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CHAPTER 4

THE LAND OF LIGHT

“Home is where the heart is." - Robert Frost

Bombay ! Watching it slowly appear on the horizon, I did not know what to expect, my mind overflowing with fantasies fed by years of Victorian fiction - snake charmers, fakirs, bejeweled swamis, white slavers, dancing girls, Mogul invaders, cartels of master criminals and swindlers presiding over myriad forms of corruption, alleys teeming with brown-skinned brigands, an opium den on every other corner, emaciated unfortunates expiring in the streets.

The high from the trip across the Indian Ocean refused to rub off on the gargantuan metropolis. As the decrepit old boat chugged past rusting geriatric tankers listlessly anchored in the harbor and the Gate of India appeared like a phantom out of the choking noon-day haze I felt strangely let-down.

We docked next to the Gate of India, a tribute to the glory of the Raj. It had once been an impressive monument but was hopelessly neglected; its journey from pride to poverty had transformed it into a haven for hawkers, thieves and pickpockets, a venue for promenading crowds, and a playground for countless rats who went boldly about their business in the light of day. With effort, however, I conjured an image of the Viceroy, dressed to the nines, attended by his guard, a company of spit-shined equestrian troops and a brass band, standing beneath its generous arch welcoming dignitaries from England, perhaps the Queen or the foreign minister disembarking from an elegant wooden schooner, her starched white sails fluttering in the breeze. One would not expect Mother India to take pride in a symbol of her enslavement, of course, but there it was, not in the excellent state of preservation of Calcutta 's Victoria Memorial, yet neither had it been razed to the ground in a fit of revolutionary fervor at Independence . It was left instead, like all real estate except most temples, to slowly crumble into the earth, victim of Kala, Time, the great devourer.

Leaving the sleepy harbor and entering the warren of fetid streets along the waterfront, I tuned to the heart and pulse of the city, my senses overwhelmed by a tremendous roar, the blending of millions of vibrations into an overpowering, shaking riot of energy. Though seemingly somnambulant from the boat, something definitely was happening - ten million souls desperately scratching and clawing to survive. Resembling New York energy wise, Bombay was dynamic, exciting, and cosmopolitan. Unlike The Big Apple, however, the sun shone year around and the streets at three in the morning were remarkably safe.

Ambling leisurely along, eyes peeled for proper accommodations, an army of touts and vendors presented fabulous deals I could easily refuse. A small, mustachioed, immaculately dressed man enthusiastically offered to shine my shoes for a rupee, about eight cents. When I pointed to my skimpy rubber sandals, he seemed unimpressed.

"Very good shine, saab. I do best work!"

For ‘pipty annas,’ four cents, a skinny one-eyed turbaned Rajasthani offered to clean my ears with a long hooked needle-like metal pick to which a small wad of cotton was attached.

A young boy with a big smile, eager to book my trip to Srinagar, Kashmir, informed me I would be the honored guest of his ‘uncle,’ a very famous man, on an old houseboat built during the waning days of the Raj. He proudly presented a worn and dirty photo of a hippie smoking a chillum on the verandah of a decrepit boat on Dal lake, the hint of snow-capped mountains, which I took to be the Himalayas , in the distance.

" Paradise ," he said, obviously coached by Western travelers.

"Only two thousand rupees!"

"I walked on, the price cascading with every step.

"OK, last price, one thousand rupees!"

"Five hundred rupees, last price. With breakfast!"

A noseless, fingerless, lion-faced leper hobbling on a rag-encrusted homemade crutch aggressively thrust a cracked, bleeding scabrous putrefying stub in my face demanding bakshish.

An amputee stuffed in a small wooden box-like cart lifted legless stubs into the air, crying pitifully from his station near a reeking public latrine under a huge banyan tree next to a small shrine, “Baksheesh saab! Baksheesh!”

Demanding five rupees, a king's ransom, a barefoot rheumy-eyed young girl, not more than five, dressed in rags, full of chutzpah, darted through the chaotic traffic carrying her snot-nosed thumb-sucking baby brother, naked except for a string around his neck to which was affixed a small cylindrical copper amulet containing a holy mantra to ward off the evil eye. When I mimicked her pathetic stomach-to-mouth gestures, she broke out laughing and wandered off singing a film song after protracted negotiations yielded half a rupee.

A small boy immaculately dressed in white with light-filled gentle eyes hoisted a large brass platter sporting an artfully constructed altar garlanded with fresh jasmine on which was enthroned a picture of the great god Rama, pride of the race of solar kings, the orange monkey god Hanuman genuflecting before him. A wafer of camphor, the size of a communion host, burned in a pile of sacred ash next to a smattering of small odd-shaped aluminum coins. Silently, he vibed a rupee from my pocket.

A stooped graying Muslim woman presented a much-folded paper, written with the help of a foreigner, attesting to her impoverished state, informing prospective donors that she had been given a small plot by a generous zamindar, a landlord. To top it off, Inshallah (By God's Grace), the reader was to be allowed the honor of contributing the modest sum of ten thousand rupees, equivalent to a Western beggar requesting fifty grand, toward the construction of a retirement bungalow,

Unlike Western street people, no one had a bone to pick or an agenda apart from money and I was not expected to feel guilty for our disparate fates; karma was karma - mine to be rich, theirs to be poor. Needy as they were, I soon realized that the extraordinary whining, crying, grimacing, and moaning was simply hi-art. The second I passed lives resumed without so much as a by-your-leave. Life was lila, a divine play, and on both sides of the equation, beggars and beggees, we were cast to be supremely indifferent, gods sporting on earth. In a couple of days I became invisible. The word was out - he knows what's up.

In the real estate trade it is said that home buyers decide in the first two minutes. I was not buying a house, but in the first two hours I bought a home, a culture, an idea that would serve the rest of my life, one only dimly grasped as I wandered around gawking at the fascinating multi-cultural city: the Dharavi slum, nestled in the shade of multi-million dollar high-rises, a quarter of a million people living in less than a square mile, the elegant Indo-Saracen architecture of the Muslim quarter, riotous bazaars, colonial mansions and pompously imperial buildings of the Raj, the steamy red-light district, thousands of temples, shrines, and mosques. And above all, incessant humanity, frenetic ants animated by the unforgiving tropical sun.

Over the years I have met dozens who did not survive the first twenty-four hours, jetting off to less challenging destinations the day after touching down, but I found India hopelessly charming from the start. Like Africa , it was home to many cultures, but unlike Africa , it was a civilization, held together for thousands of years by a spiritual mystery that continuously revealed itself in myriad ways.

I had come home.

Initially unsure how to handle the poverty, and motivated by compassion on one hand, I often gave more than necessary. On the other, the problem's magnitude produced a strange indifference to cases of genuine need. A standard comment on the subject was “Ten minutes on the streets of Bombay would bankrupt Laxmi, the Goddess of Wealth.” Many were professionals, members of families with generations of experience in the trade, parents who scarred and deformed their children to render them particularly valuable, training them from infancy to play on the sympathies of the public. Though only a short term fix, after much thought, to cultivate generosity I budgeted a fixed sum every day, like a tithe.

During my search for a hotel I stopped at a restaurant for lunch and struck up a conversation with a businessman.

"Who takes care of them? They have to eat," I said wolfing down my sumptuous lunch.

"Of course we do," he said. "Everybody gives a little something but nothing changes. There are always beggars because we have little resources and a large population. The government, which wants the problem to go away so foreigners will not get a bad impression, discourages giving, but this is nonsense. You do not need beggars to see that we are a poor country."

Lunch consisted of buttered nan, a tasty flat bread baked in a tandoor, an earthen oven, and smothered in ghee, clarified butter, a fiery, soupy spinach dish, and sweet mango lassi, a delicious milk drink similar to a shake. My tongue still smarting from the cayenne, I stepped into the baking afternoon sun, looked down the block, and spied a decrepit faded-green hotel that brought to mind New Orleans French Quarter ante-bellum times. Given a second-story room at the top of a creaking staircase, I sat in a rickety white wicker chair digesting my meal, smoking hash and watching the passing show.

Mother would have labeled the Carleton ‘seedy,’ and soft focus perception was indeed preferable. However, even four star hotels, such as they are, sport mediaeval kitchens, soiled carpets, smudged walls, leaky plumbing, and incompetent help. How amazing that a country which developed a grand civilization well before the time of Christ, famed for spirituality, mathematics, arts, letters, and sciences, could not, over the course of millennia, fathom the concept of building maintenance. Obviously-worshipped icons and pictures of Vishnu, the cosmic preserver, adorned every home and business, yet concerning real estate, the god seemed hopelessly indifferent.

The clientele, like the hotel in Khartoum , represented a motley Diaspora of neer-do-wells, romantics and desperados spewn like seeds in the wind from the four corners of the earth. To be sure, druggies were well represented, but the vibes were not, in the argot of the times, ‘heavy.’ Something about India , even in the depths of her archaic miseries, keeps heavy from heaviness. Unlike their armored, techie, mobile, Darth Vaderesque US counterparts, city cops, for example, leisurely wander the streets clad in khaki shorts, scout caps and sandals, their sole weapon, the lathi, a thin long cane stick, used sparingly on miscreants of all ilk. Even crooks believe in God and propitiate the deities with lavish devotion. A Swami informed me that the immense wealth collected at Tirupathi, said to be the richest temple in India and perhaps the world, where devotees appear daily in their tens of thousands and suffer interminable waits in the boiling sun only to fling their bodies at the feet of a miraculous boon-granting granite icon, Venkateswara, was the temple of choice for those wishing to expiate sins associated with ‘black money,’ ill-gotten wealth.

India 's version of Time recently reported that in a precinct in Bihar , a rural area in Eastern India famed for criminal activity, near the spot where Buddha attained enlightenment, in the last month of pregnancy women committed crimes requiring a month in lockup so the baby would be born in jail. When queried about the reason, the mothers said that since the child would be a career criminal and spend much of its life behind bars, it was important that it feel comfortable there from the start!

I digress.

After pondering my first few hours in the Land of Light , I took a siesta, and, as the boiling sun calmed to simmer about four, wandered the neighborhood. I ended up sipping a fresh mango shake in a juice shop catering to hippies while a pet monkey chained to a tree branch and dressed in a red skirt, masturbated in sync to the Rolling Stones blaring "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" from a battered tape deck.

DARSHAN

From an eight-to-five point of view my travels may seem exciting, funny, romantic, exotic, and maybe even slightly glamorous. But real life, the inner journey, with the exception of the epiphanies, was a titanic struggle. More often than not, after a day on the street, I returned to my hotel to sit up half the night tormented by fears and desires too numerous to mention. I cannot begin to count the times I blew into town hoping to meet my destiny, only to encounter my own very limited self sitting in the corner of a crummy vermin-infested cafe in an overpopulated third-world country sipping bitter tea, resentfully observing thoughts as dark as the natives marching across my consciousness. Though I wanted to believe that suffering was profoundly romantic, it was hopelessly banal. I suffered homesickness, longing for the touch of a woman, worry over dwindling resources, the struggle with my addictions, and the vanity that my greatness had yet to receive its due from a capricious world.

Superficially I was as strong, confident and clever as one could hope to be, but I questioned everything patiently and diligently, a practice not conducive to happiness. And I was fast coming to the conclusion that the puzzle of my being would not be solved by lonely introspection or a life of adventurous distractions. I needed help.

I would think through every doubt from a dozen different angles, yet the riddle would not yield. There I was. There was the world. Getting the two to interact and produce lasting fulfillment seemed impossible. At times I thought I was quite mad. What, except weak genes, could explain why a nice middle-class boy apparently preferred to sit in a juice shop in Bombay and watch a masturbating monkey to assuming his ‘rightful place in society’ as mother so quaintly put it?

In terms of what counted to the world - security, gainful employment, family, I was light years from reality. I was not rejecting that, or perhaps I was, as much as failing to see its long term relevance. You got all the stuff, you did all those things, but what was the point if they slipped you into the inviting warm earth with a big existential question mark on your worn out face? There had to be a reason why we were encased in these strange meaty waste-producing tubes.

After wandering the streets for a couple of hours I went back to the hotel and picked up Mr. Patel's Gita, suddenly realizing that the war forming the centerpiece of this great spiritual work was not an outer war but a symbol of the conflict between the dark and light forces within one’s own mind. Krsna said the answer was to know oneself as the Self. I had had my glimpses, tasted the peace and joy, but how could I establish myself ‘beyond the dualities’ and become ‘a man of steady wisdom?’

I prayed for enlightenment.

The next day, sitting in the juice shop reading a book on Hinduism, a handsome young man in an immaculate white kurta with a red spot on his forehead sat down at my table uninvited. Having experienced every possible permutation-combination of human hustle I rarely put up with the natives unless I was hopelessly lonely or bored. If you are a female they want sex or money, not necessarily in that order; if a male, money. No matter how innocent it all seems, (come home and meet the family, let’s go the park and see the sights) in the end it always boils down to “Help me with my son's education, marry my daughter so she can get her green card, send me a transistor radio or a hair dryer when you get back.’ I do not know what they think we are…God’s perhaps. One fellow, with a straight face, asked me to bring a refrigerator when I returned to India . ‘It’s a small thing, no?’ he asked.

I ignored him, going deeper into my reading, scanning occasionally to pick up his vibes, waiting for the inevitable interruption.

But he sat sipping his juice as if I did not exist.

As time passed my wall of cynicism dissolved and I began to feel positively happy. To my surprise I realized that the energy was coming from him! I observed him carefully, a detective looking for something that might provide an opening, when he said, "What is your native place?”

“ America , USA . And you?”

“Just here.”

“What do you do?" I replied.

"I'm a student."

"Oh, what do you study?"

"The Vedas," he replied.

"This is very interesting," I replied. "I'm just now reading the

Gita. I think it comes from the Vedas."

"No, not exactly," he said, "It's a Purana, but the ideas come from the Vedas."

"But you must have a job. You can't just study holy books."

"No, I don't have a job. My father wants me to learn our ancient culture so he supports me."

"Do you practice meditation?"

"Yes."

"And what do you experience?"

"Peace."

"What meditation do you do?"

"I listen to the words of my guru."

"So how does that work?" I asked eagerly.

"He just talks about the Self and I listen. Then something happens and I experience peace."

"Are you in meditation now? I can feel some good energy coming from you." I asked.

He seemed surprised.

"Yes. I came from satsang with Maharaj."

"Maharaj?"

"My guru.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Great king."

"So how is he a king?"

"He rules over his own mind."

"And how do you know that?"

"Because he is at peace. I become peaceful in his presence."

"What is satsang?"

"When you sit with a mahatma and you experience something."

"Are you a mahatma?" I asked innocently.

He laughed. "No, I'm just his devotee."

I could not explain why, but I knew exactly what he was talking about.

"Will you take me to the Maharaj?" I asked.

"Yes, we will go. No expectations. Not everybody experiences something."

"That's OK," I said. "I'd just like to see what these mahatmas look like. I came to India to find God. I have had experiences and read books, but I’m still in the dark. Maybe your Maharaj can help."

"Maybe," he smiled, getting up to leave, "My name is Ravi , I will meet you here tomorrow at nine."

"So what happens at these satsangs?" I asked as we made our way through the crowded streets.

"We sit. Sometimes there is a question and Maharaj talks. Don't say anything unless he asks you a question. To experience the Self, silence is best."

"But I thought you said that you experienced It when he was talking."

"I do, but I also experience it when he isn't saying anything."

"I don't get it," I replied. "How can you experience something when nobody is saying anything?"

"Too many questions," he said. "Just you see."

We arrived at a storefront on a busy street. In an atmosphere of total silence we deposited our sandals on a landing at the top of a flight of stairs and entered a room where about ten people were sitting on the floor in front of a small clean-shaven man. I don’t know what I expected but he seemed quite ordinary, like the thousands of men we had passed in the street. We sat for a long time, the sounds of the city melting into the silence like ice in hot water. I felt agitated, tortured by many questions.

Toward the end the Maharaj spoke to Ravi who turned and said, "Maharaj wants to know where is your native place."

"The USA ," I replied.

"And why have you come?"

"I want to know God," I said.

Maharaj says, "Who wants to know God?"

"I do," I replied, thinking they didn't hear properly. "Who are you?"

"You mean you want to know my name?" I asked.

"No. You. Who are you?"

"You want to know what I do?" I replied. "No, not what you do. Who you are."

"Well, I don't know," I said, irritated at the question. "I've never thought about it."

He repeated the conversation to the Maharaj who looked directly into me and said "You are God" in English.

Suddenly my mind went blank and I could barely make out his body which seemed a one dimensional cut-out superimposed in the center of a limitless radiant light! He answered my question in the only way possible - by an experience of the Self.

I felt someone gently shaking my shoulder and suddenly became aware of the world. The room was empty.

"The satsang's over," said Ravi . "Shall we take juice?"

I got up, nearly unable to stand. Everything was fresh and new, bathed in a subtle light. As we slipped on our sandals Ravi said, "The Maharaj says that perhaps you will find what you are seeking in Rishikesh."

"You are very blessed," he said as we sipped our mango shakes. "Many people wait for years to have such an experience. It is good karma from previous lives."

"But why did he tell me I would find what I was seeking in Rishikesh?" I asked. "Why shouldn't I go back to see him again?"

"So many questions," he said affectionately. "In India we do not question the guru. He knows things that we don't.”

"Maybe, but why look for a guru if he can do this for me," I said, referring to the blissful feeling that was still very much with me.

"Why should I go all the way to Rishikesh?"

"You are a very funny man," he said. "I think the Americans believe everything is logical, but life is not logical. You have to let go. It is not up to you."

Ravi was right. I thought too much.

Robbed of my ego and intoxicated by a wondrous sense of well-being, I wandered the city for several timeless days watching events melt effortlessly into each other in an unending flow. The Maharaj had shown me the door to hidden Bharat, the Land of Light . Oddly, I did not feel compelled to see him again, though I thought of him often. It was his will.

Three days later I boarded the train for Delhi and the Himalayas . Two years later I would discover I had stumbled on one of India 's great Mahatamas, Nisagadatta Maharaj, a man of the highest realization, who lived an ordinary life in the heart of Bombay .

CITY OF SAINTS

Today Delhi , like all major Indian cities, is drowning in a flood of country migrants who have exchanged the grinding poverty the hinterlands for the grinding poverty of an ugly polluted city. The situation is out of hand; India ’s population increases by the size of two New York cities a year.

When I arrived in 1969, however, New Delhi , the area built by the British as the seat of government, was still livable. I took a clean, safe room in Madame Colaco’s Guest house, near Jantar Mantar, a sixteenth century astronomical observatory with building-sized instruments constructed by a Rajput King, and breakfasted at the Imperial for the daily price of my room, two dollars. The Imperial conjured up memories of the Raj: the turbaned white-jacketed waiters attended an elegant clientele seated on close-cropped grass in manicured gardens under striped canopies in wicker chairs at tables set with starched white linen napkins and polished silver. The air was clean and the sounds of the morning traffic did not climb over the tall whitewashed bougainvillea-covered walls to disturb the tranquility of the patrician patrons as it does today. Even the touts and vendors hanging out near the front gates had a bit of class.

After breakfast I networked with travelers and picked up information on the libertine hot spots, Goa , Kulu-Manali, and Kovalam beach. Certainly God was great, but I thought it prudent to be prepared should the God quest not pan out. After lunch at Nirula’s I popped over to Old Delhi in a rickshaw for a taste of the exotic - Chandi Chowk, the riotous bazaar, the snake charmers and magicians on the lawn in front of the Red Fort, Himayun’s bat-infested tomb, Qtab Minar, and Raj Ghat on the Yamuna where Mahatma Ghandi, the father of the nation, was cremated.

But the world, which seemed far away and unreal, failed to enthrall me. So, burdened with the belief that rubbing elbows with the teeming masses of the Asian subcontinent was an indispensable step on the road to enlightenment, I caught the pigs and chickens special to Rishikesh, suffering conditions that would have made the Black Hole of Calcutta seem spacious. Why I was willing to endure rock hard seats, puking babies and screechy Hindi film music blaring from the world's most primitive audio technology to garner another useless credential for my traveler’s resume, I will never know.

The shady road to the foothills of the Himalayas where the Ganges enters the plains proceeds through endless cane fields broken by small towns and villages where peasants pass a medieval existence in mud walled thatched roofed hovels clustered around a central well. As the bus careens along the potholed road, which it shares with pigs, chickens, goats, ox carts, trucks, bicycles and countless pedestrians, its horn sending out intermittent blips of energy like bat radar, you will glimpse an old man sitting on a rope bed smoking a hubbly-bubbly, a woman drawing water from the well, small children knocking about in the dust making mischief, and lean men scratching the red soil with primitive wooden plows pulled by teams of oxen. It seems idyllic from the bus, but share a few days of these lives of quiet desperation and you will be quickly disabused of any romantic notions. Ignorance, poverty, superstition, and disease abound. What passes for peace is simply torpor.

About ten miles from Rishikesh I noticed a billboard: "Welcome to the City of Saints ." The town, a noisy, dirty, crowded, unaesthetic agglomeration of commercial establishments and residential dwellings, was a terrible disappointment. Cranky from the ride, I fought my way through the rickshaw wallas and hotel touts and walked downtown where I found a decent restaurant. The proprietor, Subash, served a nice meal and sat down to talk.

"I saw a sign on the road from Haridwaar saying Rishikesh was the "City of Saints .” It doesn't look all that holy to me," I said.

"What ashram are you looking for?" he asked.

"I don't know," I replied, "it doesn't matter. This is my first time to India ."

"Well, you have to be careful," he said. "These yogis are not always too scrupulous."

"What do you mean?"

"Just because one fellow wears the orange cloth, has a long beard and a wild look in his eye doesn't mean that he's a saint. Most of these sadhus are useless lazy fellows on the lookout for money or drugs, ‘drop-outs’ I think you call them."

"But I thought they took vows not to have money, sex, drugs, all that."

"They do, but not many stick to it. Some good ones are there, but most are just parasites."

"Parasites?"

"They live off the society and don't put anything back. And they are now going for the foreigners since the Beatles came."

"The Beatles came here?"

"Yes, they came to see the Maharishi who is now a famous guru. They put him on the map. He goes all around the world now, making lots of money. Before, he was just a little guru. Now he's too big to even visit."

"So what happened to the Beatles?"

"Nothing. They came, spent a few weeks, and left, like most of the hippies. But now many people in your country know about Rishikesh and yoga. New ones come every day looking for peace of mind. Like you. And the sadhus are doing good business."

"But I thought this spirituality was free," I said naively.

"Nothing's free in this life. You may not have to pay money straightaway but you will pay sooner or later. We call it karma."

"They really are dishonest?" I said incredulously.

"I'll tell you a story," he said warming to his subject.

"About a year ago a European woman, Swiss I think, came from Delhi . She had inherited some big moneys there and was looking for peace. She got off the train and one taxi walla, a glib fellow, saw her looking confused about where to go. He offered to take her around, show her the ashrams at no charge. He drove her around a bit and found out her story. So on the way up the river to the ashrams he said he was an honest guru who didn't want money like the rest of them, that he worked for his living and gave his money to sadhus who were looking for God."

“The woman thought it was karma. How could it be only a coincidence that she had come looking for peace and God had sent her straight to this humble yogi?” he said with a grin.

“The fellow suggested that she put up in a local hotel and he would teach her some meditation, some yoga."

He paused, sipped on this tea, and smiled.

"So what happened?" I asked.

"He taught her some yoga, all right. He told her his path was tantra, sex yoga, and that the fastest way to get to God was to sleep with an enlightened tantrik. She was lonely and middle-aged and he wasn't a bad-looking fellow so they took up with each other. He told her all sorts of things - the story is common knowledge around town. He is a shameless fellow. And she believed it all. Before long she was talking about building him an ashram. But he wanted to see Europe so he got her to marry him and take him to Switzerland ! Just a taxi walla, mind you. And in the end he got all sorts of money and left her and lives not far from here in a big house with a nice young wife. So you have to be careful."

"I don't think these yogis will want to sleep with me," I said. And my money is running out."

He laughed.

"No, I don't think so. You look like a smart man."

"I was a businessman in my country," I replied. "I know the whole game, but I'm serious about this God business. I met a mahatma in Bombay who said to come to Rishikesh. I think he must have known that something good would happen here."

"I don't mean to discourage you," the proprietor said. "There are also good yogis. Go to Shivananda ashram. Swami Chitananda is an honest man."

"What about you?" I asked. "Do you have a guru?"

"Yes," he said. "See that picture on the wall behind the counter? That's my guru, Neemkaroli Baba. One of your famous men, Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram Das), a Harvard Professor, came here and gave him some LSD."

What happened?" I inquired eagerly.

"Nothing. Nothing at all. The Maharaj took it and just sat there. Your professor couldn't believe it. He was expecting him to get high but it didn't work."

The memory of the trip with George in the Atlas Mountains came to mind. "I think I know what you mean," I said. "He was already higher than the LSD."

"Yes," he replied, looking at me with interest.

"Where is he from?" I said. "Maybe I could see him."

"You could," he said, "but he's in Almora, near Nainital many hours from here in the Himalayas .

"Why is he a guru?" I said, somewhat surprised by his bulk and lack of grooming. He didn't seem at all mystical, but had a fabulous smile.

"He is a real mahatma," said my companion. "He has great siddhis."

"Siddhis?"

"Powers. He is known as the steam engine guru because one day he stopped a train with the power of his mind. The wheels on the engine were going around but the train wouldn't move until he released it."

"Do you believe that?" I said.

“Yes. Many such things happen here. It was witnessed by many people. But it does not matter because he is an incarnation of love. He has changed my life completely. Before I met him I was very unhappy. Now I have no problems. Even business is good."

“So where are the ashrams?" I said.

"Just keep on this road. In about a mile you will see the Shivananda ashram. I hope you find what you’re seeking."

I walked up the dusty road, full of anticipation, thinking about the conversation. Traffic died at the edge of town and only a couple of tongas , colorfully decorated horse-drawn carriages with big wooden wheels, carrying brightly-clad women passed. The sight of the Ganges and the mountains pulled me out of my thoughts.

I observed four stocky men and a boy with oriental features whom I judged to be Nepali or Tibetan construction workers wearing vests, colorful hats, work pants, carrying the tools of their trade, picks, sledge-hammers and shovels, driving several small worn-out knock-kneed mules laden with heavy boulders and sand from the river. On my right a well-dressed family of Hindu pilgrims walked silently along, the wife dutifully bringing up the rear followed by three well-behaved children. Two dignified clean-shaven saffron-robed monks with begging bowls and staffs emerged from a path on the hillside and joined the flow.

Today the road from to the Shivananda Ashram is a dusty ugly corridor of makeshift businesses exploiting the boom. Sadly, the tongas are gone and the once-pleasant walk is now a torture best endured crammed in the back of a soulless motor rickshaw, hands over ears to block the incessant cacophony of horns, the grinding gears and the roar of dozens of two stroke engines. The City of Saints has been ‘discovered.’ A jet boat of American design rushes mindlessly up and down the river, marring the timeless serenity, desecrating Hinduism's most sacred symbol. At four hundred fifty rupees a head, a considerable sum by Indian standards, raft after raft of Delhi yuppies sail past sadhus and pilgrims bathing in the river.

When the river and the mountains came into view, a thrill of recognition lifted my mind to transcendental heights and I sensed that I was about to make a giant step on my journey home. I suppose I should not make so much of it since it was what any pilgrim must feel approaching the primary symbol of his or her religion for the first time: Lourdes , The Mount of Olives, the Kabbah, or Swedagon Pagoda. But I was not religious and my knowledge of God was rudimentary, to say the least. Still, the experience is as clear today, thirty years later, as it was then.

A large cluster of unaesthetic buildings clinging to the north bank of the Ganges , the Shivananda Ashram, appeared on the left. Across the slate blue, placid river on the right I noticed a string of temples and ashrams stretching half a mile up and downstream above the ghats. The Montana dream flashed. A wave of sweet, warm, tingly energy arose from the base of the spine irradiating every cell of the body with delicious ecstasy, intensifying my already-heightened state. I followed a path down to the boulder-strewn sandy banks of the river where an open long boat with wooden benches was about to embark for a large complex of buildings and temples, on the other shore.

Like a small dinghy in a hurricane, the mind burst its moorings in a violent storm of inner energy, obliterating the past. I saw myself from far away, walking eagerly into a crowd of brightly-dressed Rajasthanis, weathered low-caste working people from India's western desert, caught in the excitement of a once in a lifetime pilgrimage, waiting for the boat to leave for the other shore.

In those days the average daily wage was about ten rupees, roughly seventy-five cents, a sum that served to feed and clothe a family of four or five. Thirty years of back breaking work might allow a family to accumulate enough to justify a week long pilgrimage to the Ganges . From infancy tales of the exploits of the gods and goddesses, of whom Ganga is one of the most revered, recounted by the village Brahmin and enacted in colorful rituals large and small throughout the year, capture the imagination of the masses. Recently the Ramayana, an epic poem presenting Vedic culture's loftiest ideas in the form of a story of one of India's best-loved Gods, Rama, a warrior king whose faithful wife was abducted by a wicked demon king, was converted into a forty episode drama for television. During weekly screenings the whole country, roughly a billion souls, ground to a halt, rendering the purchase of even the most rudimentary goods impossible. Myth, psychic fact, is alive and well in India , reaching deep into the soul to touch the essential, the hidden current of meaning in every Hindu.

Led by the children, the group waded eagerly into the river chanting mantras, garlanding the placid surface with marigold leis, anointing themselves with its healing waters, tossing coins for good luck.

I looked upriver as an orange-clad monk and his disciple emerged from the warren of ashram buildings. After gazing at the river for a few moments, their elegant forms silhouetted against the mountains, the senior monk turned to speak to his disciple and I saw, or think I saw, a stream of timeless love pour from heart to heart, an event so meaningful it brought tears to my eyes and awakened the Pure Light within, which, like the sun reflecting off the river, refracted off the flow of my thoughts and enlightened my mind as to my ultimate purpose. It was the moment that, as the Buddhists say, I ‘entered the stream,’ dove wholeheartedly into the culture that would mold and shape my aspirations.

The boat pulled up at the dock, emptied itself, and we entered, every hand clutching an offering; a flower, coins, small balls of chapati dough. As we pulled away, the turbaned leader chanted to the river goddess and everyone chimed in.

Jai! Jai! Gange! Jaya Hare Gange!

Victory to Ganga , the Holy Mother.

A large school of silvery carp, some nearly a meter long, appeared alongside the boat swimming effortlessly in the current, begging shamelessly for the dough. Glistening coins sank into the swift green depths as small leaf rafts with flower offerings were set lovingly on the glassy surface.

Ascending the ghats, I wandered downstream through Swarg Ashram, entranced by the bizarre religious statuary lining the walk: a small ecstatic blue boy playing a flute dancing on one of a multi-headed cobra’s hoods, the God Krsna, whom I would eventually come to love and adore, a potbellied elephant God, Ganesh, with four arms and one tusk, symbolizing non-duality, an indifferent white yogi, Shiva, the Ganges streaming from his matted locks, a cobra coiled around his neck, an elegantly dressed Goddess, Saraswati, playing the sitar, and a flying monkey with a crazy grin, Hanuman, carrying what appeared to be a forested mountain in one hand.

The last in the line, set back a few meters from the edge of the flood plain, in an area called Muni Ke Reti, ‘the place where sages revel,’ I discovered an ashram called Veda Niketan, ‘Home of Knowledge.’ Knowing what I know now, I would not call it a proper ashram, but it was right for me at the time.

Twenty or thirty sun drenched rooms on ground level clustered around a courtyard. To impress visitors and ensnare the odd rupee a sheet metal tank encased in wire mesh had been constructed near the entrance in which was to be seen a floating stone! A poorly lettered sign proclaimed the miracle. How this extraordinary phenomenon, a porous lava rock with a suspicious resemblance to a sponge, related to the awesome spiritual power of the Swami was not apparent, but the mind was free to draw conclusions. Since his spiritual might seemed to be mainly involved in keeping the rock afloat and bona-fide Indian devotees were much in absence, the ashram had become a budget hotel for Westerners who ended up in Rishikesh awed by the magic of the Himalayas and the lure of enlightenment.

My first task was to find gurus, which to the untrained eye seemed as innumerable as stones in the Ganges . But, as Subash had warned, more than one clever long-haired fellow with the gift of gab had donned orange, tacked ananda, bliss, to the end of an already unpronounceable Sanskrit name and set out to trap the unsuspecting spiritual seeker. Shiv Kumar, a high school drop out, might morph overnight into His Holiness the Great Blissful Lord of Yoga. A ready supply of superstitious Indians with great reverence for the guru-disciple institution and an equally gullible pool of foreigners streaming into Rishikesh since the Beatles took up with the Maharishi made the guru business an attractive proposition.

The tranquil atmosphere seemed to have something to do with the many half naked men with glowing eyes who wandered the Ganges ’ banks blessing the cows, rocks, trees, and flowers with their benign presences. Hinduism was obviously a strange religion: no one was vaguely interested in shoving his or her concept of God down my throat.

It all seemed to be in the living. And, the principle, as far as I could see, was: keep it simple. If you do not want anything, you do not have to get it. Having lies in being, not getting. If you are already OK, why try to be different? I quickly learned to spot the phonies: worldly men seeking name and fame, drop-outs, neurotics playing God, the crazies, dead beats, and dopers.

Armed with a simplified but reasonably accurate version of the theory (God is within covered by conditioning, remove the conditioning and God reveals Itself) garnered from my reading, I set out to purify mind and body, vowing to avoid dope, western clothing, tea, coffee, sweets, fried foods, and sex. On the positive side I enthusiastically pursued a rudimentary program of prayer, meditation, scriptural study, and yoga.

THE SERPENT POWER

“There is no religion higher than Truth.” - Sri Aurobindo

India destroyed my belief that the world of the senses was capable of delivering lasting happiness. Although I could not have known it at the time, I was walking into another dream, confirming the fact that I was not satisfied with myself as I was, buying into one of the world's most attractive and useful deceptions - religion. But it turned out to be the appropriate course because it led me to the Truth. After over thirty years of unbroken bliss, fullness beyond measure, I can categorically state that embracing religion was perhaps the wisest choice I ever made. Why I made it can only attributed to the divine logic that was shaping my destiny.

Because I was flying blind, I simply aped what I saw. I threw out the hippie rags and donned yogi garb: the dhoti, kurta, tusli mala, and tilak. I ate like a bird, gazed intently at the setting sun and the tip of my nose, which someone said was meditation, and sang devotional Sanskrit chants for hours each day.

One day I learned of a yoga center on the mountainside near Laxmanjhoola, a small town two miles above Rishikesh. I walked upriver along a shady path lined with huge mango trees and headed up a trail on the side of the mountain, which entered an open field in front of a small cluster of white buildings. In the center of the field a group of about twenty squeaky clean young Westerners, mainly women, were clustered attentively around a handsome thirty something yogi sitting in an easy chair giving a talk in passable English. When the talk ended he invited me to stay.

His yoga was called ‘Kundalini,’ the ‘Serpent Power.’ Without putting too fine a point on it, the theory states that human spirituality is a dormant and hidden energy, coiled like a serpent in a chakra or psychic center at the base of the spine. Through a series of proven esoteric practices the energy can be awakened. When awakened, it uncoils and journeys up the spine, leaving the body through the top of the head and reuniting with the cosmic spiritual energy. This fusion of the individual and the universal is believed by some to be enlightenment.

I set out enthusiastically to get fit for the great event like an athlete preparing for the Olympics. I was told the energy was fickle and would not become activated in a polluted body so I was enjoined to swallow yards of wet salty cotton gauze and retrieve it inch by inch once the impurities had been absorbed. I also ingested and expelled gallons of salt water a day though orifices at both ends of the body, poured herbal concoctions in one nostril and out the other, ate spoonfuls of strange herbs and cayenne pepper, brushed my teeth with black powder and a stick, contorted my limbs into pretzel-like shapes, fasted, deprived myself of sleep, and bathed at four am in the icy river.

Evidently the path was fraught with danger but I suffered nothing more than nausea and fatigue. During his discipleship the yogi’s attempt to purify the bladder by sucking salt water through a glass catheter inserted in his penis caused the catheter to break. He had good karma, however, because his plumbing still worked, particularly in the sexual arena where several of the female ‘devotees’ reported that his prowess was second to none.

In spite of my enthusiasm and dedication, nothing mystical happened, yet I continued to swallow the doctrine along with the bizarre concoctions. Kundalini yoga is based on scientific principles but was not designed to serve the needs of neurotic meatballs in search of instant Nirvana. In Vedic times young men with spiritual inclinations were placed in ‘forest academies’ under the care of dispassionate mahatmas who patiently trained them in the spiritual arts for many years, imparting more and more profound disciplines as they matured so that when the awakening came the divine energy would function through a truly beautiful instrument. I believe the modern fascination with Kundalini is fuelled more by its exotic, romantic, aesthetic mythos than by a disinterested understanding of the complex factors involved.

I went to the guru to find out why it was not working. I think my view was that enlightenment was a tricky game of skill and the body a clever puzzle, a bit like the wooden Chinese ball that falls into many pieces with the application of subtle pressure on an unlikely part. You make the right moves in the right sequence and, presto chango, out pops the prize - enlightenment!

He suggested corrections and sent me back to the mines to continue my labors. In the meantime we became friendly during daily walks along the Ganges banks. I am not sure what he saw in me because we had nothing in common. Perhaps he envied the uninhibited and unapologetic way I pursued life. Because their society is so highly structured, Indians have a gargantuan longing to be free. In fact, the most common word for enlightenment, the obsession of Vedic culture, is ‘moksha,’ freedom. Though he was supposedly inwardly free, I must have seemed much more outwardly free. Perhaps that was not his reason at all because inward freedom renders any circumstance conducive. Maybe he just wanted an invitation to California .

Still, after several months nothing had happened and I began to question the whole idea. Minus the drug-induced spirituality…which I can’t really take credit for…and since the realization on the mountain top with George, the astral travel in the church courtyard in Morocco and the levitation in Tunisia , I had effortlessly garnered quite a few transcendental experiences. The Maharaj in Bombay revealed the Divine to me in the twinkling of an eye and the day I entered the stream was a gift straight from God. I began to wonder why I should work so hard for something that seemed to be coming without effort. Perhaps all this spiritual work was interfering with my enlightenment.

So I made an issue of it. I said, "This isn't working, Yogaji. Please give me something else. What does how much mucous I can coax out of the body have to do with enlightenment? It doesn't make sense. What did your guru give you?"

"It is not like that, Ram, you have to work hard and have faith," he replied. “It will come at the right time. You are not ready yet."

“Well, I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in this project and since it’s not working I think I’ll leave,” I said.

To my surprise he did an abrupt about face and said, “Well, Ram, you have been working hard and I think you're ready for the next step. I'm going to give you the practice my guru gave me.”

So I quit the swallow and vomit drill and began a complex practice of muscular contractions, breath control, and mantra. The work required intense concentration and the ashram with all its distractions was unsuitable so I moved upriver in search of a cave on the banks of the Ganges .

Carrying a blanket and a cooking pot, I came upon a huge rock in the middle of a white sandy beach. During runoff the river had gouged a large hole under the rock, a perfect cave, suitable for sitting in the shade midday and sleeping out of the elements during the night.

At the end of the first week I realized I had a roommate, a three-foot cobra that came and went through a hole in the back, sleeping during the day in a well concealed crevice. Because our schedules did not overlap and animals rarely attack without provocation I decided not to move. Instead, I took its presence as a positive omen. The cobra is the primary symbol of Kundalini yoga and the vehicle of Shiva, the great lord of yoga, from whose matted locks the Ganges is said to flow. And, snakes, according to the yogi, represented ‘the latent electricity of Consciousness,’ and have carried the spiritual projection for ages. Everyday scores of naked ash-smeared naga babas (snake daddies), devotees of Shiva with matted locks, passed the cave on their way to Kailash, the Himalaya's holiest peak, source of the Ganges and the ‘abode of Shiva.’ So I assumed I was enjoying the protection of the god.

A couple of days after discovering the snake, a small scorpion stung me on the little toe of the left foot. The toe immediately swelled and sent shooting pains into the foot, which ballooned until the skin was painfully tight. Immobilizing the ankle next, the pain and swelling moved up the calf toward the knee. When the poison started attacking the heart, sending shooting pains through the chest and the leg became so stiff it would not bend, I set out to find a doctor, hobbling toward Rishikesh three miles downriver.

I had scarcely hobbled a hundred meters when I heard twigs snapping and rocks sliding on the side of the mountain, suggesting that a fairly large animal, perhaps a tiger, was making its way downhill in my direction. Driven by the pain I pressed on, certain to encounter the beast in minutes. I managed another thirty or forty meters when suddenly a tall naked Naga Baba, his eyes glowing like hot coals, burst from the jungle in front of me! Carrying an iron trident decorated with amulets in one hand and a bundle of old manuscripts wrapped in strips of orange cloth in the other, he stopped directly in front of me.

He looked down at my leg and made a small gesture, which I took to be an imitation of a scorpion stinging. I nodded. Placing the bundle on the path in front of me, he untied one of the cloth strips, walked to the edge of the path, tore the strip into three pieces, tied them in a neat row on the branch of a nearby bush, and resumed his place in front of me.

After a moment of intense silence I heard a low rhythmic rumbling coming from the region of his solar plexus, vibrations so subtle I could not make out the words, although they were most certainly Sanskrit. Hardly twenty seconds passed when the pains in the chest stopped. He continued chanting and I felt a distinct lessening of leg pain. A few seconds later my knee returned to its normal state.

The energy emanating from him was so powerful my mind became luminously still and I could actually see the subtle form of the poison as the mantra chased it down the leg. Next the ankle returned to its normal state and the poison, pushed by the mantra, backed to the point where the stinger had broken the skin, left the toe like the Spirit leaves the body at death.

The chant stopped and the sadhu, without the slightest change of expression, walked over to the bush, retrieved his strips, tied them back together, bound his manuscripts, nodded slightly and walked back into the jungle! When I examined the toe the skin was unbroken.

I returned to my cave and resumed the practices…which were generating inexplicably high feelings and crystal-clear insights into the nature of the mind and reality. Often I felt as if I did not have a body at all. Overcome by a deep nearly unbearable current of bliss, I was unable to practice for two days, sitting immobile for hours on end. I twice heard celestial music and on one occasion smelled an otherworldly fragrance so pure it nearly took my breath away. For several hours one morning I heard a deep humming coming from inner space, the cosmic sound.

Sitting on the sand one evening shortly after sunset, I was overcome by a terribly dark energy, as if the weight of the whole world were pressing down on me. Unable to sit, I lay on my back with outstretched limbs staring into the sky in which a few stars were appearing. Observing an ominous black cloud form out of nowhere and fill the dome of the sky I wondered if it were out there in the ‘real’ sky or in the inner spiritual sky but it really did not matter because suddenly there was no longer ‘inner’ or ‘outer.’ As I watched, terrified, the cloud formed itself into the Goddess Kali who was endowed with such radiance that I could not look on her for more than a few seconds before I lost consciousness.

The next day, sitting on the sand in front of the cave in a state of awe and wonder, marveling at the experience of the Goddess, I observed an orange-clad corpse floating slowly past, a crow sitting on the chest picking at the decomposing flesh. It was such an obvious symbol of life’s impermanence I vowed to redouble my efforts and never stop until the goal was reached.

Almost six weeks to the day after I had moved into the cave, I was sitting on the riverbank in the half-lotus chanting a mantra when my body became so light I wondered if I were going to levitate. I was again magically endowed with a kind of x-ray vision which permitted me to observe the spaces between the cells begin to grow and grow until the body ballooned to an enormous size. It quickly surpassed the Himalayas and the earth, which I could see receding beneath me. When it expanded to the limit of the cosmos, time stopped and I could see galaxies without number spinning in eternity and God, my own Self, appearing as limitless formless radiance pervading an awesome emptiness!

I got up and headed downriver toward the ashram to express my gratitude to the yogi, walking but not walking, carrying an exhilarating current of divine electricity. A villager coming up the path caught by it fell to the ground in full prostration his arms stretched out toward me. Another, petrified in fear, huddled against the mountain. Passing the normally voluble vendors in Laxman Jhoola, a heavy silence brought the marketplace to a halt, and every eye turned in my direction. Several members of a group of pilgrims coming to worship at the temple did namaste and said ‘Ram Ram,’ in such a way I knew that my presence had awakened the vision of the inner Self. Continuing under the shade of the mangos lining the path, I passed two sleeping sadhus, a blind beggar and his wife chanting devotional songs to Krsna, and a naked yogi lying on a bed of nails.

Yogaji and devotees were sitting in the garden almost exactly as they had been the day I arrived. The feeling that this would be our last meeting floated through my consciousness. Turning my attention on my guru I received a rude shock. Like the devotees, he too was locked in the sleep of worldly consciousness! Everyone started to react subliminally to my energy and the yogi, fearful but remarkably collected, dismissed the satsang and turned toward me.

"I think its time for you to leave," he said coolly, "I've given you everything I can."

I smiled, nodded, picked up my pack and walked off without a thought, as if my whole life there had been a dream.

For three days I wandered in God as God. The experience was similar to LSD in that I found every mundane detail, superimposed on the blissful radiance of the Self, intensely absorbing. Every thought and feeling seemed exactly equal. There were no highs and lows, no goods and bads. I might equally appreciate the tiny veins in a small leaf as the cacophonous tones of the film music blaring from the tea stalls. Each happening in the realm of the senses made me realize yet again that life was little more than a silly comic strip pasted on the eternal reality, an experience Hindus call Maya, the grand Illusion.

Then, after the three most wonder-filled days of my life, as unpredictably as it had come, the divine experience slowly dovetailed into everyday reality, consigning me once again to life in the shadows. The loss of my own child could not have touched me so deeply. Thinking I had attained my heart’s desire, I wound up with nothing but the cruel memory of three days of transcendent bliss.

I considered returning to the cave to try again, but knew better. It had been a gift, not the result of my actions. But why had it ended? Could it have been His will? What had I failed to learn?

Sitting on a rock beside the path leading up the mountain to one of India's myriad ‘famous’ temples, tormented with doubt, my heart an open wound, I heard the sound of voices tinkling like sweet bells in the distance and spied a bent old woman slowly leading a blind man in my direction. As they passed she paused for a moment, turned, looked into me, sending a ray of love that pierced my heart. Suddenly God reawakened and my perception re-arranged itself, negating the world.

It was back!

This time I experienced sinking into a vast and secure darkness, a tumbling and floating in an ocean of peace and bliss so sweet I lost consciousness. Not that I lost consciousness (I was completely awake and totally aware) but the world as I knew it was gone.

When the senses re-emerged the sun was charting a descending path in the sky. The leaves of the trees, pregnant with life, seemed ready to explode, and every stone in the dry creek bed was glowing with Consciousness.

Evidently part of me died during that experience because the veil of separation lifted and life went on automatic pilot. A person took me to a music teacher who gave me a harmonium and lessons in devotional chanting. When I felt like communicating people appeared out of the blue, the divine spark passing into them as we spoke. A deep sexual longing caused a lovely young woman living in the ashram, who had heretofore ignored me completely, to come to my room on a pretext and offer herself. My visa about to expire, I was lead to a bribeable official who brought the papers, his girl friend, and a picnic lunch the following Sunday.

FALLEN YOGI

Seduced by my good fortune, I let my practices lapse. What was the point, I thought, of working to get something I already had. Unfortunately, I had no way of knowing that my ego had merely been momentarily suppressed by the experience of the Divine, and that it was patiently waiting in the wings for its cue to return to stage center.

The desire to see more of India set in and, feeling secure in my inner state, I caught the bus for Kulu, deeper in the Himalayas . Undoubtedly much of the obscene development characterizing many of India 's hill stations has defaced the Kulu Valley 's pristine beauty, but at the time the long narrow valley squeezed between the high Himalayan foothills was a relative paradise. The steep mountains were covered with interesting vegetation, including massive bamboo groves, and the valley was planted with fruit trees, mainly apple. The relatively unpolluted glacier-fed Beas River - more a stream by our standards - flowed merrily around huge boulders on which were carved mantras, the most frequent, ‘Om Mani Padme Hum,’ paying tribute to the ‘jewel in the lotus’…enlightenment.

I stopped at the upper end of the valley near a hot spring in a village called Manali, checked into the local hippie hotel, was shown a room next to a friend from San Francisco with whom I had spent many happy days in Morocco! Karma.

Reasoning that converting John to God would be an uphill struggle, in the name of old times I started smoking chillums of hand-rubbed resin from the marijuana that grew abundantly on the hillsides, tripping on acid, and generally squandering my spiritual capital on the trite libertine activities of hippiedom, none of which merit mention. One afternoon, high on acid, I came face to face with a huge Bengal tiger in a bamboo grove high on the mountainside. Fortunately I was stoned enough to not be fearful. I met its stare and successfully performed my ‘psychic swell’ which evidently convinced it that I was much bigger than I appeared. After several eternal minutes it nonchalantly wandered off up the hillside.

But the memory of my Rishikesh experiences mocked the petty chemical highs and I quickly grew bored. My longing for God returned with a vengeance and, vowing to regain my spiritual state, I departed for Benaras where I was led to believe yogis and gurus literally grew on trees. John headed north to Maz-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan , reputedly the source of the world's best dope.

BENARAS GHATS

The Ganges scribes a gentle arc as it phlegmatically creeps past the ghats on the last leg of its hot and dusty journey across the plains to Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal . The city's mystique derives not so much from its great antiquity or the river itself, which, as famous rivers go, is physically undistinguished, or the extraordinary architecture, the massive stone walls, elegant temples and palaces lining the ghats, but an inescapable feeling that countless minds over infinite time have come here seeking relief from the inexorable sufferings of existence, found peace, and left vibrations that hover about her crowded banks charging the atmosphere with holiness. One senses that Ganga , whose mythic life mingles with humans, gods, and the Infinite Absolute, has ministered well from Her inexhaustible source.

Unlike her clear, cold, drinkable currents at Rishikesh, by the time she reaches the Ten Horse Sacrifice Ghat she has become, by our standards, hopelessly polluted. But only infidels see it. In a land were yogis stop trains with the power of their minds and serpent bites are healed with mumbled mantras, faith will not permit the senses their reality, the mind its doubt. No earthly H20 this, but purifying ambrosia, nectar of the Gods, boundlessly gushing from the omniscient head of Shiva, patron of the ghats.

In addition to its obvious antiquity and association with the Ganges , the ghats serve as a vast open air crematorium where funeral pyres burn incessantly, consuming precious wood and the worn-out bodies of the faithful. The smell of incense, the sound of cymbals, drums, and chanting fill the air as processions wind their way through the Byzantine maze of streets, rushing lucky souls to the final fiery release. Wrapped in a sheet and immersed in the dull brown water to become food for happy porpoises, only holy men and lepers escape the fire. Hindus, of which there are nearly a billion, believe that death here permits one to step forever off the apparently endless cosmic cycle of births and deaths. Aging Hindus calmly awaiting the blessing crowd the ghats.

One senses the irrational, the darkness, too. A passage from my diary, penned on a subsequent visit, when I was confined to my hotel for three days while Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other in the streets reads, “I am awakened from a fitful sleep by chanting from a nearby temple…devotees trying to push back the madness. Dozens of dogs, like tuning forks, reverberate the terror - ancient howls and mindless barking. Racing across the sky, the moon plays hide and seek with eerie clouds as malevolent young Hindus and Muslims roam the streets, seeking victims for their slaughter. Temple speakers, gritty low-tech atavisms from the pre-electronic dawn, great black flower-like horns blaring distorted feeling lend mechanical reality to a fluid night of violence.

Weird.

In the Puranas, India 's mythological literature, this weirdness is also portrayed as an insatiable giant, a great warrior possessing the knowledge of good and evil, whose days and nights are measured in eons. Named Kumbakarana, the hidden or unseen cause, he is all-powerful, his intentions unfathomable. A shark's fin cuts circles in the surface of the ocean and the swimmer is filled with terror, not of the visible fin but of the occult malevolent intelligence to which it is connected - like tonight's terror impersonally stripping lives as the elephant strips leaves from trees.

We have our symbols of the weird power of the underworld too…Moby Dick, Darth Vader and King Kong. Reacting to our ignorance of his true self, a misunderstood Kong roams labyrinthine darkened streets and alleys abducting fair damsels, smashing buildings, running amok. Consumed by his angry relationship with his dark self, Ahab, lashed to the side of the whale, drowns in an ocean of fate. These symbols touch the depths because the giant sleeps in every one of us.

Ironically, today was dedicated to Saraswati, patroness of arts and letters and higher wisdom. For several weeks artisans have been constructing straw and plaster statues of her lovely form which they sell to all and sundry, particularly young men, who, primed with testosterone, religious fervor and rice wine, work themselves into a cathartic frenzy, then dance and chant through the streets carrying the Goddess on their shoulders to the Ganges, her final resting place.

Tonight I watched the celebrations with interest from the comfort of a rickshaw. My driver, a Hindu, said several Muslims had just been killed, recounting the details with relish. It was OK, he said, because the boys were ‘only students,’ who could not be counted on to know better, and the victims, ‘only Muslims,’ who undoubtedly deserved it.

As we inch along I become aware of the many police who instill fear, unlike ours for the black uniforms, shining weaponry and crackling walkie-talkies, but for the weakness that causes them to respond, not to policy, but to the promptings of the monster. How effortlessly they loose themselves in weirdness, wading enthusiastically into the fray with sticks, sweat, and muscle - uncle Joe killing with a stick.

Coming to an intersection, the rickshaw walla stops and orders me to step down though I am still a mile from home. Deprived of the height, I feel vulnerable. I cover my head with my shawl and blend into the crowd.

A car hits a dog. Howling, it scampers down a darkened alley.

The pace accelerates.

A boy trips and falls on a fat lady who screams, upping the energy.

Awakened to the inner world I see hidden selves - wraithlike, haunting and sinister, distorted by the terror, detached from bodies - streaming to safety. And in the heart of hearts I see Kali, a necklace of bloody skulls bouncing on her breast, brandishing myriad weapons in arms fluttering fast like hummingbird wings, madly dancing on the burning ghat, her monotonous foot beats pounding the giant to consciousness.

Oddly, in small pockets, life goes on. My favorite cafe in the bazaar is still open. I forget the night and enter. The waiter brings a steaming chocolaty cup of coffee but before I can take a single sip a terrifying silence descends, freezing life for an eternal moment. A baby cries breaking the silence. Then hell breaks loose as shop doors clang shut and thousands rush wildly through the muddy narrow streets and alleys. I am safe in the eye of the storm but I do not tarry.

Concealed beneath my shawl I cautiously pick my way through the night, furtive like a spy, but unafraid. How alert I have become, awakened by the all-pervasive fear, seeing everything, feeling the protection of awareness."

BAD KARMA

I left Kulu to get back on track but karma caught up in Benaras. After hanging out on the ghats for a couple of days I began to lose energy and within a week my skin developed a sickly yellow tint. My appetite disappeared and I spent the next nine days flat on my back in my room. I had contacted hepatitis probably from swapping spit with Lucy, one of the fun-loving chicks in Manali.

The doctor prescribed serious rest, so with great sadness I decided to return to the States. Lacking the energy to make a reservation, I showed up at the station and boarded the train but the conductor refused to seat me and I was forced to sit for fourteen hours in the aisle near the toilets. I recall looking out the window as the train moved northward about sunset, the sky filled with flying saucers!

I took a room in a seedy hotel in Delhi , wired for money, and lay around wasting away. By this time my skin, nails, hair, and eyes were bright yellow. When the money arrived I bought a ticket for Lahore , Pakistan , first stop on the overland route. At the border I discovered that my traveler's checks, which I thought had been carefully concealed with my documents in a leather body pouch were missing! Fortunately, I found about thirty dollars worth of rupees in a pair of pants in my luggage, enough to get to Lahore and collect a refund. American Express needed to wire Delhi to confirm the numbers but a week later when it had still not arrived, I realized I was being ripped off. I talked to the big man in the office but he was in on it too. I was down to my last few rupees.

The Embassy wanted to send me home on the plane but for unknown reasons I refused. I could have wired for more money, but did not, again for unknown reasons. Perhaps the answer lay in a passport-sized photograph that I had taken one day when I was waiting for my money. Many years later I found it tucked away in the back of a very tiny copy of the Bhagavad Gita. When I looked at it I saw the face of a very arrogant young man and understood why I needed to go through the nightmare that lay ahead.

One night in an unprovoked fit of rage I kicked the sink off the wall and collapsed on the floor of the toilet. The management threw me out into the street to fend for myself. Delirious, I aimlessly wandered the streets and woke up in the morning on a charpoy, a low rope bed, in a commercial section of town.

Too sick to move, I slowly watched the life ebb. When I left their offerings of food untouched, the locals gave up and kept their distance. In those days, and to some extent today, death in the streets was a natural occurrence. Perhaps they took me as a drug casualty of which there were many, a junkie run out of luck. My impending demise did not matter to them and, surprisingly, it no longer mattered to me. Why should it? I was nobody. I had been of no use to anyone but myself.

Then one day the thread, some say silver cord, connecting me to the body snapped and I traded one life for another, returning to what I had always been, a limitless silent conscious presence transcending the body. For what was probably no more than twenty minutes, but seemed eons, I hovered over the wasted yellow packet of flesh like a super conscious ghost.

A complete non-entity in life, I became a celebrity in death. A crowd gathered, fascinated by the radiant aura surrounding the body, and, as befits a solemn occasion, remained subdued, communicating in muted tones and whispers. Back home I would have been scooped off the street in a matter of minutes, wired to a machine and shocked silly until I came back to life - or permanently died. The Eastern mind appreciates death in ways materialists cannot imagine.

As I hovered motionless over the body the crowd grew, reached critical mass and spilled over into the street. At that moment a late model black Mercedes Benz pulled up. The driver, dressed in an immaculate white suit and turban, got out and opened the back door for a man of medium height attired in an impeccably tailored western suit. The crowd parted like the Red Sea as he approached, the man bent over, looked hard and fast into my face and deftly kicked me in the side to see if I were alive. Because there was no reaction, he kicked again.

He squatted to get closer and the Voice of God speaking through him said, "I can see by the way you bear your suffering you are a refined man. When he said, “By the will of Allah you will come with me. I will nurse you back to health" I re-entered the body. From that time on I was blessed with nearly perfect dispassion.

He motioned to his driver who stepped forward, picked me up, and put me in the back seat. We wound through the city streets and out into the country until a stately Raj era villa at the end of a long tree-lined drive came into view.

The car pulled up and a servant approached. My host gave instructions while the servant helped me up a flight of stairs to the roof where a four-poster canopy bed was set up under an awning beneath the overarching branches of several very tall trees. Sitting on a marble-top commode next to the bed was a Victorian English ceramic washbasin and pitcher. And next to the stand was a small man with kind eyes, Akhmed, the oldest servant in the house, who would attend me around the clock.

Khalil, ‘The Friend,’ was a western educated businessman from an old aristocratic family, a man who, in a worldly sense, lacked nothing. At the same time he had an interest in mysticism and was, in spite of a taste for good food and beautiful women, a deeply religious man. He was the owner of the hotel whose manager had thrown me out.

I remained in his care for two weeks or three weeks, I believe, during which we talked on a wide range of subjects. On Thursday afternoons when his mistress came I went to the movies at one of the family cinemas. The stay broke the back of the disease, my energy returned, and I began to eat regular, if somewhat small, meals.

Early one morning I dreamt I was sitting in an audience in San Francisco listening to a lecture on Vedanta given by a bearded Hindu holy man dressed in orange silk. I awoke to see Kahlil coming up the stairs bearing a small bag. He sat on the edge of the bed and said, "By the will of Allah you will go to Kabul today. Here is money for your ticket and food for the journey. And take this," he said, handing me a gold ring. "It will be of use. I will go now. The driver will take you to the bus. All the best."

We shook hands and he left quickly so as not to show his feelings.

As the bus bumped along it seemed the path I had been given was as harsh and inhospitable as the rocky mountainous land through which we were passing and yet as beautiful as the Kyber Pass where the bus stopped allowing the passengers to disembark, turn toward Mecca, roll out their rugs, and pray. As I watched with interest I realized that my knowledge of God was very different from theirs. Their bodies turning westward, heads touching the ground, I marveled at their deep faith in an Allah they could not see, because to me God was shining forth from every rock and mountain. I could feel Him in the air, hear Him in the wind, and see Him in the hard and leathery faces of the Afghans.

I had been reborn.

Arriving in Kabul exhausted from the long journey, I found a small hotel and fell into a fitful sleep. In the middle of the night I was awakened by my own screams. A light went on next door, a door opened, and I heard a knock on my door. It was John, my friend from Morocco and Manali!

"I heard your screams and recognized your voice," he said. "What happened? You look like death warmed over."

I told him everything.

He said he would take care of me.

We hung around Kabul for about three weeks taking long walks through the city and far out into the countryside. I spent most of my time sleeping and reading, John reading and smoking hash.

One day, sitting on one of the hills surrounding the city after a long climb, he offered dope, which I declined.

"What's the matter, man?" he said. "You used to be the biggest tripper on the block. You going religious on me?"

I recalled a similar conversation with Danny months before.

"I don't think it's that good for me right now," I said. "The body's still pretty weak."

"I don't know man, the way you climbed up here makes me think you're in pretty good shape."

"You're right," I replied. "It's not the body. I love the smell and often feel like smoking, but it messes up the mind."

"That's just the point," he said, missing the point. It makes the mind feel so good."

"Only in the short run, John. After a while it gets so dull you can't think properly. I wouldn't be in the mess I'm in today if I hadn't smoked that dope in Kulu. It cuts off my vision of God."

He looked at me incredulously. Even though he was a good friend I had not mentioned my religious experiences because I knew he would not understand.

"Your vision of God!" he said sarcastically.

"I didn't tell you before because I know how you feel about religion and God."

He did not reply but stared quizzically at me.

"It's not religion, John. Believe me," I continued. “I share your feelings about it. But God is different. I've seen Him. I see Him often. He's in my mind. If it's clear I see Him. If it's dull I feel lost."

"Lost?" he replied.

"Lost. Unhappy. Lonely."

"You're unbelievable," he replied. “The hepatitis must have done something to your mind."

"I don't think so, John" I replied.

"The happiness you think is coming from the dope really comes from God."

He laughed.

"Now I know you're nuts," he replied.

But it was only his ego trying to keep things under control. His heart was listening.

"People always think I'm crazy," I said. "But I see something else. It's a very private thing."

There was a long pause during which I could see him thinking.

"So what's this God business?" he finally asked.

"I don't know if I can explain it very clearly John. It's all so new. Something is happening to my consciousness. I'm not the same person I was."

"Not the same person? You seem pretty much the same to me."

"That's true," I replied. "But only on the surface. Deep down my soul is changing. When the tectonic plates shift you have an earthquake. Well, I'm having earthquakes in my consciousness, things I can't control. And all my ideas and beliefs are changing as a result. In a few years you won't know me."

He was unconvinced. No matter what I put him through, his brotherly energy was what the doctor ordered to prepare me for the next leg of the journey. When the time came to move on he gave me the money to get to Istanbul .

The trip was uneventful. After a few days in Teheran the money ran low so I hitchhiked through Turkey , picking up a ride with a fast lorry at the border. The sight of Mt. Ararat , which predictably set off seismic vibrations in my soul, was the only event of interest. I rested for a week in Istanbul , sold the gold ring, bought a kilo of hash, sewed into a vest, and took a first class sleeper ticket on the Orient Express to Amsterdam where I sold the hash and bought a ticket to California .

CHAPTER 5

THE INNER JOURNEY

“Once you go There, you never return.”

Bhagavad Gita

A HOLE IN THE HEAD

I did not really appreciate America until I returned from my travels. When I stepped off the plane I felt like kissing the earth. What a pleasure to sleep in my own bugless bed, take hot showers, eat mom's bland meals, talk on the phone, zip around in one of Dad’s big cars, and visit the family doctor.

After several weeks I left Idaho for San Francisco . One day I wandered south of Market, an area thoughtfully set aside for the dregs of society. Sitting in a greasy spoon thinking about my next move, I observed all types of low lifers acting out. I marveled at the irony of the attitude to which I had recently been treated by many middle-class Americans; that economic misfortune somehow disqualified India as a civilized country. Yet anyone with eyes could see nobody did human misery like America . With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa , the violence, anger, alienation, and despair I observed here was infinitely worse. In fact, the way India handled her poverty was head and shoulders above the way we handled our prosperity.

Walking through the Greyhound Bus terminal I passed an obese odoriferous man clad in a tiny soiled t-shirt and a pair of Hawaiian shorts pounding meaninglessly on the doors of a bank of luggage lockers. Nearby, a lean, stubble-faced, hollow-eyed young man, probably a junkie, shaking like a leaf in the breeze, sat in a row of plastic TV chairs next to two sleeping blacks, sizing up the patrons, looking for a mark. Next to the ticket counter two chain-smoking pudgy bleached blonde whores in tank tops, tight jeans, and stiletto heels argued with the clerk about a refund. Stepping out on the littered street, I was accosted by a drooling drunk demanding change.

But somewhere along the line I had forfeited my reactability - at least to things outside myself. I was not cold and hard. I could feel their pain. But somehow my journey had turned inward and I was having much stronger reactions to my own unexamined and unhealed stuff, the poverty-stricken, larcenous, addictive, and whory parts of my mind.

My brother, always a good friend, let me have a charming little room in the back of his house in Redwood City where I could think about what to do at my leisure. Even had I been interested, the psychedelic party was winding down and grass was going mainstream, loosing its allure. Cocaine, a high hardly worth mention, was just coming on the scene. The troops were gearing up for the sexual revolution but thankfully my ‘wild oats,’ as mother put it, had been sewn.

For a moment, in a fit of madness, I actually considered finishing my education, such as it was, and taking my place in society. But what that might be I could not imagine. In fact it was not an option because the travels, inner and outer, had awakened me to such a degree that I could never fall asleep long enough to take the American dream seriously. But where to turn? Christianity’s simple-minded option was not a possibility. I wondered if the intensity of life on the road was not responsible for the epiphanies but I was not about to set out again to test the theory. Months passed and nothing happened. I got a girlfriend and discovered that my brother’s address got its ten seconds of national fame on my account.

A year before I mailed him a gift parcel containing several items, including a hash-filled candle from Madrid . In the meantime the President decided to help Customs obtain increased appropriations from Congress and strike terror in the hearts of drug kingpins everywhere by inviting the press to view a nationally televised demonstration on the White House lawn of the uncanny ability of dogs to ferret out dope…the government’s latest heavy weapon in the war on drugs. Five or six parcels had been selected at random from the mails and mixed with the plant. Released by his handlers, the dog made a bee-line for the marked package, the officials smiled and Nixon seemed pleased. But the dog, a true professional, moved down the line and sniffed out another, which, of course, was my parcel! The officials were embarrassed and Nixon furious. A couple of weeks later the FBI showed up, inquiring about my whereabouts.

"Somewhere between Casablanca and Katmandu ," my brother said, offering them a beer. Nothing came of it.

One day I got tired of killing time and decided…against my better judgment…to write off my frustrating longing for God and drop back into the world. .

“It’s about time. You’ve got to grow up sometime, James,” mother said, when I called her to tell her the news. The next day I got up, went into the bathroom, hung a little mirror on the shower wall so I could trim my beard when it was soft, turned on the shower and thought about my day; after lunch I’d head over to the campus to pick up an application for admission.

In the middle of this very ordinary stream of consciousness my mind suddenly went blank and I experienced powerful and strange vibrations coming from the solar plexus. An unearthly silence, thick as a morning fog, descended on the room and I heard the sound, OM NAMAH SHIVAYA, rising spontaneously out of the depths, bringing deep peace, inundating my soul with nectarine sweetness and filling the body with explosive energy. I looked in the mirror and saw a face transfixed, bathed in an otherworldly radiance. In the space between and above my eyebrows a tiny jet-black dot appeared. The mantra continued churning as the spot expanded to about the size of a dime, opened up, and became a hole! The flesh on the forehead liquefied and cascaded into the hole at an incredible velocity. My whole face, including the eyes, became a shimmering vibrant river of energy dissolving into nothingness!

As I observed my body dissolve I found myself in my soul body speeding purposefully into the unknown. In nanoseconds my small bundle of consciousness burst its skin, the contents dissolving into infinite awareness.

Not that I was without self. I was no longer a limited bundle of consciousness but had become what I always was, a limitless eye seeing in all dimensions in a realm of endless spiritual light! Simultaneously, a gossamer strand of consciousness miraculously connected me to a body toweling off in a shower on a tiny planet in an insignificant solar system somewhere in one of myriad galaxies stretching endlessly before me.

Enthroned in my hidden light-filled kingdom, powerful and glorious, I observed the body exit the shower, dress, and walk out to the road. A car pulled up and the driver, a complete stranger, whom I recognized as my Self, offered a ride.

"I'll drop you off at the Bayshore," he said as the little me nodded in agreement. His mind was immediately overcome with peace and we sat comfortably all the way down the hill, intimately connected but silent like an old married couple. No sooner did I step out at the San Francisco on-ramp than a second car pulled up and the driver cheerfully offered to take me to the city. He dropped me off downtown and I aimlessly wandered the streets guided by an unseen hand, the ego completely surrendered.

Blessed with universal vision, I saw lives, mine and others, stretching back in history to the time when the soul leapt like a spark from the Eternal Fire. Preceded by a wave of peace, emitting energy like an over-amped transformer, my presence indiscriminately raised the vibrations of all those around me. People woke from their waking sleep, looked around quizzically, experiencing a fresh new world, and proceeded on with renewed purpose. Rays of the Light that I am refracted from the perfect mirror of my mind conveying messages and planting seeds that would serve in their long journeys home. The real ‘I’ did more good in the space of minutes than the little ‘I’ had done in its lifetime. And all the while I was completely hidden, a thief in the night, inconceivably minute, yet expansive beyond limit.

As evening fell I found myself walking up Market street , totally in the moment, a great joy welling in the heart. An out-of-service bus pulled up. The door opened and the long haired driver said, "Get in, I'm off duty. I'll give you a ride. Don't tell me where you're going. I will know."

We had driven through the streets for about ten minutes when the bus stopped in the avenues east of the Park.

"Here we are," he said. "Right?"

I had no clue but thanked him and nodded. Any place was just fine. He drove off smiling. Stripped of will, the body walked down the block and up the steps to a small house into a life from which I would never return.

I opened the door and noticed a crowd of about thirty sitting quietly facing a raised platform. When I entered heads turned, as if I had been expected. I took a seat in the second row, the silence deepening to such a point that a few shuffled and coughed nervously.

I tuned into an orange-clad Indian yogi sitting directly in front of me and realized we were in the same state! Radiant light streaming from every cell of his body, he got up to speak, the dream on the seventeenth day of my rooftop recuperation in Lahore flooding my consciousness.

It had become reality.

I had met my teacher.

I was terribly impressed by his dignity and presence. Every idea seemed personally relevant. He said that this wonderful state of God Consciousness, just beyond our waking, dream, and sleep states was the nature of every human being. Just as eyes and ears were necessary to know forms and sounds, Vedanta or Brahma Vidya, the science of Self Knowledge, could give the knowledge and experience of God, liberating the soul from suffering and limitation. The words of Mr. Patel from the Hotel in Khartoum flashed. As he supplied the overarching idea welding my ephiphanies together I could see how every event in my life had been pointing to this moment.

The exhilaration of our meeting gave way to a delicate clarity as his carefully chosen words concentrated the rays of my mind into a beautiful mandala. Like a small child lifted by a loving parent to see out a window, he showed me a landscape stretching infinitely in all directions, offering endless possibilities, empowering me with boundless self-confidence. At the same time I experienced deep humility and realized that, except for this and other moments in the presence of God, my short thirty years had been a terrible waste. Behind every lofty idea, eloquent word and graceful gesture the knowledge of God gushed through this extraordinary channel. Seeing in him the perfect expression of my innermost desire, I vowed to attain the knowledge of who I was and make my state permanent.

When I stepped into the still warm night every object seemed hollow and empty, physical reality a one dimensional image reflected on the screen of Infinite Consciousness. I immediately understood scripture's idea that only the omnipresent radiance suffusing the world, not the world itself, was real. A man and his dog out for a stroll seemed more a movie, a walking idea, than flesh and blood beings. Seeing the thought animating their limbs like puppets, I burst out laughing.

Within minutes the Silence swallowed the thoughts generated by the talk, chewed them carefully and refined them into purposeful energy. I knew what had to be done, laughing at the irony of the idea of going back to university. I had been enrolled in quite a different school from today.

On my way to the bus I came upon a bloody and bruised young woman wretchedly whining and crying as she pursued a drunken leather-clad man down the block. Scratching and kicking, she attacked him and grabbed him by the arm, trying to pull him back. He cursed her violently, broke loose, hit her savagely, and struck off with renewed vigor. The scene played over and over as they moved down the street. For a moment I thought of intervening but realized that everything was perfect between them, that they had unconsciously evolved this passionate little game for reasons known only to them.

I knew that that within an hour they would be passionately clinging to each other in ‘love.’ Contemplating their sordid drama, which seemed like a life metaphor, I understood that the only way out was to see what I was seeing. Their cartoony figures receded down an alley and I continued on my way lost in the glory of God.

A GREAT MAN

Swami Chinmaya was a very famous and highly respected Indian holy man. A college educated upper-caste Hindu from Kerala, he had abandoned a fledgling career in journalism to study spirituality with Swami Shivananda, one of India's most loved saints, in front of whose ashram on the Ganges I had ‘entered the stream.’ Eventually he journeyed further up the Ganges to Uttarkasi where he met his guru, Swami Tapovan, a Vedantic Himalayan sage of great wisdom and purity and attained enlightenment sometime during his seven year stay.

When it was time for him to move on, the guru suggested he stay in the Himalayas and live a simple life, saying "Why run around on the plains chasing devotees? Stay here and those meant to get something from you will come."

Exceptionally dynamic and charismatic, a genius by any standard, the Swami was unable to keep his light under a bushel so he ignored the guru's advice and descended to the plains. The first talk drew five, but before long he was waking them up in the thousands, not unusual for an exceptional orator with immense energy in a country where spirituality is a great draw. Not since Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission had Indians taken to the path of knowledge with such enthusiasm. Inspired by an intense love of Vedic culture, he could not have burst on the scene at a better time. The educated elite and emerging middleclass, for whom British secular culture was tantamount to a strong religious identity, had spiritually disenfranchised themselves in a land whose only claim to fame was God. Longing to get back to their roots, they took to his English presentation of their heritage like ducks to water.

The teaching was called a ‘jnana yagna’ a Sanskrit term meaning ‘sacrifice of knowledge.’ Because it is consistent with a duty-based idea of life, the backbone of Indian society, and invokes the power, mystery, and spirituality of the Vedic Age, the idea of sacrifice resonates powerfully in the Indian mind. The ‘knowledge sacrifice’ involved his talks on the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, the source of the Vedanta, commonly thought to be a philosophy. But Chinmaya, like Shankara, a ninth century Hindu on the level of Christ or the Buddha, who was responsible for a major spiritual renaissance, used Vedanta as means of enlightenment. During my stay with him I met many enlightened disciples. Once they had realized the Self most stayed in the Chinmaya Mission carrying on the tradition under the direction of their guru who quickly became a national figure.

By the time the sixties rolled around he was ready to spread the message abroad and took his first trip to the West in 1965. The fatal night at the Shivananda Center in 1971 was the first stop on his second trip to the West. How ironic that I should undertake a long pilgrimage to India in search of a guru, only to meet him a mile from the Family Dog where I had been informed two years before that God, not dope, was ‘where it's at.’

As fate would have it, I did not have attachments and I did have money in the bank, so when the Swami moved on, I followed.

Overpowering and intense, the experience of God continued. Completely inspired, vibrating with energy, I was happy as a clam. It did not take long to realize that my situation was unique.

One afternoon I asked the Swami, "Are there are degrees of God experience? Some people seem to only get a glimpse while others are completely absorbed. Why is that?"

"Strictly speaking," he replied, "there are no degrees. Either you experience it or you do not. But you're right too. The mind is the instrument through which the Self is experienced. Imagine looking at the sun. If the sky is clear, you see it in all its brightness. If there is a thin layer of clouds, you see it, but not clearly. If the clouds are heavy you do not see it at all. Similarly, if the mind is pure you will experience the Self intensely, and so on. That is why I'm talking so much about spiritual practice. It purifies the mind so the experience of God is clear. If you experience the Self directly you can know It as your Self."

"I have not done much spiritual practice, yet my experience is so powerful I think at times I can't stand it. And I've met devotees who have been practicing a long time who admittedly don't have much of an experience at all. How do you explain that?"

"Well," he said, "Sometime people live in such a way that they purify the mind unconsciously and when the awakening comes, it's intense. Others practice in the wrong spirit, so nothing happens."

"But sir," I replied, "My experience is intense but I've not lived a pure life at all."

To my surprise he didn't answer the question.

"You see," he said, "it's not a good idea to call attention to your experience. It doesn't really matter what you experience. Vedanta' is not about experience. It is about knowledge. You can experience the Self all day long, but without knowledge it doesn't do you any good. You have probably had many transcendent experiences but they came to an end."

I nodded.

"This is because the Self was not known for what it is. When the Self is known as oneself the experience of it continues forever because it is you. When do you ever not exist? Spiritual experience is fine as long as the ego doesn't try to co-opt it. It will think it's special because it's experiencing God."

He looked knowingly at me and continued.

“In reality the Self is everything and everything is the Self. There is no duality, no ‘experience of the Self’ as separate from worldly experience. Whatever you are experiencing, call it spiritual or not, is the Self. The reason you seek Self experience is because you think this world and all your mundane experiences are not also the Self. So what you are trying to solve by getting another experience can only be solved by understanding that everything is non-dual Consciousness. ”

So that was it! I had been hankering after a particular kind of experience. To stay in this state I needed knowledge. But what exactly was that knowledge?

"It's not a knowledge like we think of knowledge," he replied the following day in satsang, showering me with smiles. “There are two kinds of knowledge, relative and absolute. Relative knowledge is knowledge that arises when a subject contacts an object. The ego experiences the world and knowledge arises. This knowledge is imperfect, subject to error because the subject and objects are conditioned by time. Absolute knowledge, on the other hand, is non-dual, out of time. It removes the misconception that you are the body/mind complex and reveals the Self. Once you have this kind of knowledge you never forget who you are."

After ten days in San Francisco we moved to an idyllic setting in the Napa hills for a retreat, sharing the venue with another spiritual group. Isolated by business, dope, and my lonely pilgrimage, I did not realize the scope of the spiritual ferment that was taking place in California . Many Indian swamis, most notably the Maharishi and Swami Satchitananda, judged America ripe for teaching and build up large followings overnight. The Buddhists were hard at work. Within thirty years the Dalai Lama would become a world famous media celebrity and young girls in tank tops would sashay through suburban shopping malls with Om tattooed on their backs. Occult and esoteric groups of all ilk sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of psychedelic pioneers like myself whose experience had opened them up to higher ideas were fertile ground for the pre-Biblical teachings that would later be called ‘New Age.’

I believe the conviction arising from legitimate spiritual experiences induced by drugs…that there is something beyond the realm of the senses and the mind’s mad craving for pleasure and security… not drugs themselves, is the most enduring and important legacy of the sixties and forms the basis of spiritual revolution that continues today.

In any case, a week before we arrived a psychologist, vowing not to move until he attained enlightenment, locked himself in a cabin and began meditating. A few days later, alerted by his screams, the authorities broke in and hauled him off to the state insane asylum a few miles down the road.

"It is dangerous to take this sort of an attitude," said the Swami of the incident. "Enlightenment does not come simply because you want it. You have to be prepared. This is why in our country we have the guru-disciple lineage. The disciple must cultivate the requisite ethical and moral standards, a keen sense of discrimination, dispassion, and a calm mind. And he should have a teacher, someone who has already successfully walked the path. This is typical of the independent and egocentric approach to life in America ."

The retreat felt like a family gathering. Witnessing more happy faces in ten days than I had seen in the last ten years, I spent all day in his presence listening to the science of Self Knowledge.

"Why is it a science?" I asked one afternoon during the informal discussion period, hoping for more than Mr. Patel had offered. "It seems more like a religion."

"It is a science in this sense," he replied. "In science you have certain theories that have to be proven by experiment before they can be accepted as knowledge. Vedanta presents the theory that there is a God, which we call the Self, and it provides methods for verifying the truth of that theory. If they are used properly the practices and techniques will deliver the experience of God."

"Religion asks that you merely believe in the existence of something you cannot practically verify," he continued. "You are promised release later on in Heaven, but the idea of actually knowing God intimately and directly as your own Self is considered blasphemy. Our idea is that God must be of practical use. Faith alone is not enough. We want to experience God, to live in the Self as the Self. Only then can we accept the theory of God's existence, which at that time is no longer a theory, but knowledge."

"Of course God can never die, but God has died here because faith has killed Him. If you believe God can only be known through faith you rob yourself of the here-and-now experience of God."

"The West has the idea that the universe is reality and that it is made up of matter only. And Consciousness supposedly comes out of matter. To us this is a ridiculous idea because matter is insentient. How can sentiency, Consciousness, come out of matter? Vedanta says that the universe is Consciousness from the very beginning. In fact, before the beginning. It does not evolve once the material universe gets to a certain stage. Even if it did how would the universe evolve without Consciousness? Evolution, any kind of change, implies Consciousness or energy."

"So you think that the only reality is the material world and you explore that. The way you explore it is called science. And you have been very successful in exploring and explaining it using the scientific method. We do not quarrel with you on this point. In practical ways your use of science has exceeded ours. This is why your standard of living is much better than ours. But long before there was a Western civilization our sages were exploring the inner world, the world of mind or Consciousness with a scientific mentality. So over thousands of years we have developed a proven subjective science. It is not just theories. It is not the opinion or system of some brilliant man, like Neitzche or Sartre or Freud, or religious dogma, but the accumulated knowledge and experience of tens of thousands of subjective scientists."

"Our science goes beyond yours. We accept the knowledge that comes from the scientific method and the senses. Today, psychology is trying to establish itself on a scientific footing. Eventually the general public will accept the existence of the subjective as a fact, a reality equal to the reality of matter, because of science. We already fully accept the existence of the mind. We have very carefully documented its reality, how it works, how it interacts with matter. But we have also gone beyond mind. Our science has three divisions: the material universe, the psychological universe, and Consciousness, the Self."

This information was terribly important because it meant there was a method for integrating my experience of God into my life. With help of this extraordinary sage, the riddle seemed about to be solved.

***

Suddenly I had a life. Every day I attended every talk, meditation, and satsang. In my spare time I prayed, meditated, and studied scripture. My experience of the Divine was exhilarating and nearly constant. Whenever I tuned in, which was often, the swami was ‘there,’ unlike the Rishikesh yogi. I wondered how he could maintain an impeccable human façade and a clear mind while such tremendous happenings were going on within him. I would often get so caught up in my amazing inner unfoldment that I could not properly think or speak. Yet he nonchalantly dished up brilliant and detailed lectures on every aspect of the science of Self Realization without compromising his meditation. Later I would discover that for him, in keeping with the teaching that this was a non-dual reality, there was no separation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’ And eventually I would come to realize that nothing was taking place in him at all. He was the empty but full Consciousness of which he spoke, not a person experiencing it.

His teaching was a fine art. The ideas had been so cleverly arranged and skillfully expressed that simply by paying attention, a point would inevitably come when nearly every mind in the room would transcend itself and the vision of the Self would ensue. But it would never last. When they came down they would cluster at this feet again looking for another trip to the beyond.

"Any fool can sit down with a rosary on the Ganges ' banks and realize God in no time," said the Swami with characteristic hyperbole. "The problem is staying there. The Unconscious is very powerful. It will generate a strong extroverted pressure and force the mind to come back and accept its limited view of reality. The idea is to learn to live in that state. Great work is required before the mind can divest itself of its identification and attachment with the ego and its thought system. We call this work sadhana, the means of accomplishment."

The picture was complete. When the last obstacle was out of the way, the experience would be constant. Though I would eventually realize this to be a crude formulation of a much subtler reality and not altogether correct, it was perfect for me at the time because it channeled my prodigious energy into an endeavor that completely appealed to my heart. I had found my calling.

When I learned that the Swami was headed for Hawaii , I sold my car, broke off with my girlfriend and called my parents. Dad did not seem to mind. I think he had written me off a long time ago, but Mother, as usual, was disappointed. To have given birth to a son who at the tender age of twenty- nine was traipsing off to India with a long haired brown skinned Swami dressed in flaming orange was about all she could bear. How was this going to play to Mildred and Mona over tea?

I may have been intoxicated but I was not a fool. To this day I am suspicious of ‘personalities,’ big men and women. Everything about the swami was glorious, often extravagant, and conflicted with my minimalist view of enlightened souls. Although his promotional literature presented him as lecturer, a scriptural master, and made no grandiose spiritual claims, everything about him seemed to be shouting ‘I am God’ to the rooftops. On several occasions in intimate settings he used the pronoun ‘I’ to refer to himself as God. Was the ego claiming divinity or was God actually speaking?

I too felt Godlike during my mystic experiences, but what did it mean to say you were God? Even if you were, which we all are in our innermost selves, how could the claim be objectively verified? And if it could not, then what would be the point of claiming it…unless you were using it to make your ego look big.

Many devotees, whose level-headed spirituality I admired, claimed they saw him as God. And when I saw the vast crowds that came for his dashan in India it was hard to discount this view. Additionally, I had developed the conviction…without a shred of evidence…except intuition…that he had ‘called’ me with the mantra in the shower and generated the miraculous events that led me to him. It was not likely that a human being could do such things. Nor, to my knowledge, did human beings serve the world so selflessly.

For example, one chilly morning we showed up at six for meditation at a local school and found the doors locked. While the organizer ran off to dig up the janitor, the Swami, who always started on time, sat down on the cold concrete next to a trash can in a thin silk dhoti and shawl and began his talk, totally oblivious to the surroundings. A grandiose ego would probably never sit next to a trashcan…unless it was showing off to make a point…but God might.

All things considered, however, I still had my doubts.

AN HONEST MAN

A group of smiling well-dressed prosperous devotees garlanded him as he emerged from Honolulu customs and whisked him off in an expensive late-model automobile to a suite on the top floor of one of Hawaii's best beach hotels. He lectured to an attentive crowd in a large packed auditorium at the University of Hawaii . To keep the fire burning when he left town, study groups were formed and there was the usual talk of setting up a ‘center.’ At the end of the ten day event the donation envelopes filled two large boxes. The take probably amounted to tens of thousands of dollars.

Just when everything was sunny and warm, a dark cloud appeared. It is the habit of devotees to hang around the premises of a mahatma to catch a glimpse when he or she transits from one place to another, like fans of rock stars and famous people everywhere. But, instead of asking for an autograph, devotees cluster around the saint with folded palms basking in his or her radiance, perhaps, if they have the courage, asking for a small personal blessing.

One day I was standing with a group of devotees when the swami emerged from lunch at the home of the yagna’s sponsor in a state of exceptional radiance and waited at the end of the driveway for his ride to the function. We clustered around him like iron filings drawn to a magnet. When the car pulled up I opened the door, stepped back, and did namaskar, a prayerful salute. Suddenly he became deadly serious, looked at me with terrifying fierceness and nearly shouted, "Do not do namaskar!" Then he got in, nodded to the driver, and the car pulled quickly out of the drive.

What had I done wrong? One moment he gives great love and the next he yells at me, embarrassing me in front of the devotees. What was he trying to say? The thought of heading back to California entered my mind. Had this guru business been just another of my wretched excesses?

I walked over to Waikiki Beach and sat on the sand at almost the same spot where I met Madame Zora two years before and cleared my mind. Then the Voice spoke the following remarkable words, "He wants a disciple, not a devotee, Ram."

As often happened when I had a question, it was answered before I could ask it. The next day in an afternoon satsang I was amazed when someone asked about the difference between a devotee and a disciple!

"A devotee enters into an emotional relationship with God," he said. "It is the most common path because the average person is situated at the emotional level, responding to situations and people with their feelings. Such people often subordinate reason to their feelings, lose their discrimination, and find themselves unable to control their own lives. But if they can learn to love unselfishly and surrender to Him their lives will work well and they will eventually attain union with God."

"A disciple, on the other hand, keeps reason in the driver’s seat. He must have a clear mind so he can separate the real from the unreal, the one sure way to Self-Realization. Such a person does not want to be dependent on anyone outside himself, including, except for a short time, the guru. The danger on this path is that the heart can shrivel and the ego grow."

So that was it! He was saying not to love him personally, emotionally. My namaskar was a display of personal love rather than genuine devotion for the principle he represented.

The heart is a slow learner, wanting what it wants, no matter what. A year later I still did not get it. We were in Haridwaar, an ancient city where the Ganges leaves the Himalaya and begins its long journey across the hot dusty plains. After an especially good day, I showed excessive familiarity in front of dinner guests, prompting him to set the record straight in a statement that still comes regularly to mind.

"I think you have the wrong idea, Ram," he said icily. “I am not a person. I am an institution.”

One day, near the end of his stay in Honolulu I attended an afternoon satsang at his hotel. The Swami came out tired and cranky, sat down, and asked for questions. As I listened I found myself becoming irritated at the replies. He seemed to be using the questions to talk about what he wanted to talk about, not to resolve the person’s doubt. As I watched each questioner’s face for the light bulb effect nothing happened. The answer to the next question, a pat explanation of the four states of Consciousness, seemed to miss the point entirely.

When he took up the third question I quit paying attention and studied him dispassionately, like a lizard staring at a bug. He seemed cut off, locked in his own private world. The words sounded hollow and I wondered if his whole thing was not a big bluff. True, he did not seem to be squirreling away millions in a Swiss bank or messing with the hundreds of obviously smitten women, but perhaps he was just a huge egomaniac, in it for the power and glory. Did my god have feet of clay?

He finished an answer, which seemed only slightly more relevant than the last, took a hit of snuff and called for another question. A red light went on. How did the snuff habit fit into the spiritual path? When he felt the urge, which was frequently, he would take a pinch from a beautiful hand-chased solid gold box and suck it up his gargantuan nose with relish, handling the preparations with flair. First, he would remove an immaculate neatly folded orange hanky from his pocket and indifferently clean the snotty black residue without scrambling the stream of ideas or disturbing a single word in the highly polished flow. Then he would flip open the lid, nonchalantly take a pinch, shake it to get rid of the excess grains, and when he had a second between sentences, inhale it with great relish. How did he justify this obviously unspiritual, downright unhealthy habit?

I began to suspect that an exotic oriental psychedelic concoction was the source of his inspiration. Having held friends spellbound for hours when I was high on acid, I knew what dope could do.

Fortunately I had enough sense to realize that maybe I was just cooking something up, so I sat on my suspicions, hoping they would disappear. But it was too late. The Swami, irrespective of his state of mind, seemed to know exactly what anyone of us was thinking at any time and he seemed to enjoy making issues.

He finished handling a question, looked me right in the eye, and, holding up the gold box, said, “You have a doubt about this, Ram?”

My first impulse was to deny it but I heard myself say, “As a matter of fact I do.”

Every head in the room turned. I had broken a cardinal rule. Never talk to the guru as if you were an equal. It was thought to be spiritual suicide to challenge a guru, particularly a powerful one like the swami.

If his talks created a meditative state, it was nothing compared to the silence brought on by reply. I decided to see it through.

"I'd like to know what's in the box," I said calmly.

"Snuff," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "Would you like to try

some?”

"Matter of fact I would," I said.

The crowd fidgeted.

He gestured for me to come forward and I picked my way carefully through the mash of bodies.

"You know how to take it, I suppose" he said, handing me the box. Having made no bones about my drug history, I knew he was having me on.

"I believe I do," I said expertly laying a line out on the back of my hand and efficiently inhaling.

As the snuff painfully hit my palate it took every ounce of self-control not to sneeze on the Swami's neatly pressed silk dhoti.

"Seems to be like you said," I said wiping tears from my eyes.

He smiled blandly and called for another question. While the woman formulated her question he looked directly into me as only a mahatma can do, eyes brimming with compassion. Then he drove the stake in the heart of my ego.

"Trust me, Ram. I'm an honest man."

***

The incident cleared much subconscious resistance, raising my vibration, kicking me into tighter orbit around the center of my being. I noticed a constant halo of white light around my body, which had become limber and graceful, capable of sitting for long periods without moving. My skin glowed with the freshness of youth, and my senses became remarkably acute.

And significantly, the power to non-verbally resolve doubt arose, bringing to mind a science fiction movie I had seen years before featuring a one-eyed brain like creature, Hollywood 's idea of the cosmic intelligence, floating in ambrosial fluid in the center of an otherworldly room in the middle of a distant galaxy. The race of mutants serving the brain simply thought their problems into it and, presto-chango, out came the answer! My answer was not always a word or idea but an experience, a knowing, that would clear the mind.

Many strange things took place. One night, for no apparent reason, I awoke in the dead of night and suddenly became aware that the Swami was in the room, not physically, but as a presence! Was he actually there or had he become so deeply established in my consciousness that he seemed to be there? Or was he simply my personal symbol for the One that illumined all the activities of my inner world? Within a week five thousand miles away the experience would repeat itself with an unusual twist.