Former Canadian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, India, and Iran, a brilliant diplomat who was deeply influenced by Yogaswami, wrote this remarkable 1994 first-person account of his experiences with Yogaswami, the Sage of Lanka who lived from 1872 to 1964. The following are his words.
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The Tamils of Sri Lanka called him ‘the Sage of Jaffna.’ His thousands of devotees, including many Singhalese Buddhists and Christians, called him a saint. Some of those closest to him referred to him as the ‘Old Lion,’ or ‘Bodhidharma reborn,’ for he could be very fierce and unpredictable, chasing away unwelcome supplicants with a stick. I just called him Swami. He was my introduction to Hinduism in its pure Vedanta form and my teacher for the nearly four years I served as the Canadian High Commissioner in what was still called Ceylon in the early sixties when I was there.
For the previous ten years I had been apprenticed in the Gurdjieff Work, and it was through a former student of P. D. Ouspensky, James Ramsbotham (now Lord Soulbury), and his brother Peter, that, one hot afternoon, not long after our arrival in Ceylon, I found myself outside a modest thatched hut in Jaffna, on the northern shore of Ceylon, to keep my first appointment with Yogaswami.
I knocked quietly on the door, and a voice from within roared, ‘Is that the Canadian High Commissioner?’ I opened the door to find him seated cross-legged on the floor, sitting erect with a commanding presence, clad in a white robe, with a generous topping of white hair and a long white beard. ‘Well, Swami,’ I began, ‘that is just what I do, not what I am.’ ‘Then come and sit with me,’ he laughed uproariously.
I felt bonded with him from that moment. He helped me go deeper towards discovering who I am and to identify less with the role I played. Indeed, like his great Tamil contemporary, Ramana Maharshi of Arunachalam, in South India, Yogaswami used ‘Who am I?’ as a mantra and an existential question. He often chided me for running around the country, attending one official function after another, and neglecting the practice of sitting in meditation. When I got back to Ceylon from home leave in Canada, after visiting, on the way around the planet, France, Canada, Japan, Indonesia, and Cambodia, he sat me down firmly beside him and told me that I was spending my life energy uselessly, always looking outward for what could only be found within.
‘You are always running about, doing something, instead of sitting still and just being. Why don’t you sit at home and confront yourself as you are, asking yourself, not me, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” ‘His voice rose in pitch, volume, and intensity with each repetition of the question until he screamed at me with all his force.
Then suddenly, he was silent, very powerfully quiet, filling the room with his unspoken teaching that went far beyond words, banishing my turning thoughts with his simple presence. At that moment, I knew without question that I AM; that is enough; no ‘who’ needed. I just am. It is a lesson I keep having to relearn and re-experience, for the ‘doing’ and the ‘thinking’ takes me over again and again as soon as I forget.
Another time, my wife and I brought our three children to see Yogaswami. Turning to the children, he asked them, ‘How old are you?’ Our daughter said, ‘Nine,’ and the boys, ‘Eleven’ and ‘Thirteen.’ To each in turn, Yogaswami replied solemnly, ‘I am the same age as you.’ When the children protested that he couldn’t be three different ages at once and must be much older than their grandfather, Yogaswami just laughed and winked at us to see if we understood.
At the time, we took it as his joke with the children, but we slowly came to see that he meant something profound, which we could decipher. Now, I think this was his way of saying indirectly that although the body may be of very different ages on its way from birth to death, something just as accurate as the body, and for which the body is only a vehicle, always was and always will be. In that sense, we are essentially all ‘the same age.’
After I had met Yogaswami many times, I learned to prepare my questions carefully. One day, when I had done so, I approached his hut, took off my shoes, went in, and sat down on a straw mat on the earth floor while he watched me with an attention that never seemed to fail him. ‘Swami,’ I began, ‘I think…’ ‘Already wrong!’ he thundered. And my mind again went into the nonconceptual state that he was such a master at invoking, clearing the way for being.
Though the state desired was thoughtless and wordless, he taught through a few favorite aphorisms in pithy expressions to be plumbed later in silence. Three of these aphorisms I shall report here: ‘Just be!’ or ‘Summa iru‘ when he said it in Tamil. ‘There is not even one thing wrong.’ ‘It is all perfect from the beginning.’ He applied these statements to the individual and to the cosmos. Order was a truth deeper than disorder. We don’t have to develop or do anything because, essentially, in our being, we are ideally in charge here and now, when we are here and now.
Looking at the world as it is now, thirty years after his death, I wonder if he would utter the same aphorisms with the same conviction today. I expect he would challenge us to go deeper to understand what he meant. Reality cannot be imperfect or wrong; only we can be wrong and evil when we are not real or now!
