The Aradhana Day of Major A.W.Chadwick.

 The Aradhana Day of Major A.W.Chadwick.

The Aradhana Day of Major A.W.Chadwick was observed on 17th April 2023 at his samadhi (tomb) located inside the Ashram. On this occasion, the samadhi was adorned and decorated with flowers. At around 9:45 am, devotees gathered and recited the Aksharamanamalai. Subsequently, aarthi was performed and offerings of puffed rice, jaggery and raisins etc. were distributed to all.

Major Chadwick was an Englishman and was responsible for regularizing and restoring the closed Ashram Vedic School and regularising the performance of Sri Chakra Puja. Bhagavan himself has said “Chadwick was with us before. He had little desire to be born in the foreign lands. It is now fulfilled”. Major A.W. Chadwick (1890-1962) was in the British army serving in South America. After getting captivated by Brunton’s A Search in Secret India, he resigned his post, came to Sri Ramanasramam in November 1935 and remained there for good. He became Sadhu Arunachala and lies buried in the Ashram campus. He rendered into English all the original works of Sri Ramana, which were perused by the Maharshi himself. He authored A Sadhu’s Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi (1961) and some excerpts are given below:

When I first entered the Hall, he greeted me with his lovely smile and asked if I had my breakfast, and then told me to sit down. Bhagavan talked to me the whole morning and asked me many questions about my life and myself. All this seemed quite natural. He was very interested to hear about Brunton whom I had met in London. I felt the tremendous peace of his presence, his graciousness. It was not as though I was meeting him for the first time. It seemed that I had always known him. In spite of being entirely new to India and its customs, nothing that happened in the first days of my stay at the Ashram seemed strange to me; it was all quite natural.

Whenever people came to Bhagavan with their family stories he would laugh with the happy, and at times shed tears with the bereaved. He never raised his voice. He would never touch money because he never had need of it and was not interested in it. He preferred every sort of simplicity and liked to sit on the floor, but a couch had been forced upon him and this became his home for most of the twenty-four hours of the day.1 He would never- if he could help it- allow any preference to be shown to him. If any attachment to anything on earth could be said of him, it was surely to the Hill. He loved it and said it was God itself.

Bhagavan always radiated tremendous peace, but on those occasions when crowds were attracted to the Ashram such as Jayanti and Deepam, this increased to an extraordinary degree. The numbers seem to call up some reserve of a hidden force, and it was a great experience to sit with him at such times. Bhagavan had a great sense of humor, and when talking a smile was never far from his face. He had many jokes in his repertoire and was a magnificent actor; he would always dramatize the protagonist of any story he related. 

On the question of attaining Self-realisation, Bhagavan told me that in the early stages a person who was regularly meditating would usually at first go into a trance which would probably last for some thirty minutes, and if he continued with his tapas properly, such samadhi would become more frequent. A person can still carry on with the ordinary day-to-day business but he no longer identifies himself with the activities but watches them like a dreamer watching a dream.

Bhagavan said that the mind was like a monkey, never still for one second, it was an almost hopeless task to try and quieten it; the best thing to do was to give it a productive employment and never allow it to fritter itself away. Let it concentrate on ‘Who am I’? And then there will be no room for any other thought. Bhagavan said that the principal sadhanas we should practice were to eat only sattvic food and observe satsanga. He laid no other rules. He said that the mind was entirely created by the food we ate. One day Bhagavan said, “Why do you think that you are the doer? It is absurd, as it is obvious that ‘I’ does nothing. ‘I’ is always the witness. Concentrate on being the witness and let things take their course, they will go on anyhow, you cannot prevent them.” 

Bhagavan was insistent on ‘means’ and taught that we should leave the ‘ends’ to look after themselves. Bhagavan said, “Don’t worry about what other people are doing or saying, you have quite enough to do in worrying about yourself. First reform yourself and then it will be time enough to think about the world. How can you help the world until you have helped yourself?” If asked about Self-realisation, what it was like, or what would be our state in future, he would always reply, “Why worry about something in future? It is here and now which are important. You are always Self- realized, but only ignorant of the fact.”