Author’s note- Please scroll and play the chant before you read. This is from the Chants of Shiva – Art of Living. I hope you like the experience.

Mystical Moments

There are certain periods in life when you feel some higher power surrounding you in wholeness and holiness. It is a subtle presence which is just absent to the eyes but we can feel by the sixth sense to be very precise.

These are the mystic moments which come like fluffy clouds on mountain tops and envelop you like mist tenderly knowingly unknowingly without any known purpose. They always serve a purpose whether we understand depends on how we take it. If we get an answer a guidance healing depends on our state of mind.

Some very brief moments we get the glimpse of that higher power and it leaves us amazed and tingling reaction in our mind. Where do we find this?

Often very simple and uncomplicated places, isolated places where the calm talks to peace and you find the silences singing the song of the five elements. They need not be in balance. The complex simplicity of faith cannot be explained by anyone. Tell me; have you never felt that sudden exhilaration when standing on a mountain with the wind kissing your hair, and the clouds covering you like a cloak the misty white heights reflecting the amber light of the Sun or clear sunshine covering you with golden haze...?

Near a river I can stand and sit and walk on for miles. The Himalayas have pristine beauty and walking around the banks of Beas and Alaknanda was an experience which has become a part of my soul. The whole scene is just etched on the canvas of my mind as an exquisite painting where trees with leaves, the moist grass from a lovely backdrop for the whole azure blue sky on that rare clear day as I sat on the bank. I was aware of the wind which carried the smell of pine forests around me. There were the wild fragrant flowers which seemed to play with each other standing firmly on one foot and Alaknada flowed with grace and dignity. A river will teach you all you would yearn to learn in this life. To flow, to go slow, to linger, to wash away, to mingle, to rush, to cover, to change the path, to forge and finally find the sea she set to search.

How many must have sat on the bank? I have no clue, travelers to this place and travelers in time. Many must have passed this place and drank the waters I thought.

Looking at any river makes me meditative as I stare at the water flowing for some time and then look up I find a subtle change in me. Like they say a river is never the same I change every time I look at the flowing waters. Many times I have felt a strange power near me. It is difficult to describe the experience. It is as if I become a spectator and look at everything as if it exists in another time and place. Perhaps it does. There are parallel universes and alternate realities which we cannot decipher.

If you see how a river makes way and flows around and over the obstacles changing its path you learn a great lesson in life not to give up. That morning on the banks of Alaknanda I found out that inside our soul there is a spring of happiness which flows only when we are connected with the higher power. Just like an electrical connection makes the bulb glow similarly the moment we connect with that abstract power we are touched with boundless joy. It is like lightning as it illuminates the dark sky on a wild night. It is like the small wisps of darkness melt as dawn walks on the sky, like the small flower which opens its petals at night cannot grasp its own fragrance but is so full of happiness that it makes everyone around happy with its existence, or like the whole landscape washed by rains which has just stopped to put a rainbow swing on the sky and the rain drops fall from tree leaves with such grace and vanish that you can experience a whole lifetime in that mini second.

A Zen quote I had read sometime time.

"You can see the whole sky in a drop of water..."

And when we see the sky with all the stars ...it is a sight which can connect us with nature. There in the Himalayas I experienced and listened to the music of the cosmos where there was absolutely no light pollution and those millions of stars spoke in million languages telling me about the Master the Creator the many and some and few and all of the Universe.

Sounds are mystical and magical. This is not restricted to the chants and prayers. I connect with the sounds of nature ...of flowing water, of the wild ocean, the songs and cries of birds. The deep chants have always been my favorite and Sanskrit add to it makes it more powerful. If you let it seep through the whole of your being, it will change you and then someday you will find yourself connect with your own higher self and then on life will become an experience where good will happen and bad will happen and you will be like the lotus leaf which does not let the water drops affect but let them go without any attachment and yet has those wonderful mystical blooms of Lotus.

Then the everyday Sunrise becomes divine, the evening light becomes magical, the birds coming home are like spirits and hermits of the forest and the act of lighting a lamp in the evening becomes a meditation. I touch the clay lamp light it with faith so as it glows and dispels the darkness I bow my head in reverence to the Master. At such times I am with the Creator for a blink I feel touched, I feel humble, I feel calm.

"There are sacred moments in life when we experience

in rational and very direct ways that separation, the

boundary between ourselves and other people and

between ourselves and Nature, is illusion. Oneness is

reality. We can experience that stasis is illusory and

that reality is continual flux and change on very subtle

and also on gross levels of perception . . ."

- Charlene Spretnak