3.
A VOICE FROM THE HILL
OF THE HOLY BEACON

A certain Mysorean, well-built and short in stature,
presents himself before Sri Bhagavan and puts a
question on a familiar yet enigmatic subject. He asks:
"Bhagavan, what is this thing they call `Guru-kripa' (Guru's grace)?"
All the devotees sitting there are expectantly
watchful for the answer that will come from the statue-
like figure seated on the divan, utterly unswayed by the
happenings around Him, with His eyes gazing into
somewhere -- the depths of which we know not -- with
an expression whose simple placidity catches even those
with a superior air of their own. Unassuming He is, yet
His authority tells; naked in every sense of the word, yet
He is clothed in all that is wholly divine; poor, yet
possessing and claiming by right all the Cosmos as His
own; simple, yet a problem and a marvel for all who come
to study Him. He is the One Man to whom real India,
nurtured on her glorious traditions of the great past, looks
for light and life.

      This Sage of Arunagiri was one who burned His boats
even at the age of seventeen, while He was a student in
Madurai. This was so that He might be drowned in the
Ocean of Arunachala and dissolved in It, so that there
might be no trace of His little `self ' and He be only the
One Self that is, was, and shall ever be. This is to Him
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`Arunachala' -- the one resplendent and immutable Truth,
which is the substratum of all that is, was and shall be. For
aruna means red, radiant, and achalam, the changeless
rock-bottom of Truth. To Him life in the wakeful stage is
as good as a moment of dream. According to Him, the
one problem of life is how to wake from this perennial
dream. For when we awaken from life's dream, aware of
the One Seer and of all that passes before His gaze, painful
and pleasurable, we shall abide ever as the unaffected
witness, immortal and infinite.

      What is the Guru's Grace? Well, this is exactly the
word that awakens us from this dream life of ours, to
which we cling so hard until the tiger of death pounces
on us and proves that it is ephemeral, unreal.

      What is this wonderful power the True Guru holds?

Man is accustomed to dope himself in sorrow with more
and more palliatives; so he finds the more he tries to escape
from the quagmire, the deeper into it he is drawn. Out of
sheer despair, he goes to some Enlightened Man and asks
for help.

      The Master says: "You feel unhappy because you do
not know your Self ".

"How strange!" thinks the bewildered soul. "Do I
not know myself? Here I am, and yet I am in sorrow!"

"But sorrow and wandering is not your real nature,"

the Illuminate replies, "really you are Being and Blissfulness."

"How so?" asks the yet more bewildered soul.
With one meaningful look the Master sees deep into
the soul of the enquirer. And lo! What a trance of joy,
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what a blissful existence, and what a calm this is! The
agitated soul is stilled, silent; he sits and sits and sits.
Gazing at the Master before him the minutes and hours
are hardly noticed gliding softly away. In this way days
and months are condensed into a few moments of blissful
life. The wanderer has found his harbour; he is all new life
and light, so he swears, "For eternity I shall not part from
my Master, who is my All!"

Well, for a time he keeps to his resolve. But then the
"I" followed by the thought of "mine", the remnants of
his petty being, the past accumulation of tendencies
(vasanas ^[?]), all pull him back with all their force and tear
him from his Master's bosom.

      He slides back again into the very dream of life which
he had come to abhor. Now he is neither of the world, nor
of eternity. Being entrapped by the world's forces, yet unable
to be in harmony with them he returns to his Master for
proper guidance in his conduct of worldly affairs. The Master
is only too pleased to give him all the help he needs in order
to free himself from the meshes that have once again
entangled him. The poor man finds that he has to fondle
and hug once again the very dolls he formerly abhorred.
But the more he does so, the more they burn him, make
him a prisoner; he can neither give them up, nor escape
from their clutches. It is like the proverbial monkey with a
cobra in its hand, or the ant between two fires. He is only
waiting for the least opportunity to wind up his business
here and slip away into oblivion, so that he may once and
for ever return to the calm of his Master's presence.

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      He has indeed come there; but now he finds himself
utterly unfit to receive that soothing solace from the Master
which was formerly his. The mind and the senses, by
their recent association in the things of the world, have so
completely exteriorised him that `diving in' has become
for him a matter of the past, he can do it no more. So
much is this so, that he has now to sell himself, so that in
the proximity of the Divine and through It's Grace, the
rebellious and discordant elements of his being may all be
harmonised, life that was formerly so dear to him becoming
worthless if not for surrender to the Master in absolute
self-abnegation.

      Now the Master speaks: "People think the Master is
confined in a human frame, but it is not so; His existence
and presence are universal, cosmic, because He is the True
Guru (sad-guru) and Truth (sat ^[?]) as such is not a newly
discoverable entity. He has always been there with you
even while you were undergoing all the pangs of existence.
In fact, I am the `I' in you; you and I have never been
apart, nor ever can be. But you, with your separate `I' and
its exclusive and warring interests, could not know Me,
much less feel Me. Now that that `I' in you has dropped
away, I alone live in you." This is the meaning of Tattvamasi
("That thou art"), and this is the meaning and the function
of the Guru's Grace.

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