Namaste And Other Traditions With A Future
Rishikesh, Northern India.
The stories Paramahansa Yogananda tells about running around in these hills in his youth are filled with miracles of higher consciousness: levitating swamis, meditators who could subdue man-eating tigers through the power of the mind, saints who appear and disappear at will and mystics with unfathomable firsthand knowledge of the way consciousness works and the stars move.
Reading the early chapters of Autobiography of a Yogi it sounds as though Yogananda were describing something out of an early day Disneyland. And the strangest part of all – it is most likely that these stories are true.
Things are a bit tamer now in Rishikesh, though it still sprouts meditation palaces at every turn, wandering sadhus and a chaotic, delightful and mercurial nature. It is as though some bolt of higher consciousness slammed into our planet right here in Northern India some five or ten thousand years ago and its smokey remnants smolder still.
The very scrim of unreality through which most of us see the world is here, in the Himalayan foothills, made visible in the form of a smoky mist. It is a mist that floats from the hilltops and settles in the steep ravines cut by the Ganges – and says life is a dream. It is a haze produced naturally by the temperature inversions and the rushing river in these high altitudes. It is produced as well, I would learn, by the trapped emission of the cars and trucks and the smoke from the burning sugar cane fields to the South and the roiling soot from the tall chimneys of the brick-making plants to the West.
My wife and I are in Rishikesh attending a Yoga and Ayurveda conference in Parmath Niketan, an enormous learning center and spiritual retreat, much of which, like most of India, is under construction. Doctors, scientists and visitors from 22 nations are in attendance to hear Americans like Drs. David Frawley and Robert Svoboda and India scholars talk about the ancient healing system of Ayurveda. After the conference we hang around Rishikesh for a week to get a feel for the place outside the conference walls.
Today Rishikesh is known as the Yoga and ashram capitol of the world. One finds the orange shawls and face markings, the walking sticks and matted hair, the gentle presence, the begging bowl and the benevolent detachment in beings up and down the roads and pathways. One wonders who among them is a beggar, a sadhu or a saint. You can’t easily tell who is wise and who is simply wearing the robes of wisdom, but there is a gesture made here that does not lie and connects us all.
Namaste, My Friend
The gesture is a Namaste, yet a different one than our traditional palms together bow familiar in the yoga studio. It is a simple touching of the right hand to the heart. There is a slight tilt of the neck, a barely perceptible raise of the shoulder and a smile. It says my heart sees yours. It is an exquisite piece of nonverbal communication – a remnant of the past, a present truth and maybe a sign that our future is blessed.
Done properly this gesture is actually an energetic exchange at a cellular level. The very cells that make up the muscles of the face and upper body have to be instantaneously in agreement that we are both here plummeting the depths of a cosmic truth – that your heart and their heart are one.
More than anything else it is this Namaste I take back from Rishikesh. I can see the crooked ravines and bluffs and fourteen-story temples, the Ganges, hoards of workers and merchants and beggars and tourists, the slender fit bodies of asana practitioners from Japan and the West, and the wandering white middle-aged seekers in pursuit of something nameless – but most of all I see this hand-to-heart Namaste.
I’d like to believe the heart connection this Namaste recalls is simply a vestigial part of the energy vocabulary of ages past, when that bolt of consciousness plowed into our planet’s path. Many of those who were in tune with that energy have probably long retreated from Rishikesh, taken to the hills, where hopefully they are keeping the spirit of India and the tradition of super consciousness alive while the rest of India builds roads and mans phone banks.
Crossing the Bridge to Ayurveda
The Rishikesh the mystics left behind is today an immensely picturesque village. Crooked roads line high bluffs and steep banks on both sides of the Ganges; the two sides are connected by two narrow pedestrian suspension bridges over which flow foot traffic, motorcycles, mopeds, mule carts, bicycles, shoppers, tourists and holy men. There are beggars of all ages; the blind, the lame, young mothers with babies at their breast, old women squatting before the jostling crowds that throng in both directions over the narrow wooden planks high above the holy river.
Early in the Ayurveda Conference I leave the theory of the science of Ayurveda behind and cross one of these bridges to an Ayurvedic clinic on the other side. It seems I have contracted some sort of bug, affecting my throat and stomach leaving me with all manner of aches and pains. Crossing this bridge, from theory to practice, is a journey most Americans and certainly the American healthcare system is unlikely to take. For that matter even the Indian healthcare system is plunging headlong into a Westernized American model, ill at ease with preventive medicine or long term care.
It’s a shame. Ayurveda is a science of medicine based on a sound and simple diet and the body’s own ability to right itself once it is cleansed and brought back into alignment with its own nature. It is an especially low cost form of preventative care and treatment. At a time here in the West where our national healthcare bill is on the verge of toppling the entire American economy, America could do well to pay attention to this traditional Indian offering. Its effectiveness has been proven and it could very well hold the answers to the paralyzing cost of our medical technological onslaught.
As I make my way over the bridge to the clinic, my heart, one of the only parts of my body apparently functioning optimally, is overtaken by the anguish on the faces of those whose outstretched hands seek only a rupee or two – some of them are children five or six years old, “for Chapati” they say, for bread. This is not a figure of speech. These children are looking for two cents for a piece of bread. Later I will learn to pack oranges with me wherever I go and hand out oranges whenever I can. But for now I am in pain, as I look into the sightless orbs that were once the eyes of a barefoot and blind teenager. This is, I believe, the very suffering that Buddha called the first foundation to understanding.
I continue my walk across the bridge, tears streaming down my face, as the eyes of a young mother begging for food lock with my own. She touches her heart in the Namaste greeting of compassion – compassion for me – as she looks into my red and watery eyes! This is India, compassion, and the recognition of it, is the coin of the realm. I am stunned for I have now become the sufferer, and returning the Namaste gesture, she and I have become one.
Eventually I find the Ayurveda clinic. The doctor sees me immediately and sitting at his tiny desk, a computer before him, my arm outstretched, he reads my various pulses, examines my tongue and eyes and fingernails and asks me questions. At the end of the session he prescribes and hands me a paste to be taken twice a day and an herb to be taken with warm milk. He tells me that the problem is a minor imbalance in my doshas and it will be gone in three days. And indeed it will be. The cost for the consultation, the examination and the medication is 190 rupees, about four and half dollars. Before leaving for India I had gone to an emergency room, a cut on my arm required two stitches. The ER bill came to $1,250.
The doctor and I talk about Ayurveda and how it could help solve the growing diabetes and obesity problems coming to India along with its other imports from the West. But we both acknowledge that pharmaceuticals and medical technology are what’s taking root – even in these hills where higher consciousness was born. We look at one another, and touch our hearts in Namaste. There is nothing left to say.
The Sadhu On The Beach
There is a strip of boulder strewn beach on the East bank of the Ganges just north of the second suspension bridge. Not far from this beach a dump truck sits on a sandbar in a foot of water. Young boys heave rocks from the river bottom into the back of the truck. One ten pound boulder at a time, a kind of slow moving human dredge machine. It is a literally endless task – emptying stones out of the bottom of the Ganges, for what I know not.
One morning I sit on that wide ledge of sand and watch worshippers and bathers cleanse themselves and their clothes in the holy river. One man in particular catches my attention. A lean and supple yogi in long grey beard and bright yellow loin cloth performs asanas on the beach, while his orange and yellow shawls and wraps dry on a huge flat boulder. He does a headstand in perfect alignment for what seems like half an hour, and then kicks down.
From twenty yards off I watch as he carefully dresses in the many layers of his calling, finally wrapping in one swift practiced rotary sweep a long white sash into a perfect turban. He then takes from some invisible pocket a tiny pocket mirror and checks out his rather sadhu-dapper visage and drapes his prayer beads about his neck. He must have been aware that I was watching him for now he walks in my direction, touching his hand to his heart in greeting as he approaches. I return the gesture and he sits beside me. Too guys on the beach thinking. After a minute or two he takes from another of his hidden pockets a pack of Indian cigarettes and offers me one. Smoking is an accepted part of the sadhu practice in India; I politely decline.
“Where from?” He asks. “U.S.”, I reply. That is about the extent of our formal communication. He sits and smokes in silence for the next five minutes during which time I learn all I need to know to be his friend. He emits a kind of low frequency hum of comfort, a steady non-verbal ‘here we are and this is fine.’
We smile at one another at last and he produces from yet another invisible pocket a small matchbox which he sets in the sand and motions for me to open. In it is a tiny neatly cut wedge of hash. Given the level of trust that hangs in the air – in our collective consciousness dare I say – and my natural curiosity concerning the quality of the local goods – I take it, sliding over a 100 Rupee note in return.
He smiles, I smile. We touch our hearts with our right hand in compassionate farewell and off he strides.
Later, I run into him again as we both leave the beach. He smiles as we reach the stone walk that leads from the sand and he points to the brightest, spiffiest moped I’ve seen in all of India. It is chrome yellow with oversized orange reflectors on the handle bars. Leaning against it is a walking stick of polished wood topped off by bright red trident. On the back of the moped on a little rack are two clean and neatly folded wool blankets – apparently the rest of his earthly belongings. Now my gesture to him is a smile and thumbs up, which he returns and we both laugh, as he mounts his moped and putters down the lane.
It is as though some bolt of higher consciousness slammed into our planet some ten thousand years ago and its smokey remnants smolder still in the hills above Rishikesh.
It is more likely than not that this land, as the illustrations in some versions of the Vedas suggest, was visited five or ten thousand years ago by spaceships carrying energies and beings from other galaxies. I am not alone in believing seeds were planted here at that time meant to sprout lush and spread green, that hills like these were home to an ancient knowledge well beyond our own. The people in these hills, I believe, were more likely than not moving pyramid size boulders around with sound.
I also believe the ghost of this ancient energy still flows down the steep ravines and the gorges and the rivers of this part of Northern India and that a vestige of this energy takes shape in this simple Namaste gesture. It is symbolic of the consciousness that resides and connects us all, doctor, beggar, mother, tourist, dealer, priest. And I can not help but think that maybe this particular touching of hand to heart is a seed that carries within it a replicable code that has yet to blossom and fulfill its promise left to us so very long ago.
Namaste, this ancient gesture I bring back with me from India. Pass it on.
Bob Belinoff is a documentary filmmaker and pubic health consultant. He can be reached through his web site: publichealthzoom.com.
By Bob Belinoff
