Afternoon Tea with Baba
Trip Start
Oct 09, 2007
1
30
45
Trip End
Mar 10, 2008
Kolkata (Calcutta),
West Bengal,
India
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Each afternoon at around 4 pm when we are at the Temple, Baba makes ginger tea for himself and for me. It is an extraordinary wonder to me - if you have any personal experience with Indian masters, it would be to you as well - that he makes tea for me, and has me come into his room just outside of the main temple area to have tea with him every day. That kind of personal, one-on-one time for one person with a master is so rare, an unthinkable privilege. It is such a mystery. We talk, drink our tea, dip and eat our Marie biscuits, and drop in and out of conversation and meditation. Devotees sometimes come in, pranam, and have a bit of personal time with him. They might be visitors from London or America, or from another Indian state who are visiting Kolkata and are coming to touch base. Others come from time to time just paying their respects. Some come to ask for advice.
Today, an elderly woman came in, pranamed deeply and long, crying all the while. When she sat up, she spoke in a stream of Bengali and tears. Baba listened quietly to her as she unburdened herself. Then he spoke to her for a moment or two, she pranamed tearfully again, Baba blessed her, she said a few more words, and left the room.
I didn't ask what her problem was. I just sat there, as I usually do, absorbing as much of it as I could. "She is very worried about her son," he eventually said. "Her son worked at a department store, and there was a burglary. After a time, he was fired. She doesn't know why, whether he was blamed in some way or not. Now he just sits around the house. She is very worried about him."
I said nothing. Just sat quietly. A moment or so later, Baba began shaking his head and commented, "Mothers in India suffer a lot worrying about their children."
More time passed, then he began again..."Our mind is always focused outside... On the husband. On the children. On the job, the house, on money. When none of it is real! We focus on the unreal," he trailed off, retreating inward.
"So many lives consumed, wasted, focusing on the unreal...lives after lives after lives wasted," he said very quietly, with compassion and at the same time with detachment, as if observing the phenomenon of it from a great distance and being powerless to do anything about it.
"Everything negative that comes to us, everything - losing a job, illness, losing our home, our retirement - all of it comes to drive us back to the real. The mind has to dwell somewhere, and we don't dwell in the real, so it dwells in the unreal. We are drawn into the drama and the pain. We think it is real, when it isn't."
"But I have always thought," I chimed in, "that I was born into this life, and I had these children, and they always look to me as their mother as a refuge when things aren't going well. When they are well, they don't need me. I don't hear from them much, which is fine. But when trouble comes, they need a shoulder, an ear, and I have always thought that was my dharma as their mother, to be there for them."
"But if you dwell in the real," Baba responded, "if your practice is constant and continuous, whenever these problems come, you look with the eyes of the soul, you see from the real, and you will have more to give them. You won't get so caught up in the drama. You see life's ups and downs for what they are. You'll bring the energy of the real, the insight and wisdom, the stability of the real, the eyes of the soul to problem. You will be able to give them a higher service.
"We need a soul centered life. With a soul centered life," he said finally, before going into a longer meditation, "Everything would be very different."
I thought about my relationship with my daughter, Lisa, and shared it with him, "Lisa cannot abide my getting caught up emotionally in what she is saying, even when I am trying to be supportive and she is talking about some problem she has. I overreact to everything, she says. She is a samurai about it, won't tolerate the tiniest speck of it in me. I guess I have a real guru in her, reminding me about what is real and unreal ... instead of getting hurt by her reaction, I should take the lesson, the hint, the reminder to drop down into a deeper level, to withdraw from the illusion, and know it is all working itself out in its own process, in its own time, in its own way."
It seemed so obvious, so appealing. If I took that approach, I would have a calmer mind, a longer view, and I would be much less likely to stir the pot and mess things up with my reactivity. I would be able to be more present and appropriate to the situation and the person in front of me.
We meditated a bit and finished our tea. I pranamed with a silent prayer to be better able to take it all of this in, these times with him, what he says, his energy when he says it. "Grant me the consciousness, God, for what I am receiving here."
Then we went back to our computers.
