Somehow, I have managed to travel to Tiruvannamalai, a small temple town in South India, four times over the past eight years. In this article, I will talk about some of my experiences in relation to this place, and how these experiences have developed, and then eventually faded away, over time.
A DESIRE TO GET AWAY
I first went to India around the age of 21. My initial idea was to go to the Himalayas, find somewhere quiet, and just sit and meditate there. I had already planned to go there for at least six months, which was the maximum amount of time that I could squeeze out of my tourist visa. Therefore, I booked a flight from Birmingham to Delhi and even arranged a week at an Airbnb in Dharamshala, which I had chosen as my first destination to start exploring Himachal Pradesh before venturing over into the Himalayas.
Around this time I was enjoying watching a wonderful YouTube series by David Godman on the life and teachings of Ramana Maharshi. In one of these videos, he spoke about an enlightened disciple of Ramana called Lakshmana Swamy. I was also intrigued to learn that this master was still alive and actually lived somewhere in Tiruvannamalai with his own enlightened disciple, Mathru Sri Sarada. I promptly purchased David Godman’s book about these masters and their teachings, No Mind—I Am The Self.
At this point of my life, I didn’t really know which living teachers were truly enlightened masters. Obviously, if you go online, or even if you go to somewhere like Tiruvannamalai or Rishikesh during the busy season, then you will find many people trying to tout themselves as being fully enlightened masters. I personally found it very difficult to believe that everybody who called themselves enlightened was the real deal. In some cases, it was very obvious that this was not the case. Relating to this, when I began reading this book, I became absolutely certain that these two beings, Lakshmana Swamy and Mathru Sri Sarada, were definitely fully enlightened beings.
This certainty that I felt was impelled, I believe, by two elements within the book. The first element was the tremendous authenticity that could be felt in the biographies given for both of the masters. From childhood, both of these beings had their focus entirely on the path to self-realisation. In the case of Lakshmana Swamy, the path that he walked was more based around long hours of pranayama, japa and meditation. He actually only saw his guru, Ramana Maharshi on two occasions, and on the second occasion his spiritual path reached its climax in liberation the moment that Ramana emerged from a building some distance away from where he was sitting. The first words that he exchanged with Ramana came after his moment of enlightenment, when he handed the great master a note telling him that ‘through the path and your [Ramana’s] grace, I have realised the self.’ When Ramana silently looked at him and then lit up with a thousand-watt smile, his experience seemed to be confirmed.
The path that Sarada walked was both similar to and different from her guru’s. When Lakshmana moved back to his home state of Andhra Pradesh, he settled down in a life of isolation. However, after many years of living in such a mode, he started to see people, and a few devotees gathered around him. Some of these devotees were members of Sarada’s family.
As young child, Sarada fell spiritually in love with Swamy and began to be totally consumed only by her love for him. She had no interest in anything in the world except Swamy. Eventually, her parents agreed for Swamy to adopt Sarada as his daughter so that she could stay with him all the time. Three years later, at the tender age of 18, Sarada was enlightened and was, in the words of Lakshama Swamy, now ‘in the same state as Ramana Maharshi’.
It was this story, along with the tremendously clear, concise and naturally authoritative teachings given in the book, which confirmed to me that, rather than going to the Himalayas, I must go to Tiruvannamalai to find these great beings.
TRAVELLING TO TIRUVANNAMALAI
Instead of cancelling my flight to Delhi, I decided that I would stay one night in Delhi and then fly to Chennai and reach Tiruvannamalai via there. At this point in my life, I had a burning desire to simply sit, be and spend as much time in silence as possible. I even remember coming home from long days at work during this time, and just going to sit in the garden to spend an hour or more staring into space.
By the time it was time to travel, I was burning for silence. I remember that during the whole time that I was waiting at the airport, and then during the whole flight to Delhi, I did nothing except sit and look ahead of me in silence. I’ve learned recently that behaving like this on flights has become a viral trend called ‘raw dogging’, which people then post about on their social media for recognition. In these moments, there was no witness to my silence. There was nobody to tell about it. It was just me, myself and I, travelling into the unknown.
The first memory I have of India is of the taxi that I took from the airport to my hotel. I remember that we were inches away from ploughing down a small child, who was wandering through the busy road begging. I was amazed that, as the brakes were slammed down, neither the driver nor the child looked particularly shocked or troubled. It seemed normal.
After this, I mainly meditated in my hotel room, and also took one walk around the locality near the hotel. I remember that I felt too nervous to find a random Indian restaurant to eat, and instead went and ate in a Subway. The next day I flew to Chennai.
I arrived in Chennai and stayed the night there in a hotel near the train station. Looking back at this time, I don’t know why I decided to travel from Chennai to Tiruvannamalai via train. It was my first time in India and I had no one to ask for advice. So, instead of simply getting a sleeper bus or taking a taxi, I ended up taking one train to a place called Villupuram, staying one night there, and then taking another train in the morning to Tiruvannamalai. I still remember wandering through the streets of Villupuram looking for my hotel. I think that it was the first time that many of these people had seen a white person before. I felt a little uncomfortable, but took it in my stride as a means of breaking my comfort zones.
IN TIRUVANNAMALAI
I arrived in Tiru in the morning and took a rickshaw to my accommodation, which I had booked for the span of about five months. I was determined that I just wanted to stay in one place and sink into myself. Seeing that Tiruvannamalai was the home of Arunachala, Ramana Ashram, and Lakshmana Swamy and Mathru Sri Sarada, I thought that it would be the ideal place. Looking back, I see that it was very risky to book one place for such a long time without seeing the condition of it first. Still, it seems that I have always operated with some level of faith and innocence. Life has always taken care of me.
The accommodation was fine and the people who owned the apartment turned out to be a lovely family, who fed me many times and who I became good friends with.
On my first morning, I woke up and set off to find the place where Lakshmana Swamy and Mathru Sri Sarada lived. On their devotee-made website, it said that they did not give darshan to people directly, but it was possible to sit at the gate of their compound for an hour in the morning to meditate. This place was not as well known as, for example, Ramana Ashram or Yogi Ramsuratkumar Ashram. My hosts didn’t know where it was either. Therefore, I went to ask in the post office and the kind man who was working there drew me a map of how to get to the place.
This place, named Arunachala Hrudayam (The Heart of Arunachala) ended up being only a short walk from where I was staying. When I arrived, there was one lady sitting there already at the gate to the compound. It turned out that she was a full-time devotee who lived near there. Her role at the gate was to act as a kind of mediator between the masters and whoever was visiting. If people requested to meet Swamy or Amma, then she would suggest that they just keep coming in the morning to sit at the gate. I did just that.
For the first couple of months, my initial routine was made up of going to meditate at the gate at 8am, and then after that going to Ramana Ashram to continue sitting there in the Old Hall. Then I would have breakfast and carry on sitting, reading, cooking, listening to music or watching something. During those days, I probably would spend between five to seven hours meditating every day. Another favourite habit of mine was to sit on the roof quietly whilst resting my gaze on the mountain. I never went to restaurants or tea shops, and I completely avoided talking to people. I was totally focused on going within. I genuinely felt like enlightenment was in my reach.
Eventually, after about two months of going to sit by the gate, the lady who sat there asked me if I would like to give a note to Amma. Apparently, the procedure was that you should write a note and provide a picture of yourself. When Amma would see the picture, she would know everything about you, the lady said. So, I took a photo with my phone, emailed it to myself, went to a nearby internet cafe and printed it off with a note. On the note, I wrote something about wanting to be of service. I didn’t ask for anything and I didn’t say anything about myself. What is there to say if she already knows everything?
Did I have any special experiences at the gate? Nothing out of the ordinary. Two years prior to this I had experienced what I thought to be a ‘kundalini awakening’. One of the ways that this manifested itself was through spontaneous movements my body would perform when meditating. Sometimes my neck would bend backwards, or it would bend forwards and my chin would touch my sternum. Other times, my whole torso would bend forward and my forehead would touch the ground. Also, my upper body would rotate and move in a clockwise and anti-clockwise direction. These things also continued to happen when I was sitting at the gate. Sometimes I felt some degree of frustration because of the surrounding noises that seemed to spoil the peaceful environment radiating from the compound.
Maybe a week or two after I gave the note, I had two dreams on two consecutive nights. In the first dream, I met Lakshmana Swamy, who was laying down on a sofa and looking very old, frail and ill. With tears in his eyes, he blessed me by putting his hand on my head. On the second night, I met Amma in a dream and received a golden key from her. A few days after this, I came to the gate as usual to meditate. As I left that day and walked back up the narrow little road that led to gate, I felt another ‘subtle gate’ close behind me. At that moment, I knew that I would never come back here again to meditate. From that day on, I didn’t visit any temple or ashram in Tiruvannamalai. I spent the rest of my time there in an isolated state, meditating and occasionally circumambulating the mountain late at night.
A GATHERING
One day, my friend who was renting me the room asked if I would like to go to a spiritual get-together with some other Westerners. I think he thought that I was lonely because I was existing there like a withdrawn recluse. Anyway, I jumped on the back of his motorbike and we drove about five minutes up the main road around the mountain and then took a turn off into a more remote location. Apparently, this was the house of a British guy and his partner.
When we arrived there, everybody was sitting around a big fire singing bhajans led by the British guy on the guitar. It turned out that his name was Kalidas. A middle aged white guy with an Indian-sounding name playing guitar and singing—very original, I thought. The most surprising thing for me was when his partner came around to me and my friend and asked us what we would like to drink—‘vodka, gin, beer?’ I said that I didn’t drink.
I realised that I had been very naive until this point about the kinds of people that come to these places in India. I thought that people really came here to do the kind of intense sadhana that I was doing. When another couple turned up with their young child, and the woman kneeled down in front of the fire and started manically screaming with her hands in the air, my suspicions were confirmed—most of these people were just lost souls, posers and escapists. We left.
LIGHT & SOUND
As I continued my meditation practice mainly in my accommodation, on the veranda in a swing, or on the rooftop in a chair, some different experiences began to unfold. One night, I woke up at 3am and decided to meditate. When I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes, I heard what I can only describe as the ‘roar of a thousand oceans’ coming from inside of me. It was like a massive, vibrating droning sound arising from within myself. From this point onwards, I could connect to this sound whenever I sat down to meditate.
Something else that changed was that my visual perception took on a different quality. If I looked at a plain wall, then instead of just seeing a plain wall, I would see the wall as an oscillation of millions of pixels—tiny dots of scintillating light. This then became a fixed aspect of my way of seeing. Later on, if I looked at an object and relaxed my gaze, then that object would seem to ‘melt’ into this ‘pixelated light’ and then disappear.
Another time, I woke up in the middle of the night and found myself in a total void that was devoid of any sense of ‘me’ at all. This experience didn’t return though during that stay.
I also had a number of interesting experiences whilst walking around the mountain. Whenever I would go to walk around the mountain, I would leave at midnight or 1am so as to avoid the crowds and the heat of the day. I would then come back in the early morning and sleep. When I would walk around the mountain, the energy inside of me and outside of me would be so strong that I would have kriyas, or spontaneous movements, even whilst moving. My neck would roll back and both of my hands would assume a variety of different mudras.
During one of my late-night walks, I encountered a mad-looking woman in the middle of the road about a quarter of the way around the mountain. She screamed something at me and I just ignored her and carried on walking. This woman later became known as the avadhuta, Toppi Amma. However, at that time, she was not a ‘Toppi’ Amma, because she wore her hair down loose without a hat.
Despite all of these different experiences, I cannot say that I became enlightened or awakened during my first visit to Tiruvannamalai. In terms of these phenomenal experiences and dreams, I didn’t really know what any of them meant. At that time, I had no idea that masters could also work just as easily in their subtle bodies as they could do in their physical bodies. Maybe there was never a need to meet Lakshmana Swamy and Mathru Sri Sarada in person.
I think the most valuable aspect of this first, and most significant visit was the amount of uninterrupted time that I had to spend in relative stillness. After that time, I have never practised long hours of meditation in the same way as I did then.
SECOND VISIT
My second visit to Tiruvannamalai was mainly uneventful. I planned to go one year after I originally went because it was somewhere to go and I had nothing better to do. I didn’t revisit any of the ashrams this time and I mainly took time to meditate, be in silence and do some writing work.
In fact, the most interesting experience that I had on this visit was not in Tiruvannamalai but actually on the way there. Now that I knew what I was doing, I flew to Bangalore and arranged a taxi to pick me up and take me to Tiru. About three hours into the journey, when we were already well into Tamil Nadu, I began to experience a tremendous sense of bliss mixed with a strange sense of nostalgia. For one hour, tears flowed as I continued to feel both ecstasy and longing at the same time. I don’t know where this experience came from. I felt like I was tuning into another time that I had spent in this part of the world. It felt like a welcome, or a farewell—I don’t know.
Another interesting anecdote from this visit time came from a conversation that I had with the same guy who rented me the room before. He told me that in the last year he had two people staying at different times in that room who claimed to be avatars—one a Shiva avatar and another one a Kalki avatar. This again reminded me of the madness and delusion of a lot of the people who come to these kind of places—a madness that I mainly avoided by staying alone and not talking to people.
THIRD VISIT
My third visit came after a break of some years. I was staying in India for period of three months, either at Mohanji’s ashram in Bangalore, or travelling and volunteering at whichever program he was doing in other places like Shirdi, Puri, Palakkad, etc. When Mohanji and a group of people headed to various places in Karnataka and Kerala for a number of temple inauguration programs, I decided to get a bus to Tiruvannamalai for one week on my own. Staying in the ashram for over a month, I had been constantly surrounded by people, so I felt like having some time alone.
For this visit, I just had one thought in the back of my mind—that I might like to see a being called Mouna Siddhar, a genuine siddha who had spent years doing tapas around the mountain, and who now had an ashram-type space constructed around him. Even though I had this idea, I wasn’t really committed to going anywhere and doing anything in particular once I got there.
In the interim period between my last visit and this visit, I had awakened to myself, to my nature as pure consciousness, and had started the process of stabilising in that state and dissolving whatever karmic strands may still remain within me. When someone enters this state, it is unlikely that he will be seeking out gurus or looking for powerful locations where they can have expanded experiences.
Awakening is really like finding the key. All that you need to do then is turn that key and walk through the door. However, this ‘walking’ is not an overnight process. The process of dissolution may take even longer than the time it took to awaken. And speaking of keys—when I told Mohanji about the dream experiences that I had at Tiruvannamalai years before, he said that this golden key that Amma gifted to me was actually the supreme consciousness itself. Probably he meant that this was the ‘seed’ of awakening to the supreme consciousness. Another coincidence was that this awakening happened one or two months after Lakshmana Swamy had left the body at age 100.
Anyway, I was again in Tiruvannamalai, and I was mainly spending my time resting and working on my U. G. Krishnamurti book. Otherwise, I made a visit to Ramsuratkumar Ashram and also to Arunachala Hrudayam. I found Ramsuratkumar Ashram to be a beautiful and serene place. When I went to stand by Yogi Ramsuratkumar’s Samadhi shrine, I heard a voice telling me a few things.
Then I went to visit to Arunachala Hrudayam. I found the same woman still sitting by the gate, who quickly informed me that, since COVID, it was no longer permitted for people to come to sit there in the morning and meditate. She asked if I had visited there before, and when I told her that I used to come here some years ago, she said that I could meditate at the gate for ten minutes and then go. I sat for ten minutes, paid my respects internally to Lakshmana Swamy and Mathru Sri Sarada, and then took my leave. I felt Amma tell me that she was with me.
After this, I met my old friend who rented me the accommodation during the first two times that I was there. We went to swim at a large tank at a property that he and his family looked after near the Samudram lake. When we arrived at this property, I met a lady there who said she had been going to see Mouna Siddhar every day. I felt that this was a cue for me to also get up off my arse to go and see him. She told me what time the pujas were, so I decided to go there at 5pm later that day.
When I arrived, I felt a massive sense of power and stillness in the room where he was sitting. He sits on a single raised platform all day long in total silence. At that time, he did Shiva abhishekham, with the assistance of his attendants, twice a day. He also has a dog that comes and sits in his area with him in front of his platform. During the puja, I noticed that the dog was in deep meditation. It was visible in his eyes.
Satisfied with getting a glimpse of this phenomenal master, I decided to get up and go. When I went to do this, I heard a voice inside of me saying: ‘Stay longer. Come and see me.’ A few minutes after this, a few people walked in and immediately were ushered towards the area where he was sitting behind a metal railing. One of the attendants also beckoned me to stand and go for darshan as well. I did so, went in, and he blessed me by looking at me in the eyes and raising his hand a few times. After this I continued sitting.
Being in that room at that time felt like a collision between whatever silence I had inside of me and whatever state of silence he was in. It felt like a nuclear explosion within the silent core of existence. After staying for a few hours and also enjoying a traditional Shiva puja involving only the loud ringing of bells, I left.
When I later reached Palakkad, I went to see Mohanji and showed him a picture of Mouna Siddhar. He took my phone in his hand, looked intently at the picture, and said: ‘Mmm, very nice.’ I loved the way that he said this. It was like he was looking at some kind of finely worked piece of art. Admittedly, I had the desire to see this kind of reaction from Mohanji. Sometime before this, I sent a video of a master that I knew Mohanji was connected to, Shiva Prabhakara Siddha Yogi, to one of his assistants, and asked them to show it to him. They replied to me later that he looked at the video as if he was admiring a beautiful sports car. So yes, it was the same phenomenon! Every expression of a master like Mohanji is full of beauty and nectar.
FOURTH VISIT
I wasn’t planning on going to Tiruvannamalai for a fourth time. I thought that the third visit would represent a moment of closure for me. Well, it seemed that I was wrong. A friend of mine invited me to accompany them on their first visit there. I thought, ‘Why not? It’s something to do…’ During this visit, nothing significant happened other than getting incredibly sick on an overnight visit to Chidambaram. I was so sick that I had to go into hospital and get put on an IV drip for an hour or so.
Outside of my sickness, in Tiru I went to visit Ramana Ashram, Yogi Ramsuratkumar Ashram, Arunachala Hrudayam, Mouna Siddhar and also went for my first darshan at the Arunachaleswarar Temple. I even had a drive-by darshan of Toppi Amma, who I hadn’t seen in person since I saw her years before on the girivalam road.
This time there were no experiences. No inner voices were heard. Nothing. I realised that I was nearing a place where all relative experiences were extinguished. This happens when everything within our perception, both inside and outside, is totally equalised. In order to have an experience, there has to be the perception of two: an experiencer and an experienced object. In the fully established state of natural beingness, the identity of the experiencer, the ‘I’, is completely dissolved. And when the apparently internal ‘I’ is dissolved, the external ‘I’s (the ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘they’) are also dissolved. So then who will experience what? Then there is only one.
I realised that in the past I had had various communion experiences (that may have been hallucinations) because there was still something that I wanted to hear, or something that I wanted to know or experience. This visit really showed me that all of that was finished now. There was nothing that I specifically wanted to hear or see. I had clarity about who I am and what I am supposed to do in this life. This was some kind of closure, I suppose.
T. S. Eliot has said:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
Our world is created from experience. So perhaps it ends with a whimper, too.