In Ajmer, my next stop, I left the bus and walked through the city. Over time I had gotten used to being stared at, but this time something very strange happened. I had just sat down at a table in a chai-shop located in the middle of a very large plaza, as more and more people evidently started pressing around my table. After a while I realized that their eyes were on me and I looked up confused. A huge crowd of people had gathered around my table. A stately older man, proud and with piercing eyes and the typical moustache of a Rajasthani, appeared beside me, and asked me in an energetic manner to come along with him. This was not the right place for me. I should avoid such places. I told him that I didn’t want to buy anything, didn’t want to see anything ‘on any account’ and that I would much rather stay here instead. Finally, however, he convinced me and led me through the curious crowd to his shop, which was in a narrow street. The shop was filled to the brim with antiques and jewelry from Rajasthan. Tea was served, and we sat through several hours together while he showed me all his treasures in the shop. When we were parting he again told me to avoid places with lots of people, and then he brought his two young sons to me so I could say good-bye to them. In the same manner, the remainder of that journey was filled with more extraordinary circumstances in which total strangers invited me graciously into their homes.
I was so happy to be able to finally withdraw into the meditation center in Jaipur.
This place of meditation, called Dhamma Mahi, is situated in a very quiet valley and is much smaller than the Vipassana academy of Igatpur, and when I arrived, there were only a few meditators. The center was behind a small hill called the Monkey Hill that towers over Jaipur, with a simple temple on top of it where the sadhus and the babas are chanting to God Rama day and night. On this little mountain live hundreds of so-called holy monkeys, which are fed by truckloads of bananas. Up on the hill the view encompasses the entire city of Jaipur and the extraordinary Maharaja palace, ‘The Palace of Winds’, painted in entirely in pink. To the right the enormous Nahargath Fortress towers over the entire city. The noise rising up from the city is deafening. Behind the Monkey Hill on the long walk to the Vipassana center there is an ancient dilapidated temple and a beautiful park full of flowers inhabited by screaming peacocks and wild parrots.
The meditation center in the hills of Jaipur also has a pagoda that can accommodate about one hundred meditators. There was a great silence in the valley, which was disturbed only by the screeching of the parrots early in the morning. I began a so-called self-course, which had the same daily rhythm that I was already familiar with, but which had to be organized by myself without any teachers or instructors. My meditation sittings were interrupted only by a couple of hours of daily gardening work. Aside from the caretaker I was the only person in the center. All in all I spent nearly five weeks in this center, and signed up for two more guided meditation courses lasting ten days each, and basically spent the entire time in meditation.
I left this quiet place towards the end of January together with a friend whom I had met in the center. The muscles in my entire body were so relaxed that I could barely hold a pencil. All my obsessions were gone. My eating habits were totally normal. Also, the impulse to want to escape from the world and its challenges was no longer there. I felt cleansed. It felt extraordinary to be able to allocate my attention once again to the normal hustle and bustle of the world.
Together we decided to travel into the interior of the country, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. We traveled by train along the Narmada River. A few kilometers outside the city of Bhopal we took a bus, which took us into the mountain region that is now called Satpura National Park. My companion was very familiar with this region, as he had been living in India for the last fifteen years. He was certainly double my age, and had previously been a junkie. He had successfully overcome his drug addiction with the help of the Vipassana meditation. We drove deeper and deeper into the mountains, and in a small town on a high plateau we bought food supplies for two weeks. Then we started hiking into the middle of the Indian jungle to a place called ‘Shiva Mundi’, ‘The Silence of Shiva’, by the original indigenous people, the Gond-Baba of the Adivasi tribes (8). Shiva is one of the few gods whom the non-Hindu tribe Gond-Baba also worships. According to the legend, a demon was chasing Shiva in this area and he leapt from hill to hill, leaving his traces everywhere. Now these are places of worship and ritual. This entire region is littered with caves and cult sites that can be traced far back into the early history of mankind, where the people of the Stone Age were already living. In many of these caves one can find cave paintings of the Stone Age. Years later I learnt that Hindu and Buddhist monks were already using these sites as meditation and retreat sanctuaries centuries ago.
Because the indigenous people regard trees as sacred there are enormous ancient specimens of immense strength overwhelming majesty everywhere.
We cut across through very high and dense bamboo forests and encountered some mango trees, which were of enormous size and in whose crowns the monkeys were shrieking and romping around dangerously. In one of the main holy places in Shiva’s honor we once again refilled our food supplies and again saw dozens of caves, many of which were adorned by an erect black cobra carved from stone, a mark of Shiva. We criss-crossed on some difficult paths deeper and deeper into the jungle and finally found the place we were looking for.
An Indian Baba looked after this place in the middle of the jungle. It consisted of twenty to thirty small and large caves spread along the mountain ridge. Some of the places and caves were accessible only by a rope ladder. This place was dedicated only for meditation and was surrounded by deep silence. The cave of the baba was at the foot of a ravine and was in that way centrally located as a kind of a reception. An enormous palisade made of tree trunks surrounded his cave and protected it from leopards, tigers and other wild cats, for which this jungle was a habitat. At a first glance the Shiva Baba was completely neurotic and crazy. His eyes were somewhat brightened and totally veiled by the incessant smoking of marijuana. He was very friendly and made sure that we did not get disturbed during our retreat in this secluded area. He presented us with some tea as a welcome present.
We chose the last big cave, which reached deep into the mountain at the very end of a steep ravine and set up our camp place. All the items of everyday life had to be carried up through scattered boulders and paths carved in the stone. Every day we carried water with great effort up the hill in buckets after climbing down thirty minutes to a fabulously beautiful river. The same for fire wood. We had to keep the flames going throughout the entire night, because wild animals were swarming the place all around us. This included some really big wild cats, one of which had attacked a local and had injured him badly just a few days previously. We hung our food supplies on ropes from the rock ceiling. In spite of this the rodents of the night were trying to catch their share by jumping up high like acrobats.
We slept directly next to the fire at the entrance to the cave. Veiled in twilight at the very back of our accommodation there stood a man-size black cobra hewn from the rock. The Gond-Babas, gracefully moving around the forest carrying their axes and the machetes, would visit our cave every few days and put flower malas around the snake and perform Puja. They hardly took notice of our presence there and simply went about their business.
We would alternate watching the fire during the night and in the early morning hours our meditation would begin. Everything was done in silence, without speaking. All of this was an unprecedented challenge for the body and the mind. In the beginning we would meditate in the morning in the cave or on the platform in front of the cave overlooking the green valley that stretched before us. Every day after lunch we would descend, take a bath in the river and sit on the river-bank in meditation until evening. We did nothing else but observe everything that was happening inside the body just allowing it to come and go. After a few days I heard the voice of the river echo in my ears as a melodious symphony. It felt like a hug. I would sit for hours without the slightest movement and slowly an immense sadness, stirred by the song of the river, arose in the depths of my heart. What was I doing here?
As always I was sitting directly by the water when I suddenly became aware of death, my own and that of others. I