Bhagavan Ramana's Grace

I do not usually post any personal stories on this blog, but here goes ...

Yesterday, I took my children to a park beside the bay, and a few minutes after we arrived I saw a biggish sturdy boy using his greater size and strength to dominate a smaller tear-streaked boy. Their mothers did not seem to be around, so I felt I needed to help them resolve their struggle over a lightsaber.

To my great surprise, the bigger one suddenly let go of the saber and drove his fist into my mouth, hard. Twice. An almost overpowering urge arose to drop him to the ground very fast and pin him, and as I was struggling to resist this urge, he kicked me 3 or 4 times. At first there was a kind of bodily shock reaction and I had to fight back tears.

A few people witnessed this, and there was lots of consternation, and someone called the police because the child would not admit to having any parent or guardian at the park and though many people were asked, no one knew who he was. It did not seem right to just leave him running amok amidst lots of younger kids.

A polarization began to happen, in which I was cast in the role (in my own mind too) as the nice peaceful person, and the boy was cast in the role as the out of control bad one.

But then Bhagavan, whom I had temporarily lost awareness of, showed me the child's heart. At first it was just a glimmer, but enough of a glimmer that it became obvious that the child was not the ordinary looking, sturdy, red-haired body he was "in", nor the very confused and suffering mind through which our conventional reality was being filtered (he turned out to be autistic, though he had none of the usual traits).

Then Bhagavan turned up the dial and showed me the boy's heart so blazingly that I could no longer feel any difference between the child and Bhagavan himself.

An overwhelming sense of gratitude keeps flooding me, that the boy touched me in the way he did. It took exactly those two punches (and Bhagavan) to wake me up out of the trance I had been in, of imagining the child was just a troublesome individual on the loose and nothing to do with Bhagavan.

Bhagavan showed me so tangibly that what appeared to be the boy was not the boy at all ... and what WAS real about the boy was none other than our Beloved ... I cannot really put this into words, but I have tried.