Transformation and Thaad-phal

 

Transformation

What comes to your mind when you see/ think of this? 

Valmiki is the name that jumps out at me.

The robber that turned writer/saint, most of us are aware of that story from mythology. He went on to write the epic- Valmiki Ramayan.

There are many famous names and then many not so well-known. People around us, maybe we ourselves might have undergone a transformation when touched by an experience, a person, a thought, a book, a child- anything from the vast array of the miraculous elements that lie all around us. All we need is an open heart and acceptance.

Eckhart Tolle is another name that comes to mind. 

A child from a broken family and one that had played in Germany in buildings destroyed during the World war two, he had a far from normal childhood.  

A largely self-educated boy, while he pursued a Doctoral degree he was overcome by a soul-crushing depression. He then experienced a life-changing epiphany.

Recounting the experience, Tolle says, " I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void! I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness,” just observing and watching.

His first book, The Power Of Now is the only one I have read and I will not speak of it. It has to be read. Time and time again I go back to it and open just any page and read.

He also wrote Stillness Speaks and A New Earth and a few other books.

Tolle has said "I feel actually that the work I do is a coming together of the teaching 'stream', if you want to call it that, of Jiddu Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi"

And now my dear Reader I shall take you to another kind of transformation. One which occurs within us, tele-porting us in a lightning-flash into a place of joy. I am talking of eating a fruit called Thaad-phal in Hindi, Munji kai in Telugu and Thaati ningu ( I think) in Kannada. Here are some pics from a cart that sells this divinely succulent fruit very close to the college I lecture at.

The outer shell is removed and the translucent fruit scooped out. Each fruit has nectar right inside and an opaque-pearlescent delightfully chewy cover. If you haven't eaten one, do try :)

Likewise at times our own hard shell-cover/ fake ego-mind needs chopping away to uncover the pearlescent essence inside each one of us.

Do tell me your own take on Transformation and what/who comes to mind as well as if you like this particular fruit :D