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Encountering Sanatana Dharma

    My first meditations at dawn bear the seal of the Bhagavad Gita. I drank its verses like desert water, burning in the sun of its ancestral and Perennial Truth, its Sanatana Dharma. It was then that the golden door of Dharma opened for me. I crossed its threshold and for all these years I have swum the currents of its profound consequences, my consequences, my development, the actions that have shaped my transpersonal soul, whose adventure goes back even further... to some distant Tavern of Light where my drunkenness began beyond any memories.

    My life is being the unfolding of a Dharma, the course of things as far as I am    concerned, my Rta. My Dharma is an active perspective in the development of things, the responsibility of my awakening in the Self, in its accomplished expressions and in the failed attempts, both as pure and genuine as the love that sweeps me away before sublime music and the starry night, which I always feel to be the same thing.

    I remember the Spanish copy of that Gita as if I had it in my hands, closer now in this living memory than it ever was when it was book and yellow, small and with cozy letters, companion of my dawns and vigils, pages that covered me when I slept and helped me wake up among the snows next to Niagara forty years ago. Before the Gita, my parents' library had offered me the vibrant words of the classics, the undeniable depths of the great poets, but the dialogue of Krishna and Arjun was an even more familiar melody and I sought shelter in it like the mountaineer who sees his own precariousness when the storm breaks. The reading of the Gita had very little reading and a lot of absorption in remembrance. Not the memory of my Spanish childhood in faded Kodachrome, but of a life in India that I never had as prince of the Pandavas, the memory of dense curries and incense, of Lakshmi's immense eyes inspiring the Rishi in me. Through the Gita I became a Seer and a Dreamer, a traveler of the worlds recently arrived to Hastinapura’s Court, the Hall of the Elephants, from Vishnu knows what a distant realm of unfading lights. I heard the Rishi for whom -once blind to the world for having contemplated Beauty naked- it is the same to die or to sing. From that reading beyond the scripture’s signs, drops of a strange nectar still remain: that nectar is my Dharma and my ambrosia, my beginning and my end. I feel that in some mysterious way I have never stopped living in the Word of Light that awakened my soul to its Dharma.


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