[Advaita-l] Hallucination? No. He Was Talking to the Divine

[Sundar Rajan]

Read here for better formatting:
https://selfdrivingmind.substack.com/p/d7863665-def4-45ed-9661-9607de774ed5

Circa 1979. KK Nagar, Chennai.

The bottom flat of a three-story MIG block on PT Rajan Road. Home of
SV — my junior from Guindy Engineering College. A crowd has assembled
for the Satsang. Then a Royal Enfield rolls in, and all the chatter
and light banter subsides to a hush.
Sri RMU — my mentor — settles in to start the pooja.

Everyone goes quiet. All eyes on him. Satsangs those days started with
a Bhajan, followed by Sri RMU’s puja, then social mixing and a
sumptuous dinner,

Those were different times. My cousins and I would walk from our house
on 12th Avenue, Ashok Nagar, to 10th Avenue, then to PT Rajan Road,
spread across the full breadth of the road. No fear of traffic. It was
that light. You could get on the 12B bus at the Ashok pillar stop and
find a seat without any difficulty.
But that’s not the story.
________________________________________

The story is what happened when the abhishekam found its rhythm.
Sri RMU is completely absorbed. Then — you notice it. His lips are
moving. Not chanting. Something else. He speaks. He pauses. He
listens. He smiles. There is an unmistakable quality of affection in
his face — the intimacy of an actual exchange.
He is conversing with the deity being worshipped.
Everyone watches. No one knows what to say. What everyone noticed was
a room surcharged with deep Spiritual vibes.
To anyone unfamiliar with what was happening, it might look like a
hallucination. A person talking to a Goddess in a picture frame. No
one there. No one replying.
Hold that thought.
________________________________________
Circa 800 CE. Adi Shankara. Brahmasutra Bhāshya 1.3.33.

The sutra being examined: Are gods eligible for brahmajnana? Shankara
says yes. But it’s what comes next in the bhashya that matters.
He states that the ancient rishis directly perceived the gods. Not
symbolically. Not metaphorically. Pratyaksha — direct perception, the
same category of knowing as seeing a mango in your hand.
The objection is immediate: no one today sees gods. How can you claim
this was real?
Shankara’s reply is surgical. What is impossible now, he says, could
have been possible then. The world changes. Capacities change. But the
mechanism itself has not been destroyed — it has been described and
preserved. He cites Yoga Sutra 2.44: svādhyāyād iṣṭa-devatā
samprayogaḥ — from sustained self-study and practice comes communion
with the chosen deity. He backs it with Shvetashvatara Upanishad 2.14,
where the Veda itself praises the yogic path.
His point: the rishis revealed the Vedas because they had developed,
through yogic practice, the capacity to commune directly with deities.
The capacity is not fiction. It is documented. It has a mechanism. And
that mechanism cannot be dismissed simply because most people are not
doing the work required to access it.
Twelve hundred years of intellectual history, and the objection has
not changed. Neither has the answer.
________________________________________
1982. Pravachana Mandiram, Mandaveli, Chennai.

A large gathering of devotees. Waiting. The hall filled with that
particular quality of anticipation that only comes when you know what
is about to be given is rare.
Our Acharyal rose to deliver the Anugraha Bhashanam — the Gracious
Address, words of grace and benediction offered to the assembly.
The title: Dhyanam.
What followed was not instruction in the ordinary sense. It was a
revelation, offered with the authority of one describing territory
already traversed. Beginning with the full arc of meditation practice,
Acharyal drew the assembly into a specific and extraordinary domain:
Saguna Dhyanam — meditation on the Lord with form.
Stage by stage. And as each stage unfolded, the wonder in the hall deepened.
First, the object. Take a specific form of the Divine as your focus.
Acharyal gave the Kaivalya Upanishad example: meditate on Parameshwara
as Umāsahāyaṃ, the consort of Uma. Not a generic idea of the Divine. A
specific, beloved form — held with precision, held with love, held
without wavering.
Second, the practice. Close your eyes. Continuously, without
interruption, fix the mind on that form. Sustained, loving, unbroken
focus leads to Samprajnata Samadhi — deep absorption, still aware of
the distinction between self and Divine, but the ordinary agitation of
the mind stilled entirely.
Third — and here the assembly leaned in — the manifestation. Persist,
Acharyal said. If you truly persist, the exact deity being meditated
upon will take form before you. Will come. Will be present.
Fourth — then Acharyal makes a Stunning declaration.
Even if the practitioner opens their eyes.
Read that again. The practitioner opens their eyes — returns to the
ordinary waking world, the room, the walls, the light of day — and the
deity continues to be beheld. In resplendent form. Luminous. Present.
Undiminished.
The vision is not a product of closed eyes and a quieted mind. It does
not dissolve when the eyes open. It was never inside the head to begin
with.
This is Devata Sakshatkara. The Divine, standing before you. As real
and immediate as this page before you now.
Fifth, the Divine Word. In that state, any question or doubt that
arises receives a direct answer from the deity. Not interpretation.
Not inference. A command. A response. Received directly. Deiva Vaak —
the very voice of the Divine, speaking to the one who has arrived.
Sixth — uddharana shakti. The power that flows from this state is not
merely personal liberation. The practitioner becomes the bridge by
which others cross. To lift. To redeem. To raise. Not just to reach
the other shore, but to become the vessel that carries others to it.
Acharyal was not speaking of a distant possibility. He was describing
a living process — with stages, with conditions, with outcomes — to a
hall full of devotees who had come precisely because they sensed that
what was being described was real.
It was.
________________________________________
2013. Sacramento.
Running late. Swerving around a plastic bucket on the freeway.
Desperately trying to make the final session of a spiritual discourse
being led by a teacher I’d known years earlier — fresh out of
engineering college, working in the Sacramento area, no different then
from anyone else in our circle.
Now an Acharya. Hundreds of students. A prominent Vedanta institution.
After the class, he pulls me aside.
“Do you remember the book you gave me?”
Complete blank. I say no. Then vaguely — yes, maybe, something, years ago.
“Yoga, Enlightenment and Perfection. I took it with me to my training
in India. I carried it everywhere. That book is the railway track I
run my spiritual life on. Whenever I deviate from the track, I come
back to it. It totally transformed my life.”
“I want to meet your Guru. Even if I have to fly to India to meet Him,
I am willing to do it.”
The book was written by Sri RMU. My mentor. The one who had, on a
Sunday evening in KK Nagar, been having a conversation with a deity.
I had given this teacher the book without a second thought and then
forgotten the act entirely. No plan. No intention. No memory of it.
And yet — an Acharya. A railway track. Hundreds of lives shaped by a
teacher whose own path was shaped by a book passed without ceremony,
in a gesture so small it left no trace in me.

_______________________________________________

Go back to KK Nagar.
Go back to that pooja room, that Sunday at 6 PM, that room that went
still without anyone asking it to. Go back to the lips moving, the
pause, the smile, the unmistakable quality of a conversation being
held with someone who was listening.
What Shankara defended in 800 CE as philosophically coherent, what
Acharyal laid out in 1982 at Pravachana Mandiram as a living process
with exact stages and verifiable outcomes—you just watched it.
In a bottom flat in KK Nagar. In Chennai. In 1979.
Would you call it hallucination now?
Because uddharana shakti — the power to become the bridge by which
others cross — had already been set in motion that evening, in that
room. It moved, without announcement, through a forgotten book, across
continents and decades, into an Acharya and his hundreds of students.

No one writes about it.
Every morning, in millions of homes across this country, people start
their pooja by marking their foreheads with vibhuti or kumkum,
chanting mantras, offering flowers, and offering Naivedya.
The deity does not speak. The form does not appear. They finish the
Puja and go on with their day.

But what we witnessed in that bottom flat on PT Rajan Road is worthy
of being shouted from the rooftop of that three-story MIG flat.

Someone should write about it. Strike that. Someone MUST write about it.
I am. Here. And in a book.

Sources:
1. Puja: Eyewitness account collaborated with SV.
2. Sankara’s reference to the eligibility of Gods (Advaita-L posts on
Yoga vs Advaita).
https://www.advaita-vedanta.org/archives/advaita-l/2006-September/017556.html
3. 1982 Dhyanam speech.
https://www.centreforbrahmavidya.org/acharyas/sri-abhinava-vidyatheertha-mahaswamiji/dhyana---meditation.html?v=3.9
4. 2013 - A book that transformed..
https://quantumviewpoint.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-four-day-jnana-yanga-on-hastamalaka.html

Tesla = Dhyāna: Self-Driving to the Self — forthcoming from Morgan
James Publishing.
https://godzillaborland-arch.github.io/QuantumView/tesla-dhyana-blog.html#about-book

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