In the series "Photographer S1 E1" we are told "The only way you can change the world is with stories. And the bigger your legend becomes, the easier it is to share the story. People want to hear it. They want to listen."
Stories have been told of ancient times since ancient times. Sitting around a fire, sitting under the night sky, whenever communities gather these stories were acted out and reenacted as in plays and stage dramas. Now it is told through some moving movies. This blog too is about stories. Stories about adventurers walking the path of the masters, teachers, gurus, and Siddhas before them. In adopting their ways we too find a new path that is viable and appropriate for the current times. No one can possibly carry out the feat that Agathiyar is said to have carried out - sitting on the bottom of the ocean in tapas or tavam for 12 long years. Times have changed. What is and was appropriate for then would not be now.
But we too have come a long way in this journey having taken, according to Agathiyar, crores of births. We have lived in the past. We need not live in the past now. We have to drop it and move on. We have to usher the new and drop the old. That is progress. That is evolution. What travels with us is the experiences we gain in each birth. This is what child prodigies tend to tap into and continue. Agathiyar too says that we continue from where we left.
The idea in taking birth is, contrary to the common belief that it is to accumulate be it wealth and knowledge, is to drop it after having tasted and experienced it. Following in the footsteps of a child, we need to move on instead of hugging these toys throughout our lives.
If Tavayogi told us to come out of Bakthi into Gnanam giving us the rituals in worship to experience and later taught us Yoga that prepared the body to become an abode of the divine or rather cleansed the debilitated and dark altar within us to receive the Light, both he and Agathiyar infused Gnanam in stages after having us go through the experiences. In having us drop each method and way, as did Ramalinga Adigal in progressing on the Pilgrim's Progress, Agathiyar days ago reminded us to even drop Gnanam acquired. If earlier in the eighties Lord Shiva coming in a dream told me to drop my baggage of readings and knowledge acquired, in coming to read the Nadi in 2002 Agathiyar pointed out the huge baggage of Karma that I was carrying and over the years helped me lay it down, and had me lay down the guilt that I carried too, asking me first to pardon myself, and others too, added that he was the mastermind behind the show wanting me to have those experiences too. All these experiences will help empower our souls to attain Atma Balam or Soul Power he tells us now.
If he told us earlier that Gnanam wasn't gifted but was an accumulation of our experiences traveling first in the material world and later moving within the chakras until it dawns on us, last Wednesday, he asked me what further use is Gnanam to one who has seen the space or emptiness . "வெட்டவெளியை கண்டவனுக்கு எதற்கு ஞானம்?"
If we have always been tuned to look for the divine and its miracles outside, the Siddhas teach us to see it within. In preparing this body to become a temple or clearing and cleaning this temple, opening up the doors and windows to allow a breath of fresh air in, lighting up or kindling the dying fire in us to burn bright, we become the house of God and the very light. Here then live Agathiyar, Muruga, Shiva, (and the other deities and Siddhas), and us, he says.
I guess there was a reason many sacred texts were burned or destroyed in floods in the past. It was to free man I suppose from his over-dependency on them to the extent that man became fanatics and less humane as he was supposed to be. Ram Dass who says in the documentary "Becoming Nobody" that life is no error and that it was all meant to be for us to gain experiences, shares his "formless friend" Emmanuel's words that "You took a human birth. You are so busy being Holy. Why don't you try being Human?"