Swami Kriyamurti Saraswati
A Thorough Overhaul
Swami Atmananda gave me a thorough overhaul, a massive injection of normality. She brought me to my senses, down to earth; she showed me that it is the little things that matter, that each moment has tremendous significance, for each moment has everything in it.
We lived together for twelve years, in Belfast, India and Singapore. My love for her was like a flower for the sun: I opened my mind to her and she filled it with her power and radiance.
It was, inevitably, a painful journey sometimes; who likes to be shown their pride and selfishness?
I had grown up absorbing the influences of family and society, to become a product of my time, class and nationality.
But Swami Atmananda plunged me back into the primordial soup, and for twelve years I swam around in there, like frogspawn or an amoeba or something formless!
At some level she thwarted whatever I felt, said and did, so that I was left without the usual outlets, the ‘easy way’, conventional answers. I often felt angry and frustrated, not understanding why I was being confounded in this way.
Another image comes to mind – of a metal sheet, being dipped into corrosive acid, which rids it of all the rust and encrustations.
Swamiji burnt off layers and layers of conditioning and accumulations – which we carry around all our lives as baggage, which we inherit from thousands of years of human conflict and suffering.
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