A divine encounter

A divine encounter

Vijay Gopichandran


Hello dear reader! I met a very interesting person yesterday at the temple. I am going to write about meeting and interacting with this gentleman. We spent just about 30 minutes in conversation, but I left feeling lighthearted. I couldn’t sleep for a long-time last evening, immersed in thoughts of what he said. And when I woke up this morning, I felt an intense sense of withdrawal of the positive energy that the gentleman had given me yesterday. He urged me to keep writing and gave me several tips on it. I thought, I should begin this new writing spell writing about him and the influence our brief conversation had on my thought.


My friend goes to this ancient Yoga Narasimhar temple near her house, which is almost 1200 years old and has several interesting mythological connections. She is an integral part of the micro-ecosystem of the temple. Everyone knows her right from the flower vendor outside the temple to the chief priest at the sanctum sanctorum.  She is so much at home there that when we went there last evening after work, it felt like I was visiting her home. I was served sugar-free hot aromatic filter coffee as soon as I entered, had a brief chat with the priest who is also my friend’s friend and then went inside the main sanctum of the temple to witness the evening rituals.


It is a small temple, located bang in the middle of the narrow, but busy Velachery Main Road. You take one step inside the temple and you feel like you have suddenly slipped into a noise-free, peaceful zone. One step back outside, and you are in the middle of the hustle-bustle of Velachery. The temple had that magical quality of completely isolating itself in the middle of a crowded residential setting. As we stood there in front of the sanctum savoring in the aroma of frankincense (sambirani), holy basil (tulasi) and camphor (karpooram), the feeling was transcendental.


After finishing all the evening devotional rituals, my friend and I came out. It is then that my friend introduced me to this gentleman. We were seated in the temple courtyard and my friend pointed to him as he stood in a distance. She said “That person in the green shirt, do you see him? That is the uncle I told you about”. I saw a person who was stockily built, medium height, with balding hair, thick spectacles, wearing a bold mark on the forehead (thiruman sricharanam). His light green full sleeve shirt and brown pant showed him to be like any of us commoners, but the looks can be deceptive, as I would learn just a bit later. My friend said, “Come, come… father (appa) is here, let us sit on that bench and you can talk to appa”


My friend has spoken about this gentleman a lot. She has mentioned that this gentleman is a very kind, compassionate, calm, peaceful man, an intelligent and astute scholar of modern geology, marine archaeology and also astrology, religion, and spirituality. He has helped my friend get through some rough patches in her life by being there, listening to her, advising her and giving her a nice social support system. My friend believed that I must meet him and spend some time with him, as this would help me just the way it helps her. She has been trying to get me to visit the temple and meet him for several months now. But, it was never a top priority in my list and so I have not been keeping my promise to her. This is the back story, and it culminated in my visit to the temple and the meeting with this gentleman yesterday.


“Unlike your good friend here, you never get angry. It looks like very rarely you get angry, and the anger completely consumes you.” These were his words to me when we started talking and it immediately struck a chord. I could see that this gentleman could sense certain things about me just by looking at me. During the very brief conversation, he told me how a person could improve their concentration, sharpen their perceptions to such an extent that one could sense the emotions and feelings that are there around the person with whom they are talking.


“There is so much in this world that science does not understand.” When he said this, I couldn’t agree more. I was very quickly drawn into the conversation with him. Even without knowing much about me, he said that I am a writer. Every word he uttered was encouraging. He encouraged me to write more around full moon time as it will enhance my creativity. He gave me two very important tips to develop greater concentration, memory, and creativity in my writing. He asked me to sit straight with the spine, neck and head vertical and perpendicular to the ground. The second tip was fascinating. He asked me to try writing with my left hand. I am a right-handed person and I was wondering why he is asking me to do this. He explained, “When a right-handed person attempts to write something with the left hand, their non-dominant cerebral hemisphere gets activated. This greatly increases brain capacity.”


The Siddhars of Tamil tradition, the Yogis, the Sadhus and great men of spiritual evolution, have attained excellent control over the mind and body through years of spiritual practice. There must be so much that we do not understand the way the mind and body interact. I have never counted myself among the blind believers in the supernatural. I have always had an open-minded inquiry about God and the super-natural. As a matter of childhood habit, I say my prayers and go to temples. It gives me mental peace to have faith. But I have questioned my own faith time and again. Meeting this gentleman gave me more reasons to actively engage with God.


People who achieve great heights in any field, ultimately reach a point where they lose all questions and develop a tranquillity of the mind. This can be said to be true of hard-core scientists like Oppenheimer, Einstein as well as spiritual gurus like Ramana Maharishi and Kanchi Chandrasekarendra Saraswathi Swami. They reach a point of understanding where questions just disappear. I have questions and conflicts. My mind is full of them. But after meeting this gentleman, I think I may be up for slowly and steadily dropping these questions through a steadfast focus on my work.


This kind of mind-body understanding may be very important for a doctor. The discovery of mind-body interaction may probably lead to solutions to medical problems that are elusive today. So, dear reader, do not think of this as a religious or Godly exercise, but as an exercise for the mind, to make us better doctors. I am trying these from yesterday and hope you would give it a shot too.

1.      I am sitting straight with my back, neck and head perpendicular to the ground and watching my breath as it goes in and out, for 10 mins each day.

2.      I am writing with my left hand (as I am right-handed, those who are left-handed, should try using the right) short sentences, in an attempt to make it reach the same quality as my right-hand writing.