Still in the Southern Part of India by Paul Cragg

A week into our trip and the personal chemistry of the group is gelling. The theme of the first week has been Maharishi's very early days on leaving the Himalayas; his first public speech; and his inauguration of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement in Madras (now Chennai). And so it was that we arrived in Rameshwaram, the town whose name kept arising in Maharishi's mind as he sat on the banks of the Ganges.

It is a town of approximately 40,000 indelibly imprinted on the collective Indian mind as the place from which Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, and hero of the Ramayana, led an army of monkeys and bears over the bridge built by Hanuman into the kingdom of Shri Lanka. According to the story of the Ramayana, it was in Lanka that Ram defeated the demon Ravana and his armies and rescued his wife Sita. After this victory Rama and Sita returned across the bridge to Rameshwaram and there asked forgiveness of Shiva for killing Ravana, who though evil was still a Brahmin.

For our party, however, the highlight was not reliving this ancient history and its monuments, but more the witnessing of history in the making as we visited a small group of Maharishi Pundit who chanted Rudra Abishek for us in two sessions lasting almost three hours.

We sat directly behind a group of eleven pundit boys in a room no bigger than 4 x 3 yards. The men sat in the back of this small room and the ladies sat nearby in the corridor. It was so personal! The intonations of the chanting was sweet on the ears and resonated into the physiology in a way that only Maharishi Vedic recitation can. We were left with the feeling that we had experienced something very special.

In this we experienced a victory of another kind, and another step in the creation of Maharishi's legacy for the future.

Paul Cragg,
Great Britain