Reflections on the Journey Outside & within - AYC 2024

Reflections on the Journey Outside & within - AYC 2024 by Saishyam.

It’s 23^rd August, a day after the conclusion of Auroville Youth Camp 2024. The empty space is beckoning the reluctant sun to make way for its comrade – the moon. The blue open sky flaunts its colours before retreating to bed. Like a photographer patiently waiting for the perfect moment, I am sitting with a pen & paper letting the barrage of thoughts & ideas take their cue from the sun– at least for a while. The afterscent of a spiritually profound experience at Auroville Youth Camp still lingers in my mind. It feels like twilight, my mind waiting for the light to displace the darkness in myself a week ago.

16^th August 2024 will be a day etched in my memory forever. It was a day I embarked on my journey to Auroville – a place I barely knew for the dreamy photos of Matrimandir which I had never seen before. It wasn’t a chance occurrence, but a decision my soul had taken of which my conscious mind had only a glimpse. I realized this much later after an Inspiring session by Sraddhaluji. The camp was a one-week program when reckoned using the human time scale. Believe me when I say it felt much longer when measured based on the impact it had.

At first, I wasn’t sure why I came. A week later, I knew. Meeting 90 other participants, each finding their path to the same goal invoked a feeling of fraternity.

Back to the present. Reading the account of Sri Aurobindo on his time in prison oddly gave me a sense of comfort. Before we get into why, here is an extract:

I did not know that day would mean the end of a chapter in my life, and then there stretched before me a year’s imprisonment during which period all my human relations would cease, that for a whole year, I would have to live, beyond the pale of society, like an animal in the cage. And when I would reenter the world of activity it would not be the old familiar

-Aurobindo Ghose

Looking back, I should have pitied myself before 15^th August 2024 since I suffered from a strange affliction. I was stuck in a prison without knowing I was in one – How diabolical! Confused & forgetting why I came to this Earth in the first place, I was moving about like a programmed robot drawing inspiration from algorithms designed by others to give me a false sense of happiness. Is there any prison worse than this?

Reading the account of Sri Aurobindo & watching a documentary on his time at prison made me think how fortunate (as ironical as it may seem) the master was to have been imprisoned. Fortunate because it was a chance given by Vasudeva (in master’s words) to align with the atman.

I, however, was far luckier, since God gave me a chance & an environment to reflect on myself & the true purpose of my soul without having to undergo the travails of prison life! On the contrary, God gave me a beautiful environment, 90 fellow brothers and sisters & experienced luminaries on the subject of spirituality. How could I gamble away this opportunity? To quote Sri Aurobindo, my aim was that when I would reenter the world of activity (after the camp), it would not be the old familiar Saishyam [sic].

I will restrain myself from just regurgitating the thoughts & ideas encountered during the camp. Rather, I will share the takeaways gathered when contemplating upon them

1.  The biggest failure at the time of death is to not know who we are & what purpose we came for. Every moment should be a constant search for that.

1. True & lasting satisfaction / happiness comes from fulfilling one’s duties instead of parading our rights. The base of Sanatana Dharma is the precedence of duty over rights.

1.  If you thought Sanskrit was difficult or irrelevant, prepare to have the myth busted. One of the most exciting things was learning how Sanskrit is a dynamic language. I like to visualize the  language as a pointer-based language. Each word describes a property of the object it wishes to point at – almost like a variable name in programming language. For e.g.: Neera meaning to lead is a property of water. 

1.  All life is yoga. This statement which is almost like a sutra appears like a fancy poetic statement at first sight. But the one-week camp gave me an intuitive experience of what this means. Karma is Bhakthi in action. Every second of our waking lives spent in discharging our duties considering it as an act of divine is itself a sure-shot path of attaining the divine.

1. Almost 90% of our actions are driven by impulses. We need to be conscious of every decision we take. This is similar to the yogic concept of asanas & how the purpose of Sadhana is to burn the asanas. Every action we do driven by body consciousness sows another impulse seed (asanas) in the subconscious which sprouts & forms habits.

1. There are multiple dimensions & bodies beyond the physical gross body. We can heal many diseases by addressing the problem in the subtle body (prana). The idea of pranic body being a template of the physical body piqued my interest.

There are some experiences & learnings that I find difficult to articulate. Suffice to say that I am still trying to comprehend them. As Richard Bach says – "When learning comes before experience, it doesn’t make sense right away"