November 1st, 2008
This morning in Residency Hotel in the luxury of my single’s room I caught up on book entries, did Sat Kriya and then went downstairs to enjoy our last breakfast together as fellow yatrians.
Soon after a group of us decided to take a hotel taxi to the Ellona Caves. From the hotel to Ellona Caves and back, winding up the drive to Residency Hotel, was a photo-op journey for me, a chance to preserve memories of cows and goats on the street, families with children riding on a single motorcycle, putt putts (auto rickshaws) loaded with goods and people, colorfully painted trucks and buses, graceful tin and tarp hovels that afforded even the poorest people a sense of honor. When people saw me shooting them I smiled and flashed an okay sign and they smiled back, happy to be in my camera!
On arriving at the caves we were expertly guided through Hindu,
Buddhist and Jain cliff temples, all of which co-existed during the
tolerant reign of Buddhism. We strolled past walls still resonating with the vibration of God, through ancient temple rooms of volcanic rock carved from the tops of
cliffs on down with hammer and chisel, a task that spanned one hundred
and fifty years and several generations.
As the six of us gathered within a
small shrine to sense sacred vibrations, we noted how the shrines
were as special and powerful to people of long ago as the Golden Temple
is to us. But now they are merely tourist attractions. Not merely, for
they retain the feeling of thousands of devotees, unseen. Could this
happen to the Golden Temple, we wondered, maybe in 5,000 years?
Today’s Hukam from the Golden Temple—November 1, 2008 is being read aloud as I write, relaxed on my bed in Mumbai's Transit Hotel. Thankfully, they show the Hukam on a chalk board the second time it is given, so I can see its page number in Siri Guru Granth Sahib, as it is very appropriate for today's excursion through sacred ruins:
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