Published in Odyssey Magazine: February / March 2008

Natalia Baker describes her 5 week holiday in India which turned out to be a journey of introspection and profound personal growth.

I had been invited as a guest to the Oneness University outside Chennai to do a course in Deeksha Blessing so it seemed natural to add more time for some exploration. I hadn’t Realized this exploration was going to be inward!

Work over the last 20 years in the field of metaphysics has been intense! As the years unfold there seems no relief. Living in a maelstrom of courses, talks, monthly Full Moon meditations, articles, book reviews and interviews, plus the inevitable load of keeping life flowing on the ground with all the concomitant challenges feels like I have a dug a hole for myself and don’t know how to get out of it. (I know I do not speak for myself alone!) I know “being service and doing service” are two different things and that working hard does not create greater outcome but I have felt locked into a pattern.

Just as we are aware of how the energy surges in our erratic electricity supply system in South Africa can ruin any machine, it feels as though I have been creating energy fluctuations in my body for years. About two weeks before departing for India I received information from spirit which provided a glimpse of another way of living. In direct and clear contact I heard I do not always do what I encourage others to do and it is now time to build a greater sense of Self so service can be through being “for this is the level where we start to build a home for others”. It is time to come to a more conscious level of mastery. The time away is required for personal growth and I need to observe and awaken to a way of being in India. There were a few other directives but the major impact of it all was the message that I had some serious work to do on myself.

The first hurdle was that I was petrified of going. Traumatic experiences as a young child alone traveling back and forth between school and parents had not been dealt with. I was once again put on the wrong train, got lost several times and had some frightening experiences on plane journeys. The skilled and talented Karen Hvidsten, a Body Talk practitioner, gave me a session which completely healed those childhood traumas. Nor once in five weeks did I feel fearful or insecure.

I was hugely helped by my dear friend Carol Egli, who had been to Oneness University and spoon fed me through the whole process of preparation: what to take, where to goand so on. There are indeed angels on Earth.

So before proceeding further let me clarify the meaning of this Self. What is it? There are many names for it: God, the heart, the Seat of Consciousness, the centre, the I. In brief personal glimpses it is a non-personal, all-inclusive consciousness of the oneness which creates and sustains the universe. Rooted in the heart, it is immortal and beyond duality. When we are able to have this connection permanently and continuously we would be self-realized. It brings all knowledge and we live in a silent thought-free state of undisturbed peace and stillness, liberated from the shackles of earthly life. It is hard to decline because it is simply being, but a blissful, untroubled state of being. We know the minds, called by mystics the illusion or Maya, and through our minds we become engrossed, entangled and absorbed in the outer world to the detriment of the Self, that which is Real. The course at Oneness University was the first step towards the Self. Much of the information was not new but provided the means to go deeper and learn to truly experience and live it. The university teaches that oneness with ourselves leads to oneness in relationships, leading to oneness with All That Is.

We learnt that we were not our bodies. They are the temples which have their own intelligence and functioning. We need to care for them indeed but we are not our bodies. We are not our thoughts, our minds, emotions or personalities. These all come from a great evolving aura of energy around the planet referred to as the One Mind, the Once Ancient Mind. So what are we really, beyond all these outer expressions? We are the Self.

The experience of a growing awareness of this Self was profoundly enhanced by the blessings showered on us by young monks and nuns who have been trained to attune to great heights of consciousness and bring through divine energies from higher dimensions. It is difficult to describe this to you. The power of the peace, love and light was so overwhelming that I often wept. Each blessing served to bring about a deeper level of healing, allowing the attachments to our inherited programming of mind, emotion and personalities to dissolve.

The Deeksha blessings have been proven to bring about neurobiological changes in the brain which are permanent. I wish I could tell you more about this but there just isn’t space. Let me say that the blessings bring about healings in the body, in relationships, they enhance business and creativity and have brought about radical changes in youth involved in youth programmes, addicts and, for that matter, any part of society where they have been given, including the 140 000 villagers who live in the area around the university campuses.

This was the foundation from which to discover and experience the deeper Self. I chose not to have definite plans but to truly trust the unfolding of the journey, listening to the inner voice and be guided as to where and when to go. There were some vague preferences, I would love to experience Auroville and go to Ramana Maharshi’s ashram in Tiruvannamalai, a fair sized town about two hours inland from the East coast.

The first miracle was walking into a hotel boutique on the second night in Chennai, merely because I felt compassion for a delightful young man who was cooped up in the shop without frsh air or sunlight for fourteen hours a day. A book literally fell into my hand. It was David Godman’s The Teaching of Ramana Maharshi. I knew Ramana was one of the greatest and most loved of the Indian sages but I didn’t know that the major theme of his teaching was the realization of the Self. He repeatedly told his followers that they don’t have to struggle to become the Self (what a revelation) because they already are IT! We observe the Self through the self-limiting programming of our minds. Nothing could have been more compatible with the teaching of the Oneness University.

After the course I spent a week in Auroville. It felt this gentle time of walking in the forests and visiting the Matrimandir, the remarkable gold domed building referred to as the soul of Auroville, was to integrate the teaching of the Oness University course. I had a beautiful verandah outside my room with trees and shrubs forming a shade canopy filled with busy birds, squirrels and butterflies. This is where I spent much time in reflection, contemplation and completing some work I had brought with me.

After Auroville, I found my way to Tiruvannamalai and went directly to Ramana’s ashram. It became crystal clear the reason for being here was to meditate. For one week I spoke to only a shopkeeper, a fruit vendor and a waiter and meditated an hour at a time for four hours daily.

Ramana’s ashram was beautiful and ordered, a sharp contract to the incessant hooting, noise, bustle, voices and insistent beggars in the streets outside the walls. People gathered throughout the day to meditate in the big marble hall which contained Ramana’s mausoleum. I did not find the inner connection so easy to sustain here because of the constant movement, voices and restlessness although I did manage to “break through” a few times to experience a peace for which no words can describe. The deepest experience of the Self in which all was light and stillnesswas in one of the caves on the holy mountain of Arunachala where Ramana had meditated. I sat on the rocks where he had sat and immediately felt all my chakras activated and spinning.

The long meditations in the early hours of the morning were profound. For some reason I woke between 2.30 and 3.30 daily and could never sleep again. It provided an opportunity to connect inwardly and blissful to have long deep experiences of the Self in perfect silence.

India provides startling contrasts. You may walk down a street savouring the scents of incense jasmine, spices and other delights, and next the smell of excreta assails your nostrils! Beneath the window of my first floor room lived seven pigs in a patch of wilderness amongst buildings. The were very excited in the evenings at feeding time. The rampant noise of snorting and squealing made me think they were being prepared for the table! I got used to it, like humans get used to everything, and I realised we are so habituated to using our minds and this has to be released for us to move to the next level of consciousness. Our absorption into the automatic and unceasing flow of thoughts is holding us back. We suffer so. Instead of allowing thoughts and feelings to flow through us we hold on to them. Often it is the perception of suffering more than the event that holds us back. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not promoting that we move around witless and mindless but that our mind comes under the control and guidance of a greater Self. It becomes a servant rather than our master.

Across the road from the building where I stayed was an ashram where a lady master, Sivashakti, gave darshan twice a day. About 100 people would be in meditation waiting for her. A tiny figure with an exquisite smiling face glided in silently. She sat for a moment and then very slowly moved to different areas in the room. She merely stretched out the fingers of her left hand and we received a shock of light energy. It felt like electrical charges. No word was spoken and after 10 minutes she left. She personified love and light in human form and provided an example of the power of the Self, manifest through being.

So what now? I am home and different. It feels like learning to walk again. It will be challenging to alter modus operandi but my contract has changed and I must commit to the contract. I have lived to work and serve. Now I must learn to work to live. It feels like being a plant which has been pruned, actually severely cut back, in order for it to be resurrected and grow strong and verdant again. In India I observed and experienced a little of how it will be and it creates huge hope and passion in me. I hope you are able to catch a little of this too!