I MET VIMALANANDA first in September 1975 on the day that Elan, one of his most reliable mares, won her first race for him. I first accompanied him to the races on the day of Stoney’s last outing. Horse racing began in Bombay in the early decades of the nineteenth century when a race ground emerged in what is now the predominantly Christian district of Byculla. When the time came to search for greener pastures, the Royal Western India Turf Club Limited (R.W.I.T.C. for short) selected a low-lying site near Bombay’s fa mous temple of Mahalakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity. Most members of the Indian racing public mistakenly assume that the Mahalak shmi racecourse, which is among the world’s most beautiful wagering ven ues, was a British production. In truth it was an Indian, Sir Cusrow N. Wadia, the Parsi who was then head of the textile giant Bombay Dyeing, who over saw the entire project from concept through planning to construction. He gave the club an interest-free loan of Rs. 4 million ($10 million or more in to day’s dollars) and went himself to Melbourne, Australia to obtain a blue print. Thanks to his farsightedness there is only one turn for all races up to and including 1600 meters (one mile).
After racing ceases in Bombay in April, when the heat makes the course too hard for horses to safely run upon it, those horses which do not proceed to Hyderabad, Bangalore or some other venue for monsoon racing are moved to the R.W.I.T.C.s facility in Poona. There they relax during the summer and the first part of the rainy season while torrents inundate the Bombay stables. The course in Poona sits atop land which is rented from the Southern Com mand of the Indian Army. It is a little jewel box that occupies the southeast corner of the hundreds of acres of military installations that is collectively known as the Poona Cantonment. At the end of the Poona season, which usually lasts less than three months, the horses are again loaded aboard their
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vans or aboard a special train and return to Bombay, where racing com mences in late November or early December after the mud in the stables has thoroughly dried.
Racegoers have a choice of three enclosures inside that eminently tangible allegory for life that is the Bombay racecourse. Inside the Members’ Enclo sure sit the nobility of the racing world: horse trainers, horse owners, Stew ards, and Members of the Club and their guests. Club Membership is an exceptionally exclusive privilege which postulants achieve only after dangling for a decade or more on the waiting list. Many Club Members are also own ers. Most of those who weren’t were, at least at that time, nouveau riche in dustrialists, old-monied erstwhile maharajas, nawabs, and other upper-crust cavaliers and their wives. These grandees graced races mainly to see and be seen as they reclined in comfortable chairs sipping and nibbling, hazarding trivial sums on their whims or on favorites whose names were bruited about by those in the know. Each year one or more of these dignified personages would be fatally bitten by the gambling bug and embark upon the road to ruin. Sometimes I would turn my field glasses on the latest reputedly doomed victim and watch him saunter on the grass below the winning post as he sank deeper into economic quicksand with each step of his gallant promenade.
The Second Enclosure is reserved for commoners, those petty tradespeo ple, underpaid clerks and unemployed slackers who bet only a few rupees but study the racing form with the concentration and scream with the delight or anguish of those who bet thousands. These people, who lack all access to the insider information that is crucial for placing sensible wagers, mostly come to the races to lose money agitatedly. They count among their number a smattering of expert (though rarely formally trained) statisticians, pedigree investigators, hunchmeisters and the like, men and women who occasionally flabbergast both themselves and onlookers with their serendipity.
In between the Member’s and the Second is the First Enclosure, on whose wooden benches Vimalananda and I would sit when we came to watch the races. True to its central location it is the home of mostly middle-class bettors who may have some peripheral connections to people at the track and so are often able to stake their money on “good things.” If only “good things” could be guaranteed to win! Though he was an owner Vimalananda hated the in cestuously cloying atmosphere of the Member’s and preferred to breathe the free air of the First Enclosure. His friends there, who were mostly Parsis, in cluded Cama, an upper-echelon civil servant, and Firoz Godrej, the bluff, broad-shouldered transport manager of a local soft-drink bottling firm who was usually squired to the track by his milder son Noshir.
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A week after the Stone Ice debacle I again accompanied Vimalananda to the Bombay races in his 1967 Austin Cambridge station wagon, which we protected by promising a few rupees to one of the young boys who loitered in the parking lot posing as attendants. At the entrance we were accosted by the usual gang of avid sellers of race cards (Cole is the most popular brand), des perate tipsters (the most enduring of whom is a devalued coin who styles himself “Prof. Joker, the Guru”), and despairing gamblers seeking inside in formation. Just past the entrance stands the Ring, the oval enclosure com posed of the stalls of the bookmakers licensed by the Club. Around the Ring stand the hardened gamblers, the men and women with eyes of coagulated greed, who ignore everything except the odds that the bookies chalk onto their narrow blackboards. When the odds become unexpectedly favorable at one stall these maniacs elbow and shove their way there en masse to scream out their wagers. Vimalananda, the ex-wrestler, could easily hold his own with the most raptorial of these gamesters when he entered the Ring, but my height gave me a signal advantage when it came to thrusting money into a bookie’s hands. Since I could also by then run up and down stairs more
fleetly than he, I was often given the task of betting his favorites for him.
Bettors who lack the money or the nerve to wager with the bookies in the Ring utilize the Tote, or Totalizator, which is run by the Club. The minimum Tote risk is five rupees (then about 70 cents). Between the Ring and the Tote swirl the flotsam and jetsam of racecourse society, propelled on waves of ava rice toward their rendezvous with an equine-mediated destiny. On that after noon it was a world still unknown enough to me to be fascinating. Here huddled a group of astrology buffs debating the latest predictive theory; there leaned a man bent on seducing his pretty companion with the promise of a winner at long odds. Before me the clerks in the office sat calculating sti pends and logging payments; behind me the racing populace conferred enig matically in hurried tones. I navigated this corridor with all the care that one would accord a piranha-filled river.
Vimalananda’s friends in the stands were invariably happy to see him trudge up the stairs to his usual seat, for he always tried to give them at least one good horse to bet on during a long afternoon of racing. From where we sat we could see to our right, in the east, the chimneys of a few of the more than one hundred textile mills that are strewn about Bombay. To our north we viewed the planetarium, and to our left sat the naked horizon that beto kened the sea beneath it. Cama was already in his place that afternoon, and Firoz and Noshir soon joined us, but Vimalananda’s mind seemed too preoc cupied to participate in their enthusiasms. When he announced that he had come only to watch these runners and not to bet on them, the others quickly
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retreated to the business of their calculations. Vimalananda then looked at me with the eyebrow equivalent of a wink, and as I looked into his race book I watched him mark with his thumbnail one horse in each of the races. This was the first time I saw a procedure which I and others would see now and again thereafter, with the same results: each horse that he marked thus would always win, and never would he bet on those races.
Eventually it became old hat, but on this first occasion I was frankly aston ished that he could pick eight winners in a row and neither bet himself nor let his friends in on his secret. I was also shocked that though Elan was running she was not a “good thing.” “You told me,” I protested, “that you always race your animals to win.”
“And I do,” he replied, “provided that they are in fact on the job. When they are on the job everyone knows that they are on the job, so that they can all bet and enjoy along with me. It is always best to share your profits with good people; when you spread the karma around by making others your partners in karma’ your own burden gets significantly reduced. But only the greatest horses can win every race they run in, and while I love Elan she is not unbeat able. I could have just galloped her to make her fit, but this run will act as a gallop. Besides, I will be paid for it; I get a subsidy from the Club each time one of my horses runs. Also, by running and losing she will go down in hand icap, which will make it easier for her to win next time. When she is on the job everyone will know it, have no fear."
We continued to chat about racing until, after the fourth or fifth race, he be gan to comment conspiratorially from an astrological standpoint on the day’s large number of unlucky-looking attendees. Jyotish regards such characteris tics as oddly-shaped bodies and uneven teeth as indications of affliction by ma lefic planets, which impede the free flow of prana (the life force). When such unusual individuals appear at critical moments in one’s life they often foreto ken negative events, and at first I thought that he had refrained from betting that afternoon from fear of some temporary obstruction to his own luck.
But he picked up on my thought and contradicted it: “Luck is nothing but a matter of karmas, and there is nothing wrong with my luck—not today, at least. Today I am in a different mood. Only a handful of people have ever en tered the racecourse and left it again in one piece with their money, character and balance of mind intact. I was an inveterate gambler, uncontrollable, until my Junior Guru Maharaj brought me under control. My gurus cured me of the gambling disease. I gamble now, but I control it; it doesn’t control me. Still, gambling is a serious karma; it permanently devastates your mind. In fact, they say that it is one of the three things that cannot ordinarily be atoned for in this lifetime."
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“What are the other two?” “Rape and guru-murder.” “Gambling is that serious?”
“It is very serious, but I have learned how to karmically atone for my gam bling, so I’m not worried about that karma. What I am worried about is mis using my other talents. I am always happy to bet on my own fancies, on the horses that I have selected as winners on the basis of their pedigrees, records, handicaps and recent track work. But suppose that someone, some ethereal being, comes to me and says, ‘Why do all that work? Here are the winners for today’s races; go out and enjoy yourself!’ I could take his advice and make lots of money that way—but what about the karma? What about the gambling karma, and the karma of taking money that I didn’t deserve, and most of all the karma of going under the obligation of that ethereal being? Somewhere along the line he will want me to do something for him, something I may not want to do. How will I be able to refuse him if I am in his debt?
“I used to make money on racing with the help of information from the ethereal world, just to test it-and then I would promptly dispose of my win nings. Sometimes I would pay off my debts or other people’s debts with that money. For the longest time I would go down to Crawford Market whenever I had a good day at the races and buy up all the pigeons and doves and other birds waiting there to be slaughtered. Then I would free them, just to watch them fly away and enjoy their freedom. Eventually, though, my mentors made me see what I was getting myself into. Now I just like to sit, and watch, and appreciate the cleverness of my ethereal friends. Besides, if I take every thing that I am due from these horses too soon that will be all I’ll be able to get from them. Then there will be no fun in coming to the races; if I had no promissory notes to cash in I wouldn’t be able to do anything but lose!
“When I owned my dairy in Borivali in North Bombay all the other own ers used to complain that while their buffaloes would go dry within nine months after calving mine were still producing even after fourteen or fifteen months. I told them, “It’s simple. You add water to your milk to increase your profit, but I never add water. Each buffalo and calf has an individual rnanubandhana with me, a debt of a specific size that will repay me a specific sum of money. I am content to receive repayment at the rate which Nature feels is appropriate for me. You want your money faster, but because you can not get more from your buffaloes than they owe you your buffaloes have to go dry sooner. They go dry, in fact, as soon as they pay you back what they owe you, according to their rnanubandhanas with you.”
“So the only buffaloes that would enter your stable would be those that owe you money?”
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“How else would they be able to come to me?"
He interrupted his train of thought so that we could watch the next winner flash past our stands. Then some railbirds haled us into their dispute over likely Derby winners. It was only after the races had ended for the day that he again took up the threads of his argument, as we began our drive home. The sun was just then setting tumescently behind the tomb of Haji Ali like a well cooked samosa dunked by the Creator into a deep dish of cerulean chutney. Haji Ali was a pious Muslim who gained his title (“Haji”) after performing Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that all pious Muslims are expected to perform once in their lives. After his return to India he came to be regarded as some thing of a saint, and his sepulcher as something of a shrine after his death. Accessible only at low tide, his mausoleum is frequented mainly by Muslims seeking the Haji’s ethereal assistance in mundane matters, including the divi nation of likely winners. As we veered past Haji Ali’s last resting place, which juts out into the Arabian Sea on a small spit of land very near the track’s main gate, my mind skidded toward food. I was thankful after a hard day at the races to find Vimalananda driving us to our favorite pani puri stand near the temple at Babulnath. We arrived there just in time to watch the last golden rays of the vanished sun settle to the ground between the faded pastels of the apartment buildings that loomed above us.
Pani puri (known in North India as gol guppa) consists of silver-dollar-size medallions of wheat dough deep fried to make them swell into hollow balls (puri). The stallholder breaks open the ball with his thumb, scoops a few cooked beansprouts or chickpeas into the cavity thus formed, adds a chutney or two, and then fills the ball with at least two types of thin sauces (pani): one spicy with chilies and the other sweet and sour, preferably from tamarind and dates. The customer now alertly stuffs the ball into his mouth and when he bites it all the flavors rush together and riot on his tongue. Win or lose we usually stopped for pani puri at the end of a race day.
As we munched Vimalananda waxed oratorical: “How many are the ways to make money, and how few of them are free of karma! And the karmas are often very hard to recognize. I have had to work, and I have had to make money. I had a rock quarry for a while, I was in the textile business, I owned a dairy. I have had practical experience of the many unsuspected repercussions of the karmas you incur when you earn money. I have always believed in treating Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth) as a mistress, not a wife; I tell Her, ‘Come to me if you want to, but I am married to Saraswati (the goddess of learning), and I don’t want a charge of bigamy to be laid against me. That way I do not tie myself down to Her.
“But even with this attitude it is very hard to earn a living without creating
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a big bunch of karmas in the process. To begin with, certain things like knowledge, food, and women were traditionally forbidden for commercial ization. These three were never supposed to become objects of commerce be cause they embody the Mother, and how can you even conceive of selling your mother? But people today don’t seem to be concerned about this. They do a roaring business in all three, and reap horrendous karmas as a result.”
We paid and saluted the vendor. As Vimalananda sped onto Marine Drive heading for home I asked him, “Weren’t you selling food when you sold the milk from your dairy?"
“Indeed I was, and that is my point: I know of what I speak, because I have been through the grind. I have had practical experience of the truth of this principle. But this is only one of many things for you to consider. Even among the things which are permitted for sale there are variations in the karma involved. For example, to make money from the sale of live animals is better than to earn money from the sale of the corpses of dead animals, but it is still not a good thing. Suppose you own a pet store and you sell an animal to an owner who mistreats his pet. Who will be to blame for that abuse? You will! And that pet will curse you for it, day after day. Dealing in grains and vegetables is better than dealing in meat. Plants will still curse you when you kill them, but a plant’s curse is less severe than an animal’s curse because plants have less awareness than do animals. Selling live plants is better than selling pieces of dead plants, but what if you sell a tree to someone who mis treats it, or who hangs himself from it? Even when you plant a tree some of the karma will come to you if that tree is somehow mistreated.”
“Or if someone chops it down and builds a gallows from it.”
“Exactly. Selling fruit is better than selling live plants, and dealing in milk is better even than selling fruit, assuming that the calf drinks its fill first, be cause there is no killing at all. But you can get yourself into trouble selling milk also, especially if you or your hired hands ill-treat your animals, or if you sell your old dried-up animals to the slaughterhouse, or if you breed the animals and then separate the calf or the kid from its mother. And that also goes for breeding pets for sale and separating pet mothers from their chil dren. Do you think that animal mothers have no feelings? They do, and they and their children can curse you!
“But as bad as they are, these karmas pale before the karmas incurred by the people who sacrifice the millions of animals that are used every year to test and improve medicines and cosmetics. Our ancient Rishis used to test their medicines on themselves; they never asked animals to do their work for them. And their medical system, Ayurveda, has been used safely for thou sands of years on millions of patients without requiring any kind of animal
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experimentation. But in the modern world millions of animals are butchered annually without any thanks for laying down their lives in the service of sci ence. Alexander Fleming was knighted for discovering penicillin and many other scientists have received Nobel Prizes, but has a laboratory monkey, or dog, or cat, rabbit or rat ever received a medal, or had a statue erected in its memory? No! Never.
“Millions of animals are sacrificed each year so that humans can enjoy safe drugs, but what happens to all the violence that is used to perfect the medi cines? The Law of Karma tells us that it will not just evaporate; it has to ap pear somewhere. One day I got the idea that each of these preparations must contain a fraction of the torture that was inflicted on those animals. Some of that hate and pain must be there, and it comes out in the form of the terrible side-effects that many of these drugs produce. I don’t think anyone else has ever thought this way, do you?”
“I doubt it.”
“And what about modern agriculture? Today we try to prevent the insects, birds and other ‘pests’ from eating their fair share of the crops. Why should we give them a share? Because then they would also have a share in the karma of digging into Mother Earth’s body with plows to produce the food. Jains are forbidden from farming, or even selling milk, for this very reason. This prohi bition has made many Jains into moneylenders—which is even worse. In stead of sucking life from the earth a moneylender sucks the prana out of those who borrow from him. Besides, think for a moment about what it means to lend money at interest. Money is the embodiment of Lakshmi Shakti. If you regard all shaktis as mother, could you ever dream of taking your mother to someone else’s house and making her work there? And on top of that, demanding her earnings from her at the end of the day? I hope not!
“Jesus said, “The love of money is the root of all evil; and He was right; but He should also have gone on to say that money itself is a very filthy thing. It is Lakshmi, but Lakshmi in Her whore form, the form in which she is passed from person to person and used over and over again. Think of all the karmas that pile up on just one piece of money! Do you know what happened to Croesus, the king who invented money? He died by having molten gold poured down his throat. That should give you an idea of the magnitude of the curse he has unleashed upon us. The Rishis never used money, and I person ally never keep any on my person unless I simply cannot avoid it. I hate to handle it, which is why I always prefer to give it to you or to Roshni to handle.”
“Oh, great.”
Roshni was Vimalananda’s foster daughter. She and I respected each other sufficiently that we were willing to work together for Vimalananda’s benefit
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despite what was at that time an ongoing foster-sibling rivalry.
“What are you worried about? It is my job to see that this curse doesn’t af fect you. If I ask you to dig in the slush for me then I have to arrange for you to bathe as well. But not everyone has this advantage; those who don’t are af fected by these curses.”
He swung the car onto our street and parked it. Upstairs Roshni served us drinks. “Do you know the story of gold? Gold itself once told me this story: ‘I was resting peacefully in the womb of my mother, Earth, when men came and dug into Her and dragged me from my home. Then they tortured me by burning and melting me and forming me into new shapes. But I have altered their minds so that they do not keep me outside working for them; instead they keep me hidden in dark, cool vaults, very much like my mother’s womb. I have cursed them for tormenting me, and now they torment each other over possessing me!
“Every substance which is stolen from the earth has its own tale to tell. Iron, which is also mined, becomes weapons when men hold it. Just as the earth’s skin is punctured in strip mines for iron ore, iron and steel are used to puncture men’s skins, in the form of bayonets and shrapnel, razors and knives, needles and scapels. Likewise coal has its tale to tell, and oil. Oil is the earth’s blood; by pumping oil from the earth we are sucking Her blood. Doesn’t She have a right to suck our blood in return? And She does, via mod ern medical science; every syringe that draws blood from a human is helping to pay back this debt.”
“Particularly if they are plastic syringes; plastic is made from oil.”
“How can human beings be so blind as to fail to offer the greatest respect and love for Ma, for our Mother Earth? We spill urine, feces, and toxic wastes onto Her, we walk on Her and spit on Her, but she never objects. We tear Her skin and extract treasures like gold, silver, and precious stones from Her, and She gives them freely. Even though we pump Her own life’s blood up from the depths of Her body She still supports us. And when we die She welcomes us into Her lap. Only Ma has such magnanimity. But even She cannot save us from the Law of Karma, because She looks on all Her children-every min eral, plant and animal-with an equal eye. What we do to Her children we have to pay for.
“Gorakh Nath says, ‘When you don’t ask you get milk; when you ask you get water; when you take you get blood. This is Gorakh’s Rule.He means that if you don’t demand things from Nature She will give them to you of Her own free will, just as mothers give milk to their babies out of the exuberance of their joy. If you ask, Nature will give you just what you ask for. Because you cannot know what is best for you it is best not to ask, but if you ask for some
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thing you will receive it. Even though water is not so tasty and nutritive as milk it will keep you alive, at least for a while.
“If you grab you get blood. Theft is always a karma, just as theft of an ani mal’s life in order to enjoy its flesh is a karma. According to the Law of Karma the repayment for blood is blood. Blood is also hard to digest and may cause you to get sick if you are not used to drinking it. Milk is a beautiful, sweet drink; pure water is pleasant, but blood tastes good only to vampires. So never take anything; always remain in the lap of the Mother, and let Her feed you from the abundance of Her milk.”
“OK, so producing things is out of the question, karmically. What about the professions?”
“What about the professions? Are they any better? I would never want to make money from law. That money is tainted with whatever evil karmas your client has performed to get him into the sorry plight that has brought him to you. Then those karmas are multiplied by all the lies you will have to tell if you want to win your case. I have a law degree, but I’ve never practiced law. My father was trained as a lawyer as well, and he too refused to make money from law. On his first day at work he advised his clients to settle with each other and avoid litigation. His British boss took him aside and said, “Young man, if this is your attitude you’ll never thrive in this profession.’ My father told him, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do what you are asking me to do, and he quit.
“As for medicine, well, it is better than law, because you don’t need to lie all the time. But Ramakrishna Paramahamsa himself said that a doctor’s money is ‘all blood and pus.’ When you take money for treating someone you still share in that patient’s karma, and maybe even create some new karmas. You might as well just take on all the patient’s karmas and be done with it; that way he would get well immediately. And whatever you do you are only help ing Nature out. What is so heroic in that? If anyone deserves to be paid when a sick person gets well it is God, because it is God that does everything. Of course, for that matter, what beneficial activity is there in the universe that God does not do?
“It is true, though, that a doctor who treats people without demanding a fee helps to clean his karmic slate. I have also trained as an Ayurvedic physi cian, but I have never charged any fee for my services and never will.”
“What about me? Here I am attending this Ayurvedic medical college.”
“Why do you keep worrying about yourself? If I told you to go there that makes it my karma, my responsibility. If I tell you to practice medicine, and you do, then there too am I responsible, provided that you practice to the best of your ability. I am doing this for you because of my love for you and my rnanubandhana with you. As for all the other doctors in the world, well, they
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have their own karmas and rnanubandhanas, and if they are lucky they have someone to take responsibility for them. If they don’t that’s their problem.”
“Their fate, you mean.”
“Their fate. Now, if they are clever they can try to alter their fate. They can practice for free, or for donations alone. Or, if their economic circumstances force them to charge a fee, they can sincerely offer some of what they earn to God, and God will appropriate some of their karmas.”
“And so will the priest, if the doctor hires a priest to do the worship that of fers some of what they earn to God.”
“And so will the priest, to some extent.” “But you don’t like priests.”
“The priests that are good men are the ones I like. The ones I don’t like un fortunately form the vast majority of priests. They practice their profession not because they really love God but only because they want to make money. All of the religions of the world have been ruined by those greedy priests who loot the gullible—but I am certain that even most of those priests would never loot the people the way they do if they really understood the Law of Karma. It is a terrible karma to sell spiritual teachings. Even though you may hope to escape from most other karmas you cannot escape the ill effects of collecting money from people as a condition for providing them spiritual ad vice. I wonder how many of our phony"bhagavans” and “swamis” are aware of this.
“Of all the looting that priests do, that surrounding death is undoubtedly the worst. When a person dies the priests do their rituals and pray their prayers. After collecting plenty of money from the family of the deceased they announce that the soul has reached heaven. But how do they know that? Is it so easy to reach heaven? To get to heaven you pretty much have to die planning to go there, because it is what you are thinking about when you die which determines where you will go after your death: ante mati sa gatih. After death people tend to try to insulate themselves from their new reality. They try to remain wherever it is that they find themselves, and tell themselves just as we humans do that they are very happy right there. People must want to change before change can occur.
“But no priest today even has an inkling of what happens after death, so of what use are their assurances? The only reason they reassure the family is be cause they want to be well paid and want to be well fed. Unfortunately for them, the food and the money they receive from these rituals is contami nated by the carnal desires of the dead person. Today’s priests are not taught how to digest this food and the money, which means that those desires will pollute them by making them more worldly. This in turn will cause them to
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enjoy themselves lavishly, in so many ways. Is this not a sort of heaven? By the time they die they will have used up all their good karmas, which gives them no alternative but to go to hell and endure the effects of their bad karmas. Is that not terrible?
“Stealing from God creates similar results. The former trustee of one of our famous Bombay temples was very fond of the horses. He would oversee the counting of the temple’s daily collection, and when he needed money for betting he would loudly abuse whoever was doing the counting: ‘Hey, you id iot, count properly!’ When he heard this agreed-upon signal the counter would let some coins roll under the furniture. Then, when the sweeper came to sweep up he would also be roundly abused by the trustee, and would sweep up and deliver the money; the sweeper also knew the signal.
“To rob God is bad enough, but to gamble with God’s money is even worse. Especially when God is your cook; this trustee lived exclusively on food that the temple was providing him. Given these facts you will not be surprised at how this fellow died. He was in such a state that he couldn’t eat, or even drink water. Horrible—but that is the Law of Karma.
“Why, the Law of Karma has not even spared God Himself! Look at that temple I regularly visit in the South. Last year gold, silver and jewels worth hundreds of thousands of rupees, including one of the enormous emeralds presented to the temple by Krishnadevaraya of the Vijayanagaram Empire, disappeared into the hands of thieves. Everyone was asking, and rightly so, why such an ancient temple where so much worship has been performed for so many centuries should have to suffer like this. The Brahmanas, of course, are partly to blame; they always are. But here we should look deeper. Where did Krishnadevaraya get that emerald? He was a king, so most likely he stole it from somewhere. Isn’t that unrighteous?
“And where did the temple get so much money? Much of it came from the sorts of people who have pots and pots of money nowadays. Those are the people who have stolen, cheated, lied and killed to get rich. When these peo ple realize what they have done they try to purchase deliverance by giving some small fraction of their wealth to some temple. When God tries to eat all this karmically indigestible tainted money shouldn’t he also be given a good purge? Shouldn’t he also be taught a lesson? And shouldn’t the people who come there and try to be clever also be taught a lesson? Like Bhai Kaka from Bombay, who dropped dead of a heart attack in the toilet of the ashram he had built for his guru near that very temple, on the very day of Guru Purnima when gurus are to be worshipped. What a message that sent to all concerned!”
“So poor God has to suffer for His devotees’ karmas.” “Yes, but He’s happy to do so; that’s how much He loves them. And how
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much work is it for Him anyway? But for a human to try to do what God does—well, Namdev (a famous Maharashtrian saint) tried it once. He took over from his beloved deity Lord Vitthala (“Vishnu Who Stands on the Brick”) for a day, just so he could see what it was like to be worshipped–and what a day he had! He had to stand up straight without even a quiver, so that no one would discover he was there; he had to put up with all the complaints that all the worshippers brought to throw at his feet; and he couldn’t eat any of the beautiful food they brought him! Deities eat with their eyes instead of their mouths, but this was beyond Namdev, who had to stay hungry. By the end of the day he was exhausted and fed up. When Lord Vitthala returned to His temple that night Namdev fell at Vitthala’s feet and cried, ‘Enough, Lord, enough! Forgive me! Take your job back, I can’t handle it.”
“It’s so easy to bollix things in this business of money that it’s hard to be lieve anyone ever survives the effects of their errors.”
“Well, I am very lucky that way, because even when I have made mistakes someone has been there to correct them for me. Once I was in desperate need of money. I was so desperate that I just didn’t know what to do, but I was thinking of doing something drastic. Thinking, thinking, thinking I fell into a deep sleep, and had a dream.
“In the dream someone showed me a man with a big fat belly, the kind of belly so many successful businessmen have. I was told his name and his wealth: ‘He is worth fifty million rupees.’ Then I saw a second man, who was thin absolutely; four times thinner than any man you have ever seen. I was also told his name and, “This man is worth one hundred million rupees.‘Fi nally I was shown a man who was absolutely rotten, literally eaten up by dis ease, full of leprosy and eczema. I heard his name and, ‘He is worth five hundred million rupees.
“Then I was asked, “Now do you want to become wealthy?’ I said, ‘No, please forget it. All I want is for Nature to take care of me, and whatever She provides for me I will accept with great thanks. Since that day I have forgot ten to try to become rich. I don’t need to be rich; Someone is taking care of
me.”
The next day I proceeded to Poona to resume my Ayurvedic classes. A cou ple of weeks passed before I could escape again on a train bound for Bombay and descend through what is some of the loveliest scenery in India, the range of hills known as the Western Ghats. The Deccan Queen arrived at Victoria Terminus that morning precisely at its scheduled time of 10:35 A.M., and
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once I reached the egress it took me my usual seven minutes to walk to Vima lananda’s digs. He was awaiting me excitedly.
“It truly amazes me,” he began, “that so many people who should know better willfully ignore the terrible karmas that are connected with tainted money, and merrily continue to scuttle themselves just for the sake of a few rupees. You can call unimaginable calamities down on your head when you start to play about with life and death. Only a few days after you last left a sadhu came to meet me. He told me, ‘Get me half a pound of meat from a black goat and half a pound from an owl and I will work miracles.‘I could see that he was willing to do this just to put me under his obligation so that I would have to do some other work for him. No thanks.
“I told him, ‘I know what an owl can do; you needn’t think you are telling me anything new. But I am not interested; please get out of my house.”
“Was he upset?”
“Who cares? I don’t even want his thoughts in my neighborhood. Do you remember that I told you that the Goddess Lakshmi rides on an owl?”
“Yes.”
“I explained to you then that when you become rich your discrimination becomes clouded and works well only at night or when you are otherwise in the dark, literally or figuratively. But that is just one interpretation of this ‘myth. Now I think you should know some more things about owls, things that very few people know.
“Suppose you were to apply to your eyes the collyrium that has been pre pared from an owl according to the appropriate ritual. You could then meet the richest man in the world and request a billion-dollar loan and he would give it to you without even batting an eyelid. What is more he would follow you around like a puppy dog and become so fond of you that he’d never be able to leave you. Or you can use it on some movie star. You can marry her and never have to fear that she’ll go with another man; how can she leave when she is crazy about you? You can also prepare from an owl a thing which can make you invisible and there is no need for me to tell you how advanta geous it can be to be able to become invisible whenever you please. The owl can be an extremely useful bird, if you know how to use it.
“We can call the process by which you use an owl the Uluka Sadhana; ul uka means owl, and sadhana, as you know, means any kind of spiritual pro cedure that is designed to achieve some specific result. You begin the Uluka Sadhana by taking an owl to the smashan (cremation ground) and perform ing a ritual to call a certain class of spirit to sit in the owl’s body. The spirit will start to talk to you through the owl’s mouth, and will tell you all about each part of the owl’s body and how it can be used.
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“Now comes the dangerous part. You must watch the owl closely, and lis ten to it very vigilantly. As soon as it seems he is about to stop talking you must hit him very hard, with a stick or with your fire tongs. If he gets to the end of what he has to say he will conclude his remarks by saying, ‘Now you are ruined!’ Coming from an owl this is such a tremendous curse that you will be a destitute, disease-ridden beggar to the end of your days. But even death will not save you; after you die you will become one of the most miser able of spirits for uncountable ages.
“So you have to be alert, and ruthless. You repeat the same procedure of calling the spirit into the owl’s body several days in a row until you are satis fied that you have collected all the information that you can safely extract. Then, if you want to save yourself, just as the owl is about to stop speaking on that last day you take a sword or a large knife and cut off its head with a single blow. A moment’s hesitation for any reason—and the spirit will do his best to pervert your mind just long enough for him to get his curse in edgewise and you are doomed. No one on Earth can save you, and even God will not come to your rescue.
“Even if you do succeed in murdering the owl your problems have only be gun. First you must see that it is reborn into a higher womb, unless you want it to slaughter you in some succeeding birth, according to the Law of Karma. Also, how do you think the Goddess Lakshmi, who rides on an owl, will feel about you if you kill Her vehicle? I’m sure you can imagine what will happen to your wealth and prosperity, if not immediately then in the future, if She gets angry with you. Never approach these things lightly.
“And anyway, is it right to torture an owl just for the sake of mundane gains? Never! I did this sadhana once, simply because an ethereal being had told me about it and I was determined to see whether or not it worked. Well, it works, but I have never done it again; I really don’t think that anyone should ever do it.”
“I killed an owl when I was out hunting when I was young; do you think Lakshmi is still angry with me?”
“Well, even though you did it deliberately you didn’t know any better, so I suspect that Nature will eventually let you off the hook on this ac count. At least it was an owl and not a frog. Killing a frog is such a terrible karma that they say it is equal to killing a human, but I would go further. I would go so far as to say that although you may be able to pay off the karma of killing a human during that same lifetime you will not be able to pay off in the same lifetime the karma of deliberately killing a frog. When you kill a frog you will have to be born again to endure being slaughtered by that frog.” .
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Instantly my blood froze, for though I had never killed a frog even in a lab oratory I had a few years earlier been involved in a Tantric ritual in which a frog was used. Fortunately it was released alive. I told him about it.
“Thank God it didn’t die! That’s all I can say. Besides, the whole project wasn’t your idea; the fellow conducting the ritual will have to pay for its karma. Does he realize what he has got himself into?”
“But what about the people who kill frogs in laboratories in the name of science, and the people who eat them?”
“Even though ‘ignorance of the law is no defence, the degree of the karma depends a lot on intention. In the context of science the karma is minimal if you are a student and your instructor directs you to kill a frog. But if you de sign some sort of research project that involves killing frogs then you are re sponsible for those deaths. Eating them makes you responsible too, of course. You know, when I owned my rock quarry over on Sheva Island I more than once saw my workers break open a rock in which there was a frog. Out it would jump, alive—don’t ask me how—and then as the poor thing was try ing to hop away they would grab hold of it and eat it on the spot!”
“Didn’t they even wonder how the frog had stayed alive in there?”
“Not at all. They were being driven by their karmas. Being illiterate and ig norant, all they could do was conform to the nature of their rnanubandha nas. But what of all the educated people who look at a frog and immediately think, ‘Frog legs!’ How many people ever wonder about the life of frogs? How many people ever look at a little frog and appreciate it for how beautiful it is just enjoying its life! The frog is the farmer’s friend; when it begins to croak in the summer the farmer knows the rains are about to start. Frogs eat thou sands of insects during their lives, so they are a natural form of pest control. And, whenever you see a frog you know there is a snake about, because frogs are the natural food of snakes; life lives off life.
“But instead of being respected frogs are cruelly tortured. Their legs are chopped off while they are still living and conscious, and the torso is tossed aside to die. And those who exterminate them by the hundreds every day, how many hundreds of times must they have been sliced apart to give them the right to slice in turn? And how many times in how many thousands of fu ture lives will they be killed by the frogs they are killing now? It is so difficult to know the Law of Karma.”
Hmm. “I did hear that a frog is used to sweep the ground in the area where a Vedic yajna (sacrificial ritual) is to be performed, and that there is a Vedic hymn that is used to obtain rain that compares frogs to Brahmanas. Even the scientists say that so far frogs are the only animals they can clone–so all told I suppose frogs must have some unusual shakti.”
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“They certainly do. For example, you can use frogs to‘enchant’ a piece of money. I won’t go into the details, but it involves taking a pair of frogs and burying one of them alive. Once the money is enchanted you mark it, so you will be able to recognize it, and then you go spend it on something. Within a few hours it will return to your bag; don’t ask me how. You can keep using it, and getting it back, indefinitely. But what about the cost to you? The price is far too high to pay
“Do you still have to pay the price when you sacrifice an animal to a deity?”
“You will unless you know how to escape it. A certain ruler who was a great devotee of Ma used to offer a number of animal sacrifices to Her daily. After he died he found himself surrounded by thousands of angry animals, and asked Ma what was going on.
“She told him, ‘You have taken their lives; shouldn’t they get an opportu nity to take your life now? This is the Law of Karma.
“This came as a great shock to the ruler, who begged, ‘But Ma, I sacrificed them only from the love of You.’
“Ma smiled and said, ‘No, there was some self-interest behind your love and affection for Me. The real reason you sacrificed them was to get Me to benefit you and your family. And besides, did I ever ask you for these sacri fices? No, I never did. If you were really so interested in sacrificing to Me why couldn’t you have cut your own flesh and offered Me your own blood? They at least belong to you. If you really loved Me why didn’t you give Me the thing you are most fond of: your own life?
“At last the king realized what he had gotten himself into.
" But wait, Ma went on, ‘My grace is there for you. I am here to look after you. Instead of having to be born and then slaughtered thousands of times you will only have to do it ten times. But those ten times you will have to ex perience what these sacrificial beasts have experienced.»
“Sacrifice is very big in Judaism; is that one of the reasons that the Jews have been suffering for so long, that they have all those dead animals angry with them?”
“That is a part of the problem, obviously. Another part is that when they invaded Canaan they massacred everyone they could find.”
I knew from Sunday school that in a number of places in the Old Testa ment (e.g. Joshua 9:24) Jehovah exhorts the Israelites to ensure that no Canaanite be left alive. The ensuing carnage amounted to genocide of the Canaanites—was the twentieth-century Holocaust a part of the karmic reac tion to that long-ago extermination? I thought at first to ask his opinion but then kept this thought to myself and asked instead, “So Islam, which is big into sacrifice, will not be spared either?”
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
“The Muslims are already starting to slaughter each other; look at Iran and Iraq.”
“Does everyone who performs animal sacrifice end up this way?”
“Almost everyone. You should slaughter an animal only if you know your rnanubandhana makes it necessary for you to do it; you must have that sort of karmic debt with the animal. Then, you must properly select the animal you want to slay. The only fit victims are those animals which carry certain signs on their bodies which show they are meant to be sacrificed. If you per form a sacrifice without a fit victim your karma will be much worse.
“But even if you have a fit victim you must also have the power to make the dead body live again. When our Rishis used to sacrifice animals they always brought the animal back to life afterwards by means of a special mantra. That way there is no stain of karma at all, as there is when you murder an animal without being able to revive it. For instance, you can sacrifice a chicken, cook it and offer it to Ma. Then you distribute its flesh as Her prasada (blessing), but you must retain at least one small bone. From that bone you reconstruct the chicken and bring it back to life. It will live again, but it must never again be sacrificed. Instead you must either set it free or keep it and feed it well. If you cannot or choose not to do this then you must still bring the animal back to life, but in a different way. You do this by ensuring that the animal gets an immediate, higher rebirth. This is what I do whenever I eat a piece of meat. If you sacrifice an animal without this power you are the biggest fool. Ordinary people kill only for the tongue, which is what causes the karma. They kill and eat now and afterwards they are killed and eaten, birth after birth. The wise slaughter only to redeem.
“And this is only for ordinary sacrifices. The karma for human sacrifice is far, far worse. Human sacrifice-Nara Bali—is the most difficult of all sacri fices. To kill a human being is a terrible karma, but to offer a human soul to Ma offers unbelievable benefits, both for the offerer and for the soul. It is a good thing to do Nara Bali, but you can do it safely only if you know exactly what you are doing. For one thing, even though almost everyone today is a pashu, an animal, you can’t just go out and slaughter whomever you please like the Thugs did.”
The Thugs (“Deceivers”) were a secret society of Indians which offered un suspecting victims as sacrifices to the goddess Bhavani. During their heyday they waylaid and murdered an estimated two million travellers. Their depra dations ended when they were suppressed by General Sleeman and the Brit ish Army during the last century.
“In the wrong hands these rituals bring nothing but trouble. The reason there are almost no Aghoris left in Girnar today is all because a group of Ag
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horis once kidnapped a little boy, sacrificed him, and ate him. When his dis traught mother came to them to ask about her son they lied to her and said they had not seen him. Then she complained to Guru Dattatreya, the first of all Aghoris in the world, who used his yogic power to discover what had happened. He became wild and personally expelled all but the best Aghoris from Girnar.”
“So what they say about Aghoris and human sacrifice is true.” Earlier in his life Vimalananda had lived as a naked sadhu at Mount Girnar, a renowned pilgrimage spot in Western India, where he met his Senior Guru Maharaj.
“Aghoris have always been fond of Nara Bali, but no true Aghori kills with out being able to resurrect. There is one very hard group of Aghoris which uses Nara Bali if they enter a village and the villagers fail to welcome them properly. These Aghoris perform homa (fire worship) and invoke a goddess like Chandi (goddess of cholera) or Shitala (goddess of smallpox and chick enpox) to ravage the village. While it might seem that this could not help anyone these deaths in fact act as Nara Balis, which makes Ma pleased with the Aghoris. The victims are benefitted because Ma has taken them and they are bound to be saved. And the remaining villagers, who come to their senses after a few deaths, learn proper manners. Everyone gets some benefit, but the process does produce some karma.”
“Doesn’t it produce a lot of karma? It certainly seems like a lot of ego is in volved here, like there was with the Aghoris that Dattatreya threw out of Gir nar. I mean, all right, the villagers fail to welcome you properly, but is that a good reason to kill them? Shouldn’t you be a little more compassionate if you are a sadhu?”
“Suppose though that you are an Aghori whose worship of Chandi or Shi tala has matured and your goddess is with you twenty-four hours a day. Then the villagers are not offending you as much as they are offending your god dess. It is She who loses Her temper, She who performs the homa through you, and She who consumes the sacrifices.
“And besides, if a tiger were to waltz in here right now you would behave toward it with respect, wouldn’t you? I should hope so! Similarly, you would be very wise to behave respectfully toward a powerful goddess, in whatever form She might choose to appear to you. It is true that the villagers probably did not ask for the yogis to come to their village, but once they arrived the lo cals ought to have realized the potential consequences for disregarding them. This is India, after all. There is no lack of precedent for this kind of thing. Re member, don’t ever make friends with a king, a yogi, the fire, or the water un less you plan to live up to your friendship!”
He started to laugh.
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
“My Senior Guru Maharaj, my Bapu, is both a ruler and a yogi, so you have to be extra careful with him. One day he took me to a place where an immense underground treasure lay buried. We passed through stacks and stacks of gold bricks, heaps of jewels and what-have-you, but neither of us stopped for them. We were both interested in an amulet, one small amulet. In order to obtain it, though, a small child would have to be sacrificed. Bapu or dered me to do it, but I refused. Why stain my hands?
“ ‘All right, he said, “I’ll make you a deal. I will come to you, in any form. Watch out for me and catch me, and if you can catch me I will see that you get the amulet.’ Great!
“Back in Bombay a few days later I was just sending my son Ranu up to bed when suddenly an enormous black cobra appeared. I was on one part of the divided staircase and my friend Dinkar was on the other, with Ranu. The co bra wound itself around Ranu’s leg; my Senior Guru Maharaj always did love that boy! Ranu didn’t do anything, as if he understood. Then the cobra headed toward me.
“Unfortunately by this time Dinkar, the stupid idiot, had started shouting, ‘Snake! Snake!’ He grabbed a walking stick and began to beat the cobra be fore I could stop him. The snake disappeared forthwith and I became furi ous: ‘I told you not to hit that snake Ñ’
“He cut me off: ‘Now, Pratap, you don’t know, those snakes are deadly poi sonous. Ranu was here; he might have been bitten.’ But, numbskull, if the snake was going to bite Ranu he would have done so while he was curled around the boy’s leg. What can you do with such people?
“A few days later I met my Senior Guru Maharaj again. He was wild with rage: ‘Look at what you’ve done! Most of my bones have been battered, showing me the place on his back where he had been clubbed.
‘What could I do, Maharaj?” I asked him. ‘I couldn’t stop him in time. And until today neither of us has obtained that amulet.”
We both smiled and moved on to other things. The next morning Vima lananda returned to the subject of sacrifice in what seemed an incongruous venue: the R.W.I.T.C. cafe at the racecourse, where we sat over buttered toast and milky tea after witnessing the early morning trackwork. Vimalananda’s then trainer Mr. Lafange sat with us for a while, trying to convince us that the mediocre work we had witnessed was something more than mediocre. After he left Vimalananda grimaced briefly as the euphony of the chirruping birds was contaminated by the stridor of two of the stuffier Club members. They were hypothesizing over foreign jockeys: who George McGrath would be riding for this year, and whether Sir Lester Piggott, then the Queen of En gland’s retained rider, would be out for the Derby again.
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Vimalananda spoke: “I have always believed in avoiding karma whenever possible. The more you do to try to accomplish your ends the more karma you create for yourself. Whether in human sacrifice or in horse racing, avoid ing karma is the sensible way to go. One way to avoid karma in human sacri fice is to follow the example of the Rishis and use a mantra to bring the man back to life after sacrificing him. But even without such a mantra you can still offer as many human sacrifices as you like without ever becoming stained by karma, if your intelligence is subtle enough. Can you guess how?”
“It must have something to do with the victim’s prana.”
“Right. Ma has no use at all for the bodies of sacrificial victims. She is ethe real, She has use only for the spirit which is separated from the body at death, and the prana which that spirit carries. Knowing this, a clever person can of fer a human sacrifice without any danger by taking a spirit and offering it to Ma. You can take any spirit, even one killed on a battlefield; wars kill so many every year. You can give thousands of Nara Balis this way if you so desire; all you have to know is how to do it.
“First you locate a country in which a war is going on. Then you tell Ma, ‘Ma, I am going to provide you with a certain number of Nara Balis within two days, if you give me permission to do so. If She gives you permission you proceed; otherwise not! You collect all the spirits of everyone who has died in the war thus far, soldiers and civilians, innocent victims and guilty warmon gers alike. Since they have all died violent deaths they don’t know where to go and cannot find their way into a new rebirth.
“After collecting the spirits you bring them to the spot where you will in voke Ma to devour them. Then you perform stambhana (‘immobilizing’) and kilana (’nailing’) to lock them inside a circle from which they will be un able to escape. This is the ethereal equivalent of tethering a sacrificial animal to the sacrificial post by tying a noose around its neck
“Then you invoke Ma. When Ma arrives She is ready to eat, but because She is ethereal She does not eat with Her mouth. She inhales the spirits they are ethereal anyway, just like puffs of wind-taking their prana from them and enjoying Her own cosmic intoxication. Have you ever seen a puppy playing with a ball? You throw the ball, he runs after it, catches it, and runs back to you with the ball in his mouth so that you can throw it again. It is the same thing here: Ma has caused all these beings to take birth, to be thrown into the samsara (the universe of manifested existence). You are just restoring them to Her so she can throw them out again.
“She doesn’t toss them into some ditch, of course. Because of Her grace, Her aspect of motherhood, they all receive immediate high rebirths. Ma is the mother of all, and what mother refuses to save her children even when
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
they are naughty? So the spirits are bound to be satisfied by this process. Ma is also satisfied, and She rewards the sacrificer. Everyone is happy, and the real beauty of the whole thing is that the karma is very minimal.”
“Great! Why aren’t more people doing this sort of thing?” “Because it is very difficult to do, unfortunately. This is why we have yet other ways of offering Nara Bali. One way requires that you find an animal or a human with whom you have the right rnanubandhana. Then you invoke into that person or animal a goddess, or a spirit of a certain class who also has the right rnanubandhana with the prospective victim. The goddess or the spirit then sits inside that victim and drinks up all his blood. The victim gradually loses weight, and wastes away to a skeleton, because his prana is be ing lost. There is no cure; death comes as soon as Ma wishes, or as soon as the spirit has taken all the blood it is entitled to in that case.
“For instance, you might select Chinnamasta, the Great Goddess Who holds Her severed head in Her hand and drinks an unceasing stream of Her own blood. She is the goddess of wasting diseases like leukemia in which the red blood cells decrease and the white blood cells increase. Sometimes ordi nary leukemia patients survive, because Ma chooses only to take a part of their prana when She calls on them. But no victim of a Nara Bali can survive unless you botch the ritual.
“Whatever goddess you may select will be happy, because She will get the spirit of the being She wanted without having to bother about all the flesh and other disagreeable offal produced in a physical sacrifice. The victims are made to remember God by their pain, which is nothing but the effects of all the karmas of their millions of previous births. When they die Ma saves them. You get the benefit of giving the souls to Ma while you sit on the side lines as a spectator, and none of the karma in actually killing the person comes to you.
“In these ways one hundred thousand Nara Balis can be given. The result? Tremendous! You could never do so many physical sacrifices, which is why I always say that physical worship is limited. But if you try to fool about in this way without knowing your rnanubandhana with your victims you are head ing for big, big trouble.”
“So how to know rnanubandhana?” “All in due time, my boy,” laughed Vimalananda,“all in due time.”