Baba Rampuri talks about the role and nature of Hindu scriptures and sacred text in Indian tradition.

Baba Rampuri talks about the nature of sacred speech: syllables, aksharas, and matrikas living in the sacred geography of our articulation.

“For, as the stars are the witnesses and therefore the storytellers, crisscrossing all lives and all events, now and forever, Speech makes those stories known and establishes the possibilities of all knowledge. Knowledge is transported in the boat of storytelling on the Ocean of Story. The “speech” of the sky contains within it the language of The Book of the World, whose syllables reside in the sacred geography of our mouths.”

“Upama as Analogy joins together Proximity and Reflection, and through it, all the marks and signs of the universe can be drawn together. We can see that analogy in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad:

Truly, the dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse;
the sun his eye; the wind his breath; the universal fire his open mouth.
The year is the body of the sacrificial horse;
the sky his back; the atmosphere his stomach…
the stars his bones; the clouds his flesh…”

Upstairs, in the Hall of Darshan, in the ashram of the Old Baba, Arjun Puri, a dozen frightened individuals gathered for this most terrific of yoga demonstrations.

Shri Mahant Kapil Puri invoked his lineage, reciting it backwards, starting with his guru, Shri Mahant Arjun Puri, back twenty five hundred years through Adi Shankaracharya, back another 2500 years past the advent of the present Age of Kali, and then back through countless millenniums, past the Dwapara Age, into the Treta Age, to the Lord of Yogis, the three headed Dattatreya, and past him, past Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, all the way back to the first guru, Maha Shunya, the Supreme Void.

His eyes rolled back in his head as he sat in siddhasana, his legs crossed, the soles of his feet facing his body. He cleansed his nerve currents with Pranayama, alternating the breaths through his right and left nostrils. He lowered his head and his last breaths shook the hall with thunder.

Speech at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, March 2008
The Edge of Indian Spirituality – The Oral Tradition of Naked Yogis

Magic happens anywhere worlds meet: at a crossroads, the seashore, graveyards, airports, hospitals, mountain tops, and temples. But those places where the Ordinary World meets the Extraordinary World require pilgrimage, whether internal or external. The act of making a pilgrimage is that of suspending oneself between worlds. Those locations to which one makes a pilgrimage, are called tirthas, crossing over places. They are spaces containing the meeting of worlds, and standing on those intersections, one may be at once in both worlds. Tirthas mark hidden entrances to the Extraordinary World.

They resemble a fold in the page, a hinge between the macro and the microcosms. A reflection of the inner journey onto the external world or a reflection of the heavens onto the Earth. Those who go on a pilgrimage become witnesses of mirrors.