Swami Lakshman Joo Raina - Part Two
Next day at about four clock in the afternoon as I was completing my work in the outpatient unit of the Psychiatric Department of All India Institute of Medical Sciences when I saw Jagata rushing in. She was panting, having run up the four floors of the Out Patient Block of AIIMS as the lift did not work. She said Swamiji was at the car park, waiting in the cab. He was on his way to airport to catch the five o clock flight to Srinagar but he wanted to see you before he left.
Since our meeting of the previous evening, the thought of Swamiji had not left me and the eagerness to see him again was growing every moment. I could not believe that at that very moment he was sitting right down in the car park waiting to see me and bless me. As I dashed down hundreds of stairs, my heart overflowed with an intense and bounding energy coming from a great source of love.
As soon as he saw me Swamiji came out of car and hugged me. I felt as if the God Almighty was hugging me in the form of the divine father. He pulled a book out of the pocket of his grey Phiran (the long woolen cloak) he was wearing and gave it to me. It was essentially a book on Zen Buddhism called 'The Zen flesh Zen bones'. He had contributed to this book, a dialogue between Shiva and Parvati held in the holy cave of Amarnath’ translated from Sanskrit. The dialogue was found in an ancient manuscript recently unearthed by him. 'The Zen Flesh Zen bones' became my primer to spiritual education. It also showed to me at an early age that Zen Buddhism, Buddhism, Advaita, Shaiva Siddanta, mysticism, Islamic Sufism all spring from a common source of spiritual realisation. What should matter to a human being is the spiritual realisation and not the source from which it came. He once again hugged me energizing my whole being. During this entire encounter we did not exchange a single word, but as he left for the airport he put his head out of the window of the cab and said, “ Write to me”.
I corresponded with Swamiji on and off, in happiness and in misery, like how one would write to a parent. I informed him religiously about such happenings as my passing the IAS exams, my romance, my marriage, my getting a daughter, my adopting a son, my successes, my failures and my disappointments with people or my work. Generally he took time off to reply to my trivial letters, writing beautifully, in black ink in his own hand with soul elevating contents. When I met my fiancé Dr. Rajkumar, a post graduate medical student at AIIMS and wrote to him that I had fallen in love. He replied, “One does not fall in love but only rises in love”. These were amazing words giving ultimate importance to love and depicting it as the highest human achievement.
In April 1972 after I had just passed my IAS exams and was waiting to leave for Mussoorie, my aunt Jigri (Jagata’s mother) called upon me to spend the summer in Kashmir and visit Ishwar Ashram. The 60th birthday celebrations of Swamiji was to take place and everyone from all parts of the world would be present. I felt this was a rare opportunity that I could not fore go. I was to leave Delhi for good and I did not know when I would get another chance to visit Kashmir and meet Swamiji. I accepted the invitation and left for Srinagar. I reached the ashram just on the birthday of Swamiji. He was seated motionless in the lotus position on a wooden seat and had been in meditation since the early hours of the morning. His face shone like the sun and his body looked ethereal. The ashram was thronging with thousands of devotees and students of Swamiji from different parts of India and abroad. They had come from places as diverse as Shivananda Ashram in Rishikesh, Varanasi in UP and London in UK. The devotees were continuously showering flowers on him , but he was not even aware of this. Soon he took the absolute form of an idol of Shiva and the devotees started performing holy abhishekam (bathing, anointing, decorating and worshipping with milk, rose water, and holy ash, flowers and incense, just as they would do to an idol of Shiva or Shiva Linga. This was the first time I saw a human being symbolising the divine in such totality that I almost started understanding the meaning of Advaita. After nearly twelve hours Swamiji rose from his samadhi. The atmosphere of the ashram which stood on the banks of the emerald hued Dal Lake and the fabled Nishat Garden was so enchanting and the air so rarified and pure. I spent a blissful week in the ashram while participating in all kinds of activities from decorating and cleaning the ashram, to helping in the kitchen and in serving food. After a very inspiring time in the ashram and after obtaining the blessings of Swamiji, I left for Delhi for my onward journey to Mussoorie to join the national Academy of Administration.
