Places impact you for a variety of reasons. And the same place impacts different people in different ways. This is especially true when it comes to spiritual experiences, where every single person’s experience is unique. And personally, every spiritual experience is unique, the same person can have different deeply spiritual experiences at different places, at different times. This thought has emerged because of my own experiences over the years, but especially so this year, with different and unique experiences at various places I have visited recently. I began this year with a visit to Baroda (Vadodara) with friends. It was meant to be a relaxed trip, a touristy trip, with our sons. We enjoyed ourselves to the hilt, but the highlight of that trip was a visit to the Lakulisha temple at Pavagadh. It was the iconography of the temple that I connected with, and I spent a few hours simply lost in the details of the figures carved around the temple. There was an indefinable connect with
Long long ago , during the great deluge, Brahma collected all the seeds of creation in a pot of nectar, which floated down the water, and finally came to rest at one place. The story goes on, with Siva appearing as Kiratamurthy (hunter) along with his wife Parvati, and shattering the pot with his arrow. The nectar spilled over, creating a pool, and the broken pot took the form of a Shiva lingam. Since the lingam originated from a pot (Kumbham), and was the fist form taken at the beginning of creation, this lingam came to be known as Adi Kumbheswarar and this place is known as Kumbakonam (Kumbham = pot, and Konam = crooked, for the pot broke crookedly). The pool formed by the nectar is the holy Mahamagham tank, where, it is believed, the nine holy rivers come to take a bath and purify themselves once every 12 years. This is celebrated on a grand scale, and thousands and thousands of devotees arrive here to have a dip in this sacred pond on that day. For a small city , Kumbakonam has an