A pleasing routine developed when Vimalananda visited Poona’s Trani colony. I would come over early to help prepare lunch, and then would go off to college in the afternoon. In the evenings we would go to the stables to visit his “four-legged children,” and on race days I would accompany him into the stands at the racecourse. After returning home we would sit together until late at night while he discoursed on spiritual subjects.
One night we were sitting with Chotu, one of Vimalananda’s oldest friends, and with Sardar Dengle, the scion of a noble family of Poona. Vimalananda decided to have some drinks, and though he usually permit ted his friends to drink with him this time he told everyone, “Please, I am in a different mood tonight, and I want to drink alone. You can give me com pany the next time.”
“Ha!” said Chotu. “What do you think? Have I not lived with you day and night for eight years? Have we not always eaten and drunk together? If you are going to drink tonight, I am going to accompany you.”
“Listen,” said Vimalananda, “Don’t insist. If you do drink I will not be responsible for what might happen to you.”
“Leave off,” said Chotu airily. “You are just saying that because you know I
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can drink you under the table without any difficulty. I am also going to drink," and he incited Sardar Dengle to drink as well.
“I warned you," was Vimalananda’s reply, and I poured the Scotch. At his insistence I gave them only half a drink each. Although both these gentle men measured their capacity in pints and quarts, after these particular drinks they were blind drunk. Chotu vomited all over himself and made a mess of the room before falling flat on his back in bed unconscious, leaving his grumbling wife to clean up behind him. I was assigned the task of deal ing with Sardar Dengle. It took me half an hour to get him out the door, and another half-hour to steer him back to his home. Vimalananda enjoyed the whole spectacle immensely.
When Chotu came to he started to abuse Vimalananda roundly, and this caused Vimalananda to break into fresh peals of laughter. “Please abuse me some more," he told Chotu, “I expect it from you. I love to play with my ‘children," he said, turning to me, “and they love to play with me; it is a mutual bondage of affection.
“I love to play with my children,” he went on, “but they should do as they are told,” looking pointedly at Chotu, who smiled broadly and foolishly. “Have you forgotten the story of the shakarpala?” We all leaned closer to lis ten to Vimalananda, while Chotu, who obviously knew the story, said noth ing but continued to grin as if he had lost the ability to comprehend human speech.
“Once,” Vimalananda began, “there was a wrestling club presided over by an old wrestler who was also a spiritual guru. His favorite among his many pupils was a shopkeeper, not because the shopkeeper was a good wrestler but because of a past karmic relationship. The shopkeeper, however,
thought the guru loved him because he was the best pupil.
“The shopkeeper was always pestering his guru to let him fight a very eminent wrestler of the area. The guru knew his child’ was no match for the bigger man, but he also wanted to fulfill his disciple’s desires, so one day he called the boy to him and said, ‘What makes you think you will be able to beat a professional wrestler?’
“The shopkeeper said, ‘Well, I know that I am your best pupil, so that gives me confidence. I also know he will give me a lot of trouble, though, because he eats a whole goat every day.’
“The guru said, ‘So what? Do one thing: Follow him out into the jungle in the morning and see how much he shits.”
“The shopkeeper started to object, but the guru told him forcibly, Now don’t argue; if you want me to help you do as I say.’
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“Unwillingly he did so, and came back the next day to report to his guru: ‘About two pounds.’
“Then his guru said to him, ‘You have nothing to worry about. He eats a whole goat, but he can’t digest it. You have my permission to fight this big lug’
“On the day of the match, just before the bout, the young shopkeeper did a full prostration to his guru, as is customary, and as the guru lifted him up from the floor he picked up a piece of shakarpala (a type of sweet), blew on it while repeating a mantra, and put it into the shopkeeper’s mouth. The boy bounded out into the ring. The two wrestlers shook hands and began to fight.
“Within seconds the shopkeeper grabbed his opponent’s leg, brought him down, and pinned him. He was so elated he began to dance, but his guru shouted at him, ‘Hey, you rascal shopkeeper, sit down! Why are you dancing? It is the shakarpala which is really dancing.’ Then the shopkeeper remembered himself and prostrated again to his guru, to thank him for the loan of shakti.”
All of us listening realized that this story was aimed at Mr. Chotu and his prowess with the bottle, and we had another laugh at Choru’s expense. Vimalananda then decided to let Chotu off the hook, and changed the sub ject.
“Even my Junior Guru Maharaj, who is very strict, loves to play about. Back during the time I owned a dairy in Borivali he once came to visit Bom bay, and my manager, Vasudev Pansekar, who we called Vasu, came to meet him. Vasu was a good singer of devotional songs, and after singing a few he invited Guru Maharaj out to visit the dairy. Chotu here, who lived with me out at Borivali then, is my witness. Do you remember, Chotu?”
Chotu, one of the most genial of men, smiled as he remembered Junior Guru Maharaj and nodded his assent.
“Guru Maharaj smiled at Vasu’s invitation and told him, ‘Of course I’ll come, but you have to catch hold of me.’
“Vasu didn’t think much of this, but late that night Guru Maharaj came to the dairy and strolled through. Vasu saw him and tried to catch him, but Guru Maharaj was moving too quickly, and disappeared. Or at least that is what Vasu told us the next day; I didn’t believe him because Guru Maharaj had been sitting with us all during the time he was supposed to have been at the dairy. I told Vasu chat without proof no one would believe him.
“Vasu said to Guru Maharaj, ‘If you came to the stables and you were also here all the time, you must have come in your subtle body, and that is why
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you couldn’t be caught.’
“Guru Maharaj said, ‘All right, just to prove to you that I was there I will come again; this time be prepared.’ Vasu replied, ‘But none of this subtle body business; you must come in your physical body.’ Guru Maharaj agreed.
“This time Vasu prepared a reception for Guru Maharaj. He marshalled together all the cowherds, armed them with sticks and ropes, and sur rounded the corrals with thorns and barbed wire, so that once anyone got in, there would be no way for them to get out again. Late the next night while everyone was on guard Guru Maharaj appeared, and though all the cowherds strove their mightiest he eluded all of them. They drove him toward the barbed wire and thorns, but he walked right through the barrier; the barbed wire broke when he touched it.
“This was too much for Vasu. He and several cowherds immediately came to where I was staying. There was Guru Maharaj, chatting quietly with my friends. He had not left my sight all day long; I wanted to make sure he didn’t try any funny tricks.
“Vasu said, “All right, so we didn’t catch you again this time; how can we catch you when you come in your subtle body, which is ethereal and gives us nothing to hold onto?’
“Guru Maharaj called him over and showed him the skin on his arm; there were thorns in it, the same kind of thorns that the barrier had been made of. ‘I kept my side of the bargain, and here is my proof,’ he said. “I can’t help it if you couldn’t catch me.’ How Guru Maharaj could have two physical bodies in two different places at once is something I cannot under stand, but it happened.”
We all knew that he understood how it could be. I asked: “What were the sticks and ropes for?”
Chotu answered, “To tie Guru Maharaj up and give him a good beating as a welcome.”
I said, thinking of Guru Maharaj’s august personage, “How could Vasu, or anybody else, dare to lay a finger on Guru Maharaj?”
Chotu smiled again, this time at my foolishness, and Vimalananda said, “Well, Guru Maharaj had challenged him; what was he supposed to do? Just lie down and let Guru Maharaj walk over him? Besides, did anyone catch Guru Maharaj? The old man knows how to take care of himself.”
“It’s just the idea,” I replied. “A disciple has every right to test a guru,” said Vimalananda vehemently.
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“Look how Chotu just tried to test me, and he isn’t even my disciple. But then the disciple, or the ‘child,’ had best be ready to be tested in return. That is how it has always been: first you test the guru, to see if he or she is right for you; then the guru will test you, to find out what you are fit to leam, and what you deserve to learn.”
Indeed; even in the Ayurvedic texts, a student is advised to first test a pro spective guru thoroughly, and only when he is satisfied with the guru’s capabilities should he submit his name as a candidate for discipleship. Then the guru gets his tum to test.
“A guru has to test his disciples, and if he is a good guru he will test the disciple until the disciple’s resistance is completely broken. Your guru is try ing to teach you to efface your ego, to disengage your consciousness from the limitations Kundalini has imposed on Herself by becoming embodied. Only when your ego is humbled can you learn. The guru is like a gardener, and the disciples like flowers. The flowers may be beautiful, but they shouldn’t get a swelled head over their own so-called importance. When your guru ignores or insults you he is only testing to see how far your ego has been effaced. Never, never get angry in return. Just keep quiet, and see how you are benefited.
“I love my mentors, but they play hard, much too hard for most people today. I remember a good saint who once ran afoul of my Senior Guru Maharaj. This saint was called Joowala Sai (the ‘Lice-Covered Saint’) because his body was covered with thousands and thousands of lice and other tiny insects. Every day he would very carefully remove the insects from all over his body, talk to them, play with them, and then carefully replace them. One day Bapu, my Senior Guru Maharaj, happened to meet Joowala Sai, and Joowala Sai smiled at him. An instant later the smile left Joowala Sai’s face, and there were tears in his eyes. He begged for forgive ness, and even stood on a hot road for hours, burning his feet, but nothing doing. Bapu said to me later, ‘How could he afford to show me his teeth?’”
I obviously didn’t understand, so Vimalananda explained: “It is tradition aly impolite to smile and show someone your teeth. When Joowala Sai smiled at Bapu it was a challenge to Bapu; it was tantamount to saying, ‘See what a fine level of spirituality I have achieved!’ Bapu had compassion for this fellow and so in a trice he stole all of his shakti. Joowala Sai immediately realized what had happened, and so he tried to placate Bapu, but to no
avail.”
“So then what happened?” I asked.
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“What happened? Nothing happened. Joowala Sai had to start over again from the beginning. Eventually Bapu will have to do something nice for him-that’s the Law of Karmambut Bapu is in no hurry.”
“It hardly seems fair,” I protested.
“Fair!” It was growing late and Vimalananda was tiring of my refusal to see his point. “What would you know about what is fair when it comes to peo ple like Bapu? If Joowala Sai had been really advanced he should have been able to recognize that Bapu was infinitely more powerful than he. Then he would not have tried to show off, and he would still be happily playing with his lice today.
“You talk about fair because you still have a bee in your bonnet; you still haven’t lost this filthy Western attitude that you deserve to be taught simply because you are fortunate enough to run across someone who can teach you. Unfortunately most Westerners have no patience. Your culture teaches that all desires should be immediately gratified. You see a girl you like and you go up to her and say, ‘Hey, how about a nice screw?’ No romance, no mystery, no excitement. ‘Sex is a natural function,’ say the scientists, and that is what you have made of it. In the West sex is now on the level of any other bodily function: whenever you feel the need to relieve yourselves you do. And you think the spiritual urge can be gratified in the same way. No wonder you people get only fake gurus.
“You cannot buy a real guru. If you try to purchase him or her you will get a nice kick on your behind; you’ll be thrown out. If a real guru sees that his ‘child’ is becoming impatient for knowledge that guru will deliberately delay, to teach the child’ a lesson. If the ‘child’ loses his patience and storms off, well, why should the guru care? One less burden for him.
“Of course Westerners are not entirely to blame,” Vimalananda contin ued, calming somewhat. “Our friend from Germany who said that India is exporting ‘godmen’ is right, you know. We export them to the West where they steal money from people who come to them for knowledge. But the Westerners, and particularly the Americans, are partly to blame, because they think they can buy everything, including spirituality. When something cannot even be spoken how can it be bought? This is why Westerners are not being taught the true things. They only get false gurus; only a false guru will agree to teach someone in return for money.
“And they are not unique in this, of course. Rich people in every country, including India, think that because they feed, clothe, and house their guru that they are headed for heaven. It is not like that at all. A teacher can point the way, but he can’t do your work for you. But if the disciple refuses to lis
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ten-and why should he if he has purchased and now possesses the guru?—what can the guru do about it? All he can practically do is refuse to teach–but it takes guts to turn down all that easy money.
“The knowledge I am trying to give you I gained after a lot of difficulty. Even if I could sell this knowledge to you, which I can’t, the price would be so high that you would not be able to pay it. How can you put a price on the decades I have spent in smashans? Besides, a parent never expects money from a child, unless they are not true parents but merely procreators, like animals. I treat you as my son, Robby. After I have some drinks this feeling is magnified immensely, and I feel that there is so much I want to teach you. But you should be ready to learn it, and Ma should be ready to teach it. You know that the truth cannot be expressed in words; if it could be it wouldn’t be true. I can only use words to point out the truth and other methods to transmit the knowledge directly without your even being aware of it. This is the way a gift should be given. But I need your cooperation in order to give it.
“Americans need to stop trying to possess saints and sadhus, and look for spiritual masters who will possess them instead. Only when you surrender everything to your guru, including especially your acquisitive nature, can you ever hope to progress. The Americans are the ones who can do it. They are interested in reality. I hate to say it, but most of today’s Indians are cow ards, the legacy of one thousand years of servitude to the Muslims and the Europeans. We Indians need to relearn this attitude of mind from the Amer icans, and they need to come to us, to some of us, for spirituality.”
I began to feel a little distressed, not because he was upbraiding Ameri cans, but because he still considered me so much of an American.
He saw this, and said to the others in the room, referring to me, “I know he may not like what I have to say, but I’m very blunt; I can’t be sugar coated quinine.” With that he dismissed me for the night. I kept quiet.
The next time the subject came up was in Bombay, when one of Vimalananda’s “boys” who had been studying astrology for a few months dropped by to ask some questions. The familiarity with which he asked made me remember the episode of Joowala Sai, and in fact Vimalananda told him, as he sat expecting to be patted on the back, “Please study for twelve years and then come back and discuss astrology with me. Astrology cannot be learned overnight. You know, I thought you were mature, since you are physically almost as old as I am. But I see now that you are still in your puppy stage. When a dog is small it bites its mother playfully; biting is an inborn trait in dogs. After it grows older it bites everyone else, but when
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it is a puppy it only has strength enough to bite its mother. The mother doesn’t mind a bit; she knows it is her own puppy, and she allows it to do as it pleases.”
It is no more polite to call someone a dog in India than it is elsewhere, so clearly Vimalananda was aiming to shock. Then, as his last sentence had promised, he showed his compassion.
“If you were to go to a sadhu he would say, “First become my disciple and then I will teach you.’ I don’t want any disciples; I want to remain a disciple to my dying day. And I don’t mind your trying to impress me with your knowledge, though I am not in the least impressed. But if you try to show off in front of someone else you may be humiliated, so please be careful; that is my advice to you.”
The budding astrologer was ashamed of himself, and asked for forgive ness, but Vimalananda replied, “Forgiveness for what? The essence of moth erliness is forgiveness, no matter what the child does.” After the man left, Vimalananda went on.
“Like most people nowadays who study a little tiny bit of a subject and become experts, this fellow thought he knew quite a bit. I knew he was try ing to show off his knowledge by the questions he asked and the way in which he asked them. If I were a sadhu I would have treated him roughly, shouting at him and upbraiding him for being cheeky, so that he would never do this sort of thing again. Because I treat him as my child I can’t do that–but I can’t let him get away with it either. So I had to be blunt. It hurt him, I know, but better he should be hurt a little bit now and learn his les son than to have someone else burst his bloated balloon later, which might have hurt him a lot.
“Suppose a surgeon sees that he needs to operate in order to cure a cer tain disease. If the patient says to him, ‘Oh, no, don’t operate, it will hurt me a lot,’ will the surgeon start to feel sorry for the patient and think, ‘No, I mustn’t operate; how can I cause him any pain?’ Never! Not if he is a real surgeon. A real surgeon will cut, if he knows that is what the patient needs, because he knows that the end result for the patient, which is freedom from the pain of the disease, is worth the little bit of pain that it takes to achieve it.”
I remembered his recent bluntness in Poona.
“I have never been and will never be a teacher. When you try to teach you usually end up cheating yourself. For one thing, most people are motivated by idle curiosity rather than a sincere thirst for knowledge. I have no time to waste my breath on people who want to know whether or not God exists.
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For those who believe in God no explanation is necessary; for those who don’t believe in God no explanation is possible.
“I will never claim to be God, or a prophet of God, or even a guru, as so many claim to be today. To be a guru you have to say, ‘I know and I can teach you.’ But if I say that, well, I’m finished. I can never learn anything else. I have shut myself off from anything new. If I remain a student all my life, though, I will always be ready to learn new things. I am nothing; the sort of nothing which has everything contained within it. That is the kind of nothing to become: the nothing which occurs when Kundalini leaves her dalliance with samsara and opens you to the universe of all possibilities.
“There are plenty of people around who think they are gurus and that they should try to enlighten the world. One of them is a famous swami from Bombay who has centers all over the place, in so many countries. I invited him to my house some years ago, just to see what he was about. When he arrived I offered him refreshment, as one does to any guest who comes, but he refused, saying, ‘I never take any nourishment outside my ashram.’ All right, I thought to myself, if you are being strict I will be strict in return.
“Then he asked me, ‘Are you following some Yoga?’
“I pretended innocence and said, ‘No, Maharaj, I am only an ordinary man. Yoga is too far away for me.’
“He said, ‘You know, I am having my discourses on the Bhagavad Gita at the Oval. You should come and listen to them, you will be enlightened.’
“This was too much. I said to him, ‘Maharaj, the Bhagavad Gita was spo ken by Krishna, who was God incarnate, to Arjuna, who was a great yogi. Both of them were aspects of Rishis, in fact. You are not Krishna, and your listeners are not Arjuna. How can you expect that the kind of jnana which is in the Gita can be passed from you to them by discourse?
“Not only that, you go day after day to the same place and speak the same things over and over again. The Gita was a spontaneous outpouring of joy from Krishna’s heart. Arjuna was His beloved spiritual child,’ and He had such a desire to make Arjuna understand that He couldn’t control Him self. The Gita came from Krishna’s lips spontaneously; even He was not aware of what was happening. That is why it is so great.
“And when it was all over Arjuna said to Krishna, ‘Lord, I have forgotten what you taught me. Can you tell me again?’ Krishna replied, ‘No, that time is passed, and it cannot be recovered.’ Which means that the Gita could be only transmitted between its original author and hearer, who were both Rishis, at a certain time, because afterward that spontaneous outburst was gone. Now, Maharaj, how can you think that you are doing any good to any
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one by babbling on about the Gita?
“Well, he got wild, of course, and told me, ‘You are an atheist, I won’t stay here any longer,’ and stormed out. As he was leaving I said, “Maharaj, the scriptures say you must control your anger.’ That only made him wilder. Such are the sadhus we have nowadays. Only rarely will they recognize their mistakes.
“I don’t mind meeting anyone who has a sincere desire to learn. I’m ready to teach anyone who is ready to learn, and as long as someone comes to me with humility I will do anything for them. But how many have real interest in spirituality, and how many have the patience necessary to wait for those spontaneous outbursts to happen when transmission can really take place? And besides, how many could endure learning with me? When I teach I am ruthless. No compassion; you must succeed or you’ll die.
“If I were a sadhu, Robby, well, I love you but I would rip you to shreds before I taught you anything. That is the best way; then there is no fear of backsliding. As it is lam a householder, so you are receiving knowledge with much less effort on your part. I will never have disciples, only children,’ because that is the way a real guru should treat a disciple: as a spiritual son or daughter. I can’t afford to be as strict as a sadhu because I treat you as my son, and no parent ever wants to see his or her children suffer. I am willing to suffer on your behalf. In return I expect you to act in a certain way, and you do. I appreciate that.
“So,” he concluded, “I’m afraid you have fallen in with a madman. Mad men can be dangerous; look out! Think twice before continuing to stay with me.”
He laughed, and I grinned in reply, happy to be exposed to his sort of danger. I told him, “Hopefully my ego will come sufficiently under control so that I don’t end up like Joowala Sai.”
Vimalananda shook his head and said, “Poor fellow! He didn’t realize who he was tangling with. Bapu is terribly strict about things like respect. One day he and I were sitting around here in Bombay when someone told us of a fakir who was very ill. My mentor immediately said, ‘Take me to see him and I will cure him.’ He is very loving that way. Now, I knew this fakir, and knew he was a good man, but I also knew that he was not yet ready for my Senior Guru Maharaj.
“I told my old man, ‘Don’t bother, he will not see you.’
“He became wild-as his disciple, I had no business contradicting him, after all–and said, ‘I am ready to bet that he will see me.’
“I am a gambler, and I liked my odds, so I said, ‘Be careful, Bapu! This is
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Bombay; you don’t know how people are here.’ But he insisted, and we set tled on a bet: one betel leaf.
“He went to the fakir’s residence and asked to see the sick man. The peo ple there refused to let him in. He told them, “Look, I am a fakir myself, 1 want to cure him,’ and all sorts of other things, but they steadfastly refused.
“Finally he lost his temper and said, ‘Is he God, that he will refuse to see me? All right; he has a plaster on his chest right now, doesn’t he? That plas ter will remain on his chest until his dying day, just to remind him of the fakir he did not meet.’ And it actually happened that way. You know it, Robby; you and Freddy have seen his photo with the plaster on his chest.” Yes, we had.
“Of course then Bapu had to come back home and pay me my betel leaf, and he doesn’t like losing any more than I do. I told him, ‘Why do you become obstinate about such things? These are human beings; they can’t pass the kinds of tests you dish out.’
“It always pays to give respect to spiritual people. Back in the time when the British ruled India there lived an Aghori in a small hut in a small forest on the outskirts of a small village. For some reason the government decided to build a road right through the sadhu’s little hut. When the Englishman in charge of the road gang came to evict the old man he acted so highhandedly that the Aghori decided to teach him a lesson. He lengthened his penis, wrapped it around a nearby boulder which must have weighed tons, and towed it in front of the machinery in use on the roadway. Then he stood back and told the Englishman, ‘Now please remove it.”
“The Englishman, of course, thought it was some kind of trick-wrap ping your penis around a rock and dragging it along?—so he ordered his men to remove it. All of his men got behind it and tried to push it out of the way, but they couldn’t budge it, not even an inch.
“Then the Englishman realized that something funny was going on, and he went to the sadhu and told him politely, ‘Look, I have to build this road. It is my job; if I don’t do it I’ll be fired. Please help me out.’
“The sadhu looked at him closely and said, ‘That’s better; now you are talking properly.’ Then he again.lengthened his penis, wrapped it around the boulder, and tugged it to one side, and the roadbuilding went on undis turbed.”
By this time both of us were guffawing over the vision of the hapless Englishman and the Aghori who had lassoed the boulder with his penis. After the mirth died down Vimalananda continued:
“I accidentally got involved in one of these situations myself. It was in the
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South, and it involved a Western couple who were touring India. One day while they were sightseeing a wild-looking man with unkempt hair started to stare at them. This made them uneasy and they asked him to stop. He ignored them, and continued to stare, wide-eyed. This went on for some minutes until the male tourist lost his temper and spat on the man.
“The man, who was a sadhu, picked up the wad of spittle with his fingers, looked at it carefully, looked at the couple carefully, and then walked away. The couple thought they were rid of him. How wrong they were!
“Next morning they began their day with bloody diarrhea. They tried all sorts of remedies, but nothing worked. Someone they knew knew me, and I was called onto the case. In the course of our talk about their health it came out that they had spat on that sadhu.
“Oh,’ I said, ‘now I get the idea. You should never have insulted him like that. No wonder he has decided to teach you a lesson. Don’t worry about a thing.’ And I went to the smashan. The next day they were fine again, and I warned them strictly never ever to do anything like that again. India is a very strange and dangerous country.
“Two days later who do I see coming to visit me but the sadhu, who asked to be cured of his bloody diarrhea. I told him, “Look, you are an old man and you are supposed to be matured and mellow. Why did you allow your mind to be disturbed by a couple of foreigners, who after all are so ignorant of our ways that they are no better than children?’
“He retorted, ‘They come to India to stare at us, so I wanted to see how they liked it when someone stared at them.’
“I said, ‘Yes, but you can’t just use your power on everyone who irritates you, especially when those people don’t know how to fight back. Besides, they are our guests while they are here, and we have to treat them as such. Anyway, they have learned a lesson, all right, and I hope you have too.’ He agreed that he had learned a good lesson, and we parted as friends.”
The unstated but clear message was of course directed at me: watch your step here in India, lest you land in quicksand!
“I have always tested my gurus, you know; only if they meet my criteria am I willing to learn from them. I have met and tested many sadhus, but most of them have been found wanting. One day one of my friends came raving about a certain saint: ‘What heights this man has reached! He even talks to Lord Krishna!’ I said to myself, ‘Ah-hah, he talks to Lord Krishna!’ I’ve always been willing to meet anyone who was willing to meet me.
“You were supposed to take a coconut and present it at his lotus feet, and then he would tell you what you wanted to know. I didn’t take any coconut,
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and when my turn came he asked me where it was. I told him I had only come for his darshan and not to ask any questions. Then he started to say, ‘Lord Krishna says this,’ and, ‘Lord Krishna says that,’and I got wild. Lord Krishna indeed!
“I told him, ‘Whatever Lord Krishna may say, you had better watch out for yourself, Maharaj, because I think that within one month you will be trampled under the foot of an elephant.’
“Everyone there became very angry with me, of course, but I didn’t care; I was so insolent then. And besides, I was just telling the truth. My friend tried to intervene: ‘What are you saying? Ask Maharaj his forgiveness.’ That only made me wilder, and I had to leave the room.
“Well, it happened as I had predicted. About a month later this sadhu was being taken out in a big procession on elephant back. Suddenly the ele phant went berserk, picked the sadhu up with his trunk, threw him to the ground and trampled him. A horrible death.
“Like that I’ve met so many babas and holy men. I remember a fakir who used to sit on a big cushion of rich green velvet. When I met him I saw that he had a small spirit with him. The spirit was very unhappy because the fakir was taking a lot of work from him. I asked the spirit if he would like to be set free, and he said, ‘Yes, I would like to repay this fakir for all the work he has taken from me.’
“As soon as the spirit was released he immediately grabbed that fakir’s tes ticles and began to squeeze. My God, what a howl that guy put up! None of the disciples could see the spirit, of course, so they didn’t know what was going on and didn’t know what to do about it. As if there were anything they could do about it. His balls were squeezed mercilessly until the next morning, when he died and became a spirit himself.”
My face must have hinted at disapproval, because Vimalananda contin ued by saying, “What should I have done? Left him as he was, to create more karma for himself and make the spirit more miserable so that when his end finally came his condition would be even worse?” Since I had no answer to this, the conversation ended there.
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One day Vimalananda sat me down and outlined for me his criteria for testing saints:
“Some people follow what is called the path of the Ant in their search for God: they scurry about hither and thither, moving backward as well as for ward, taking many births to reach their goal. Those who are more deter mined follow the Path of the Fish, swimming strongly against the current. The Path of the Monkey, which involves leaping from limb to limb on the Tree of Knowledge, is more difficult still; but the most difficult is the Path of the Bird, the Path we Aghoris follow: you leap out into space, and your wings carry you to Him.
“Of course, if your wings fail, and you drop to the ground, you are fin ished, totally; you are dead. A monkey at least has branches to break its fall; a fish can rest behind a rock whenever it needs to. The Path of the Ant takes the longest time but it is the most secure, because an ant has nowhere to fall. The more difficult a sadhana is, the more necessary it is to have a guru. In Kundalini Yoga it is absolutely essential to have an expert guru. The guru is a spiritual aspirant’s friend, philosopher, and guide; he guards the disciple against all dangers, and ignites the internal flames which eventually con sume all the limitations of the disciple’s personality. You can make spiritual progress without having a guru, it is true, but if you want to reach the high est states a guru is absolutely essential.
“No effort is ever lost. Even if you cannot succeed in this lifetime your effort is right there in your bank balance in an account that travels with you from birth to birth. It is such a wonderful account that you can never lose your passbook. The vibrations of your efforts exist indefinitely in a subtle form, so there is nothing to worry about. No matter where you end up you’ll be dragged back into your spiritual practices. All the records of your past lives are available to anyone who knows how to locate them and who can perceive their subtle sound, so your guru never has any difficulty keep ing track of where you are and what you are doing, no matter how far you may stray from him.
“But for you to have this sort of guarantee you have to have a real guru! Out of a thousand sadhus today perhaps one is genuine, because it is Kali Yuga. You will meet many sadhus, Robby, and you will need to know how to evaluate them. You should learn to smell saints out; yes, ‘smell’ them out. They say, ‘Attar can be created only when flowers are crushed,’ and it is the same way with a sadhu, Only after his ego has been thoroughly crushed so that his Kundalini can identify with God will he be able to give a sweet smell
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to all who come near him. So long as he retains traces of selfishness a stench will follow him wherever he goes.
“So long as your own mind and body are blocked up you’ll never even be able to know what a saint is, or to sniff his scent; as you purify yourself, and your perception improves, you will learn more and more. This is like open ing a bottle of attar in a room. After a moment or two everyone except some one whose nose is blocked up can tell that attar is present. The least experienced person can say only, ‘Attar is present.’ Someone with more experience can identify it more accurately: ‘It is rose.’ Only an expert will recognize the fine nuances: ‘It is Kabuli rose mixed with a little jasmine.’ It is the same way with saints.
“If you want to find out whether or not a sadhu is genuine, first go to see him, but don’t ask any questions. Sit quietly and don’t say much; listen, and try to keep your mind blank. If when you sit near him you find yourself for getting the things of the world and becoming more peaceful, then he is a good saint; his halo is quieting your mind. If not, run away!”
“Naturally if you yourself are purified it will be easier to know whether and how much your mind is being quieted,” I observed.
“Naturally. Once your mind becomes purified there’s no limit to what you can learn. You can know so many things about a person by simple observation. For example, check the saint’s feces, like the shopkeeper who wanted to wrestle did. A real yogi excretes only an ounce, or at most a few ounces, a day; anything more indicates that he is bogus. If Jathara Agni has yielded most of its energy to Bhuta Agni, there will be very little physical digestive fire left. Yogis are disciplined by nature, and a good yogi will only eat as much as he is hungry for. If he eats more than he can digest he will have to excrete the excess, and you will be able to detect it. Or, if his bodily fire is generally weak, his assimilation will be poor and he will excrete more than he absorbs, which suggests that his mind will be as dull as his body.
“This principle makes Jain munis easy to test, because of their toilet hab its. They never go outside the house to defecate; usually they do it on a outer balcony or somewhere like that. And they never use water to clean themselves afterwards, since water is life-giving and they regard it as sacred. So they clean themselves with a pebble or a stone and just leave the dung there for the rain to wash away. When someone told me one day that an excellent Jain muni had just arrived in town, I first went to see his drop pings, and after I saw them I knew he would be no match for me. I went in confidently and defeated him easily at religious debate. He was actually rather dull. You can use this test for anyone.
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“Whether or not you are able to observe a sadhu’s droppings, look at his face. A good saint’s face will begin to take on the form of the face of the deity he worships. You know how married couples start to look like one another after forty or fifty years? This is the same principle. There was a sadhu in Bombay named Kamu Baba who meditated on Sai Baba of Shirdi for so long that when you looked at him it was just like looking at Shirdi Sai Baba. At the end of his life my father looked almost identical to his own guru, on whom he had meditated for decades. This effect is magnified millions of times if your Kundalini has been awakened. Kundalini’s power is self-identi fication, and she quickly takes on the form of whatever she identifies with.
“True saints rarely approve of having their photos taken. They don’t like to be known by multitudes of people; they prefer to live alone and die alone so they can be nearer to God. Also, a photo gives a great boost to anyone who wants to self-identify with that person. Anyone who has a saint’s picture can call that saint astrally and play about with him, which is all well and good. But suppose someone for some reason should hate that saint? Everytime they see his photo they will remember their hate, and send reinforced nega tive vibrations his way, which will have unpleasant implications for the health and well-being of the poor innocent saint. Only false sadhus who are anxious for publicity go out of their way to be photographed.
“While you are busy observing the sadhu don’t forget to listen carefully to what he says. Do you remember that young woman who was born in India of Western parents? When she came of age she decided she wanted to marry a fellow-disciple of the same female guru. But when she went to ask her guru’s permission the old woman said, ‘No, how can it be? You are a for eigner and he is an Indian; such a marriage must never take place.’ This shows the depth of that old woman’s deficiency. If she really believed herself to be the Divine Mother incarnate, as she claimed, how could she discrimi nate between two of her children? Mustn’t she treat them all equally? Her predjudice proves that she was not all that spiritually advanced. She could rightly have objected for other reasons, but not simply because of skin color.
“If the supposed saint you meet talks about collecting money to build ashrams and centers and so on, depart immediately. His disciples may talk about such things, I admit; disciples are always somewhat deluded. But a real sadhu says, ‘Why should I bother about trying to establish something? If God wants me to have it I will have it.’ This is the right attitude; it shows that the sadhu has full faith in his deity. Only if he has no faith will he try to collect money, or disciples, or whatever. We have a saying in Hindi: ‘What is the use of a flower which has no fragrance? What is the use of a beautiful
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face which has no one to desire it? What is the use of a fakir or sadhu who is not a giver?’ Fakirs and sadhus are always givers, because they have realized that everything belongs to God; how can they refuse to give to God in the form of a human being that which belongs to God?
“It is absolutely scandalous how many people are making money and fame for themselves off the Bhagavad Gita. I knew one Dada Maharaj, who had gathered a lot of disciples for himself by his discourses on the Jnanesh wari. You can be sure that a great Siddha like Jnaneshwar did not write the Jnaneshwari so that he could become famous; he did it so that common people who did not know Sanskrit could hear Krishna’s story in Marathi, their own language, and keep it in their hearts, and bring themselves closer to Krishna in that way. When Jnaneshwar himself never commercialized his writing, why should anyone else do so?
“This Dada Maharaj was a barber who had promoted himself to religious lecturer. There is nothing inherently wrong in this, except that the Jnanesh wari is actually a wonderful treatise on spiritual subjects including Kun dalini, and unless you have had personal experience in that department you have no right to open your mouth. You certainly have no right to develop a swelled head, as this man had done. He developed such a bloated ego that one day I decided to teach him a lesson. I went to see him, and I took a dog along
“When I went in to him I performed a full prostration, as I always do in front of any saint, to gauge his or her qualities. This fellow, I could tell, had achieved absolutely nothing. He started to explain something when suddely the dog burst in, as I had planned, and ran up to him. He shouted, ‘Get that dog away from me!’
“Then I said to him, ‘Maharaj, you claim that you are a great man, though by pedigree you are only a barber. Be that as it may, the book on which you give lectures states clearly that a sage looks with an equal eye on a realized soul, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and an eater of dogs. Are you better than Krishna, that you are offended by a dog?’”
“Then what did he say?”
“What will he say? He had no choice but to keep quiet. There’s no use in jabbering on about all these things; you need to do the sadhana and have the experience. Then you will know, and there will be no need to talk. You don’t realize the truth just by thinking about it; you have to go through the
grind.”
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None of the saints, fakirs and babas that I met impressed me nearly so much as did Vimalananda, perhaps because none of them had gone through the grind as thoroughly as he had. Because he always preferred to have questions put to him mentally, so that he could answer them at the moment he felt most appropriate, I began to mentally inquire about becom ing his disciple. One day he told me frankly that he was not a guru, but that I would meet my guru one day, if I had a strong enough desire to do so:
“People are always coming to me saying that they want to locate a guru, and I always tell them that if you have real bhakti, real spiritual love and devotion, then your guru will automatically come to you; you won’t have to go out looking for him.
“You don’t need to search, but you may well have to wait; remember Chang Dev.” Chang Dev Maharaj, a sadhu who rode on a tiger and used a cobra for a lasso, had to wait fourteen hundred years for his guru. Every hundred years death would come for him, and he would go into samadhi to elude it. After fourteen hundred years he met his guru, Jnaneshwar Maha raj’s fourteen-year-old sister Mukta Bai, and was released.
“Unfortunately,” Vimalananda went on, “if you are not a superb yogi like Chang Dev you may not be able to know when you will meet your guru, or even recognize your guru when he or she comes to you.”
“Meanwhile what am I supposed to do?” I retorted peevishly.
“Meanwhile do as I tell you to do, and you will continue to make progress. I didn’t say I was not going to help you; I just said I am not fated to be your guru,” he replied, warning me with a glance to behave. “Besides, first you need to be ready for your guru. Can you honestly tell me you are ready?” No, I couldn’t.
“One of my friends asked my Junior Guru Maharaj in 1959 to make him his disciple. Guru Maharaj told him, ‘I don’t dare to do that, because once you become my disciple you will have to do everything I tell you. If you make any mistakes you will be guilty of guru droha (offense or treachery against the guru), and that could ruin you. You just be my devotee for twelve years, and at the end of that time if I feel you are ready I will accept you as my disciple.’ But so far that has not happened, even though many more than twelve years have gone by.” I got the hint. So did that friend, who has yet to become Guru Maharaj’s disciple.
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Just before Vimalananda’s death he introduced a well-known Ayurvedic doctor from Bombay to Junior Guru Maharaj, who told him, “Get yourself a shalagrama (sacred river rock) of the variety known as Lakshmi Janardana and worship it.”
The doctor replied, “Maharaj, you know much time it takes to worship a shalagrama properly,” implying that he was a very busy man. “Give me a mantra to repeat instead, because otherwise I will have to carry that shalagrama around with me everywhere I go.” As Vimalananda told me later, he forgot that you do not dictate terms to a sadhu, and especially not to someone like Guru Maharaj. There must have been some good reason Guru Maharaj wanted him to worship a shalagrama, but he was thinking only of his own convenience. Besides, on the one hand he asks Guru Maha raj for a way to advance spiritually, and on the other he says he has no time to do it properly. What does this tell us about his sincerity?
Guru Maharaj kept quiet, and the next day asked this doctor to prepare a medicine for a child with epileptic-type fits, a medicine whose recipe hap pened to call for equal parts of honey and ghee. The doctor objected again: “But Maharaj, Ayurveda forbids the mixing of equal parts of honey and
ghee.”
Guru Maharaj displayed great patience and replied, “This recipe also comes from the Rishis; please do as they have prescribed. Besides, there are other herbs in the medicine which will remove the poisonous effects of this combination and make it into nectar. What is poison and what is nectar any way? Just do as you are told.”
After this encounter was over Vimalananda took me aside and said, “You see how it is? Sometimes even when a guru wants to give some knowledge to a ‘child’ the child’ refuses to learn it. You never get anywhere by arguing with a guru, and especially not with a guru who is a live wire like Guru Maharaj. What is a teacher to do with students like these? It is a great bless ing to get a good guru, no doubt, but it is an even greater blessing to get a good disciple. Have I ever told you the story of Nagarjuna?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“When Nagarjuna wanted to learn alchemy he located a guru and became his disciple. The guru assigned Nagarjuna to a room adjoining his, and for many days Nagarjuna worked on various preliminary sadhanas.
“One night just as he was going to bed Nagarjuna heard a strange noise from his guru’s room. Wondering what it was he stared quizzically at the wall, and suddenly noticed a small hole in it. His native curiosity quickly over powered any guilt about spying on Guruji, and he put his eye to the orifice.
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Inside he saw his guru busily applying some sort of paste to his feet. After he had finished, he took hold of his staff–and flew out the window.
“Nagarjuna was momentarily stunned, but then his mind began to work again, wondering how he could learn that trick. He knew that asking his guru outright would prove fruitless, so he had to think of a workable plan if he was to gain the knowledge. Suddenly, it came to him.
“He waited up for several hours until his guru returned, and then, after waiting a respectful moment or two to let the old man catch his breath he rushed from his cell and knocked softly at the guru’s door. When the door opened Nagarjuna explained, ‘Guruji, I have been overcome with the desire to serve you. Please let me wash the dust from your feet.’
“The guru eyed Nagarjuna carefully, and then solemnly consented. He had expected this, of course; otherwise why would he have left a hole in the wall for Nagarjuna to peep through? He wanted to see how much initiative the boy had, and he was pleased with what he saw. But he didn’t want to let Nagarjuna know how he felt, so he suppressed his praise.
“After washing his guru’s feet Nagarjuna bowed low and returned to his room, where he exerted himself to the utmost to figure out the composition of the flying unguent. He tasted the wash water over and over again, and finally decided he could identify one of the ingredients. The next night he waited impatiently at the knothole, and finally, there went Guruji! Again he washed the old man’s feet; again he tasted and tasted. Eventually, after many a night of this, he felt confident that he knew the recipe.
“And so one night Nagarjuna himself mixed up a paste, and smeared it on his soles. Then he walked to the window, and-off he flew! Unfortunately he did not have the formula down pat, so he didn’t get very far. He fell out of the sky, and on his crash landing broke one of his legs. He spent the rest of the night outside, wondering what his guru would say when word of this excursion reached him.
“He need not have worried. He was found early the next morning, and his guru personally came to him to say, ‘Of all my students you are the only one who has ever tried to discover the secret of that paste. You deserve to be taught.’ And he was taught.
“A good guru always sets challenges for his disciples, to test them. Some times a guru will give a disciple a Shiva Linga made of crystal, or, if he is a really mighty guru, one made of solidified mercury, and make the disciple insert it into the mouth just above the hard palate. This is a type of penance; it limits you in many ways. For example, as long as it is in your mouth you dare not speak a lie; if you do, it will split into two pieces. If you can observe
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all the limitations you can achieve quickly, but if you fail, you fall. Never set out to attempt such things until you are absolutely certain that you can achieve them.
“The guru’s order must be obeyed to the dot; then only can the disciple get results. Tukaram Maharaj once gave a rock to a man who was going on pilgrimage. This was no ordinary rock, of course; it was a philosopher’s stone which could convert base metals into gold. The man had a fine pil grimage, creating gold here and there whenever he needed more money to go on.
“At the end of the trip the man realized that he could not give the stone back to Tukaram Maharaj; he was too attached to it. What to do? He thought of a plan and hid the stone in his house. He then went to meet Tukaram Maharaj, who first asked for details of what he had seen and done, and then asked casually, ‘Oh, yes, let me see that stone I lent you.’
“The man told him, ‘Maharaj, while I was bathing in the Ganga the stone slipped into the water, and although I tried to catch it, it was lost. Obviously Mother Ganga has taken back Her own.’
“So be it,’ said Tukaram Maharaj evenly.
“As soon as the man got back to his own home he looked in his hiding place for the stone, but there was no stone to be found. He raced back to Tukaram Maharaj and shouted, ‘Maharaj! The stone is gone!
“Tukaram Maharaj told him, ‘Stupid, of course it is gone. You just told me yourself that Mother Ganga had taken it back.’ And that was that.
“So be patient, and prepare yourself,” Vimalananda continued soberly. “So often a guru gives a disciple something like that philosopher’s stone, and the disciple becomes so excited by it that he or she forgets altogether the guru who gave it to them in the first place. You can always lose objects, but you can’t afford to lose your guru. If you hold tightly to the guru he can provide you with all the objects you’ll ever need or want.
“One day a king decided to give away everything in his palace. Kings are like that, you can never know what they will do next. He told everyone in the kingdom that in between sunrise and sunset on a certain day they were all free to come and ask him for whatever they wanted from his palace, and it would be theirs.
“By late afternoon the palace was empty. There was absolutely nothing left in it, not even the throne. At five minutes to sunset a young girl entered the palace. The king told her, ‘Oh, no, why didn’t you come earlier? Now there is nothing left.’
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“She said, ‘You are wrong, Maharaj. Of course there is something left; you are left. I am taking you.’ And they were married. After she became queen the girl told her husband, ‘Now that I have you, I can use the money in the treasury to build and decorate fifty palaces if I like. I got the best bargain of
all.”
Indeed she did, and Vimalananda paused briefly to let this sink in and to light another cigarette before proceeding.
“But why go so far away? Let us take an example that is close to home. I have taught you and several of my other children’to do homa. One of them, whom you know well, now spends all his free time wandering around the countryside performing homa. There is nothing wrong with this; it is a good thing. But he could learn even more if he spent more time with me, since I was the one who taught him to do homa in the first place. He has let his little bit of knowledge go to his head.
“Why should he spend more time with me?” I loved to spend all my time with Vimalananda, and needed no reason to do so, but I knew this question had a purpose. “Well, he is trying to convert himself from a caterpillar into a butterfly, from an ordinary human being into a worshipper of fire. He is still weak in visualizing his new role, still like a puppy; his Kundalini is not yet sufficiently awakened and freed from his normal, everyday personality. He is not yet able to disengage himself from his ego attachments. I could help him by visualizing for him, but he has to spend some time near me so that I can do it.
“The best example of this sort of practice that I can think of is that of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Whenever he saw his householder disciple Dr. Nag Mahashay, Ramakrishna would worship the Divine Mother Bhavatarini in him. He would visualize the Divine Mother in Dr. Nag’s astral body, and eventually, by the force of Ramakrishna’s will, the Divine Mother’s form was actually created in Dr. Nag.
“When Ramakrishna saw Vivekananda he would visualize Shiva, and Vivekananda actually became the embodiment of Shiva as a result. When Gopaler Ma came to Ramakrishna she was already an advanced sadhaka; when she meditated on Gopala, Krishna in the form of a young boy, she could actually project a form of Krishna from her astral body. When she met Ramakrishna, that form of Krishna merged with Ramakrishna, and then she knew that he was indeed Krishna embodied. Ramakrishna began to work on her too, and eventually created the Divine Mother in her as well. This is the way a real guru works on his disciples.
“Do you think Swami Vivekananda, who was Ramakrishna’s favorite dis
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ciple, could have done anything on his own? Never. When he went to Chi cago and stood before the crowd at the Parliament of Religions, before he began to speak he mentally repeated this verse: “I salute Lord Krishna, the embodiment of Supreme Bliss, by whose grace the mute speak and the lame cross mountains.’ Then the Divine Mother Kali entered Vivekananda’s body, and when he began, ‘Brothers and sisters of America, I would like to talk to you today on “The Master as I Knew Him,”’ all America went wild. That is the power of Ma, and of guru bhakti (devotion to the guru).
“Vivekananda had real guru bhakti. When Ramakrishna lay dying Vive kananda felt so much attachment to him that he actually ate the phlegm and pus that Ramakrishna coughed up. This was in fact a subtle test, and Vivekananda passed with flying colors.”
“That was a test?” I asked.
“Yes, that was a subtle test. The same sort of thing happened with Sama rtha Ram Das, one of Maharashtra’s greatest saints, who was actually an incarnation of Anjaneya. His favorite disciple was a boy named Kalyan, and of course all the other disciples were jealous of him. Samartha Ram Das decided that the jealous disciples needed to learn a good lesson, so one day he developed a big boil on his back. All the disciples showed plenty of sym pathy, but didn’t do much of anything of a practical nature to alleviate his misery
“When Kalyan heard that his guruji was in pain, though, he was over come with love. He ran to Samartha Ram Das, put his mouth over the boil and began to suck out the pus. But when he tasted it he found that it was not pus; it was nectar! His guru just smiled. This was a form of Shaktipat Diksha for Kalyan. The other disciples were ashamed of their jealousy when they saw that Kalyan did what they did not even dream of doing, and they never even suspected that he was getting anything in return for his devo tion. Kalyan became the successor of Samartha Ram Das.
“Kabir says, ‘You talk about lovers, but what do you know of them? Only the man who is ready to cut off his head at a moment’s notice for his guru is a real lover.’ Bhakti like Vivekananda’s or Kalyan’s is very rare, but I have seen an example of such bhakti. There was a nobleman named Jaisinghrao Ghatge, whose guru was a Muslim fakir named Mungshahji Maharaj. When anyone came to meet Mungshahji Maharaj he would throw feces at them, or if he knew they were vegetarian he would pick up a chicken bone and throw it at them, just to see how much they could take before they became angry.
“Mungshahji Maharaj lived with Jaisinghrao, and when the mood struck him he would throw his feces at the wall, set fire to the curtains, and break
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things. He would do anything he felt like doing, and Jaisinghrao never said a word. Jaisinghrao was so devoted to his guru that he used to perform full puja to Mungshahji Maharaj’s feces.
“One day Jaisinghrao was in danger of losing all his land because his mon etary position was very bad. He never spoke a word, but that day while he was paying his respects to his guru his mind strayed to his mundane diffi culties and a single tear fell from his eye. When Mungshahji Maharaj saw it he said, ‘Child, when you take such good care of me, never asking even the simplest favor, do you think I can bear to see a tear in your eye? What’s the problem?’
“When he heard the problem, Mungshahji Maharaj said, ‘Go! You not only will not lose your land, I am going to make you a billionaire.’ Jaisingh rao kept his land, and when he sold it piece by piece he made in fact one bil lion rupees.
“At one point the entire population of a certain town petitioned the court that Mungshahji Maharaj be forced to stay with them. Jaisinghrao filed a countersuit, asking to retain custody of his guru. The learned judge was quite perplexed, and finally decided that since a fakir is free of all encum brances he has the right to decide where he will stay. Mungshahji Maharaj then said, ‘I will never desert Jaisinghrao, because he doesn’t ask me for any thing.”
I interrupted: “Mungshahji Maharaj was called ‘Maharaj’ even though he was a Muslim?”
“Yes, because he had so many Hindu disciples. Jaisinghrao was a Hindu, after all.”
“He must have been quite a saint.”
“He was good. I met him because he had been trying to dig up a buried treasure. He had got partway and a cobra had appeared to block the path. Also, spirits could be heard howling around the area. He had heard that I knew how to get around such obstacles–I have dug up hundreds of things from the ground—so I came and grabbed the cobra and said, ‘Dig!’ Just before they were about to strike pay dirt I told them, ‘You must donate this much to charity, this much to a particular trust fund, and then you can keep the rest for yourself.”
“Poor Jaisinghrao said nothing, but Mungshahji Maharaj’s ego was hurt, and he said, “No, it will be divided as I decide.
“I let go of the cobra and said, ‘Do it yourself then.’ They couldn’t, and the treasure remained buried. It is so difficult to keep the ego under com plete control, even for great saints like Mungshahji Maharaj. But in spite of
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his guru’s imperfections Jaisinghrao did well, because of devotion. It was the bhakti that did most of the work. Have I ever told you the story of Pyaredas?” He had, but I wanted to hear it again, so I kept quiet.
“Pyaredas was a drunkard debauchee who was very fond of women. One day this wastrel met a sadhu who told him, ‘Pyare, you are completely devoted to flesh, skin and bone; if you were to love God as much as you love the physical body, what do you think you might become?’ These words had such an effect on Pyaredas that he left everything and took that sadhu as his guru. He loved his guru very, very dearly, and was so terrifically devoted to him that he never left him for a moment.
‘When it came time for the guru to leave his body he became worried that the shock of the separation might be too much for Pyaredas, so he told him, ‘Pyare, you go to such-and-such a city, and I will follow you later.’ After Pyaredas departed, his guru left his body.
“Pyaredas waited several days in that city, and when his guru did not come he returned to the guru’s town and asked news of him. When he learned that his guru had left his body, and that a memorial stone had already been erected for him, Pyaredas went directly to the memorial stone and began to cry. He cried and cried and cried, so much so that he went blind.
“Finally he decided to end himself, and started to bang his head against the stone. After his head had become quite bloody and his skull was about to crack, his guru appeared to him in an ethereal form. He made Pyaredas to see again, healed the wounds on his head, and then entered his body. Then the two were always together, and they lived together in that body for a hun dred years. Bhakti like this is very rare.”
We were interrupted at this point, and some days later he continued this lesson.
“You can be dead sure that your guru will come to you when the time is ripe. The question is, will you be ready for him? Will you be ready to love him without any limits or preconceptions or conditions? The mother is high, but the guru is even higher. It is because of your mother that you have any physical existence at all, which is why you must worship your mother until the end of your life; but it is because of the guru that you are born again. A real guru will first destroy you and then recreate you, give you a new birth. When Jesus said, ‘You must be born again,’ this is what He meant.
“If you want to love God, or your guru, or whoever, you must have a waxen heart. That was Shakespeare’s phrase, but I’m not sure he under
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stood the full implications of what he wrote. You must have a heart which is ready to melt when the emotion becomes too great. And that is only the beginning. Once your heart melts, you must melt your bones so that there is no resistance left at all. You must surrender totally to your guru, making his will yours, so that your guru can have his way and perfect you. Unfortu nately, only one in a million can surrender totally; everyone else must first learn how to surrender.
“The relationship which exists between guru and disciple is the deepest possible human relationship. They relate like parent and child, like chums. Nowhere in the universe will a child’ ever find a pal like his guru. And they are like lovers. The guru will tempt the child in all sorts of ways, like Matsy endra Nath tested Gorakh Nath (see Aghora, pp. 156–7), but a good disci ple will never be tempted. A good disciple loves only the guru, and wants only the guru.
“You well know that Guru Purnima is the day on which the guru is to be worshipped. Have you asked yourself yet, ‘Why a full moon, and not some other lunar day?’”
“No,”
“Well, it has to do with emotion. If two lovers find themselves alone on a full moon night they are likely to be overcome with the desire to unite sexu ally. They cannot endure the separation from each other; they must embrace. Full moon nights cause an overflow of emotion in the human psyche. On Guru Purnima the guru and disciple, whose relationship is much more intimate than that of mere lovers, experience a natural outpour ing of emotion for each other. The guru, because of his tremendous love for his disciple, takes the disciple’s karmic debts onto himself. The disciple responds with guru dakshina, an offering to the guru.
“Someone with subtle understanding will now ask, “Why is the disciple supposed to give an offering to the Guru, if the guru has already taken all the karmic debts from the disciple? Then the disciple has nothing of his own left to give.’ And that is very right. The disciple has nothing he can give the guru except love, and so he can do nothing in return except worship the guru as God incarnate; not to pamper the guru’s ego, but to become more and more selfless so that the guru can work on him without interference.
“They say in Hindi, “Light comes from the moon, not the stars; love comes from one, not many.” That one is the guru, and only when you have learned how to love your guru will you ever learn how to love God. The rela tionship between guru and disciple can begin only when the disciple forgets everyone else except that one; once that happens then everything follows.
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“A guru always wants to make his disciple into his own guru. The Self, the Absolute Reality, is the true guru, because the gu-ru is that which is gu natita and ru-patita (beyond attribution and form). A true guru makes the disciple go beyond attribute and form. First he makes the ‘child’ go beyond manubandhana, the bondage of karmic debt. Then he makes the disciple realize the nature of the Self, and the two become guru-brothers (or guru sisters). Then the guru worships the disciple’s Self as the Supreme Guru, the First Deity, and the disciple is made.
“If this is what it takes to make a disciple,” Vimalananda continued rhe torically, “how many real disciples can a guru have? One or two; a handful at the most. Jesus had only twelve, and not all of them had the same capacity or achieved the same things. Four of them, like John, had Sattva predomi nating in their natures; they were the ones who best followed Jesus’ teach ings. Four of them who became pillars of the church, like Peter, were dominated by Rajas; because the pillars were Rajasic, the Catholics and their church exist mainly in Rajas. And four disciples, like Judas, were full of Tamas. Poor Jesus did the best He could with the material He had available.
“A few gurus teach a handful of disciples each; some teach no one. A guru may have many devotees, but there is no use in creating hundreds of disci ples who are all half-baked. Every guru should have one special disciple to whom to transfer his most precious knowledge. Make one, but make that one so thoroughly that the whole world will gape at his or her greatness. That is the real value in being a guru.
“The pride of seeing your child’ succeed cannot be measured in words. But a guru can’t just select a disciple arbitrarily; he must know the innate capabilities and aptitudes of each of his children’ so that he can select one to whom to transmit the bulk of his knowledge. This is why a guru always loves to play with his ‘children,’ to test them.
“After he has been satisfied, and he wants to give Shaktipat Diksha to a disciple, he usually transfers that shakti through a vehicle, which might be a drink of water, the smell of incense, an intense gaze, or a tap to the spine or head. Perhaps he will transfer the shakti in the form of a mantra. When the disciple with closed eyes sees the mantra written in tongues of flame, in Devanagari script, a voice will tell the ‘child’ how to repeat the mantra and what restrictions to observe. It is better to do it this way, because mantras are never meant to be spoken.
“This is what happened to Tukaram Maharaj. He met his guru once only, in a dream. The guru showed him the mantra, repeated it to him, and told him to repeat it. That was it; no lengthy discourses, physical initiations or
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complicated rituals. He got his mantra and began to recite it. And it was not some sort of complicated mantra, either; it was the simple, beautiful mantra “Rama Krishna Hari.’ Because he had supreme faith in his guru, Tukaram Maharaj achieved wonders even without any personal guidance from a liv ing guru. He was so advanced that he did not die in the usual way; like Eli jah, a chariot from heaven came down and collected him. Not everyone who claims to have been initiated in a dream ends up like Tukaram Maharaj!
“And what about Kabir? He was initiated when he lay in front of Ramananda Swami early in the morning as Ramananda Swami was retum ing from bathing in the Ganga in Benaras. Ramananda Swami inadvertantly kicked Kabir, whom he could not see in the darkness, and said, “Ram, Ram, which Kabir took as his mantra. He could achieve in this way, with a mantra which had been given to him offhandedly, because he was Kabir, and because he had full faith in Rama and in his guru.
“Kabir was a great saint who had a great son: Kamal. Kamal, which means ‘amazing,’ really was amazing, which meant of course that all of Kabir’s other disciples were insanely jealous of him.
“Kabir loved horses, and one day he sent Kamal out to cut grass for the horses. Kamal found the grass, but when he went to cut it he started to think about how much that would hurt the grass. To make a test, he took the sickle and cut his own finger. When he felt the pain he decided that he definitely couldn’t go through with cutting the grass.
“Horses have to eat frequently, and when these weren’t fed they became uneasy. When some of the other disciples discovered that Kamal had not brought any grass they rushed out to cut some, and then ran to tell Kabir, hoping to see Kamal get a good scolding from the master.
“When Kabir heard the story he called for Kamal and asked him why he had not cut the grass. Kamal explained to Kabir that the grass was living just as much as he was and that he couldn’t cut it; in fact, he would rather cut himself than cut the grass. Then Kabir understood, and composed a verse on the spot: ‘Kabir told Kamal, ‘You are really kamal (amazing). I have only been half-baked, but you are completely done.’ This is the beautiful play of guru and disciple.”
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Perhaps because he knew he would be dying soon, Vimalananda sat me down one day late in 1983 for what would be a final admonition.
“Sooner or later, Robby, I am going to die.” “Yes, but you are not going to die any time soon.”
“Can you guarantee that? Can you guarantee that you or I will be alive even one minute from now?”
“I can’t guarantee anything about me, but I can guarantee that if you decide you want to stay alive you can do it.”
He continued without comment. “Everyone is going to die. Maybe now, maybe later, but someday I will be gone, and you will be left here. You have learned quite a lot, and you have a lot left to learn. Never pass up an oppor tunity to leam.
“Because it is Kali Yuga there are no longer any Rishi ashrams here on the physical plane. But the Rishis are immortal, and they can travel anywhere they like in the universe. This means that a Rishi might be moving amongst us, in Bombay or anywhere else. Of course no one would be able to recog nize him; he would be in disguise. You would only be able to recognize him if you knew the special signs on his body which distinguish him from ordi nary human beings. Very few humans know these signs.
“If you do know these characteristics and are able to spot a Mahapurusha, even a Siddha, he will give you a wonderful blessing. Because this is Kali Yuga everyone’s sadhana is imperfect, so you are not likely to be able to attract a Mahapurusha to you by force. But if you sincerely do the sadhana that you have been taught, and if you have an aching desire, one day a Mahapurusha will come to you, in disguise, and will let you try to catch him. See how they love to play about? Even though sadhana is very serious business, you must always keep an attitude of playfulness about you, like a small child. Everyone, and this especially includes celestial beings, loves children; but no one likes an adult who thinks he or she is too clever. The quickest way to be shot down in the spiritual field is to become too big for your breeches.
“This is the reason you must always see Narayana in the heart of each and every creature you meet. You can never know when, or in what form, your deity or a Mahapurusha will come to test you. If you pass you are made; your sadhanas have been crowned with success. If you fail-well, you will have to start all over again from the beginning, and no one knows how many lifetimes that might take. So don’t make any mistakes.
“And remember, this is not the sort of test you can mug up for. You will never know it is taking place until it is over. Actually, of course, there is no
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such thing as a test. You think it is a test because you’ are there the false personality. Once the e-y-e ’eye’ has been converted into capital ’l’ there is no question of a test; who will you test? Yourself? But so long as duality is presentso long as Kundalini is not completely free of Her bonds—there is always the danger that you may not make the right choice, because of the play of karma and manubandhana.
“Whatever you are destined to have you will get, beyond the shadow of a doubt. How and when you get it depend on how well you can cultivate your mind. The function of Tantra and Aghora is to put the government of mind, senses, and body into the proper order to avoid misery. Life minus misery for a prolonged period produces satisfaction, which yields happiness; and when happiness is increased beyond all conceivable limits and is sustained it becomes bliss, what the Vedas call ananda. Sadhana is a means to this end. When Kundalini awakens, if body, mind and spirit are in good working order bliss is certain.
“Bliss is not something you have to create, or accumulate; it arises spon taneously. Just let God decide what is best for you, and God will provide it accordingly. So even at those times when your will power is weak and your mental control is poor, there is still nothing to worry about. Always, always remember that the supreme method of mind control, the supreme intoxica tion, is the perpetual repetition of the sweet name of God. Never forget God, and God will never forget you. And one day you will succeed.”
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