are in the end subtle electromagnetic waves. It is a matter of tuning in to the subtler frequencies, it is about engaging with the eye of intimacy.
We have seen a film where a majestic and ferocious black jaguar which has just been rescued from a circus is very difficult and dangerous to handle, an animal communicator starts spending time with the cat which is in a cage formally every day and slowly she manages to connect, the jaguar shares the anger and pain it carried from being abused at the circus and after the sharing, it becomes ok. It is a matter of tuning in for a deeper communication, language of the tongue is no barrier as this happens at a subtler level.
We do also intuitively know that plants grow better when we follow a daily ritual communing with them.
In the old days, when there were no roads in the mountains, people had to walk and they often took high roads through passes that were always covered in snow because it was a much shorter route. They would rely on their ability to tune in, they decide when to walk and when to stay put in their dwelling based on just what they gathered from Nature itself. If we see how they do it, you will be surprised to know that for most it is pretty concrete, they follow certain rituals because, in tuning in, we are trying to align with the frequency of a certain creature, formation or force of nature which has a certain form and will be available at a particular frequency. So to tune in to the frequency of a particular object we will have to perform the appropriate ritual, it is in the end a protocol in a different language.
The simplest example of a ritual is how you wake up on a lazy day, it will be the same every time and each time it will have the same effect. It is a protocol that we have naturally arrived at.
AGAMA - THE KNOWLEDGE SUBMERGED
Rituals are protocols that enable us to dial certain frequencies to be able to harness certain energies, to be able to connect and develop intimacy with any person, creature, phenomenon, form or energy in nature.
Communion was understood so thoroughly by the ancients as a science, there are thousands of protocols to communicate with practically anything. This huge body of knowledge is called ‘agama’ in Sanskrit.
Agama means “to approach” or “to go towards”.
The ‘agama’ spanned the areas of cosmology, architecture, sculpture, farming, town planning, philosophy and above all they gave various approaches to the science of happiness.
What we know as mantra, yantra, mandala and Tantra are the protocols of the agama and each protocol has four dimensions of knowledge, yoga, action and ritual.
A PROTOCOL TO ENABLE ABSORPTION
As we walked up the mountains, we felt many things. Some of us were feeling the urge to just stay still and stare at a peak, some felt like just closing their eyes, some were captivated by the sound scape, some with the awareness of their own body. Our work with the deity at Kedarnath can be seen as a way to tune in more deeply and intensely to all of what we are experiencing and absorb it. Absorbing means digesting something to make it part of one's life, we have great experiences .. and once we go back home. it can all easily be forgotten but once something has been absorbed, life can never be the same again, the protocols of the agama are meant to enable absorption.
In the Yoga Sutra, the word for absorption is ‘Samapatti’. It is a state where there is no barrier between the meditator and the object, one one does asana, it is said that one merges into infinity just like those moments where just the snow capped peak is and you are not.
In our common spoken languages, the protocols of the agama are called ‘puja vidhi’. They are commonly taken as an expression of faith but let us understand the science behind it.
THE PUJA VIDHI
Let’s start with understanding the term ‘puja vidhi’.
The word ‘pu’ has two connotations; one is “purification”, implying a process of getting to the essence of something and the other is “the tip of”, “the end of anything” like the tip of a tail.
‘Ja’ means culmination prepared from, descended from, as a result of, caused by, produced from, belonging to, peculiar to.
But all these meanings are placed in the context of honoring something, the word ‘Pujarah’, for example, is used to mean “worthy of praise”, “celebratory”, “honorable”. It is also used in the sense of “to consecrate something” or “to initiate” or “an offering”.
An offering is something we place in front of the deity. It is symbolic of giving back. By doing this we establish the equation that we are here to receive from the source by giving myself over to the process. It is meant to be an act of surrender and not really an act of faith.
But this whole thing can happen all in the mind, the entire puja can be done completely internally. The idea of having an external deity as an expression in a personified form is because it is not so easy for everyone to handle complete abstraction. We have the situation in the appreciation of abstract art, some are gifted, some need to develop their faculty of abstraction, some are very happy with the figurative, so this part called the Puja is not essential for all but it is so powerful for som.
So Puja is a consecration, an initiation and an offering, the culmination of an effort, an effort which is a surrender to the process of purification, of the removal of the layers that veil our being.
PIERCING THE VEIL
The Yoga Sutras say, that following the practise of pranayama, “the covering of light is pierced” allowing our essential being to emerge.
If you meditate on the tip of a flame at the point where the flame disappears, it’s the tip . It refers to the very subtle, the very essence.
In the word ‘vidhi’, the root word ‘vid’ has connotations of knowledge, experience, declaration, dwelling, considering, existing, obtaining.
‘Dhi’ means holding, acquiring, possession.
‘i’ is used to connote studying, remembering and this remembering is a reference to the archetypes in us.
Yoga Sutra clearly refers to agama as a form of ‘right knowledge’. It is inherited and that inheritance is not really about what has come to us from a scripture but what exists in us as archetypes. So if at all we refer to a scripture, it is to awaken the knowledge or the agama contained in an archetype within.
So the word ‘vidhi’ is, a means of acquiring knowledge, a formula, a protocol, an application, a method or a system or a performance which can trigger off the remembrance of the wisdom that exists in us as ‘archetypes’.
Deities are projections of archetypes that exist in the collective consciousness of creation and the work that we have with a deity is to be able to connect to that archetype within through whatever it is that we do with the form outside or purely mentally.
Hope we have clarified the question, Why do we have deities?
So if we look at the word “Puja Vidhi”, it is a protocol of honoring our own wisdom body to realize our pure essence. It is a remembrance that comes from accessing our unblemished state, it is a protocol or a ritual of tuning in.
KEDARNATH - THE THAWING
Among the many meanings of “Kedar” is a field or meadow which is submerged. Scientists from the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun say, the several yellow lines on the walls of the Kedarnath temple structure point to glacial activity in the region. They say that the Kedarnath area was under a glacier in the mini ice age between 1400s and 1900s. Only after the rise in global temperatures in the early twentieth century, the Kedarnath rock became accessible to visitors.
Entering the sanctum, seeing the triangular rock, it is time for a communion with Kedarnath.
We can see one of us is sobbing. People outside our group are perplexed, “why is he crying here, in the sanctum” but that is the difference between faith and trust. Trust is unconditional. You surrender and let the forces do their job on you. It was a huge decision for him to come on this trip as his father was recovering from a stroke and he was his sole caretaker as we climbed up his anxiety was just growing. It peaked half way up, it was not easy.
It is a home-coming back to the womb of nature.
When you go to a physician, some of the old school physicians don’t ask you your problem. They just read your pulse and tell you the symptoms and the cause. A surrender is to such a force because deep down, we don’t really know what is it that needs healing, we just leave it up to the very source that has made us, that animates our every breath.
It was a blissful few moments, the chanting, the sounds, the silence. We are now stepping out. He is not making a sound but he is bawling.
BASKING IN ASH
We are stepping out. The sun is peeping through the clouds. It is a little windy. The one who had fainted last night, she is on a roll, given a chance she would break into a dance.
We are lucky. There are three accomplished adepts among the many here; will take everyone to spend time with them. That is all we can do with those who just wear ash and stay in these heights alone, at peace like they are no different from these primal formations.
We won’t tell the people much about the adepts. It will allow them to come to their own conclusions.
On this journey each has to figure out how to read the signs because in reading another person, who is worthy of your adoration or in reading the mountains, nature, you are also creating benchmarks for your own journey, a few signposts in what will eventually be a walk in the clouds of abstraction.
It is so satisfying to spend time with these babas. They seem so merged with the elements here, just looking at them is a healing.
It is time to begin our descent. Let's take our time.
Space has long since stolen our
earth dwelling.
We walk under the covering of a
sky sheet.
Lot’s of Love
Bharat Thakur