From the lips of Jesus's companions

You are home. Nothing could be more home than this. The ancient traveler in you is home. He is already there! He doesn't want to go anywhere else. Since you arrived he has been breathing in a sustaining silence like a subtle ambrosia. In the courtyard of the main Ashram building, around the samadhi, the silence is gently massive. You don't have to try to be quiet there. It's not like church, where you may have to restrain yourself to maintain a respectful silence...

The first time you went to the samadhi was late in the evening. You could feel the calming silence even before you turned the corner of the sidewalk and came into full view of the courtyard. Only a few people were still there. You had very strong surges of emotion in those first moments of pilgrimage. The feelings didn't disperse the silence nor even disturb it. Its calming influence is not imposed; it does no subtle violence to you. It does not restrain the lunging want or the nagging need. Instead it calls out something else in you; it calls the secret you to the front.

In the Ashram quarter of Pondicherry, you had unspoken permission from everyone you met to be your truth, your secret self. The people here are living it. They shine on you when you meet them. Some kind of radiance, sister to that soothing silence, pours out of their eyes when they look at you.

Rather they look into you, and you cannot find the subtlest hint of social exploitation in their gaze. You didn't even know you watched out for that exploitation until you realized that something familiar "was missing" in this meeting of the eyes. Here the inner being is richly more than a clichŽ, more than a passing emotion. Here soul fills out, grows substance, raises its head and looks out at you from those eyes.

She is here and He. People pour out stories about them into your willing ear. They were living a miracle, a living miracle, a sustained miracle that lasted in this spot for 60 years. The fragrance of it is everywhere. People will tell you stories for hours about their grace, their compassion, their laughter. Seekers came here attracted like bees to a meadow bursting with wildflowers.

There are books and books of collected stories emanating that special fragrance. You feel like you have landed in Capernaum just in time to hear the stories from the lips of Jesus's companions, the stories that will make their way into the New Testament in the second century. Or you are on Mt. Carmel and, with Peter, you don't ever want to leave. A home for the ancient traveler by John Robert Cornell This article is excerpted with permission from the Fall/Winter 1995 issue of Sunseeds (Vol. 9, No. 2). editor@collaboration.org