Kanniyakumari by Chris Jones

Day Five

After two restful days in Kovalam Beach, where we set the rhythm of study, travel, and group program, we left our beautiful resort for Kanniyakumari at the very southern extreme of India. Kanniyakumari is the home to one of the great temples of India, a temple to Mother Divine. It was in Kanniyakumari, after his evening bath in the ocean, that Maharishi first had the inspiration to bring the blessings of the Himalayas to the people of Southern India. It also sits at the confluence of three oceans--the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the Arabian Sea--and is considered for this reason alone to be an auspicious site.

We were in essence retracing Maharishi's steps in reverse order. Maharishi began with Rameshwaram, traveled to Kanniyakumari, and then to Thiruvanandapuram (Trivandrum); whereas we began in Thiruvanandapuram and traveled in the reverse direction. Maharishi had said that it took him three weeks to fathom the silence of Kanniyakumari. We were to be there two days.

On the way to Kanniyakumari we broke up our trip with a visit to a relatively small temple dedicated to Hanuman in Suchindram. This was our first introduction to temples in South India, and it was a moderately simple and open temple compared to others that were larger, more complex, and less open to westerners. This temple had twofold significance to us--first, because we were reading the Ramayana during class time; and second because we had begun studying the Vedic Devatas in physiology and we had already been introduced to the concept of Hanuman as the biochemical messengers, including neurohormones, neurotransmitters, etc. As Hanuman was Ram's messenger, so the biochemical messengers are carrying out the brain's messages all over the physiology, even sometimes into very remote corners of the physiology. As Raja Ram notes in his book, "Hanuman embodies the holistic value of Natural Law--the field of all possibilities, always ensuring that every specific value is supported by the total potential of Natural Law." (p. 367)

There were too many interesting and beautiful feature of this temple to even try to capture in this blog, but suffice it to say that it was a good introduction to a world that sits apart from the rest of India; a world that has remained unchanged for hundreds, if not thousands, of years; where Indians young and old, of all colors, come to pay respects to personal and impersonal forces of Nature which run through their culture like threads through a cloth.

After an hour and a half in Suchindram, we got back in the bus and drove another hour to Kanniyakumari, where we checked in, did our meditation program in groups, and had a brief dinner.

That night we went briefly to the Mother Divine temple where we ran into one of the managers of the temple by the name of Shankamnarayana who knew of Maharishi and his movement and who was a good friend of a Purusha by the name of David Hooper. He immediately whisked us into the inner sanctum of the temple and invited us to sit down and do a brief meditation. There sitting a little ahead of us was another westerner, who turned out later to be the national leader of the TM organization in France--small world. After a short time in the temple, we left the temple. At the exit our manager and guide said, "Please give my regards to Mr. David Hooper. Give him the blessings of Mother Divine." We assured that we would and returned to our hotel and to bed after a long but satisfying day.

Day Six

This day began with a dip in the "sangam," the confluence of the three oceans mentioned above. The women in sarees and the men in kurta pajamas walked down to the ocean from our hotel and, holding on in a long line, walked into the water. The water was warm and at the same time refreshing on this hot day. Following local custom, we dipped three times into the water, and then came back to our hotel to dry off, have lunch, and go to the temple for the afternoon.

The Mother Divine temple is dedicated to Parvati. Parvati, as we learned early in the course, is the fundamental aspect of Mother Divine. "She is the source of all that there is in creation. Nothing takes shape without her. In the physiology, Parvati represents all that gives structure and form, either on the level of the cell, organ, or the body as a whole. " (Nader, p. 375) The three traditional forms of Mother Divine are Lakshmi, the nourishing or wealth-giving aspect; Saraswati the knowledge value; and Durga the energy and power value.

According to Raja Ram, Saraswati, representing knowledge, can be seen residing in the head or brain and her four arms represent the four lobes of the brain. She is the consort of Brahma, who also has four heads, and it also represented by the four lobes of the brain.

Lakshmi, representing the wealth, health and nourishing aspect of Mother Divine, resides in the chest, with the heart as her seat. Her four hands represent the four chambers of the heart, and on the molecular level, the four chains of the haemoglobin molecule.

Durga, the third aspect of Mother Divine, represents power, or Shakti. In the Vedic Literature the lower tip of the spinal cord is seen as the source of energy or Shakti. In the physiology the sacral bone in the vertebral column is the base and support for entire vertebral column, and by implication, the whole nervous system. In the sacral bone there are eight holes corresponding to the eight arms of Durga.

While this is only a brief taste of the kind of background we gained in the day we spent in Fairfield on the Devatas in the physiology, it gives you the idea of the approach we were taking. We went into the temple innocent people who had been for years enlivening the silence of the Transcendent in their physiologies--the home of all the impulses of creative intelligence, the devas, responsible for the whole manifest universe. We went simply with the idea that at this site we would be open to the further enlivenment of the impulses that were functioning in our own physiology. Every aspect of Mother Divine, in the case of this temple, or Shiva, in the case of another, is one of the structuring dynamics of Natural Law contributing to that wholeness that we experience as the Transcendent. Strengthening any of these aspects, therefore, through our attention to it, further strengthens the wholeness that makes up our inner and outer worlds. This is at least the approach that we were taking.

Not all aspects of every temple turn out to be in accord with this approach. There are aspects of the Mother Divine temple which are not fully nourishing; aspect of the Shiva temple which seem a far cry from the lively silence of the Absolute; but on the whole there was something special about each of the holy places we have visited so far and we feel much enriched and purified by each of these experiences.

In the afternoon of Day Six some of our group went out to visit the Vivekenanda Memorial, accessible by a short boat ride from the temple. Vivekananda was the first of India's great exponents of Vedanta to try to bring the Vedic knowledge to the west--to America and Europe. Like Maharishi, he traveled around India teaching and then took off for the west, arriving in U.S. in 1893, in time to represent India at the World Parliament of Religions at the World Fair in Chicago. Vivekanda would go on to form Vedanta societies throughout the U.S. Maharishi later credited him with warming the air for his (Maharishi's) own teachings nearly 80 years later.

On the evening of the sixth day we retired early to prepare for a long bus ride the next day. Rameshwaram was calling.