The Mountain Answers
While Kate continued classes and did another round of panchakarma at the Ayurvedic school in Kerala, I traveled solo to the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. I spent time at an ashram outside of Coimbatore and in the town of Tiruvannamalai, home of the holy mountain Arunachala.
Arunachala is an important pilgrimage site for both Hindus and Western spiritual seekers. The focal point of the pilgrimage for most Hindus is the monumental Shiva temple around which the town has grown. For many Westerners, the focal point is the ashram where the sage and saint Ramana Maharshi lived from 1922 until his death in 1950.
Maharshi experienced a spontaneous spiritual self-realization, which he described as a “death experience,” in 1896, when he was sixteen years old. Shortly thereafter, he traveled to Arunachala and became a renunciate. From that time until his death, he never left the mountain.
People who came into contact with Maharshi immediately saw that he was not ordinary. He was recognized as an enlightened being, like the Buddha. Some believed him to be an incarnation of a deity. Spiritual seekers came to the mountain to be in his presence. Today he is considered the most important Indian sage of the 20th century.
Maharshi spent most of his early years on Arunachala in silence. The seekers who came to see him sat in silence with him. It was only later that he began answering seekers’ questions. While many books have been written based on those answers, Maharshi always considered silence to be his greatest teaching. In his words:
Silence is ever speaking. It is a perennial flow of language, which is interrupted by speaking. These words I am speaking obstruct that mute language. For example, there is electricity flowing in a wire. With resistance to its passage, it glows as a lamp or revolves as a fan. In the wire it remains as electric energy. Similarly also, silence is the eternal flow of language, obstructed by words.
I walked partway up the mountain to Virupaksha Cave, where Maharshi lived for 17 years in silence. Silence is maintained in the cave and the area outside its entrance: you enter in silence, you remain inside in silence, and you leave in silence.
The main chamber of the cave is about 20 feet in diameter, with a ledge around the outside for sitting and a simple altar towards the innermost wall. I found a spot on the ledge to sit and meditate. There were about half a dozen other people in the cave. I closed my eyes and turned my attention inwards. After a few minutes, the impression of the other people faded, and I was alone in the silence of the cave, cocooned within the mountain itself.
People who come to meditate in Virupaksha Cave immediately feel that it is not ordinary. The cave is suffused with a palpable energy, a quiet, humming vibration. It is said to be shaped like the character ॐ, which represents the sacred syllable Om. The sacred syllable, it is believed, is something like the fundamental frequency, the tonic note of the universe. It is the sonic representation of the both the individual soul, Atman, and the ultimate reality, Brahman. As such, it is the name of God.
Mediation in the cave came more easily and went deeper than it usually does. The walls of the cave blocked out noise and helped create the profound silence I needed to hear the inner voice of the true, divine self. The chamber of the cave then echoed and amplified that interior voice.
I saw for myself the power or silence to teach when I performed girivalam, the 14 km walk around the sacred mountain. It is considered a powerful spiritual practice, and on full moon nights, hundreds of thousands of people flood the streets to make the walk. For my girivalam, I set off alone, early in the morning on an ordinary day, carrying plenty of water, snacks, and flowers for making offerings at temples along the route.
Arunachala was my teacher that day. As I walked, the appearance of the mountain, ever-present on my right, changed so slowly and gradually that I might not have noticed if I hadn’t been paying attention. No matter how often my thoughts wandered from the present moment, no matter what conversation I was having with myself, the mountain remained silent. No matter what mystery I wanted to unravel, no matter what questions I asked, the mountain answered with silence.
When we enter into silence, we learn that the answers to our questions can be found within. This is fortunate, because God, like Maharshi and Arunachala, seems to prefer silent teaching. We close our eyes and meditate, and we are met with silence. We bow our heads and pray, and our prayers are answered with silence. It is unlikely that any of us will encounter a burning bush where God will speak to us aloud. Instead, we must enter into silence and listen to what is there. Thomas Merton said “God is hidden within me. I find Him by hiding in the silence in which He is concealed.”
When we truly enter into silence, when we still the fluctuations of the mind, even if it is only for a fleeting moment, we realize the incredible depth and richness that it contains. There is a passage in the Chandogya Upanishad that describes what we can find if we search earnestly within the “tiny space in the heart” that contains the soul:
The tiny space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, the sun and the moon, fire and air, lightning and stars, all that exists in the world and all that does not. All of this is contained within it.
When we dwell within this tiny space, this Virupaksha Cave of the soul, and listen to what is there, we can hear our true voice. God may be silent, but we are not. From the vast universe within the soul spring forth acts of creativity: music, poetry, art, our passions, our great works. Our true nature contains this creator form of the divine. From the same source also spring forth acts of nurture: love, devotion, selflessness, our compassion, our works of tenderness. Our true nature contains this nurturer form of the divine.
We will likely only ever experience glimpses of our divine nature. But we should not be discouraged, because these glimpses can sustain us, even through bleakness and despair. We do not need to make a pilgrimage to Virupaksha Cave to have this experience; we can create the conditions anywhere. When we chant the sacred syllable Om, or another prayer or blessing, we invite the divine into wherever we are. When we are still, when we put aside the gnawing hunger of the ego and enter into silence with humility, we can come home to our true selves. And every pilgrimage is, ultimately, a homecoming.
This is one of a series of posts written during our travels. You can find the first post here. You can sign up for email alerts about future posts here.
