Healing And Faith

Stories abound over the efficacy of the benefic touch, word,look and the mere presence of a saintly person......That they could ward off our ailments,misfortunes,and sometimes even our negative tendencies....That even their most seemingly casual movements hide a deeper purpose....May be the topic is relevant in these days, when experiments are being conducted to study the effects of music, gentle touch and soothing ambience over even plants and animals...

See what Ramana Maharshi had to say on this....

"Just as an arrow, aimed at somebody"s head, loses it"s impact on hitting the headgear,so also does a devotee"s misfortunes,and dushtakarma gets eradicated by the mercy of a saint.....undoubtedly.......significantly a saint never has any intensions or inclinations to purposefully do anything.....Yet...His or her presence is so powerful that even as he or she not intending, it causes miracles to happen,exhausts prarabtham,grants wishes,saves devotees,brings peace of mind, and finally accords salvation....This power itself answers your prayers....and it all happens involuntarily and quite naturally....without even involving him.."

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I too have heard a good deal of these stories.......One was about how Baba cured the asthma of Balaram Durandhar of Bombay by forcing him (that was curious)...to take a smoke from his hookah.....That just one smoke was said to have ended his longstanding asthma.....In this case, it is believed that Baba took Balaram"s suffering upon him self as the scourge returned to him four years later in Bombay,the moment Baba passed away in Shirdi... .

Another one was about how Baba once called for a ladder.....Some one brought it for him and Baba was stated to have gifted the man two rupees for the help he rendered...Baba reportedly used that ladder to climb and cross over the rooftop of a household...At that time most of the people thought he was allaying the high fever, one of his devotees was undergoing in that very house...While it might or not have been the case, it seems the man who brought the ladder and got two rupees from Baba and who had been childless till then, had two kids later on...

FAITH is a rummy thing....As i said before,i too have heard a good many anecdotes like this and passionately believed in the power of the benific aura of saints so much that it came as a kind of rude shock to me when Ruby caught fire and badly burned her self in a fight...

Now, ..Ruby was our pet .....(specially mine)...All of us in the house just loved her and when Mother graced our home at Bandar with her presence, we even presented Ruby to her as one of our family members....May be it would be better if i could reproduce the event as i have chronicled it somewhere in my previous blog posts...


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"The second memorable incident happened in 73, when the holy mother of Jillellamudi chose to come to Bandar and graced our house to stay for two days.Babai was an ardent devotee of her.Since the upstairs were allocated exclusively for the use of mother and her party,....and the downstairs were full of us, and visitors ,who arrived for her darshan,,we shifted Ruby to a house behind our own...The street before our home used to be thronged by hundreds of people waiting for a glimpse of Mother.....On the second day .,a little girl of her party saw Ruby and suggested why we did not show her to mother."mother loves the poor animals' she said......so,..we took her in and tied her near the staircase, where mother could see her as she went up and down.

It was the morning of VUNDRALLA THADDI,..a festival day celebrated exclusively by women..just like KARVA CHAUTH.... swinging on OOYALA is mandatory that day. So our swing in the courtyard was decorated with marigold and kanakaambaram flowers, my cousin Hyma laboriously sat weaving through out the previous night... a pure white dhovathi of my grand pa that had red and gold borders, was spread on the plank..... At about eight thirty in the morning ,,mother came down stairs and sat on the swing for few minutes , looking resplendent in a violet and yellow silk sari.. she received her children sitting there as many of them came up to bow....She was going to leave Bandar that day.....As she got up to leave,...someone...my jellathai. i think...pointed Ruby to mother....Mother"s eyes softened as she saw the dog....Her love for the mute little lives was boundless...she spread her hands invitingly ,..murmured NEE KANTENA? in a low tone,....went and patted Ruby for few seconds....Terrified by the sight of so many people around her, Ruby drooped her ears and stooped low at her feet."

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That was how it happened and Mother patted her back for few seconds,...running her hand along lovingly...

Sometime after this incident,Ruby was taken to Chinthalapudi to deliver her litter and was caught up in a fierce fight with a gang of stray dogs....She was dragged around in the melee of fighting dogs and had been literally hauled over live coals over a burning oven....In the end, the marauders had been driven away, but Ruby herself was severely burnt....Her back was all terrible blisters...A big,deep, one foot wide wound formed along her spine and it had been a pitiable sight..to look at her suffer so much...It was a torture for her to nurse her puppies and she had been constantly plagued by flies and insects that swarmed over her wound....She would crawl under almirahs and tables whimpering, to escape from her tormentors...It took nearly three four months for her wound to heal and now an ugly scar remained on her poor back....All along just where Mother ran her hand over....

Ofcource you can"t say my faith wavered....for a very simple reason that the feelings i entertained for Mother could be hardly called Faith....I was just a mixed up chit of a girl..--willing to seek, yet not really equipped for the task and got dogged at every step with scepticism and what you call "logic"...So, not only was i so sorry for the plight of Ruby, but also was greatly puzzled over the so-called"failure ' of the efficacy of "divine touch".....Why did it happen like that?......Till i heard dad saying one day that the veterinarian ,who attended on Ruby congratulated him with....."It is lucky that the burns stopped just a scratch near the spinal column...Else she would have been paralyzed from her back downwards and might have to go about dragging her bottom as some of those unfortunate strays on road...May be she had to be put to sleep too...Who knows?"...

Ruby recovered from the wounds,lived actively for few more years and ofcource died later of a tumor.....I can"t exactly say the event made my faith too strong....May be a little bit...