Dravidian and Narayani run the Osho Amar Meditation in Bray Park via Murwillumbah in the Tweed Valley Northern New South Wales in Australia. Dravidian is currently recovering from a serious accident Dravidian and Narayani can be contacted via email.
OUT OF THE UNSEEN CAGE Inspired by the belief that others who are in a similar space to that in which I was at the commencement of this story -- and I know we numbered in numberless terms --may find some help or inspiration towards stepping onto the PATH TO TOMORROW... by ATIT DRAVIDIAN
One thing about the rat-race: even if you win it, you're still a rat. Throughout that year of 1991, the feelings of dis-satisfaction with my life-style, feelings of unidentified need, of unassuageable hunger had been recurring with greater frequency, greater intensity, until at times I knew not what to do with myself. I was fifty-one that year, watching my life slip away in mediocrity. Indeed, I was successful in my business - that wasn't the problem. It was an intangible something, one of those things one can only grasp at and yet not touch, which I can only describe as an emptiness, a void. Many times that year I'd explored that exquisite northern part of New South Wales, a full thousand miles from my home, drawn there by a magnet held by I knew not what or whom. In car and on foot I'd quartered the area: all I had was the feeling that whatever "it" would be which would fill my void, that something was there. So I was searching for something I couldn't describe, to fill an emptiness that I hadn't fully recognised, let alone defined. Often I considered ruefully the apparent impossibility of the task I had set myself. The desperation grew, the pressure mounted. I started by offering my business for sale. I bought new clothes, looked for new friends and examined every last thing I was doing to see what each action did for me, and realised that very little of what I was doing - a scant few minutes of each day - gave me any reward at all. Caged. Yes, that's the word for it. It's a very safe place, locked in a gilded cage of one's own making. Not that more than a handful know about the cage... I certainly didn't, but I could feel its unseen, unrecognised bars. And when, early one Australian spring morning, I awoke with the suffocating feeling of restriction, I delivered an anguished scream from my soul to the Universe. "There must be more to life than this!" And it came to me also, that I had no real idea of what was my "this". I boiled it down to the daily meaningless grind, the empty relationships, the loneliness. The answer to my semi-coherent heart scream was beyond my wildest imaginings. I'll try to share it with you now. I lived alone, a steadily greying Melbourne professional man of sober mien, not widely known for impetuosity, nor yet for than occasional spontaneity. Somewhat deliberate, occasionally hesitant in speech, considering and tasting every word before vouchsafing it to the freedom of the air. A not untypical representative of academia, you might say, the world of which was my first love. So when I walked out of my consulting rooms that evening, only I was aware that things had changed, and irreversibly. I did all those methodical housewifely things at home and then climbed into my ancient converted London bus to drive a thousand miles to stay with a colleague's sister in the enchanted Kalang valley, up there in northern New South Wales. It's lovely there at any time: in October it's a heaven of spring sunshine by day bright-flashed with multi-hued darting parakeets. At night the stars are at hand's reach, lighting a landscape gripped in astonishing crystal cold. The old bus was ideal for the trip. A greyhound of the highway it never was, and now, a fifty-five years old child of the Great Depression and sorely battered and tired through a long and chequered life - we had much in common, that old bus and me - the lumbering, cumbersome ancient vehicle trundled along in a definitely contemplative manner, quite in tune with my mood. After three days, alone and in silence if you except the bellowing AEC diesel beside me, I drove slowly along the narrow dusty road through the lovely hidden valley: a sharp bend, the track widened for a rare road junction. I pulled over for a minute, my eye caught by a gay letter box on a post - bright red, sparkling in the sun, white lettered "NARYANI". I mused over the word, transported back to a boyhood in the Raj. Sitars, ragas, temples, incense... even the quiet with the engine stilled was evocative in that perfumed stillness. I looked again - yes, that's it... she's spelt it oddly, but even so... My hand lay on the letter-box, drawn there I knew not how: fingers traced the name. Bright in my inner eye, the image of a cool grey-eyed fair lady appeared, totally and startlingly at variance with the name I was even then touching, and totally clear in my vision. As I shook myself, muttering of touches of the sun, I climbed back into the driving seat and reached for the starter switch, it seemed to me that the pantheon of Hindu Gods waved me along the track with a rippling Namasté. I followed the School Bus, drove on to Road's End, lost in the soft beauty of the valley, but suddenly aware that I had to know this road very well... Naryani, oddly spelt, lives here. It seems I was rather absent with my friend's sister.... Of that visit to the Kalang and Bellinger Valleys another story may be written, and certainly reverberates to this day in my consciousness, of magical days in the sun. At its end, rolling south again through the golden plains of the inland, I returned to Melbourne, returned to the day to day existence, knew in my heart that I could stay no longer. The time had come. ************ An October morning in Melbourne. Raining. Of course! A gale whining eldritch through the tram wires outside my office window. Outside in the street, my partner dodged the freezing blasts with an armful of mail from the Post Office: the aroma of fresh coffee awaiting his arrival pervaded the office suite. The mail sorted, we sat quietly studying the morning's delivery. On my desk the magazine flopped open. "Spontaneous individualistic matured female" it read, "seeks companion of compatible calibre." The advertiser was one Narayani, spelt correctly: the address was that of the red letter box! Time stood still. My pen wrote a letter. My tongue licked an envelope. My thumb affixed a stamp. My legs took it to the Post Office. I was afoot on the Path to Eternity. I knew. The light shone out of the gaily hand-decorated envelope which arrived a few days later. It was the start of an exciting journey by letters, by telephone, by shared feelings transmitted and received over the thousand miles of telephone line crossing the spring-time outback. "You're mad" they said. I was, too. Still am, for the matter of that. "It isn't possible to love without knowing the beloved." So 'tis said. but it happened to me, that enchanted Australian spring. Hours I spent studying her letters, written with an astonishing elegance and economy of language which demanded attention. Nights in solitude, writing reams by candlelight in my rather archaic (um, stuffy?) English, feeling that I was already in a Temple communing with its Goddess. Then, later, the telephone calls, an hour, two hours at a time: this crystal voice, very English. At every turn there was a surprise for my ossified mind. I had to... for my life I had to stretch, to get out of the strait-jacket, just to keep up with her quick-silver thoughts. I was able to render her some small services: I felt like a village swain offering posies to his maid. Her word of thanks - no, I won't share that just now - lives in the sound room of my heart. "Come" she said, her voice young, liquid, melodious, alive on the humming wires. I packed carefully, but knew not what I'd packed. The car - roadworthy? The roads - clear? all open? no floods on the inland route? The meticulous planning of the long journey - did it matter? I'd have sprouted wings. I set out at sunset. Twenty hours or so to drive through the long, starlit night. A delicious sleep under the stars, where? north of Parkes somewhere. The sun rose on the majestic northern ranges... three hundred miles to go. The car purred: I believe it knew. Blazing early afternoon sunshine on the red letter box. The gate latched behind me, I drove slowly along the dusty gravel road, past a farm entrance, ever uphill. I crossed a cattle grid, passed a pretty wooden cottage, dived into dense rain-forest, over a bridge... Insh'allah, I'm arrived. Yes, that's what she named her place - "Insh'allah". And I had a sensation, a feeling of awe, as I stopped the engine, got out of the car, quietly clicked the car door shut. The sun blazed down. The silence I could touch, feel it soft and heavy in my hands. Cicadas sang: deafening paradox indeed, for this only accentuated the silence. So there I stood, stretching, feeling the tensions of the long drive wash out of me, feeling the peace of this, this, sacred that's the word, this sacred space, this Temple, imbue my being. There was nobody there, the little hut in the forest clearing was empty. And then, over the low hill behind the shining water tank... ...a wide straw hat, a green overall buttoned any-old-how, a bright little backpack like a child's school pack, a stick of celery like a bannered lance erect through the top of it, a hint of shining fair hair under the ridiculous hat... ...and cool quizzical grey eyes.... ...and with a smile that dimmed the sunshine she walked into my arms. I felt that I had come home, home from the wars, that her touch on my arms and the smile in her eyes were balm on the scars of battle. ************ She said, only the other day as I sat down to write this, that all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. So in that sense, I suppose that this isn't really a story, only a prologue. And in the same sense, my life until that spring day when the light in her eyes and the sun in her hair and the incandescence of her being first illuminated my soul was only a preparation for what has since transpired, for the magic carpet ride on which I launched myself that day. On that day, in that moment, I knew I had a choice which was no choice at all, given what I have told you about the desperation which propelled me to this point. My choice, put simply, was between the present and the past, the here-and-now and the never-was, between illusion and reality. Had I chosen the latter, this would have been a story as she defined it. But I didn't. In closer sharing of our lives until this time, we found so many co-incidences that we had to go into detail of progenitors. We found, added bliss that we are half-brother and half-sister, children of a wild professional soldier who cast his seed widely. Thus a new life began in which my forest witch teaches me that the first step in loving and respecting her, is to love and respect myself. She teaches that the first step to stilling the scream is to acknowledge the torture. She teaches that the first step to health is to acknowledge the sickness, to get in touch with what my feelings are telling me and to trust them above all. And she teaches that the first step to leaving the cage of one's confinement is to know who built the cage. And with what. Henry David Thoreau wrote: "I went to the woods because I wanted to live deep, and suck out all the marrow of life! ...to put to rout all that was not life... and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
