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i'm sitting in the old hall in ramanashram this for, a period of well over 20 years was the beating heart of ramanashram this is where bhagavan lived this is where he taught this is where he held court and this is where he met with all the thousands of people who came to see him between, about 1928 and mid-1940s
when this particular building was too small for the vast crowds, which were, by then, coming to see him. when bhagavan first came down the hill from skandashram the only building was the thatched shed over the mother's samadhi the shed was divided into a small temple area where pujas went on to the mother and there was a small private area where bhagavan himself lived and slept devotees who came to ramanashram at that time, such as
muruganar and krishnamurthi iyer report having to go into this very small, tiny, pokey, little, coconut leaf hut and to meet and interact with bhagavan in a very small space, in what was little more than a temporary shed as the ashram started to develop in the 1920s and more people began to come it was realised that a bigger space was needed for bhagavan to live in and receive the increasing number of visitors who were starting to come
now, chinnaswami, bhagavan's brother, was very much attached to the building over the mother's samadhi and he wasn't comfortable with the idea of a second building in the ashram where bhagavan would teach he wanted the ashram always to be centered around the mother's samadhi so the other devotees played a littletrick on him they said they were going to build a newkitchen and dining room
and chinnaswami said,"great, we need a new kitchen and dining room" so this particular building we're in now was constructed and for the entire duration of the construction chinnaswami was under the mistaken idea that this was going to be the new dining room they even managed to put in a fireplace and have a chimney on the roof just to make it look more realistic then on the day it was finally completed
i think chinnaswami was the only one who wasn't aware of this they just simply moved bhagavan in and chinnaswami had to accept it as a fait accompli if you look at the old photos of this hall in the 1930s on the apex of the roof, you can still seethe old chimney there that chimney wasn't demolished for at least ten years after bhagavan moved in here bhagavan originally sat on a very low bench in a corner, over here
slightly elevated above everybody else and there is a story of how a devotee called gounder gounder is one of the caste names of south india brought a new sofa, which he'd paid for himself and persuaded bhagavan or attempted to persuaded bhagavan to sit on it bhagavan didn't like special treatment for himself and i don't think he liked the idea of being elevated so far above everybody else and he didn't like the idea of
a comfortable existence that involvedthese mattresses and cushions when everybody else sat on the floor after lots of toing and froing when bhagavan, at one point, was so against being above everybody else that he got off his little bench and sat down on the floor again level with everybody else mr gounder started crying and wailing and successfully managed to createsuch a disturbance
in front of bhagavan for three days that finally, bhagavan, gave up and just for the sake of quietness in the hall, i think he agreed to sit on the sofa and make that his home so this was considered a great feat by mr gounder so all the devotees forever after nicknamed him “sofa gounder†for his feat of persuading bhagavan to get off the floor and live & sleep on this particular bed
this is the original sofa which sofa gounder donated the cloth, some of the cloths are original the cushions are original what is not? well, this is the original railing.this came along a little bit later the people who were looking after bhagavan one of their principal jobs was to try and prevent people from physically touching bhagavan's body he had a very sensitive body
and it was noticed that he would get physically ill if certain types of people would touch his feet and there's one instance when someone managed to hug him managed to evade the attention of the attendants and bhagavan's body actually broke out in welts across his chest when this misguided devotee hugged him. so, it was agreed that to protect bhagavan's health and to give him a little distance a railing would be put up around the sofa
and this was the limit that devotees could approach and that would stop people coming right up to the sofa trying to touch his feet and so on bhagavan was somewhat amused by this railing when it appeared he just called it his jail, because from his vantage point all he could see was a row of vertical bars keeping people out away from him and when when he wasn't here, which hewasn't, in the early days for much of the day and somebody would come to the ashram to meet him
somebody would be dispatched from the hall to find him he might be in the cowshed, he might be in the kitchen and bhagavan would sigh and shrug his shoulders and say “i've got to go back to jail†so, in a sense, this sofa was his confinement area this is the place where he had to be on duty this is the place where he had to sit answer questions, be stared at all day and it wasn't really what he wanted to do a lot of the time
i think he was very comfortable with being out and about in the ashram he liked to be involved in all the chores which the other devotees had to do the washing, the cleaning, the cooking, the cowshed but they felt it was disrespectful to have bhagavan do most of the more menial activities he insisted on being in charge of the kitchen he insisted on going there 2-3 am every morning and starting the cutting of the vegetables
but, i think bit by bit, he was sidelined from other activities such as carrying water, washing clothes - they were considered very low-class very demeaning activities and one shouldn't allow one's guru to do these things so bit by bit, bhagavan was more and more confined to his little jail inside these railings crowds would come he would spend most of his day here except for periodic trips to the ashram kitchen
to check up on the food trips to the cowshed to see what was going on to see lakshmi trips to dining room to eat and walks on the hill for the rest of the time, he was based in here and people would sit, filling the whole hall there was a sexual segregation the women would be on one side and the men on the other now, there was a very short narrow section in front of me
and this is obviously the best seat in the house so it wasn't always women here or men here there was a kind of rota system sometimes the women got these seats and sometimes the men and once in a while, as the earth changes it's polarity everything moves backwards and forwards the male-female portions of the hall wouldalso move and the men would get front row seats for a while and then the women would get front row seats
what's also interesting is that, originally the main door for this new hall, was over there over there is where bhagavan's samadhi hall is currently located there was a door in the centre of that wall and two or three steps down into an open courtyard that's the access, through which most of the people who came to bhagavan in the 30's, used as bhagavan became feeble, later in life, it was noticed that he was struggling to climb the stairs to come in one interesting thing about bhagavan is that
irrespective of how weak and incapacitated he was he never let anyone help him to climb stairs or negotiate obstacles he had to be able to do it himself or hecouldn't do it all no one was allowed to put a hand under his arm or help him up stairs so when it was realised that the stairs were proving an inconvenience for him these particular doors were closed.they're still there and another doorway was opened on the side facing arunachala that meant that bhagavan could walk in at ground level and have easy access to come in and go out to the dining room
now originally, in bhagavan's day the ashram was a lot more compact than it is now so as he would get up off his sofa and walk to the old doorway he would enter a alleyway a passageway, which is covered to protect him when it rained and that was the old dining room so the place where bhagavan's samadhi is currently located was until the late 1930's
the main ashram kitchen & dining area so he would go in there, cut vegetables, eat his food and then, through the ashram dining room a little bit further where the mother's temple is now is the original or one of the original structures over the mother's temple so the old ashram was very much a compact, single building there was this old hall situated here next away from the hill was the kitchen/dining room
and beyond that, was the mud and thatch building which constituted the mother's temple until the new building was begun in 1939 now, somewhere about where i am sitting right now was a stool this was the stool where devotees would bring offerings they'd bring their bananas, they'd bring their fruits they would be put on the stool here when not many people were coming
they would be distributed as prasad amongst everybody in the hall but when the flow of visitors and the flow of offerings increased then, it wasn't considered healthy for bhagavan to have to taste a nibble every five minutes all day so a lot of the offerings went straight to the kitchen they were amalgamated and distributed at the next mealtime in winter, there was a stool here also which had a small charcoal brazier on it you can see this on some of the old photos
a narrow base, coming out like this and inside there would be burning charcoal and that the only heat that bhagavan ever allowed himself to have it got quite cold in here in winter but he refused to have anything that would keep him warm he never wore anything except a loincloth sometimes you see him with a dhoti under his armpits but so far as i am aware, he never had blankets at night he never had anything to keep himself warm at night
and if it was a little bit cold he simply had this charcoal brazier on during the winter months for a long time there was a resistance to having electricity also i think bhagavan was a bit of a... i wouldn't call him a miser but he didn't like wasting money or resources so there was a gigantic hand-propelled fan and in olden times, these were called punkahs they were huge, great, coconut leaf constructions imagine a hand fan, about a hundred times bigger
that's pulled by people on ropes and the rope-pullers were called punkah wallas so there was a gigantic punkah which kept bhagavan cool but he insisted that it be big enough that everybody in the hall benefited from the wind he wouldn't let anyone fan him if everybody else in the hall wasn't getting fanned as well. this proved to be somewhat inconvenient for all the devotees bhagavan was tough
bhagavan could stand any amount of heat or cold and he didn't like any arrangement which warmed him up or cooled him down which didn't provide equal opportunities for heating and cooling to everybody else so there are reports of everybody in the hall sweating madly in summer and bhagavan not permitting the ashram fan to be put on saying “sweating is healthy, we should all sweat. it's good for the body†the stool, which is more or less where i'm sitting now
there's a lovely story that katya osborne who is arthur osborne's daughter told me many years ago on her first visit, with her mother arthur was interned in a prisoner of war camp in what is now thailand and he didn't join the family till 1945 when lucia osborne and her children came on their first visit they didn't really know what the protocol was
especially katya, who was quite young at the time and she walked in looked around and she was a westerner who was used to looking for a chair and sitting on a chair and the only object that she could see, that looked like a chair was the offerings stool in front of bhagavan so she came in, she looked around she marched up and sat on the top of the offerings stool
and of course, everybody laughed and then somebody said “oh, she offered herself to bhagavan!†so, i think that's a very auspicious start to a child's career at ramanashram to come and put yourself on the offerings stool in front of bhagavan now off to my left, over here was the original ashram library there were several cupboards here bhagavan has his own private... i say private...the books that he consulted a lot, that he used a lot
were on a revolving book case, about here and there was a noticeable tendency when people asked for references bhagavan would take a book off the shelf and without having to search for it the book would automatically fall open at the page that he was looking for this happened so many times that devotees in the hall just accepted that bhagavan had this peculiar knack this peculiar power, of just picking up a book
and having it open at the right page without having to thumb through an index or look at the contents page there was just something about him that facilitated these things to happen in a very natural way when i arrived in the ashram in mid 1970s all of these old cupboards containing the ashram library books they'd been moved from the hall, at that point, to make more space they were in the new hall, which we will visit later i was given the keys, and i went through them
it was a real alladin's cave there were manuscripts in bhagavan's handwriting all kinds of old ashram books there was an in-house librarian in bhagavan's day somebody in the hall would check books in and out so people who didn't want to sit and meditate all day they could read these books in bhagavan's presence there's one story about this hall, that somehow, it strikes me, i like it i mean, there's a lot of amazing things happened here
superb experiences, everybody felt very quiet, very peaceful but i remember reading a story about a french academic, who came here in the 1940s the hall was crowded and he must have be doing some research on indian philosopy and he was very persistent he kept asking bhagavan what was bhagavan's understanding of the word “samsara†now, "samsara" might mean the process of birth & rebirth
manifestation, just the endless round of births and deaths and the consequent suffering that we are all embedded in as a result of our ignorance bhagavan didn't appear to notice him or look at him and that's something else that's interesting because people would come and some would sit, some would pester bhagavan with questions sometimes he'd answer them, sometimes he'd ignore you but the general feeling was : if you sat there long enough
somehow the answer would come it might come as paul brunton noted that you come with a head full of questions you never get them answered but sooner or later your questions drop off one by one because you realise they are not important there's something more important going on in this hall there's a radiating silence a presence, coming off bhagavan into you
that is making any academic questions that you might have completely irrelevant you no longer need to know the answer you know longer need to understand philosophy because bhagavan is giving you a taste an experience of what all these various philosophies are pointing at that was his role, which was to sit here in silence and communicate, insofar as everyone was able to receive it
some measure of that silence that he himself enjoyed all the time now this man, being a foreigner, and an academic was quite persistent, he kept saying "bhagavan! bhagavan, what is samsara?" bhagavan just ignored him then, i think, on his third day a vip came to the ramanashram gates it was one of the leading congress politician of the era who'd been campaigning for independence for india
he was well known to all the devotees here so they went down to the gate to greet him i suspect the french scholar had probably never heard of him and even if he had he wasn't that interested in going down to say hello to an indian politician at the gate so one by one, the whole hall emptied until bhagavan, and the french scholar and the attendant were sitting here by themselves
bhagavan just turned to him and said “for three days you've been asking me, what is samsara?" "people come here to get enlightened" "but soon after they get here, they forget about enlightenment" "and get excited by something else" "that is samsara" now bhagavan slept on this sofa behind the railing and he himself, speaking from the highest standpoint would say that he never slept
he would say that the sleep state is a superimposition on the real state of the self for him, the various states that we think that we have because we identify with our bodies : the waking, the dreaming and the sleep to him, they were just things that came and went on the continous substratum of his own self so one peculiarity, one ramification of this is that he always seemed to be aware of what was going on around him even when, to external eyes it might look like he was asleep
i mean, he closed his eyes at night people heard him snore but there didn't ever seem to be a total lack of awareness now major chadwick questioned him about this once and said "how can you say that you don't sleep, we hear you snoring!" and bhagavan said, "i like snoring, if i didn't like it, i'd stop" there seemed to be a fundamental, continuous awareness of who he was and if his body was snoring at night then he'd be aware of it
now one consequence or one outgrowth of this was that you could come and see bhagavan at any time of the day or night in the late 1920s or early 30s this is the only teacher i know about who was so insistent that every one of this devotees could have access to him that he wasn't even inside a closed room in the middle of the night the doors to this hall were open 24 hours a day for at least 10 years if you had a problem at three o'clock in the morning in 1935
you could walk in, you could sit in front of bhagavan and you would find bhagavan awake, alert, ready to receive you you didn't have to wake him up his attendant didn't have to wake him up somehow, bhagavan would know that you were in there that you had a problem he'd open his eyes and whatever problem you had, whatever transaction was needed you could conduct it at three o'clock in the morning
i think this is one of the most extraordinary aspects of bhagavan's teaching life that there wasn't a time for probably twenty years when he wasn't accessible to devotees except for, when he was walking on the hill or when he was inside a bathroom having his bath in the 1940's, the ashram management began to recognise that bhagavan's body wasn't as strong as it used to be
and that he would probably benefit from having a short rest every day between 12 o'clock and 2 o'clock in the afternoon they all knew from previous experience of trying to limit access to him that he wouldn't go along with this ban on people looking at him for two hours during the day so they tried to get round this by telling all the devotees that no one is allowed to go in the hall between midday and 2 pm because bhagavan needs a rest so on the first day, bhagavan sat there
noticed that no one was sitting there and of course, his curiosity was aroused so he came outside to find out why nobody was sitting with him anymore and then somebody said "oh but, bhagavan, we've been told" "that no one should go in there between midday and 2 o'clock!" at which point bhagavan himself sat outside the hall and refused to go back in and when chinnaswami came along and said why are you sitting out here? you're supposed to be inside, resting!
bhagavan said that, "there's a new rule" "no one is allowed to go in the hall between 12 and 2 o'clock" "so that must include me" "i'm going to sit outside for those two hours as well!†finally, after much negotiation, it was agreed by bhagavan that he could have two hours down time in the middle of the day between 12 & 2 there was an attendant who was on duty, to make sure that people didn't come in
but as part of these negotiations, the door was, in fact, open so that if people did have emergencies, they could come in the attendant would make some attempt to dissuade them if they thought it was just casual business which could wait i know of a couple of instances when people who really did need to see bhagavan urgently just walked in between 12 & 2 and although the attendant tried to shoo them out bhagavan would say "no, no, this is important. let them stay"
perhaps, one i've mentioned before is when papaji came here and really wanted to know whether ramana was the person who had knocked on his door in the punjab he didn't know about the resting rule, so he just walked in krishnaswami, the hall attendant at the time tried to make him go away, and bhagavan said, “no, no, let him come in†so if bhagavan could see that you were in an advanced state that you had urgent business that couldn't wait he would overrule his attendant
and allow you to come in and discuss whatever business you had with him so this insistence that people should have access to him went on in the later years towards the late 1940s of course, his health deteriorated access became less and less possible, simply because he caught cancer he was dying, he was recovering from operations but there wasn't a single day of his life when bhagavan was persuaded by
either his doctors or the ashram management that his door should be closed and that no one should have access even on his final day everybody who wanted to see him was allowed to have a walking darshan past him in the room, on the day he finally passed away when i first came here in the middle of 1976 i had a passion for bhagavan, his teachings and in particular, self-enquiry and the place in ramanashram that drew me more than any other
was this particular hall i've talked to people and they say, “i like this place†or “i like that place†for me, this was where i felt most at home, most at peace with myself this, for me, was the place where bhagavan had sat and taught and this was the place where i wanted to sit and pursue my practice in those days, hardly anybody was here i would sit in a corner over there, same place every day opposite the door in those days, the trees weren't so big
there wasn't a wall opposite the doorway so sometimes, i just opened my eyes and you could see the sihouette of arunachala in front i'd just look at the silhouette sometimes i'd close them sometimes i'd look at bhagavan's photo this one behind me, sitting on the sofa then i'd go back to enquiry i was absolutely determined
to follow bhagavan's practical teachings on enquiry to the best of my ability and to do it as intensively as i could i think something drew me here something kept me here i used to come about 6 o'clock in the morning i'd get up once in a while just to get the cramps out of my legs and maybe walk up and down a little bit outside and then i'd come back and sit another hour or two
go home for lunch 2 o'clock in the afternoon, i'll be the first person in and often at night, i'd be the last person out i don't know what compelled me to do this i just felt a passion that i had to sit here. i had to be here i had to immerse myself in bhagavan's presence in the place where he lived and to the best of my ability do the practice that he recommended the most highly
after that particular period of my life i started to get more involved with other things i started running the ashram library i started editing their magazine other things came up but i think what i got from sitting here apart from a lot of peace, a lot of quiet was the cultivation of a presence inside me you can call that presence bhagavan
you can call it grace, you can call it whatever you like it's like having a recognition of an old friend inside yourself you know it's there all the time for me that was the concrete result of doing bhagavan's practice in this hall there's a tangible knowledge a tangible presence of something inside yourself and after a certain point i didn't really feel a need to sit here all day and look at it