There’s a story about Meher Baba. He was crossing the United States
by train, and when the train stopped in Santa Fe, he suddenly got up
from his seat, climbed down off the train, and walked toward the center
of town. At a certain corner, there was an old Indian man standing,
leaning up against the side of a building. Meher Baba walked up to him,
and they looked into each other’s eyes for a few seconds. Then Meher
Baba turned around, walked back to the station, got onto the train, and
left. He said, “Well, that takes care of my work for this trip.”
Now
all that may just be incredible showbiz — I mean, if he’s playing at
that level, he could certainly have done it all on another plane and
skipped the walk to town. But it’s a great story — and it’s possible
that that was, in fact, what Meher Baba’s trip had been all about. How
would we know?
Gradually, as our perspective deepens, we begin to
experience our own lives in the context of a wider purpose. We begin to
look at all our melodramas and our desires and our sufferings, and
instead of seeing them as events happening within a lifetime bounded by
birth and death, we begin experiencing them as part of a much vaster
design. We begin to appreciate that there is a wider frame around our
lives, within which our particular incarnation is happening.
I
was on board the Taj Express train bound for Agra, with a stop at
Mathura where I would get off. Traveling by train in India is full of
rich lessons. The trains go slowly, express or not, and we moved at a
prehistoric pace, the countryside creeping by, palm tree by palm tree,
until I wanted to open the window and scream. But then something began
to shift. Rather than resist the slowness and count the minutes, I told
myself a little story. “This trip is going to go on forever,” I said
inwardly. “This present moment will never end. I’ve been on this train
my entire life, and will never, ever get off. Now what?”
Meditating
on this story, I began to surrender into the rhythms and speed of the
train, looking out the window at the passing images without the anger of
moments before. My attention fixed upon a young woman in a field; she
was wearing a colorful sari and walking along a path by herself, in one
of those middle-of-nowhere places, a large clay jug balanced on her
head, her undulating gait allowing her head to remain still as she
moved. She was close enough for me to see her eyes, which were
underlined with black kohl. She wore a pink hibiscus flower behind her
ear and silver bracelets on both wrists.
To my eyes, she was like
a Gauguin figure, caught in an action that would never end, her past
and future filled in by imagination. As my train moved slowly,
purposefully forward, covering the passengers with coal dust, the woman
moved more slowly still along a path that extended in both directions,
out of sight, seemingly without end. Although she was only in view for
half a minute, her existence seemed to penetrate me, forming a profound
impression. I was both attracted and repelled — attracted in the part of
me that yearned to slow down, to move to the rhythms of earth and sky,
the seasonal cycles of planting and harvest, the coming and going of
generations; repelled in the part of me raised in the West, accustomed
to material life and great stimulation. In that moment, I saw these two
aspects in stark relief, and wondered which of these parts was actually
“me.”
Ram Dass
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