There could be any number of tales in which an Indian boy leaves home in search of his real Guru. In reality life it self is the greatest guru you can have or more precisely your guru visits you in many guises unknown to you and leaves you instructions. This has happened several times in my life. I would speak about the first such incident of real importance that happened to me.
I was having a ball with my life in my youth after my studies were over, roaming our countryside drinking toddy and arrack and smoking weed and doing whatever came to mine and my dissolute companions minds. It seemed good to be inebriated all the time without having any responsibilities what so ever.
I did not believe in god and my reading had convinced me that the life is a meaningless phenomenon to be suffered till it ekes out of you in some way. It was a long wait for Godot (As Beckett says) or death and the only thing you could do is to fill it with pleasurable activities. There could not be any possible world after this and even if there was we would not be the same in that world, with the same problems worries and fears.
Spirit or consciousness or whatever there was would not have the same desires and the same materials to work with in the other world. So why fear that our deeds have an effect on our after life and forego whatever pleasures the life offers you. So I continued with this style of living till one day I found my father sad and broken about my way of life. He was telling my mother of the expectations he had about me when I was born. It wrung my heart though I thought myself to be immune from such feelings armed with my out look of life.
Perhaps it was after that I became troubled by a nagging doubt that this was not the life I was really after and I could not sustain it for very long. But I did not know what to do about it.
I went on with my lifestyle and kept out of my father’s sight for the time being.
Then one day as we were sitting in the shade of cool plantain trees waiting for our agent to turn up with the inevitable bottles of rum, one of my companions quoted a religious verse.
Some one had said “Narayana” while sitting down probably in derision. It was a name of Lord Vishnu who sustains the world.
The verse immediately followed.
Narayana ennu sada japichchal papam ketum pasi ketum vyasanangal theerum
Its meaning was that if you go on repeating the word “ Narayana” it will destroy all your sins , hunger and would do away with your sorrows altogether.
The one who said it was the grossest character around and would have no thoughts about spirituality at all. He was just repeating some thing he heard some where to show off before us or to say something interesting.
Strangely it struck home in me.
I got drunk after that and was quite inebriated when I reached home but the verse held and would not go away. I was not religious then and never was for that matter. I rarely visited temples or prayed in my life up to then though both my parents homes had temples in their premises. Perhaps the over-religiosity of the two families had driven me away from religion altogether. Perhaps it was further strengthened by my reading.
Any way in the next morning a curious thought came to my mind. If the name of “ Narayana” is so powerful why not try its potency by repeating it for a few times just as an experiment. I had no real idea what the name actually meant other than it was the name of God Vishnu. Now Vishnu, as depicted in posters and calendars was totally anachronistic with his yellow dhoti and the ancient weapons that he carried in his arms.
For the world I could not guess how an ancient god like him could do all that the people believed he could. This was the world of nukes and supersonic jets and space travel. What could a poor Indian god do to help you in it? Yet I wanted to check it out too.
I stayed at home that morning resisting the temptation to go out and get drunk. I did not know the times I should repeat the name to complete my experiment. A thousand looked not enough; ten thousand looked more like it. I decided to repeat the name a hundred thousand times to make sure that it could produce some effects in the physical world.
Now I needed some proof that it has some power.I thought hard. What do I want to accomplish with it?.
Well I had this habit of dreaming with my eyes open, some what like the character of James Thurber (in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty I think). It had proved to be the greatest impediment in my life. I was ever going into day dreams and was always vacuous than I really wished to be.
I decided that I would recite the name a hundred thousand times at the rate of 5000 names per day and would complete it in twenty days. If the name had any efficacy at all I would like it to remove this curse from my life. It appeared to be reasonable project to me.
I dropped all else and started on my adventure immediately. When I mentioned it to my mother she gave me a string of beads which was used by my grand father for the purpose of keeping count. I soon found out that completing 5000 “Narayana’s” in a day is no easy task. One, after some time you begin to wonder what you are doing, the name becomes a meaningless sound and two it conjures up images that are absurd and laughable.
Being unaware of its real meaning( Nara= water, ayana= journey , because water is considered the source of prana the life force, the word actually describes the movement of life force in the universe and its mover Vishnu. In fact the word Vishnu also has a similar meaning)
I would unconsciously break it in to two parts of nar, aya = filaments in my language and ana which is the stem of a plantain leaf in my mother tongue. The combined effect was that I was picturing a Plantain stem turned into its filaments during my japa. It would either irk me or make me laugh inwardly. But I persisted with the effort. It was only later that I looked it up in the Seed-word-thesaurus in Sanskrit and learned its real significance.
As I said I persisted and after some real hard work completed it on the twentieth day.
From the fifteenth day onwards I felt the curse of my Walter Mittyness departing from me. Any how it has never really troubled me since. And those twenty days at home also got rid off my companions of those days, and I began a serious effort to get back into life.
May be the name had nothing to do with it at all. It may have been the mental effort and discipline that had done it. Yet it all came of the words of a dissolute character. This surprised me at that time. I have listened to hundreds of wise saying in the past but none of them struck home. But his words did and reformed me.
This is how the Guru acts. He came to me then through the words of that no good bum. What the guru does is to point you in the right direction without you being aware of it. The trick is to watch out for the instructions and act on it. Actually the guru is within you. He brings things to you. You need not search for any guru in life, anything ( sathyakama was advised by all the elements and animals he came into contact with)anyone can be your guru.
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