Carol’s mom, Jean lived with us the last 2 years of her life. During part of the time she knew we wanted to move to India and were basically waiting for her to die. She didn’t like this much.
After Jean died, I went to the Social Security office and applied for Social Security benefits, quit my job at Soffront, and we started getting ready to move to India. Getting rid of all our stuff took three months.
We had garage sales, sold things on E-Bay, and took antiques to consignment shops. We had 3 households to disband, Carol’s, mine, and her parents’. We had to look at every item and decide what to do with it. Those things that I felt were family heritage, I boxed up and took to Megan and Rich before we left for India. We took many loads of usable items to Goodwill. We took more trucks to the dump. By the time we were done we each had a couple of suitcases, and we shipped a few boxes, mainly of books that I could not make myself give away. Books were a big item for me. I had accumulated many over my lifetime that I thought worth keeping. Most were not worth taking to India. As we got rid of everything we felt lighter, less encumbered.
We were ready to let go of our old life and start up a new one, and excited to do this in a new land, and one as foreign as India.
Then we made the trip. Sathya was waiting for us at the airport. We were so happy to see his face at about 4 AM when we cleared customs and walked out into the heat and the massive Chennai International Airport crowd. His driver drove us the four hours to Tiruvannamalai. Dawn had broken before we got there, and we were able to see Arunachala, the mountain we would live with for the net eight years, from the road, from maybe 20 KM away. Sathya drove us to his house, where we were staying until we got settled. It was so chaotic at the airport, and we were exhausted from the 24-hour flight, it was so good to have a friend waiting!
So now we were in India. Our old ‘daily life’ was built out of a myriad of habits. Now none of these fit anymore, and we would have the chance to develop new ones.
As I write this section, I realize I wrote a lot on my blog, richardarunachala.wordpress.com. I started this in July of 2007 and over the time we were in India did a post about every week, so this period of my life is far better documented than any other. There were about 400 posts and 25,000 photos posted. It was heavy on photos since I wanted to give an immersive experience of being here. The average post has 60 photos, some have many more.
As I think about the time in India, it seems like there were phases, and there were several long-term projects/activities. We will see how it comes out.
We arrived in November of 2007, just before Deepam, the biggest celebration of the year in Tiruvannamalai. Sathya met us at the airport at about 4 AM. It was hot and noisy and crowded with people. There were so many people waiting for incoming international flights, many of which arrive about this time. But we recognized a face in the crowd - Sathya! His driver drove us to a hotel in Chennai, then the next morning to Tiruvannamalai, about a 4 hour drive. As we neared Tiruvannamalai, t we saw Arunachala rising in front of us! We were staying in Sathya’s house. We had a room with a mattress on the floor. We were so happy to have this. The house was walking distance from Ramanasramam, which was a central focus for our life for the next years.
We went to Ramanasramam and presented ourselves. Mani, Ramana Maharshi’s great-nephew and one of the managers of the ashram, remembered that we were there before with Nome. Since we were with Nome, we were treated as people very close to the ashram. Mani invited us to eat there any time we wanted. This was not usual. For the most part, people who ate there were either guests, staying there, or Ramanasramam staff.
I soon saw that Sathya was involved In too many things, and so would not be a good local person for us to use for support to make a life here. So I found the rickshaw driver that I remembered form a previous visit, Rajan. I was impressed with his English and had a good feeling about him. I met him at Usha’s café. We had coffee and talked. I proposed an unusual arrangement, where he would basically be on-call to drive us around and help us out. I proposed paying him 3000 rupees a month.
This was about $50. A poor family lives on about 100 rupee per day. Rajan, on a good day in the tourist season would make maybe 500 rupees. He thought about it and agreed. I am so glad that he did. Rajan made our life in India manageable. Otherwise many things would have been much more difficult, and our abilities for life limited by language. Rajan knew his way around, and he had good English. He had taught himself English, largely by reading English newspapers. So he was a smart guy.
We had a house waiting for us. At a SAT retreat just before the trip, we found that a SAT member owned a house near Tiruvannamalai, and that we could rent it. We quickly made and signed a one- year lease. It was a small house on more than one acre of land. It had a big garden, maintained by people they had working for them to do this. I don’t remember the details but it took us about one week to move in.
What a wonderful start to our new life. We had a home, and we had help to get us started living in a new place. Now there were many things we needed to do. Residency permits, bringing a phone line about ½ km from the road for phone and internet, get phone and modem installed, and get a banking account. Plus get local clothes. Which meant go to fabric stores and buy fabric to take to a tailor, who measures you, and plans your piece. Then a few days later you go back and it is ready, made just for you.
And nothing is in English. And they use a very different alphabet, so there is no chance of reading a sign. But we had Rajan, and in a few weeks it was all done.
At first we either called Rajan, or walked. Our house was pretty close to Arunachala and the Inner Path. Pretty soon we started walking the Inner Path from our house, around the north side of Arunachala, and out at Pachaiamman Koil. And then to the Rama Krishna Hotel for South Indian breakfast. This really was our favorite local meal. Ghee dosas, sambhar, idlies, vadas. Poori and potato masala. And Indian coffee; this was hot milk, sugar and instant coffee. I am surprised that both Carol and I liked it so much. Often we would go to Ramanasramam for lunch; maybe we would go there early in the day and walk up the hill to Skandashram.
A big activity for us at first was walking the Inner Path. We would do this 2 or 3 times a week. We were also exploring Arunachala and finding little used paths. By May, 2008 we had found an old path that crossed over the hill, and made a big short cut in the Inner Path. Looking back on it now, I am surprised how quickly I moved pas just walking the Inner Path to really starting to explore. This exploration would be a big part of the next few years. It started when I noticed other small paths when walking the Inner Path, and I know about paths; they go somewhere, you just have to follow them to know where.
In February, 2008, we got a call from Marga, a woman whose boyfriend we knew from SAT. She had been working with some a small local NGO, and she wanted to meet with us.
We met her at Satya’s Café (a different Satya), on Perumpakken Road in Samuthiram Village, not far from Sri Ramanasramam. She was leaving India the next day. She had worked with a local man, Dhakshinamoorthy, to set up a nonprofit, called here a “Trust,” to help care for “abandoned elders.” In India the system for elder care is the oldest son. He is expected to care for his parents until *and after) their death. There is more about our activities with this group later in this document as a section in RichardArunachala Blog.
I just followed my instinct, and told her I would take over for her. I really had no idea what it entailed.
In August, our life in India changed. I bought a Honda 108CC motor scooter. We eventually would not need Rajan for everything.
To buy this, we needed to take a taxi to Pondicherry and buy it from the dealer there. Rajan then drove it back to Tiruvannamalai, about 100 km; it took him maybe 3 hours for the drive. For the first few weeks I just drove near our house, then on a back road, and then finally, the 3 km to Ramana Ashram. Eventually I was comfortable going everywhere, but it took several months. One thing I practiced was driving the scooter off of the roadway. This was a critical maneuver to avoid oncoming busses, which travelled faster than any other vehicle, and seemed to have right-of-way over everything except cows. Many people are killed each year by these busses.
In July 2008 I started the blog. In many ways the blog chronicles our years in India.
When I got to India I had been posting in a Yahoo group run by Harsha, maybe the biggest nondual spiritual newsgroup at the time. He liked what I posted about Tiruvannamalai, and invited me to post on his blog, Luthar.com. I made a few posts, and then in July we were invited to a family function in Rajan’s family’s village, some distance away from Tiruvannamalai. Carol and I went and enjoyed ourselves. It was an annual celebration and pooja at the family shrine in the village. It is a big event for the family.
The big event in the pooja was a sacrifice of a goat. The goat is the skinned and cleaned, and made into the meal for the event, Goat Briyani. I wrote this up on his blog, and posted a bunch of photos. And I got such a negative response from Harsha’s spiritual – and vegetarian - community that I ended up deciding to create my own blog, and started from scratch to build an audience. I had 646 readers (“Hits”) the first full month, 9K in the first year, 75K in the second and 130K in the third. It still receives well over 100K hits per year, even though I have not posted anything on India in about 4 years. The blog has more than 1.5 million hits now.
After the blog got going, a big part of our life was centered around it. Every week I would try to post something, so we were constantly on the lookout for material. Carol and I both had cameras, and for something big, we would both take photos, as many as 1000 in a single day. We took cameras with us everywhere we went. I synchronized the clocks on both cameras, so that when I imported all the photo files, I could easily put them into date/time sequence. This is better when trying to tell a story of what happened from the viewpoint of two cameras. I had more than 400 posts in the next seven years, and published more than 25,000 photos. We looked for things that would make good posts. For the most part, we did not understand what we were recording, and afterwards would do internet research and figure out what happened. For the blog, I needed to provide a context so that Westerners would have a chance to understand.
There were a number of series of posts where I covered something in detail. Some of the main ones are listed below. Some series were worked on for years. I will write about some of these in the sections below.
First post 9/4/2008: Sadhu feeding for Carol’s birthday
richardarunachala.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/sadhu-feeding-for-carols-birthday/
We discovered that in India, for a birthday, you give gifts to the people near to you. A child will take treats, for example, to his classroom in school. We loved the idea of giving things away for a birthday; what a difference from an American birthday, where the attention is on you and how many presents you get! So, for the first time for Carol’s 60th birthday in 2008, we gave food to sadhus. We had breakfast meals made up and packaged into individual meals. done at Sathya’s café, We had Rajan drive us in the early morning around Arunachala where there were always many Sadhus. This was special contact with the Sadhus, many of whom would give a blessing as they got the food. With some of them, it was like, when you looked into their eyes, they were as deep as the sea. Others were orange-dressed beggars.
We did this the rest of the time we were in India for each of our birthdays, and every few months during the year. We started with 75 meals, and expanded to 100 then 125. Dakshinamurty and his wife would get up at 4 AM to start working on the meals. The cost was about $50.
Several times we did “Sadhus feasts,” and made sit-down lunches for about 150 Sadhus. These were great. One of the sahdus became the regular “Sadhu host” for the event, leading chanting before the meal, and making sure that, as hosts, we did what we were supposed to do when we were supposed to do it. No one could start eating until we were done. These meals with the guests with all the traditions and blessings of everybody involved cost about $200.
Later I found out that, to Indian minds, feeding others, especially holy people, was something they thought brought you great punya, spiritual merit. Because Carol and I felt pretty blessed to begin with, we started to have Rajan’s two children giving out the meals. This way, the sadhus blessed the kids.
First Post: 9/10/2008 Inner Path Southside from Ramanasramam
richardarunachala.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/arunachala-on-the-inner-path-southside-from-r amanasramam/
This was a major project for a while, the first such series of blog postings. We knew of the Inner Path before we got there, from the walk with Nome when we had visited before the move. We felt it was a special place, peaceful away, from the city and all the people. Walking around the mountain Arunachala was said to have great spiritual benefit and this was a way we could to it that was better suited our temperaments than was the walk along the road. We walked the Inner Path in the early morning hours many times, at least twice a week for several years. I think we walked the Inner Path maybe 500 times. We got to know it, and some of the places that felt like special places just to sit for a while.
As I got to know it, I wanted a way to record various paths and places. I found Google Earth, and started a custom map. Here is the one that shows Pradakshina routes, walkways to circumambulate this small mountain, held by so many as a special and holy place with so much power.
Ramanasramam is on the bottom right. The main walking route, the “Outer Path,” is shown in yellow. In red is the Inner Path. Later versions of this map show additional paths that we had made a few years after we got there.
We would not go the full 8- mile route since we didn’t much like walking through the town, with its noise and people, rickshaws, trucks, buses, cars, and motor-bikes.
Instead we would stop at the Rama Krishna Hotel, get breakfast and have Rajan pick us up. This is where we learned to love South Indian breakfast.
I wanted to photograph and write blog postings there were immersive, that would give the reader a taste of the experience. I thought the way to do this was with lots of photos. The average post had about 60 photos, some had more than 150. Posting like this, I did not think I could do justice to the Inner Path, so I made up section names, then posted each section of the Inner Path.
I found a map and Photoshopped in the Inner Path and a few landmarks. I updated this map as I updated the blog series.
First , in green from Ramanasramam. Second, in blue, along the southwest side. Third, in purple, in Katu Siva tank area and around Parvati Hill. Fourth, orange, on the North Side, called “The Elephant” for a big rock formation. Fifth, in red, through the trees, and sixth, in yellow, to Pachiaimann Koil, and out to the main road.
It was September, 2010 before I actually started the six-path posts. It was March, 2011 when I was through, so during this time I walked, photographed then posted photos and a write-up for about one section a month until finished.
One result of this series was an increase in foot traffic, especially Indian people walking the Inner Path. This increased greatly. A common weekend activity there was for the family (extended family, with grandmothers, fathers and their wives, and the oldest children, to take a trip to a temple and make a day of it, taking food to eat, and planning to stay a while. I think they started doing this with the Inner Path, too. We saw several large groups sitting and eating -and not carrying off the trash. And we only walked early in the day. Sometimes people would contact us through the blog, we would take Indians with us to walk the Inner Path. It was kind of funny to be showing India to Indian people.
I felt like this was a very good thing to do. We loved the Inner Path. We were making more people aware of it, and giving them a chance to experience it with all the photos, then to walk and actually experience it for themselves. It was magic for several years. But everything changes. Perhaps because I made the Inner Path better known and more visited, the increased traffic made the Forest Department concerned for the safety of the forest, and so they closed to Inner Path altogether. As the years have passed the Forest Department has further closed the mountain off to visitors. Now they even prohibit climbing to the top of Arunachala as has been done for thousands of years. They open it up only during Deepam, when thousands of people trek up the hill to bring the ghee needed to keep the lamp lit for ten days.
We were there during golden years. For this I am so grateful.
First post 10/2/2008 Walking up to Skandashram
richardarunachala.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/walking-up-to-skandashram/
Ramana Ashram was a big element in our lives there, and we wrote about it in a number of ways. One was to show typical daily activity, and at various times of day. I also showed places where most visitors would see on the hill, Skanda Ashram, and Virupaksha Cave. Another was posting about some of the many Hindu spiritual events that take place at Ramana Ashram. We did not use Ramanasramam as much as some, because we have our own spiritual practice, so had less need of it.
Shown above is a pooja to Nandi for Cow Pongal in front of Mother’s Shrine.
One thing we especially enjoyed over the years was eating lunch at Ramana Ashram.
To the right is a typical lunch meal. There would be 200-300 people, sitting on the floor eating off banana leaves. The food was served, one dish at a time, by Ashram staff. You would wait for everything to be served before you started eating. Eating, of course, is done only with the right hand.
First post 9/12/2008 New access to Ramana sites below Virupaksha Cave
richardarunachala.wordpress.com/2008/09/12/arunachala-new-access-to-ramana-sites-below- v irupaksha-cave/
After a few months, I thought a great blog series would to visit and post about places where Ramana Maharshi had been over his life, and around Arunachala. So I set out to do this, By this time, I knew that I would take lots of photos, and post about each place. This seemed worthwhile for those interested in Ramana. And it would be a good experience for Carol and me. For this, I engaged a helper, Sarann, a young man I knew with good English, and who had grown up o the side of Arunachala. He had a deep love for the mountain. He is now a big-time local tour leader, and well-thought of by the groups he leads. It was his first time to some of the places we went. So we kind of helped get him started with places that would be of interest to Ramana devotees.
Altogether I posted 20 different sites. Most were in Tiruvannamalai, but some were in Madurai, about 200 miles SW of Tiruvannamalai. This is where young Ramana realized the Self. We also visited Ramana’s birthplace – Tiruchuli, and Tirukkoyilur the small city that Ramana passed through on his journey to Arunachala.
These posts were done over 2008 and 2009.
First Post 7/25/2008 Arunachala, my heart, Southside views
richardarunachala.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/arunachala-my-heart-southwest-side-views/
One of the things I liked most was to explore the mountain. During the first years in India I was all over Arunachala, except to the top. When I walked on the Inner Path, I saw many smaller paths leading towards Arunachala. I followed a number of these. These led to finding things like Papaji’s Cave, on the west side of the mountain, and the path over the hill - a short-cut to the Northside - from Kattu Siva area. Once we figured out how to equip ourselves for this exploration, with garden clippers and sturdy walking sticks, we felt like we could go anywhere on the mountain. There were times when we explored on the mountain side and came over a ridge into thick thorny bushes that blocked any progress. With the clippers, it took just a few minutes to cut our way through the thorns and be on our way.
Before I was through I had explored up many small paths all around Arunachala. I found many caves, I explored a possible route for the Inner Path that completely skirted the town and noise and traffic. I shared this exploration with my readers.
First post 7/26/2008 Taking friends to Papaji’s Cave
richardarunachala.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/taking-friends-to-papajis-cave-on-arunachala/
There are said to be about 70 caves on the mountain. I found more than half of them. Now what they call a cave here is not what you think. Here a cave is a place where there is as little as an overhang of rock that shelters you from the sun and weather. Many of the caves are just rocks, fallen together with a space in between, or where the dirt has been dug out below them. I was interested in these caves since holy men have been coming to Arunachala for thousands of years, and they had to stay somewhere.
Indeed, in some of these caves I found signs of long-term use with sleeping places and altars, even painted areas on walls.
One thing that made me especially happy: There was a Frenchman named Gee who had been coming for years. When he read the blog, he saw that he could also explore Arunachala. He found a few caves and then took me to see them. To have my enthusiasm rub off onto another was quite satisfying. To have him show me a new cave was a delight.
First post 10/21/2008 A path across Arunachala
richardarunachala.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/a-path-across-arunachala/
By the middle of 2009 I had walked on many small paths, especially on the north side of the mountain. Then a farmer built a fence, cutting of a small section of the Inner Path. A fellow Westerner said that he would give 1000 rupees to make a side path around the farmer’s fence. I worked with Saran again. He brought in two of his Arunachala-loving friends. I laid out the route of the path, and a few days later, there was a new section, so people could walk on the Inner Path without disruption. This gave me ideas, though.
On Arunachala’s north side the Inner Path goes like this: Around Parvati Hill, and then it stays close to the hill. After a while you come to what I called “The Frog Pond” (the red A on the map to the right). From here, the path goes pretty directly to the tip of “The Elephant.” There is a pretty big area inside the path. The area opens up at the Frog Pond, and on the right (facing the mountain) is the backside of Parvati Hill, then the backside of the small hill that connects Arunachala and Parvati Hill. Arunachala sweeps in an inverted arc from there to the tip of The Elephant. You can see this in yellow on the map above. The area between the Inner Path and the mountain is pretty big, maybe a square km. I had found many small paths through this area already, so I took a few weeks and set out a route from the Frog Pond, into and through this area. Carol and my name for it was, “The Inner Inner Path.” I paid Saran and his guys to do the work. Soon a new section of the Inner Path was open. People started to walk it, and I heard many people say how much they enjoyed it. This is in yellow on the map above, right. I had Saran and his crew paint markers on this path, like the Inner Path. He used yellow, not red like the Inner Path markers.
Then it was time to improve the shortcut over the hill from Kattu Siva. This is shown as a red line in the map. Now people could take this shortcut over the hill, and see new Arunachala vistas! Many people had good things to say after they walked this Yellow Path.
The next section of the new path was more complicated. We wanted to make a good path on the west end of the small hill between Parvati Hill and Arunachala There was already a poor quality path used by villagers. This path had a section toward the bottom that was nicely done by people from one of the original Arunachala tree planting operations. The path was widened, and nicely paved with stones. They abandoned this work though. I suspect because the Forest Department did not like it.
Our work started in March, 2011. Saran and his crew were making good headway. By late May, the work came to a halt. It seems that the workers were saying that the mountain spirit did not want this path. The rate of progress really slowed down. The men said that when they tried to work, the spirit was jumping on their backs and also coming into their dreams. We talked with Saran about the situation and what to do. We realized that before we started this section, we did not hold a pooja to get permission from the gods for the work. And so we performed a pooja to the mountain goddess. It was quite a production. Afterward, though, the men still did not want to resume the work. So I found someone else to help, Ramesh and a few villagers. They reported being so very happy doing this work, and they felt that Arunachala was happy, too. We finished the work and opened up this new segment in September, 2011. I had more plans, but they never came to fruition, since a few months later, after the worst series of fires on Arunachala in many years the Forest Department closed the Inner Path (even though none of the fires was near a path, and the Westerners who walked the path would not set malicious fires).
In mid 2012, with the closure of the Inner Path, an era passed. Some people thought it was closed because of me and the Yellow Path. I saw some posts on a guru-hate site that wished me ill fortune and death. Maybe it was closed because we were not able to propitiate the mountain goddess adequately and never got her permission. Maybe it was closed because I as an arrogant Westerner thought I knew better what to do with the Inner Path. Maybe, as they said, it was closed because of the fires. Maybe it was closed because the Forest Department just does not like people, just trees; they think people are problems for the forest.
First post 9/27/2008 Sri Sathya Sai Baba at Puttaparthi Ashram
richardarunachala.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/visiting-sri-sathya-sai-baba-at-puttaparthi-ashram/
There are so many temples and shrines in India, especially in Tamil Nadu and South India, where there seems to be more spiritual fervor, and another temple every block. We visited places like Brihadisvara Temple in Tanjore in Tamil Nadu, more than 1000 years old. And in places like Arayaninallur Temple in Tirukkoyilur, near Tiruvannamalai. This temple is built upon a very ancient temple. Before they had the temple buildings they had shrines built upon big rocks rising from the ground. Arayaninallur Temple is such a place. It is hard to know just how old, but certainly more than 2000 years.
Indians use temples in a different way than churches are used in the West. On a Sunday, the whole family will go to the temple, bring a meal and make a day of it. They use these temples kind of like we use parks in the West. Maybe it is because there is so little public space except for the temples?
2Inside Bhuminatheswara Temple
Tamil Nadu has so many old temples; several times we traveled through the state, visiting ancient temples. One place I liked the most was the temple in the small town that Ramana Maharshi grew up in, Bhuminatheswara Temple in Tiruchuli. It is an ancient Siva temple across the street from Ramana’s ch