II
Sunyata
Sunya Baba -- Emmanual Sorensen in hispurvashrama -- refers to himself always in the third person
in the article.
IT WAS IN THE YEAR 1929 that Poet Rabindranath Tagore
and his secretaries (Arya Nikam and Amiya Chakravarti) met
him and I befriended him at Dartington Hall in Devonshire,
England. And it was the Poet's casual invitation to the
simple,`uneducated' gardener to come to Bharat `to teach Silence'
to the ebullient Bengalis, which called him here. He discerned
in the simpleton's Being a quality of Sunya-Santi-Silence and
intuitive awareness which was felt to be congenial and
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appreciated in India. The invitation gave the sadhu-type the
needed push or pull, to venture forth simply and solitarily into
India, and the proposed 3 or 4 months' stay stretched into 45
years of Himalayan ananda-grace.The solitary pilgrim in
Consciousness had come ` Home'. In India he read the Vedas,
the Upanishads and the writings of genuine Masters.
He heard of Sri Ramana Maharshi while in Kashmir and
Tibet from Lamas, and later from Paul Brunton and Dr. W. Y.
EvansWentz. After spending several years in the Himalayas and
other sanctuaries, he came to Sri Ramana Maharshi in the year
1936 for the first time and was introduced to the Maharshi by
Paul Brunton. He also came three times or more later at a few
years' intervals. He had no problem, no disease, and no quest
and so asked no questions. Maharshi, however, did ask him
some questions which he has now forgotten.
But the first darshan of the Maharshi remains an
unforgettable experience, especially Sri Ramana's casual, as it
were, statement ` We are always aware'; and this made a most
powerful impact on him. It resounded in his consciousness
like a chime and continued to linger in his memory like a
mantra or an echo of Sri Arunachala or Dakshinamurti. He
also remembers some passages mentioned from the Bible: the
phrase, `I AM THAT I AM', `Be Still and know that I am
God', `Know ye not that you are Gods?' and the words Jesus
exchanged with Nicodemus.
He found Ramana Maharshi's was pure advaita-experience,
and his chief language, radiant Silence, to which only mature
souls familiar with solitude could easily respond. When Ramana
was questioned by officious officials and was later asked if it had
tired him, he said: "No; I did not use my mind". He was
mind-free and ego-free.
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As for Sunya, there was from babyhood no sense of guilt,
no sin-complex and no ego-pitiful grievance against What Is.
Very little friction, imposition or conditioning, and so no
ego-importance. Affectionate detachment from forms and
things, is natural in the conscious awareness that there is no real
division, no real detachment in the Reality we ever are, ego-free
and death-free. There is no ambition to `become' this or that
and no reaching out for power or self-possessions, security. Yet,
there is intuitive Light-awareness, a flair for essence, wholeness
and esoteric grace-awareness; a secure contentment in the
fundamental all-Rightness of things and happenings as Siva Lila,
Self-interplay.