Vashista Guha
The wake up call was supposed to be early and after a good breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant, we move as quickly as possible on a road that is mostly in ruin to Vashishta Guha, a cave at 23 km from Rishikesh where meditated Swami Vashishta. The road was in continuous repair. The monsoon kills it every year and is a Sisific work that cannot be dome quick enough to keep it in a repaired condition. On this road it is very heavy traffic being the main road to the Himalayan towns, Baderkhnat, Kedarkhnat, Mala, etc. 23 km does not seems a lot but on the Himalayan road it can take forever and it took us about one hour to get to the cave. The caves are named locally gufas. This gufa is located on the Ganga’s shore and is an amazing meditation place.
Vashishta lived, as the story goes, 56000 years and he had a whole adventurous and incidental life. How you count the years is up to you. The swami who was at the cave, Swami Shantananda Puri, whom we visited before in order to get a gist about the cave, pointed out that the energetic properties of the cave are unique in this area, existing only two more caves like this and it helps your meditation practice a lot as you would do 20 years in your apartment. So we went inside and indeed the atmosphere is unique and after meditating in the cave for close to one hour, we came out not enlightened but at least with a calm unmatched till now in the trip in spite of the Kumbha Mela.
Right after I went out I was able to ask permission from the swami for an interview that I hoped to be something like 5 minutes. Swami Shantananda Puri, who is well versed in English, ended up with a 20 minutes presentation of the cave and his life at the cave with his old master who passed away and continued for about 40 more minutes answering questions and telling stories about everybody’s role in life, their enlightenment that is not in scriptures but in you. It is only the fact that you don’t know how to open the eyes to see the God in you. It was an amazing and comforting experience augmented by the excellent English of the Swami and his amazing sense of humor and joyful approach. His books are downloadable for free from http://www.scribd.com/group/79503 God bless him! We left the guha around 2:00pm, way latter than originally planned, and we dropped the driver and the car at the hotel, chat with some other travelers, who were horrified that they saw a corpse in the street and people were obliviously passing by, and went to the town to eat in the same restaurant where I had the banana pancakes last night. After lunch we started walk the town main and only street, full of stores catering for foreigners, internet cafes, travel agents, ayurveda stores, jewelery stores and obviously full of ashrams teaching yoga and meditation, a typical backpacker hang out.
Aarthie
We took a rest and watched the aarthie again, a real pleasure and now we are hitting for another banana pancake and lime soda. Here we do not eat Indian food. After dark the stores are enchanting, lots of music stores abound of great CDs with Indian, Tibetan and “New Age” music at a fraction of the price as in the West. Book stores full of spiritual books from great masters and clothing stores do a steep business. In this atmosphere the cows are roaming the main street finding their way among Germans and Americans travelers like in a promenade. They go back and forth the entire evening like walking an Italian Corso.
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