THE SPIRITUAL HEART
My travels in Tiruvannamalai, India take me to the heart of the Holy Mountain and the teachings of Ramana Maharishi.
Text and Photographs by HEATHER ELTON

In South India there is a lonely hill that is revered in Hindu sacred tradition and legendary history. Arunachala, the Holy Mountain in Tiruvannamalai, rises up as some anomaly thrown up by the earth under the stress of some violent volcanic eruption in the dim ages before even the coal-bearing strata were formed. The peak is imposing, yet it offers no pretty panorama of balanced proportions. Rather, it is ungainly with sides jagged and broken, whose face is a mass of thorny scrubs and jumbled boulders. This granite mountain has been dated to the earliest time of the planet’s crust, long before dinosaurs moved their ungainly forms through the primeval forests that covered our earth. Arunachala is as ancient as the planet earth itself. The Tamil traditions say that it’s older than the Himalayas. It’s believed to be a remnant of the vanished continent of sunken Lemuria, of which indigenous legends still keep a few records. A great seer, who lived at the foot of the mountain, spoke of the lost continent that once stretched all the way across the Indian Ocean, embracing Egypt, Abyssinia, and South India. There are similarities in the religions, societies and monuments of the Dravidians in South India and those people who settled on the Nile. It is believed that the culture of lost Lemuria was carried westward to mingle in Egypt with that of Atlantis, which disseminated its civilization to many a distant place in the near east.

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