India is hot and busy, colourful and crowded, dirty and beautiful, full of 
      white smiles and strongly scented flowers in black hair. The roads look like
      they should be dual carriageways but with no perceptible order. Bordered by 
      open-fronted shops, shacks, places for people to call home. Bony cows with
      brightly painted horns, oxen, water buffalo, goats with painted pink spots,
      mangy dogs. Wide-eyed children stand or lie at the edges amongst the excrement 
      and plastic litter or right in the middle. Pedestrian school girls, 
      dupatta scarves regally flowing out behind them, bicycles with at least 
      two people and an impossibly large number of plastic pots tied to them. 
      Motorcyclists with sari-clad women riding side­saddle behind, holding 
      toddlers while older children sit on the handlebars. Yellow auto rickshaws 
      with two seats and seven people in them. Buses sardine-packed with the 
      younger men holding on outside and vividly coloured trucks with TOOT HORN 
      painted on their backs - all vie for place. It is like some great 
      pre-ordained cosmic tapestry unfolding before uncomprehending ryes.

      I am in India on a three-week pilgrimage, choreographed by Ramana Baba 
      (Muz Murray). The first week is a settling in and a tuning in to the 
      subtlety of the vibration of the mantra and this country. The satsangs 
      shed the ignorant questions I have asked before but have to ask again 
      because I am still in my ego roles -- as yoga teacher, teacher trainer, 
      mother, wife, entertainer, organiser. I ask questions to fill the gaps, 
      but don't hear the answers. I try listening and saying nothing next time. 
      My questions are answered without asking and I hear more! I am not bored. 
      I am absorbed in this Self-exploration.

      The second week we move onto Arsha Vidya Gurukulam Ashram, in elephant 
      country behind Coimbatore. India is lush, rich and fertile, the Blue tea 
      growing mountains rising up all around the verdant plains and plentiful 
      flowers which the women of the Ashram gather daily as offerings for the 
      pujas. We are taken one afternoon to visit projects financed by the Ashram 
      ­workshops where young women produce marbled bags and Banyan plates and a 
      delicious sweet rather like tablet made from milk and sugar cane; a 
      hospital to supplement the herbal remedies favoured by the tribal 
      villages; and a boys hostel providing accommodation so the boys from far 
      flung villages can attend school. There are 136 boys who chant for us and 
      show us a tribal dance. Some of us join in the clapping and stamping 
      rhythmic circling.

      But the project I am most excited about is the nursery. They are 
      propagating castor oil plants by the thousand with the intention of making 
      India free from reliance on diesel within 10 years. Wonderful news for 
      this polluted country, wonderful news for this polluted world -- even if 
      in the cold light of this grey drizzle day the time scale sounds a mite 
      ambitious.

      The western Swami lectures us twice daily on traditional Vedanta, a 
      means of knowing the Self: "You can't imagine not being. You always 
      existed, just not yet manifest. You die but you still are.  I am in and 
      through the body and the mind.

      Things are always either me or not me. Knowledge is always other than me. 
      Knowledge was always there. When we learn something the ignorance goes 
      away. We use asana, japa (repetition of a mantra), meditation to make the 
      mind more subtle, to make the mind ready. You don't have to go beyond the 
      mind. . . "

      Oh but you do. Muz doesn't lecture us. He tells us­ something because 
      it comes from his heart. His mind may well be listening to it without 
      knowing what it is going to hear, for there is an overwhelming urge to 
      impart this wisdom. He asks if there are any questions, then waits. The 
      silence is never uncomfortable. Just sitting there all of us together 
      being in the silence is blissful. Learning without words. That is how his 
      guru, Ramana Maharshi taught initially: imparting the truth of everything 
      through his silent presence. But not everyone can understand the wisdom of 
      silence. Perhaps we live too much in this world to be able to trust what 
      we pick up through wordless vibration. So Ramana Maharshi would say 
      something short and succinct. Then elaborate on it only if the silence 
      following the words still proved barren.

      Muz is leading us in the same way, beyond the mind, learning to experience 
      from the heart. During mantra chanting the experience of the body is as a 
      mass of vibrating particles. The body begins to feel as though it is 
      dissolving into the particles all around; the edges become undelineated 
      and a sensation of wholeness pervades, of there being only I. And where 
      the body goes, the mind follows.

      We are observing and letting go of the thoughts without developing 
      them, noticing the spaces between thoughts; focussing on the heart and 
      opening out from there. We are given the practice of visualising an inner 
      sun, which on the inbreath, fills the entire being with light And then on 
      breathing out, we allow the rays of the sun to move outwards, going beyond 
      the physical body; filling the whole room and the whole world with light. 
      The mind begins to feel, like the body; as though it is dissolving into 
      oneness, into stillness.
       

      Muz's satsangs during this week are quite remarkable. On receiving 
      questions, an answer comes with slow deliberation from the heart -- you 
      can almost see it ­circumventing the normal intellectual process. Life is 
      but a dream. 

      (Row, row, row the boat, gently down the stream, Merrily, merrily, 
      merrily, life is but a dream. . . . we teach our children that, but do we 
      really know it?)

      We come to understand that what we experience as reality is the dream 
      we are living in. It is no more real than the dreams we have when we 
      sleep. Time and space are not linear. In the beginning was the Word 
      (Consciousness) and everything is created from the word, things past, 
      things present and things not yet manifest. Consciousness has no parts, 
      everything is consciousness, everything is God. Namaste. I see God in you. 
      There is no separation. Look into the heart space and know the Self Look 
      at an ant or a flower and see the whole of creation, see God.

      I am, I was, I always will be
      One with the earth, the sky and the sea.
      The ego will vanish and I will be free.
      I don't need me, I don't need me.

      I detach from this body, these eyes that don't see,
      Release these belongings that bring misery.
      For I know I am WHOLE, through eternity 
      I don't need me, I don't need me.

      (Song written by Jayne Morrissey, a fellow pilgrim, while we were at the 
      Gurukulam).

      The last week we go to Tiruvanammalai, south west of Chennai, home of 
      the Holy Mountain Arunachala where Ramana Maharshi spent his adult life, 
      initially in silent meditation, latterly giving teachings. Our first 
      glimpse of Arunachala is as the sun is setting on the night of the first 
      full moon of the year, an auspicious night when thousands of pilgrims walk 
      the fourteen kilometres round the mountain. We visit his cave. It is a 
      long hot climb half way up Arunachala, past boys selling carvings of Oms 
      and elephants. Ramana Maharshi spent fifteen years sitting in this cave in 
      silent meditation, oblivious of hunger and bites and sores all over his 
      body. A couple of hundred years before, another swami had asked to be shut 
      in the cave for two days and when they opened the door all that was left 
      of him was a pile of ashes - not even any bones. The cave has the most 
      incredible atmosphere. It seems to be hotter inside than it is outside and 
      you really feel as if your body is dissolving and being drawn inwards into 
      the depths of whatever other worlds lie deeper into the mountain. I have 
      to go back. Muz is having another tour next year. Hmm…