Shyama Priya and Guru Tattva

Facebook reminded me that last year was the 50th anniversary of my joining the temple in Toronto. A year on down the road and headed back to Canada. It seems another momentous change is occurring in my life. 

I told the story of "Oct. 1, 1970" on this blog. In myth, travel is always associated with some dramatic change. In 1970, I hitch hiked with another seeker, who for some reason struck me as something of a fool, and intentionally headed, on his whim, to the Toronto temple on Beverley Street.

Just the other day, I visited a friend of mine, Shyama Priya, originally from Holland, who is the same age as me, also white haired, pony-tailed and bearded. He has a little jewel of an ashram out on the Ramtaal road. It is right near the protected "forest" land that stretches from Chattikara Road all the way to his neighborhood. It is a cul-de-sac and thus very quiet. The road is barely tended to and it has that old Braj feel. When I arrived in the late afternoon, he was sweeping the road in front of his house and further along. 

But his garden is trimmed and managed to every detail., with a tiny pond and a couple of small thatched cottages on the ground. His temple room has a beautiful mandala of the Yoga Peeth, given to him by his guru to serve. The whole aesthetic reminded me a little of Gadai Gauranga Kunj. Loving attention to the environment is not such a big quality in most Indians for some reason.

His sadhana primarily consists of reading and relishing the Mahāvāṇī, the beloved Brajbhasha text that forms the essence of all Nimbarki bhajan. I asked him to read one song for me, which he did, with a Hindi translation, which he enunciated with great care and attention. The sattvika atmosphere and deep, simple devotion to his holy book, had a good effect on my consciousness, which has been so much in a roller-coaster state for the last month. 

And then his disciple's wife came with prasad. It has been ages since I experienced this. Two years cooped up in Covid-era confinement. Ahaha!! What have I been missing?

We shared stories a bit. Shyama Priya has taken initiation in the Nimbark sampradāya, for the rasa, as he puts it, with a laugh. That is his answer when that question is put to him, which may or may not be my answer. But we did talk about guru tattva. He said emphatically that people become confused because they identify the body with the guru, they fail to distinguish vapu and vani.

The guru is a Principle, a Tattva that manifests always and everywhere, but in particular at certain pivotal moments, usually recognizable by their serendipitous, synchronistic and numinous character.

He has himself taken a disciple, only one. It is his next door neighbor, a Brajabasi who observed his character, liked what he saw and asked him for initiation. So Shyamapriya says, "The guru tattva was activated in me and so I had to respond to that impulse. And even now, it is always a question of surrender as to when I respond to that impulse." 

And this is why Guru Tattva can manifest temporarily in children and fools. 

I think that this is a fairly well understood Tattva by many, but obviously the kanishtha is fixated on the body, which leads to all manner of ills. It most often happens with gurus who have mass followings. They simply play a stereotyped role for most of their disciples: an image to put on the altar and a collection of do's and don'ts to follow. Just as there is progression in understanding of Bhagavat-tattva, so there is with Guru Tattva.

That discussion impressed me somewhat. When I was leaving I joked about how I had ended up there visiting him in the first place. We have a common acquaintance, a poor illiterate man from Ramtaal. He used to do odd jobs for me in Sant Colony, but I got rid of him for stealing. Still he comes around and begs from me on quite a regular basis, usually coming on the pretext of some calamity that has befallen one or the other of his family members. I have been to his house. It is about as miserable a condition as any human being has to live in in this world. He belongs to a Dalit community.

At any rate, he is the one who came to me and told me Shyam Priya was sick with typhoid and was asking me to visit. This story was totally untrue, and the whole thing struck me as strange. Perhaps he also has an imagination and thought that Shyam Priya and I make natural friends. I thought it amusing that his lie had served to give me a few hours of pleasing conversation with an advanced senior rasik devotee. I said, "Was he not acting as guru?"

Not necessarily a pleasing thought, but perhaps it was value for all the money I had given him in begrudging charity over the years. 

And the reason all this I tell now is because I was reminded of that guy I met on the streets of Montreal, walking in the late September early snowfall, someone who was almost a Jada Bharata in his social skills and mostly silent, took me to the Toronto temple, stayed there a few days and then left, never to be seen again, while I stayed on for nine years, and on in bhakti for decades afterwards to this day.

It was serendipitous -- a chance encounter, synchronistic in that it happened when I myself was just becoming interested in deep spirituality and had started to investigate the Montreal temple, and numinous, by which I mean momentous, filled with ineffable significance, the feeling that a higher power is moving one helplessly along.

Shyama Priya had seen his final days in ISKCON as more or less directionless. He was feeling his spiritual purpose was no longer being fulfilled there, and then this kind of event happened to him and he found himself being introduced to the rasa of Mahāvāṇī by a saint who was himself totally absorbed in that rasa. And he saw that this is what he had been missing.

 Jai Radhe!