Punarapi jananam, punarapi maranam, punarapi matrdareshayanam: Birth and death and living in a womb, over and over and over again.
THE PRIMAL DEBT
What is the purpose of being born? To recognize yourself, to realize that you are neither the body nor the mind but rather the Eternal Soul which is the Ultimate Unity — call it Atma, Parampurusha, Brahman, or what you like.
How is one born into the world, though? What makes an individual take birth? Some say that karma is at the root of everything, but when they are asked the origin of karma they say that karma is eternal.
But how is that possible? If karma was eternal how could anyone ever escape from it? Actually the Law of Karma is nothing else but Newton’s Law of Motion: Each action causes an equal but opposite reaction. There is no fundamental difference between action and reaction since their relationship is such that whenever one occurs the other has to follow; this is simple cause and effect. This is why I always say, “Cause is Effect concealed, and Effect is Cause revealed.’’ When you know one you know the other. If you know the potentiality inherent in the seed you can predict what sort of tree it will produce. If you know the egg, you know the bird.
If there is no end to action and reaction how could anyone ever hope to get out of the whirlpool of life? How could you ever hope to realize yourself? There must be a way out, and there is. God is never cruel or unjust; humans are, and we project our limitations onto Him. To get out of the grip of karma you must first realize that all karma is due to rna (debt). Karma can occur between two individuals only if there is some bondage of debt between them. I call this rnanubandhana (from the Sanskrit rna “debt” + anubandhana “bondage”). For example, if I steal something from you in this lifetime the opportunity for me to steal from you can arise only if a debt exists between you and me; only if you owe me something. If there is no bondage, I will not be able to locate your home, or will not find what I want even if I do burgle it. And if I steal from you, instead of receiving from you as a gift the thing I want, of your own free will, it is highly likely that you must have stolen from me in the past. Your past action creates a like attitude in me. This is a very much simplified example, of course, but you can get the idea from it.
My theft from you is not a karma: it becomes a karma only when I identify myself with the act of stealing. As long as I do not self-identify myself with the robbery it is not a karma for me. It may be unwise — it will hurt your feelings, it may land me in jail, you may beat me up or shoot me in return — but it is no karma: It is only a past rna working its way out. Selfidentification with one’s actions converts them into karmas by binding the ego down more tightly to the limited, temporary personality.
If I write a check for 10 million rupees and fail to sign it, it is valueless, even though I performed the action of writing it and giving it to you. Once I sign it, though, and you present it to my bank to be honored, well, I’m in trouble unless I have at least 10 million rupees in my account.
Remember, only the ego has the power to self-identify. Your ego is continuously self-identifying with your body and your personality: “I have black hair, I like race horses,” whatever. Thanks to the ego we are all able to remain alive because as soon as the ego ceases to self-identify with the body an individual dies.
The difficulty is that the ego not only self-identifies with the body, it also self-identifies with all the actions performed by the body. The ego tries to protect itself by preventing the repaying of karmic debts which have fallen due. Thus, new karmas are created.
Suppose I know I have a rnanubandhana with you. If I am wise I will ensure that the debt is paid off; it will mean one less bondage to the world and will bring me closer to my goal of self-realization. People enjoy being repaid but usually balk when it comes to paying out. The result is karma.
In my case I am very anxious to finish off my cycle of births and deaths so I allow every person who has any rnanubandhana with me to take from me whatever they are entitled to. Whether they are destined to make my life miserable, or to make me poor, or whatever, I don’t mind. Let them do it; they cannot take from me any more than the value of the debt I owe them. The moment I object in any way, even mentally, then karma has begun. Likewise, if I have to take from someone I take only what I know I am entitled to, no more and no less.
Now, I know I have the advantage of knowing about my rnanubandhanas. But anyone, even someone who has no idea at all about whom he owes and who owes him, can make good use of this attitude. The more you scheme and plot to snatch from others the farther you bind yourself down in karmas. The freer you are, accepting when it is given and giving when it is requested, the more of your rnanubandhanas are effaced and the closer you come to your goal.
This is why I always say that life is only a memory. It is the memory of all one’s rnanubandhanas of countless births. This memory is stored in your causal body, from which the rnanubandhanas project for their fulfillment at the appropriate moment. If you have given a lot in your past births then you will have many people to act as your debtors in this birth and you will have “sweet memories.” If you have taken ruthlessly from everyone in the past they will take from you ruthlessly this time around and your life will be filled with “bitter memories.” However you look at it, life is nothing but a memory, be it bitter or sweet.
And remember that the sweet memories can also get you into karmic trouble. Suppose someone owes me money and I demand it from him, or kill him for it, instead of permitting him to pay me in his own time, according to his own sweet will. Or suppose a woman owes me sex, and when the rna is over and she wants to leave me I try to force her to remain, or I rape her if she refuses to provide me with immediate gratification. Or suppose I am a doctor, and a loyal patient suddenly stops coming and I react with indignation or with insulting behavior. The moment you act to protect what you feel to be your self-interest, your ego, karma adheres to you like mud.
People ask me, “But how did all this start? How could there be a first rnanubandhana, a first debt to start the whole ball rolling?” The first rna, the source of rnanubandhana, occurs when Shakti has emanated from Shiva. After emanating She feels She must return and reunite with Him. She owes Her existence to Him and because She feels incomplete without Him She craves reunion. The period between the emanation and the reunion is the time when karma is performed. When the union is complete there can be no karma; there is no individuality left to self-identify.
The job of Shakti is to irritate, prod, awaken Her Shiva. Once Shakti has emanated, Shiva becomes quiescent. Shakti incites Him to action so They can dance together and by Their dance create the play of existence. Shakti provides the energy for the sublime cosmic dance, Shiva provides the control and rhythm. This is the meaning of the pictures in which you see Kali dancing on the prostrate body of Shiva: She is awakening Him out of samadhi so He can dance with Her. My Tara does the same thing.
Look at the atom. The protons are like Shiva; they remain still at the center, attracting the electrons to themselves passively. The electrons, forms of Shakti, whirl incessantly about the nucleus trying desperately to reunite with the protons. Shakti is dynamic because it is She who emanates; She moves outward and then tries to move back, like the protons. The neutrons represent what happens when Shiva and Shakti reunite. All dualities like polarity and charge are finished; the manifestation is dissolved. This is why the authorities say that the Absolute Reality has no gender or attributes. All the attributes are contained within it — otherwise how could they manifest? — but in the absolute state they are only in potential form. When a neutron splits to form a proton and an electron then the manifestation begins all over again: Duality has been created out of unity. If a physicist is asked why this happens he can only answer that it is in the nature of matter to manifest and redissolve like this. And we Vedics say the same thing, that it is simply in the nature of the universe to manifest and redissolve periodically.
But why the atom? Consider human beings. Birth and death, death and birth: two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. If you know birth you know death, and vice versa. Birth came first: Shakti emanated from the Unified Unmanifested Reality. When Shakti returns to Her controller, Lord Shiva, that is death. Birth and death occur only so long as the causal body exists, because only when there are sufficient karmas with which the ego has self-identified will there be enough impetus for birth to take place to create situations in which the karmas can be worked out.
All the karmas in storage in the causal body must be burned away before one gains exemption from rebirth. But it is so rare for the causal body to bum that only a few over the course of centuries and millennia ever get to experience it. Besides, out of a million people perhaps only one even wants to experience it. Why? Because most of your karmas must first be burned away before you can even develop the desire to do away with desire. And, as long as even a few karmas remain, your body will remain and your ego will continue to self-identify with your form and will continue to relate to the universe in terms of form.
The Ultimate Shiva has no form, no attributes, nothing. When you aim for the ultimate you can’t expect to carry form along with you. Remember, all forms, even the form of Shiva, exist within the manifested universe, which is nothing but the Adya Shakti. When you are ready to go beyond Shakti to Shiva you must be willing to turn from form and go beyond everything. Which is another reason I say over and over again: Worship God with form first and only then go for the Formless Absolute. Convert your own self into your deity so your ego self-identifies with the deity’s form and not your own, and then your deity can carry you across to the Ultimate.
FATE AND RNANUBANDHANA
Unless you work very, very hard and obtain immortality you can be certain you are mortal. All created beings are mortal, because they are merely projections of energy, of Shakti. When Shiva and Shakti unite, millions of beings and universes are created by the overflowing of their bliss: This is on the cosmic scale. On the small scale a man and a woman copulate, and when the sperm and the ovum unite, they, two cells, proliferate into billions of cells out of the exuberance of their joy. Men and women procreate; Shiva and Shakti create.
Whether it is creation or procreation, every projection is limited. The limitation is one of time. Even at the creation of the universe the projection of Shakti is limited; otherwise how could any forms be created? The idea of form is nothing but the idea of limit. Shakti is the force of limitation, which is why some so-called holy men fear and despise Her. But they don’t realize how limited they are themselves.
The moment anything is created its life span is determined. Call it trajectory or atomic clock or anything you please, but the seeds of destruction are planted at the instant of creation and grow at a fixed rate. And that is why I always say, the moment of death is fixed at the moment of birth.
Some people say, “Oh, but you can always commit suicide and cheat death,” but it’s not true. If you decide to commit suicide it is because you are meant to commit suicide. As they say in Sanskrit, “Purvadatteshu maranam”: you get the same death again and again, for at least seven births in succession. If you are meant to die by your own hand the idea of suicide will come to you just at the time that Mahakala is ready to come for you. So it is not as if you have any free will over selecting your time of death. Every death, in whatever circumstances, is decided at the time of birth; you may do your best to avoid it but you will be unable to do so.
Even if you could know when you would die — and only a few Yogis can know—there is no likelihood that you’d be able to alter the time or the circumstances because even if you try to make some changes Mahakala will make use of your rnanubandhanas to create the situation as He desires it. He will pervert your mind and the minds of those around you to force events to occur as He pleases.
Here’s an example. Once there was a childless couple who prayed to Shiva for many years before being blessed with a son. When the father, who was the local king’s astrologer, cast his son’s horoscope he was horrified to learn that the boy would die on his ninth birthday after paying his parents 100,000 rupees. This was the rnanubandhana between the boy and his parents, the reason why he had been born into that family.
The boy’s father was mystified as well: Where could a nine-year-old boy come up with 100,000 rupees? He felt secure in the absurdity of the situation but just to make sure, he never let the boy out of the house, even to go to school, so he could never amass any money. Still, the boy learned something of astrology almost by default, because his father was an expert and people came regularly to consult with him. Off and on the man would warn his wife, “Never take anything from this boy!” and his wife would assure him she wouldn’t.
When the boy became eight years old the astrologer warned her again: “Make sure you never accept anything whatsoever from him!” His wife replied, “I told you once, I will never take anything.” At age eight years and eleven months the astrologer delivered yet another warning to his wife and received the same assurance.
Three days left. The father thought, “When this period passes the dangerous conjunction will not recur for at least 100 years. Nothing to worry about.” One day left: again he cautioned his wife. But he didn’t realize that he was living in a fool’s paradise. Mahakala always possesses His victim six months before the appointed time of death and makes the individual perform the actions which cause death to occur in the prescribed manner. It was no different in this case.
The wife of that country’s king had finally become pregnant after many years of barrenness. Just before the delivery was to occur the astrologer’s son was strolling through the palace garden when he saw a gardener’s wife collecting flowers. He asked her in childish innocence, “Where are you going with all these flowers?’’
She replied, “I am to take them to decorate the queen’s bedchamber, where she is about to give birth to a child.” The little boy said, “I am coming along with you.” The lady told him, “Only women are allowed.” The boy said, “Make me wear a sari so I can come too,” and looked at her so mournfully that she had to agree. Mahakala had taken possession of him and was ordering her; otherwise the gardener’s wife would never have dared to take him along, knowing the stiff penalty she would have to face if the deception were discovered. Some rnanubandhana had to exist between the boy and the gardener’s wife, of course, to give Mahakala a field in which to operate.
Off they went to the palace like mother and daughter. There, just at the moment of the child’s birth the little boy got inspiration — from Mahakala — and took a twig and wrote on the wall in the blood-red juice of the paan (betel nut and betel leaf mixture) he was chewing: “This boy will surpass his father in every way and will live for 125 years.” Then he and the gardener’s wife left.
Ten minutes after the delivery all the royal astrologers came, led by the little boy’s father, and when they cast the horoscope they all agreed: “If the father ever sees the face of this child the father must die.”
Well, what to do? The king could not afford to allow that to happen, because the welfare of the kingdom was at stake, so he called two butchers and told them, “Take this child out and kill him.” The queen felt grief, but consoled herself with the thought that her husband would continue to live and she could have more children.
When the two butchers had taken the baby out into the forest they said to one another, “What has this child done that he should be murdered on the day he is born?’’ They could not do the deed so they left the child under a tree. They killed a deer instead and took its eyes to the king to prove that they had done the job. How could two bloodthirsty butchers become so compassionate? Mahakala, the god of death, and a complex rnanubandhana connecting the baby, the butchers, and the luckless animal.
By now the king was feeling remorseful — guilty of the murder of an infant and his own son at that — and he was wondering what to do. The remorse? Mahakala’s doing. He went to the queen and told her, “I’ve done a terrible thing.” She said, “You? What have you lost? I’ve lost my baby.” Suddenly the king saw the horoscope written on the wall. When he read the words he was so astonished that he called all his guards and ordered them to find out who had written it. They interrogated everyone who had been there and when they reached the gardener’s wife, she admitted that the chief astrologer’s young son had come in disguise and done so.
Meanwhile the boy had gone happily to his home and had had his nice food and was resting, as if he knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly officers arrived and escorted him to the palace. The king confronted him with the writing on the wall, and the boy boldly told him, “What I have written cannot be wrong. The baby cannot be dead.” A nine-year-old boy could never be so confident; Mahakala was speaking.
At this the king called in the two butchers, who confessed after a good hiding that they had not killed the infant. The king and his whole court rushed to the tree and found the baby alive, honey from an overhead honeycomb dripping into his mouth to satisfy his hunger. The astrologer’s son told the king, “You have seen your son’s face and yet you live.” The king was wonderstruck and asked, “How could you be right when all my astrologers were wrong?” The boy told him, “I was present at the precise moment of birth; my father and all the rest were ten minutes late.” The king was so pleased that he wrote on a slip of paper, “Pay the bearer of this note 100,000 rupees from the royal treasury.’’
The boy ran home as fast as he could, calling for his mother: “Ma, Ma, Ma!” When he got to his house his mother met him at the door. He jumped into her arms, thrust the note into her hand, and died.
His father came home a few minutes later, having heard the whole story at court, and found his wife cradling their son’s dead body. He shouted, “You stupid wife! I told you never to take any money from him!” But she said, “How could I have known that the scrap of paper in his hand was a receipt?” And then, of course, there was nothing to do about it.
So there is no way to escape death unless you go beyond it. Please remember, the time of death is fixed for everyone. Even if you want to die earlier or later you will not be able to. I remember a newspaper report: As soon as some young bride left her new home to visit her mother her husband became so depressed that he decided to commit suicide. First he swallowed all the poison in the house. Then he sealed all the doors and windows and turned on the gas. Since he didn’t like the smell of gas, he went and bought some cigarettes and returned to the kitchen where he lit one, and bang! He was so frightened by the noise and fire that he vomited out all the poison and ran for his life. He was miraculously unscathed by the explosion, and his wife had to get him out of jail for trying to burn down the house.
And then there was another true story not too long ago. Some primary school teacher had been so fed up with his life for the past ten years that he kept wanting to die but had never been able to do so. Then one day he was found dead in a Shiva temple, embracing the Linga. He had searched for Mahakala for so long, and had finally found Him. Why didn’t he succeed for ten years? Because it was not yet time for him to die. No other explanation is possible. I have spent many long years of my life in the smashan and I think I have found out a little something about death.
You know, it is really a blessing that we do not have full knowledge of fate and rnanubandhana, the workings of birth and death. If we did, a mother who knew that a certain son would take more from her than he would give would never love him; she would neglect him and might even try to kill him. We would be prejudiced against other people from the start and that would only increase our self-identification with our bodies, which exist solely because of rnanubandhana. And all this would only add to our already heavy load of karmas. That is why one does not get remembrance of past lives until a later stage.
RANU
I have experienced all this myself, you know, which is why I can talk about it. I lost my first son, Ranu, in spite of every precaution; and I did not understand what was going on until much later, when my Guru Maharaj literally beat it into my head.
Ranu was meant to die young, that is all there was to it. I had plenty of warnings, I had my own suspicions, I did all I could, but there was no way to avoid Mahakala.
Jina Chandra Suri, the Jain ascetic who forced me to do Shava Sadhana the first time, was also involved in this drama. See how strange are the workings of rnanubandhana? My wife had had several miscarriages, and I was wondering if she would ever be able to have a child. Once when she was at her parents’ home in Gwalior, Jina Chandra Suri came to me and said, “There is an ethereal being who has been coming to me daily and bothering me: ‘I want to come to the world of mortals and play. Let me come. Let me come.’ I have decided that he should be born into your family.” Right in front of me the old man wrote out the horoscope and described exactly how the boy would look. He told me, “Your wife will conceive on such-and-such a day.”
I thought it was all a big joke, and told him so: “Look, Maharaj, my wife is in Gwalior; how can she conceive there?” He didn’t bother to reply but just left. I knew that even in his miserable condition he still had a few tricks up his sleeves, so I sent a telegram to my wife telling her there was no need for her to return to Bombay; she should continue her vacation with her family indefinitely.
But it’s not so easy to prevent the unfolding of your destiny. Someone in Gwalior told my wife, “Your husband has just been operated on for his tonsils and he is hiding it from you.” She took fright and caught the next train for Bombay. When I met her at the station I realized that it would all take place as Jina Chandra Suri had predicted. My wife conceived on the specified day, the pregnancy was uneventful, and the boy was born at the exact time required by the horoscope the old man had written out. What’s more, the baby fit the physical description perfectly.
And so I have Jina Chandra Suri to thank both for introducing me to my Mother Tara, and for giving me a unique son. You know, Jina Chandra Suri’s fate was somehow connected with that of Ranu. Three months before Ranu’s death the old man came to me and said, “Your child is going to make you cry; he’ll make you miserable.” And three months after my son was cremated, the old man passed away himself. One day he was delivering a lecture on the Jain religion in one of their temples, and in the middle of the discourse he just keeled over dead.
What a boy Ranu was! My God, if he had lived he would have been the best! Sports, studies, you name it, he was tops in all of them. Not only that, he had innate spiritual powers. Sometimes when people would come to me to get some work done Ranu would meet them first and say, “Give me some chocolate and I’ll see that your work gets done.” And it would be done! No one ever understood how, and even I only found out how after he was gone.
Everyone who met him loved him. He was my father’s favorite. And my mother! Here in India it is a tradition that when you take initiation from a guru you give up one food for the rest of your life; you dedicate that food to your guru. My mother refused to eat mangoes after Ranu’s death, because mangoes had been his favorite food — even though obviously he was not her guru.
And even my gurus loved him! One day when Ranu was being too mischievous I raised my hand as if to slap him. I would not have done it; I never hit my children. I just wanted to scare him. But my Junior Guru Maharaj was in the room. He caught my hand and with real pain in his voice he said, “Haven’t you ever looked in his palm and seen how short his life line is? Promise me you will never strike him.” And of course I did promise it. Actually I had known from Ranu’s horoscope that his life would be in danger early on, and as soon as my second son was born and I looked at his horoscope I saw that it predicted he would be the eldest child in the family. This certainly suggested that Ranu had to die.
So I decided to give him the happiest childhood I could. When he was wild and naughty I would tell him, just to punish him a little bit, “If you don’t behave, your Papa will go to where Gopala lives,” meaning that I would die. But Ranu would always tell me, “No, Papa, I will be going before you do.” He knew, he knew!
Well, Ranu died at age nine. As the time approached my Senior Guru Maharaj decided to visit Bombay. Now I know that he came to say good-bye to Ranu; back then I was still hopeful that something could be done.
One day a couple of friends and I were sitting with my Senior Guru Maharaj and one friend said to me in English, “Why don’t we try to get your Guru Maharaj to go to the cinema?” This fellow knew that my Senior Guru Maharaj would never patronize any thing like that because he hates the British, which mean to him Westerners in general. He used to say, “What have the Westerners ever done for us except to teach us to urinate standing up like donkeys?”
Anyway, my friend was still talking: “Let’s take him to a really hot picture.” My old man was just looking at him with his piercing stare — his eyes never blink — and then suddenly he said in Hindi, “Why don’t we go to see a picture today? I’d like to see that new picture with Rita Hayworth in it.”
I got the shock of my lifetime. I couldn’t understand it. Why should he want to go see something he hates? And how could he possibly know or care who Rita Hayworth was? But we went. And during the picture my Senior Guru Maharaj didn’t even look at the screen. He sat with his head on his chest, covered by his arms, with his elbows together at the waist. Very strange. I didn’t know what to make of any of this.
If you ever get the opportunity, see that picture. It was called Down to Earth. Danny is a piano player whose dancer quits him. He is in bad shape so his mother, who has died, gets permission to come down from heaven to help him. She becomes his dancer — of course he does not know who she really is — and then he rockets to fame. They are doing very well together when the first dancer Danny had employed comes back and asks to be rehired. Although his mother tells him, “But Danny, I only want to help you,” he sends her away and rehires the first dancer — and straightaway plummets. Then he realizes his mistake and asks his mother to come back. She does, and up he goes again.
His mother is finally called back up above. There is a limit to everything, after all. She begs, she pleads, “No, I can’t go, I have to look after my son,” but then we see a big Gandharva or some kind of angel smiling at her, and he moves his hand and she leaves the earth and is drawn back up above.
As she is about to go she sees her son and cries, “Danny! Danny! Don’t you hear me? Can’t you hear me? I want to help you. Listen to me!” But Danny is drinking at a cocktail party in some producer’s house and he can’t hear her because she has become ethereal.
Up in heaven she is very unhappy — ”My Danny, what will become of him?’’ — and someone comes along to talk with her about it. She is completely despondent, and he just strokes the back of her head and suddenly she says, “Oh, it was all a dream, wasn’t it?” And she becomes happy again. But still for some time the memory is there, like the morning recollection of a dream.
After the picture was over my Senior Guru Maharaj asked us, “Did you understand?” I said, “No,” because I couldn’t understand. My old man left Bombay and sometime later Ranu died. About two months thereafter he returned to Bombay and asked me again, “Now, did you understand that film?” I still can’t tell you how he knew that film was worth seeing to remind me of the story of Ranu’s life.
Look how Mahakala works. I had gone out of Bombay to Mathruli near Surat in the Konkan for a short while with a certain sadhu — my wife’s own guru, in fact; he was named Shankargiriji and lived to be about 125, though he was not quite 100 at this time and still looked like a sixteen-year-old boy — and I told my wife in no uncertain terms not to have Ranu operated on for his tonsils while I was away. But she ignored my advice and did it anyway. I had a peculiar feeling that something terrible was going to happen. Then when I learned of the operation I told her specifically that if she let him go to school while I was gone that it would be the end of him. Well, she didn’t listen to me. She — or rather Mahakala — sent him to school and he developed polio. He was sick only four days.
While I was sitting out in the jungle I started seeing something funny. I saw that Ranu was dying. I told Shankargiriji that I had to go back to Bombay, but he said, “Don’t be stupid, it’s all your imagination; don’t go back.” I waited there for some more time and then I saw the same thing again. This time I forced Shankargiriji to come back with me to Bombay. By the time I got back it was almost too late. I quickly put Aghori Baba’s stick under the mattress and laid my boy on the bed on top of it.
I then thought that everything would be all right, because if Aghori Baba’s stick had stayed underneath him Ranu could never have died. That is the power of the stick. Aghori Baba gave it to me long ago, and I have used its miraculous powers on so many people. My foster daughter used it on me when I had my heart attack. I used to ask her, “Why is my bed so lumpy?”
But look how Mahakala works! Dinkar, my friend who was with me there, told me to go down and get some coconut water for Ranu. While I was gone Ranu — remember, it was Mahakala speaking through Ranu — asked Dinkar to put him on the other bed. Dinkar never knew about Aghori Baba’s stick, and didn’t move it along with Ranu. When I came back my boy was gasping. I lifted him in my arms, he said “Gopala,” and he was gone.
He knew he would die. He even told the principal of his school, “Now it is time for me to leave. I won’t be meeting you again. I’m going to a place where it is very cold,” meaning he would be reborn in America. And even my intellect had become perverted. At one point I had prayed, “Let my boy die rather than become a cripple,” because he had been so good at sports like badminton that his spirit would have been crushed if he had been forced to limp around for the rest of his life; that is what polio does to you, you know.
In any case after my Ranu died I went mad. My position was pitiable. I actually had to borrow money to burn him. For six months I sat in the smashan with one small bone and some ash which I had retrieved from his funeral pyre. I was trying to revive him in the same body. Eventually someone promised me that he would come back to me after being born to different parents, carrying certain signs on his body so that I could recognize him.
I refused to meet my Junior Guru Maharaj for four years after my son’s death. When I finally did go to visit him I gave him such a barrage of curses that he had no option but to sit and listen to me for two hours. I used all the foul language I know; in addition I was telling him things like, “You are a sadhu so you never had any children; what can you know of the grief of a father who loses his son?”
He listened to me patiently until I was through and then said quietly, “Wah, Babuji, wah; now I know how strong is the love of human beings. If you really loved your son so much how is it that you are still alive after his death? Why didn’t you die of shock at the moment of his death or throw yourself on the funeral pyre with him? You are eating and drinking as if nothing had happened. You are going to the races and enjoying your life. So I understand that this was not real love but only rnanubandhana, just a debt which had to be paid.”
I was ashamed, because I knew that what he said was the truth. Then he told me, “Come here,” and he pressed a certain nerve on the back of my head, and suddenly I understood the rnanubandhana between me and my son, and why he had to die. Guru Maharaj told me, “There is no need for you to cry. You know God exists in everyone’s heart. If you see your Ranu in everyone you meet, you will have so many Ranus.”
So, I lost one son but gained millions. Wasn’t it worth it? And later I realized that by continuing to live I had been able to do some things for Ranu which benefited him immensely. I saw to it that he underwent thousands of births during the four years between his death and his reincarnation in human form. Thousands of births, in which millions of karmas were wiped out. And in so many of those births he was sacrificed. It is not necessary for the spirit to enter the womb and actually grow with the fetus. It is sufficient if the spirit enters the animal just a few minutes or hours or days before the sacrifice occurs. And the nice thing about it is that once you are sacrificed in one womb you never have to take rebirth in that womb again; never.
I can predict one characteristic of my son’s personality in his new body, wherever he may be. He will never want to injure any animals; and there will be some species of animal of which he will be so fond that he will never be able to endure it if he sees them in pain; all because he has been sacrificed in those forms.
When you see a dead animal on the road and a shiver suddenly and involuntarily goes up your spine, somewhere in some previous birth you must have endured something like that. Perhaps it was not a car; you might have been crushed by anything, even an elephant or a boulder. But subconsciously the agony is still present. You “remember” the past experience and shiver uncontrollably.
And once you develop yourself spiritually you feel not only your own pain but you empathize with the pain of the being who is suffering. When you see God in every human, every animal, even the tiniest insect, and even in the vegetables you eat every day, you cannot bear to see their torment, because it becomes your torment. You see God suffering, and it is unbearable.
Whenever I drive past a certain mutton shop near Poona I see rows of goat carcasses, and I feel pity for the goats who were slaughtered merely to please someone’s tongue. One day I got so wild that I said to myself, “I’ll see to it that everyone in this city is burned alive!” just to make up for the sufferings of the little kid goats who are tethered near the carcasses. Animals can smell imminent slaughter, and they fear death like any other living being. How cruel it is to force baby goats to spend twenty-four hours with the dead bodies of their own kind, knowing all the while that in the morning they too will end up on the meat hooks!
I was so wild that day that I was ready to invoke any spirit just to finish off everyone in the town and teach them a good lesson in sensitivity. Suddenly some ethereal being sneered at me, “You fool! Who are you to pity them? At least they know when they are going to die; their suffering is limited to a day. But you have no idea when you are going to die, or how much you will have to suffer. Who deserves pity: they or you?” And then I had to keep quiet, because every word was true.
Let me assure you, though, that it is better not to know when you are going to die unless you are an advanced Yogi, and sometimes not even then. If I had not known Ranu was going to die I would still have felt the hurt at his death, no doubt, but how much more did I feel it when I knew it all beforehand and could do absolutely nothing about it? It is a real blessing from Nature that when we are born we forget our rnanubandhanas; otherwise most people would not be able to endure the misery of existence. Only those who need to know are finally permitted to know, so that they can go beyond rnanubandhana. And for those few who do know there is nothing more relieving than the grip of Mahakala, the grip which signals that soon they will be free of the responsibility of remaining alive, swimming in the shark-filled ocean of the material world.
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT
Ranu’s story exemplifies Vimalananda’s whole teaching about rnanubandhana, a true tale of how a being takes birth, plays about, pays off debts, and departs, once those debts have been paid. The story of Ranu would not be complete, however, without appending the story of Vimalananda’s father to it. Since this tale involves me personally I have deliberately written it in first person from my point of view.
During the summer of 1978 Vimalananda predicted that his father would die in his sleep before the end of the year. I had already experienced Vimalananda’s accuracy in predicting the date and time of an individual’s demise. It surprised me then when the year was ending and the foretold death had not yet occurred.
We were in Bombay to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s when on the night of December 30 I told Vimalananda, “You assured me your papa would pass on during this year. What happened? He is still alive.”
Vimalananda replied, “There is still one day left in the year, isn’t there? Let it go by first and then tell me anything you like.” Suddenly, for no apparent reason, a dog began to howl piteously in the street below. We later discovered that he had been locked in the post office located in our building on the ground floor and was howling to try to attract attention to his plight. According to the science of omens, however, the mournful baying of a dog in the night is an exceedingly inauspicious sign.
The phone rang at 5 A.M. the next morning to announce that Vimalananda’s father had died in his sleep during the night, about the same time the dog had begun to wail. As Vimalananda hung up the phone he turned to me with a big I-told-you-so grin and said, “Now what do you have to say?”
As we entered the old man’s room to pay our last respects Vimalananda sighed contentedly and whispered to me, “Look at that face!” Then he pointed to a picture on the wall which was obviously one of the old man done just a short while before his demise, for the features tallied almost precisely with those of the dead face before me. “That fellow on the wall is Haranath Thakur, our family guru,” Vimalananda continued. “My father concentrated on his picture for so many years that he became like his guru even in physical form. This is a practical demonstration of the Kita Bhramari Nyaya, the Law of Caterpillar and Butterfly: Whatever you concentrate on you will eventually become.
“Actually there is a better reason for this,” he mused on. “In 1927 my father came down with meningitis and died. Yes, he died; I can show you death certificates signed by three different doctors. We received a message from Haranath immediately: ‘Don’t remove the body for twelve hours after death.’ All our relatives said, ‘Don’t be stupid. He’s dead now, let’s cremate him.’ But my mother had implicit faith in her guru and she was adamant. After six hours the corpse sat up. He lived for another fifty-one years.
“A few days later my father received a letter from Haranath: ‘My son, you will have a long life, but you will never see your Haranath any more. Look after my boy,’ meaning me; I was eleven at the time. A cover letter from Haranath’s son was enclosed which stated that on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time his father had gone to sleep in his garden after mentioning that he felt my father needed his help. Haranath never woke from that sleep. The time he went to sleep turned out to be exactly the moment my father revived.
“After this experience my father was a changed man. Although he had not had much interest in his business before, after this incident he lost all interest in business and would spend his time doing japa or discussing spiritual subjects with my mother. I think there must have been some connection between his revival and his guru’s death.”
Vimalananda made some further observations about his father’s corpse, noting that there were no flies around the body and that abstemious living had made the body itself almost as light as that of a child. Both things he attributed to the old man’s purity.
At the Banganga smashan Vimalananda insisted on arranging the pyre himself: “I always arrange the pyres for my family’s funerals. It’s my job; the smashan is my home. I think I should know best how it is to be done.” After igniting the pyre Vimalananda called me over and he and I made offerings of clarified butter into it as if we were worshipping a sacrificial fire according to the traditional ritual. No one dared stop us, though there was visible agitation in the audience at the scandal of a son openly performing ritual worship on his own father’s funeral pyre.
Later as we sat quietly smoking and watching the pyre burn I mentioned this to Vimalananda. He laughed a hearty laugh and said, “What does my family know about me? I have never shirked from doing anything I felt I needed to do. I don’t know why it is, but I will do most anything just for the experience of it. I’ll do it once or twice just so I know I can do it well and then quit so it doesn’t become a habit. Aghora is my life, though I have always lived in the smashan, and as an Aghori I cannot afford to distinguish between the funeral pyre of my mother or my father and that of anyone else. How can I? No; sadhana means sadhana, however you look at it. You must be ready to forget everything to become an Aghori.”
“I had the same idea at my mother’s funeral. In fact I asked my friends, ‘Shall I perform a little sadhana here? It will give us great material benefits.’ But they turned me down.”
He fell silent. For a couple of hours we chatted intermittently. Apart from voices, only the hiss of the dying pyre’s flames, the cawing of a few raucous purple and black jungle crows, and the splash of ocean breakers just beyond the retaining wall disturbed the stillness of the smashan. Eventually Vimalananda said jauntily, “Let’s go see if the old man has turned to ash yet.” On inspection only a few bone slivers remained among the piles of ash. After collecting some of these splinters for later rituals we walked back to the car to drive home. A broad smile illumined his face as Vimalananda told me, “Tonight we’ll celebrate New Year’s Eve with champagne! I feel I really have some reason to celebrate. My father has succeeded at his sadhana and had a fine death. As we head into the new year he has got a good head start into a new life, a life those of us who live in the smashan know very, very well.”