“To meet a Nath, Muni or Rishi, or one of the Supreme Shaktis, is almost impossible. But you may be able to meet Siddhas. I was very fortunate to have met Telang Swami (see Aghora), who was a great Siddha. When I was in
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the Himalayas I met Babaji, the Siddha who Yogananda talks about. Babaji is a good Siddha, no doubt, but his sister is even better than he is!
“Let me tell you about another Siddha I met. He is a very unusual person, even among the many unusual people in this universe. Some years ago a policeman saw a man wandering around in the backwaters of Cochin, in what is now the state of Kerala. When the policeman stopped him and asked his name the man replied, ‘My name is Prabhakaran, and I have come to look after the interests of my great-great-great-grandchildren.’ The police man thought he was trying to be funny and asked him his age. The man replied, ‘More than seven hundred years.’ The policernan ran him in.
“Prabhakaran told the policemen at the station house that he did not eat or drink anything, so the jailers informed him, ‘We are going to keep you in solitary confinement without food and water, and no toilet either.’ Prabhakaran said, ‘O.K.’ When five days, six days later Prabhakaran was still in perfect shape the jailers had to admit to his abilities.
“Then they asked him, ‘Does anyone know you?’ Prabhakaran replied, ‘Ask C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar; I once saved his life. As soon as they telephoned Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, who was then the Prime Minister of Travancore (also now part of Kerala) he immediately flew to Cochin to meet Prabhakaran, and insisted that Prabhakaran return with him to Travancore. But Prabhakaran said, ‘No, I prefer to go back to the sea.’ As soon as he had seen to the well-being of his descendants he walked out into the ocean. But that was nothing for him. He had already spent four hundred years in the Himalayas, and two hundred years in the sea. He is a Siddha, after all.”
I recently learned that a man whom some had identified as Prabhakaran had been living on land for some years in an ashram, spending most of his time dancing in Bhava Samadhi. Eventually he announced to everyone that he had had enough of existence after seven hundred years, and that he had decided to leave his body in ten days. And so he did.
“And then there was Vishuddhananda. He was the pride of India, a real Siddha, not like these babas who produce ash from the air and so on. On the day I first met him in Benaras he was in such a fine mood that he began to press the area around his navel, and suddenly a lotus stalk came out, like the one at Vishnu’s navel! As he continued to press, it became longer and a red lotus blossom appeared. Why red? Because red represents the Fire Ele ment, which resides at the navel, the Manipura Chakra. There was a beauti ful fragrance. After some time he pressed it, and it returned into his body, back through the navel. You may believe it or not, I don’t care.”
Nor did he pause to discover whether or not I believed it.
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“The navel is really a very interesting structure. If you know the technique you can take in water through your navel and excrete it through your penis. Everyone in the world today performs creation, or rather procreation, with the penis, but Brahma, the Creator of the cosmos, does it with his navel, because He is Himself created from Vishnu’s navel.
“After this performance Vishuddhananda’s chief disciple, Pandit Gopi nath Kaviraj, who was the greatest authority on Indian culture of his time, permitted a big smirk to escape onto his face. He was thinking, ‘Yes, my Guru Maharaj can do this. What can you do, you bedraggled Aghori?’ I looked at him and said, ‘Have you ever heard of Vajroli?’ He said that he had. “Bring me some mercury,’ I told him.
“Now, Vishuddhananda was doing research on mercury and there was plenty on hand. They brought a fifty-six-pound sealed tin and opened it in front of me. I sucked the mercury up with my penis. They were all gaping. Then I said, ‘Aghora Nath is going to show you a little something about mer cury. Wring my hair!’ And all the mercury that had been taken inside was recovered from my marted locks. That put us on a more equal footing.
“Vishuddhananda was an expert at Surya Vijnana, the knowledge of how to make best use of the sun. Do you think this is simple? Never! Only when you understand the significance of the phrase ‘Surya Putra, Agni Mitra’ (‘son of the Sun, friend of the Fire’) can you even hope to know Surya Vijnana. It has something to do with purification of the Fire Element in the body, of course.
“Vishuddhananda would take an ordinary object, like a cookie, and put it on a large tray. Then he would direct sun rays onto it through certain yantras and the cookie would become a little puppy! Yes, it would come alive and move about. He would allow it to play for a bit, and then he would change the yantras slightly and the puppy would become a flower. Another change and a living human baby would appear. Finally he would change the thing into a sprig of tulsi (holy basil), and would give it to someone to be offered to the River Ganga.
“He would store the beads of his rosary in his arm. When he wanted to do japa he would remove them, string them, and use the completed rosary to count his japas. After finishing the number of japas he had decided to do he would unstring the rosary and replace the beads in his arm. And there was no hole, no scar, nothing to show where they had gone in or come out. He even used to keep a Shiva Linga made of solidified mercury in a hollow in his palate.
“I spent some time with him in Benaras. One day while he and I were
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together he became rather intoxicated with his powers, and suddenly a skull he was holding began to move its jaw, as if it were talking. I got the idea, and suddenly two rocks lying nearby began to knock into one another, over and over again, until they were pounded into rubble. And he also got my idea: when two people compete, the outcome can only be destructive, just as the rocks destroyed each other.
“Vishuddhananda was a true Siddha: he learned his vijnana at Lake Manasasarovar in Tibet. But even he had one fault: he showed himself off to too many people, and when he was ready to leave his body for good he had to suffer from diarrhea to purge all the samsara from him. Excess in all things is to be rejected.”
Vishuddhananda lived for many years on the portal of the main post office in Benaras, so it was not easy for him to avoid people. The Law of Karma, however, makes no allowances.
“He did not need to die, of course; he was a Siddha. But he wanted to die so that he could continue to make further progress. To become a Siddha is a great accomplishment, but it is nothing compared to being a Rishi.”