The mystical experience defies rationality and women going through it usually invite dismissal. Arundhathi Subramaniam바카라™s latest book, Women Who Wear Only Themselves: Conversations with Four Travellers on Sacred Journeys, has in it four unique women who carved a spiritual path for themselves in the wake of a cataclysmic experience. There have been blazingly memorable women mystics in India, but the four profiled here walk their own paths, independent and unnoticed, without acoÂlÂytes or steady funding.
바카라śWomen turn out to be more oriented to spirituality than men, for reasons unknown, and of course they are more likely to be disbelieved,바카라ť says Tanya M. Luhrmann, a renowned scholar of religion, whose work focuses on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. In her book How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others, she says that mystical experience is important because it makes God real to people, it is 바카라śthis-world evidence that the world of the faith frame is real바카라ť.
Subramaniam recounts how for Sri Annapurani Amma, her late guru, Sadashiva Brahmendra is a grandfather figure whose 바카라śpresence바카라ť sees her through times of need. Balarishi VisÂwasÂhirasini uses nada (sound) to commune with the Divine, her vocal outpourings akin to glossolalia. Lata Mani, a Marxist and femÂinist, experienced a rebirth into clarity after a traumatic accidÂent. Maa Karpoori found herself crying unstoppable tears in the preÂsence of a yoga teacher through whom crucial people entered her life.
Describing spiritual transformation can be like pinning thin air to paper. But the author is a master at conversation as her biography, Sadhguru: More Than a Life will testify. Here, too, her gentle, yet probing questions elicit self-sufficient answers like this one from Sri Annapurani Amma: 바카라ś바카라¦he (her guru) works only if you hold him as your very life breath바카라ť. Or take this precise answer from Lata Mani, analysing the author바카라™s question about the Marxist-mystic link: 바카라śSpiritual teachings are unitive philosophies. When they are practised at their deepest level what you experience is your intimacy with the whole of the universe. So it바카라™s an individual journey, but it바카라™s not an individualist journey.바카라ť
As interpolator in these conversations, Subramaniam바카라™s prose hits the mark when it is more show and less tell, as in this summing up of the charming child-turned-guru, Balarishi: 바카라ś바카라¦I am fortunate to have met her at this point in her life when she is not merely accessible, but capable of both reflection and vulnerability. She is a woman who still speaks of herself as process, not product; who hasn바카라™t yet allowed image to obscure her reality as a mystic.바카라ť Interpolation gets in the way where the writing veers into excess and over-explanation, as in the preface, afterword and the profile of Maa KarpÂoÂori. Also, to elide lines of verse by redÂÂouÂbÂÂtable mystics and saints into a part of a para to corroborate a point is to rob them of their power.
The layout of the book바카라”a poem by the autÂhor prefacing and closing each profile바카라”works beautifully, award-winning poet that Subramaniam is. Poetry works through compression and can often illumine inner expansion, which is the subject of this book.
The mystical experience is a headstart in preparing the mind and heart for the long haul바카라”the path to self-knowledge and an undÂerstanding of the truth. It is a headstart unavailable to the average seeker바카라”and therefore Subramaniam바카라™s stories of these women help us see them in a vast continuum, calling to mind also Barbara Newman바카라™s study of women mystics in medieval Christianity, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature.
Traditional teachers of the scriptures point pragmatically to the flip side: The public, if primarily looking at mystics for siddhis (accomplishments of a miraculous nature) or quick-fix solutions, may fall prey to delusion. This book reminds us to keep the questioning mind alive; and not be dismissive of someone for whom Shiva is not a deity, but a guru at arm바카라™s reach whose sleeve she can tug.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Visions Of Clarity")
