Dear wonderful neighbour and fellow traveller;

The only thing you need in your life to make it flow like honey is to increase your capacity to perceive life as it really is. To discover how, we can look towards those enlightened wonders who live in a state of complete awareness — think Sherlock Holmes on steroids. There is nothing they need do; their life is simply an extension of living untouched by a conditioned mind. They exist solely to lead us to this same natural state — our natural state.

Many years ago in upstate New York while walking along a wooded path at the ashram of Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, a self-realised spiritual master, I came upon her gazing into the woods. She was alone and turned to me as I approached with a big smile. Without a word, she pointed silently towards a thick group of trees. I desperately tried to see what she wanted me to notice, but all I saw was bark and branches and a thousand different leaves. After what seemed an eternity, the gods must have had mercy on me for she gestured again towards the woods and this time I saw it; a hummingbird’s nest about fifteen meters away. Hummingbirds are not naturally found in Europe, so for my European friends, a hummingbird’s nest is about the size of half a walnut shell. It was the first time I had seen one in nature. What struck me most, however, was the incredible state of perception required to notice that teeny-tiny nest on a small branch among hundreds of other branches…

From their heightened state of aliveness, spiritual masters also perceive the Gordian knots we carry inside, the castle walls we hide behind that prevent us from living life to its fullest possibility. During the beginning of my ten-year stay in the ashram, I was assigned to the kitchen to assist the head chef with breakfast for the four-hundred staff who stayed through the winter. Breakfast consisted of oats, fruit, toast, chai, and a delicious savoury porridge developed by Gurumayi’s guru consisting of grains, ginger, dates, fresh coconut, chilis, tomatoes, onions, cilantro, salt, and several spices associated with Indian cuisine — jeera, ajwan, and dhanya. To work, each ingredient required perfect balance or whoever made it would suffer the indignation of hundreds of diners. 😁

At that time, I was young and impatient which is another way of saying I was not paying much attention to what the head chef was doing. He told me to stir what needed stirring and simmer what needed simmering. He’d toss cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamon into the chai telling me “about this much” for each, then ask me to turn my attention to an industrial blender where he’d blend several of the ingredients for the savoury cereal to be added to the grains and spices simmering in a steamer — all 300 litres of it.

After about a week, I went into the kitchen one morning at the usual 3AM time slot and waited for the head chef. We were expecting higher numbers for breakfast as the Christmas retreat was just beginning. I looked at the clock as the minutes ticked by, perhaps a bit nervously. Where was the chef? Just then, the ashram manager came through the door looking jovial and upbeat and straight at me — a sure sign I was about to pay off a karmic debt.

“Hi, David! Yesterday, Gurumayi sent the head chef to Australia to help organise the kitchen at the Melbourne ashram. You are on your own this morning making breakfast, but I do have helpers to bring it out to the dining hall. It needs to be ready at 7AM sharp. Have fun!”

I stood there unmoving, not by choice, but because I had forgotten how to move. When she got to, “You are on your own” my mind was not able to register anything else. There was no use trying to explain how I didn’t know how to make breakfast. The curtain had lifted, the show was on, but I was still getting dressed.

“Oh, by the way, an influx of participants came in for the Christmas retreat. You’ll need to make breakfast for 2000 guests — perhaps 2100 to be on the safe side.” She relayed this information to me like she was telling me about a new pair of shoes she had just bought. No worries. All is well. Have fun!

After I regained my ability to breathe, I immediately went into a desperate search of the kitchen filing cabinet. Surely the recipes were written down somewhere… anywhere! And just as surely, I discovered they were not. These recipes had been part of ashram life for as long as the ashram had been around. They were stamped into the minds of all the cooks… but I wasn’t a cook. I was just a helper — or so I thought.

The irony of the situation did not escape me. I had a computer science degree, yet I was put in the kitchen to replace a Culinary Institute trained chef who was placed in the, you guessed it, computer department. She barely knew how to find the on/off switch on the computer and I had made not much more than a PBJ sandwich. My greatest accomplishment was toasting the bread before slabbing on the peanut butter.

As we hear so often from the gurus themselves, the guru we seek is not found in the guru’s body, but in the guru principle they imbibe. There are many anecdotes of Gurumayi’s guru admonishing crowds of gawking onlookers to stop looking towards the guru’s physicality for answers and embrace the guru inside. Sadhguru, too, has said the guru is not a body, but a principle that permeates Life. It’s our task to plug into this aspect of the guru’s unlimited nature even as we are enjoying the guru in physical form.

As it turned out, I made breakfast on time though I lost 5 kilos of body weight in the process. In the midst of sheer terror, I was able to piece together the recipe with the help of a memory in desperation mode and a guru principle which did not want 2000 guests starting their day with indigestion. The real breakthrough, of course, happened within me. I learned a valuable lesson to live life as a participant and not a spectator. Along the way, a good dose of pride melted away replaced by shock and awe in the power of the guru’s grace.

For the next couple of years, Jupiter and Saturn will be playing a game of hide and seek and how we play the game is more important than the results. As Sadhguru teaches, the success we seek is a natural result when we become awake in our own life. Saturn is our karmic destiny whose path is changed only by right action in the right moment. Jupiter is the grace that is always present in our life to make it happen…

All we have to do is care.

 🤗

David 🔆

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