BE HERE NOW [FATHER-SUN]

But I'm clinging tight to my passport and my return ticket to America, and a traveler's check that I'll need to get me to Delhi.  Those things I'm going to hold on to.  And my bottle of LSD, in case I should find something interesting.

And during these travels he's starting to train me in a most interesting way.  We'd be sitting somewhere and I'd say,

"Did I ever tell you about the time that Tim and I ..."

And he'd say, "Don't think about the past.  Just be here now."

Silence.

And I'd say, "How long do you think we're going to be on this trip?"

And he'd say, "Don't think about the future.  Just be here now."

I'd say, "You know, I really feel crumby, my hips are hurting ..."

"Emotions are like waves.  Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean."

He had just sort of wiped out my whole game.  That was it -- that was my whole trip -- emotions, and past experiences, and future plans.  I was, after all, a great story teller.

So we were silent.  There was nothing to say.

He'd say, "You eat this," or, "Now you sleep here."  And all the rest of the time we sang holy songs.  That was all there was to do.

Or he would teach me Asanas -- Hatha Yoga postures.

But there was no conversation.  I didn't know anything about his life.  He didn't know anything about my life. He wasn't the least bit interested in all of the extraordinary dramas that I had collected ... He was the first person I couldn't seduce into being interested in all this. He just didn't care.

And yet, I never felt so profound an intimacy with another being. It was as if he were inside of my heart. And what started to blow my mind was that everywhere we went, he was at home. 

If we went to a Thereavaden Buddhist monastery, he would be welcomed and suddenly he would be called Dharma Sara, a Southern Buddhist name, and some piece of clothing he wore, I suddenly saw was also worn by all the other monks and I realized that he was an initiate in that scene and they'd welcome him and he'd be in the inner temple and he knew all the chants and he was doing them.

We'd come across some Shavites, followers of Shiva, or some of the Swamis, and I suddenly realized that he was one of them. On his forehead would be the appropriate tilik, or mark, and he would be doing their chanting.

We'd meet Kargyupa lamas from Tibet and they would all welcome him as a brother, and he knew all their stuff. He had been in India for five years, and he was so high that everybody just welcomed him, feeling 'he's obviously one of us'.

I couldn't figure out what his scene was.  All I personally felt was this tremendous pull toward Buddhism because Hinduism always seemed a little gauche -- the paintings were a little too gross -- the colors were bizarre and the whole thing was too melodramatic and too much emotion.  I was pulling toward that clean, crystal-clear simplicity of the Southern Buddhists or the Zen Buddhists.

After about three months, I had a visa problem and we went to Delhi, and I was still quite unsure of my new role as a holy man and so when I got to Delhi, I took $4.00 out of my little traveler's check and bought a pair of pants and a shirt and a tie and took my horn-rimmed glasses out of my shoulder bag and stuck them back on and I became again Dr. Alpert, to go to the visa office.  Dr. Alpert, who had a grant from the Folk Art Museum of New Mexico for collecting musical instruments and I did my whole thing.

I kept my beads in my pocket.  Because I didn't feel valid in this other role.  And then the minute I got my visa fixed, he had to have his annual visa worked over, and he had to go to a town near-by, which we went to, and we were welcomed at this big estate and given a holy man's house, and food brought to us, and he said, "You sit here.  I'm going to see about my visa."

He told me just what to do.  I was just like a baby, "Eat this," "Sit here." "Do this."  And I just gave up.  He knew.  Do you know?  I'll follow you.

He spoke Hindi fluently.  My Hindi was very faltering.  So he could handle it all.

We had spent a few weeks in a Chinese Buddhist monastery in Sarnath, which was extraordinarily powerful and beautiful, and something was happening to me but I couldn't grasp the total nature of it at all.

There was a strange thing about him.  At night he didn't seem to sleep like I did.  That is, any time I'd wake up at night, I'd look over and he would be sitting in the lotus position.  And sometimes I'd make believe I was asleep and then open sort of a half-eye to see if he wasn't cheating -- maybe he was sleeping now -- but he was always in the lotus posture.

Sometimes I'd see him lie down, but I would say that 80% of the time when I would be sleeping heavily, he would be sitting in some state or other, which he'd never describe to me.  But he was not in personal contact -- I mean, there was no wave or moving around, or nothing seemed to happen to him.

The night at that estate, I went out -- I had to go to the bathroom and I went out under the stars and the following event happened ...

The previous January 20th, at Boston in the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, my mother had died of a spleen illness -- the bone marrow stopped producing blood and the spleen took over and grew very large and they removed it and then she died. It had been a long illness and I had been with her through the week prior to her death and through it we had become extremely close. We had transcended mother-child and personalities and we had come into true contact. I spent days in the hospital just meditating. And I felt no loss when she died.  Instead there was a tremendous continuing contact with her.  And in fact, when I had been in Nepal, I had had a vision of her one night when I was going to bed. I saw her up on the ceiling and I was wondering whether to go to India or go on to Japan and she had a look that was the look of "You damn fool you're always getting into hot water, but go ahead, and I think that's great." She looked peeved-pleased.  It was like there were two beings in my mother. She was a middle class woman from Boston, who wanted me to be absolutely responsible in the most culturally acceptable fashion, and then there was this swinger underneath -- this spiritual being underneath who said, "-- go, baby."  And I felt these two beings in that look which supported my going back into India.

This night I'm under the stars, and I hadn't thought about her at all since that time. I'm under the stars, urinating, and I look up and the stars are very close because it's very dark and I suddenly experience a presence of mother, and I'm thinking about her -- not about how she died or anything about that. I just feel her presence. It's very very powerful. And I feel great love for her and then I go back to bed.

Of course, Bhagwan Dass is not the least interested in any of my life, so he'd be the last person I'd talk to about my thoughts or visions.

The next morning he says, "We've got to go to the mountains. I've got a visa problem. We've got to go see my Guru."

Now the term "Guru" had meant for me, in the West, a sort of high grade teacher. There was a Life article about Allen Ginsberg -- "Guru goes to Kansas" and Allen was embarrassed and said, "I'm not really a Guru." And 1 didn't know what a Guru really was ...

Bhagwan Dass also said we were going to borrow the Land Rover, which had been left with this sculptor, to go to the mountains. And I said, I didn't want to borrow the Land Rover. I'd just gotten out of that horrible blue box and I didn't want to get back into it, and I didn't want the responsibility. David had left it with this Indian sculptor and he wouldn't want to loan it to us anyway.  I got very sulky.  I didn't want to go see a guru and suddenly I wanted to go bock to America in the worst way.

I thought, "What am I doing? I'm following this kid and all he is ..."  But he says, "We've got to do this," and so we go to the town where the sculptor lives and within half an hour the sculptor says, "You have to go see your Guru'? Take the Land Rover!"

Well, that's interesting.

We're in the Land Rover and he won't let me drive.  So I'm sitting there sulking. He won't let me drive and we are in the Land Rover which I don't want to have and I'm now really in a bad mood. I've stopped smoking hashish a few days before because I'm having all kinds of reactions to it, and so I'm just in a very, very uptight, negative paranoid state and all I want to do is go back to America and suddenly I'm following this young kid who wants to drive and all he wanted me for was to get the Land Rover and now the whole paranoid con world fills my head. I'm full of it.

We go about 80 or 100 miles and we come to a tiny temple by the side of the road in the foothills of the Himalayas. We're stopping and I think we're stopping because a truck's coming by, but when we stop, people surround the car, which they generally do, but they welcome him and he jumps out.  And I can tell something's going to happen because as we go up into the hills, he's starting to cry.

We're singing songs and tears are streaming down his face, and I know something's going on, but I don't know what.

We stop at this temple and he asks where the guru is and they point up on a hill, and he goes running up this hill and they're all following him, so delighted to see him. They all love him so much.

I get out of the car. Now I'm additionally bugged because everybody's ignoring me. And I'm following him and he's way ahead of me and I'm running after him barefoot up this rocky path and I'm stumbling -- by now my feet are very tough but still his legs are very long and I'm running and people are ignoring me and I'm very bugged and I don't want to see the guru anyway and what the hell --

We go around this hill so that we come to a field which does not face on the road. It's facing into a valley and there's a little man in his 60's or 70's sitting with a blanket around him. And around him are 8 or 9 Hindu people and it's a beautiful tableau -- clouds, beautiful green valley, lovely, lovely place -- the foothills of the Himalayas.

And this fellow, Bhagwan Dass, comes up, runs to this man and throws himself on the ground, full-face doing 'dunda pranam,' and he's stretched out so his face is down on the ground, full- length and his hands are touching the feet of this man, who is sitting cross-legged. And he's crying and the man is patting him on the head and I don't know what's happening.

I'm standing on the side and thinking "I'm not going to touch his feet. I don't have to. I'm not required to do that." And every now and then this man looks up at me and he twinkles a little. But I'm so uptight that I couldn't care less. Twinkle away, man!

Then he looks up at me -- he speaks in Hindi, of which I understand maybe half, but there is a fellow who's translating all the time, who hangs out with him, and the Guru says to Bhagwan Dass, "You have a picture of me?"

Bhagwan Dass nods, "Yes".

"Give it to him," says the man, pointing at me.

"That's very nice," I think, giving me a picture of himself, and I smile and nod appreciatively. But I'm still not going to touch his feet!

Then he says, "You came in a big car?" Of course that's the one thing I'm really uptight about.

"Yeah."

So he looks at me and he smiles and says, "You give it to me?"

I started to say, "Wha ..." and Bhagwan Dass looks up -- he's lying there  -- and he says, " Maharaji, (meaning 'great king'), if you want it you can have it -- it's yours."

And I said, "No -- now wait a minute -- you can't give away David's car like that. That isn't our car ..." and this old man is laughing. In fact, everyone is laughing ... except me.

Then he says, "You made much money in America'?"

"Ah, at last he's feeding my ego." I think.

So I flick through all of my years as a professor and years as a smuggler and all my different dramas in my mind and I said, "Yeah."

"How much you make'?"

Well, I said, at one time -- and I sort of upped the figure a bit, you know, my ego -- $25,000.

So they all converted that into rupees which was practically half the economic base of India, and everybody was terribly awed by this figure, which was complete bragging on my part. It was phony -- I never made $25,000. And he laughed again. And he said,

"You'll buy a car like that for me?"

And I remember what went through my mind. I had come out of a family of fund-raisers for the United Jewish, Appeal, Brandeis, and Einstein Medical School, and I had never seen hustling like this. He doesn't even know my name and already he wants a $7,000 vehicle.

And I said, "Well, maybe ..." The whole thing was freaking me so much.

And he said, "Take them away and give them food." So we were taken and given food -- magnificent food -- we were together still, and saddhus brought us beautiful food and then we were told to rest. Some time later we were back with the Maharaji and he said to me, "Come here. Sit. So I sat down and he looked at me and he said,

"You were out under the stars last night."

"Um-hum."

"You were thinking about your mother."

"Yes." ('Wow', I thought, 'that's pretty good. I never mentioned that to anybody').

"She died last year."

"Um-hum."

"She got very big ill the stomach before she died."

... Pause ... "Yes."

He leaned back and closed his eyes and said, "Spleen. She died of spleen."

Well, what happened to me at that moment, I can't really put into words. He looked at me in a certain way at that moment, and two things happened -- it seemed simultaneous. They do not seem like cause and effect.

The first thing that happened was that my mind raced faster and faster to try to get leverage to get a hold on what he had just done. I went through every super CIA paranoia I've ever had:

"Who is he'?" "Who does he represent'?"

"Where's the button he pushes where the file appears?" and "Why have they brought me here?"

None of it would jell.

It was just too impossible that this could have happened this way. The guy I was with didn't know all that stuff, and I was a tourist in a car, and the whole thing was just too far out. My mind went faster and faster and faster.

Up until then I had two categories for "psychic experience." One was 'they happened to somebody else and they haven't happened to me, and they were terribly interesting and we certainly had to keep an open mind about it'. That was my social science approach. The other one was, 'well, man, I'm high on LSD. Who knows how it really is? After all, under the influence of a chemical, how do I know I'm not creating the whole thing?' Because, in fact, I had taken certain chemicals where I experienced the creation of total realities. The greatest example I have of this came about through a drug called JB 318, which I took in a room at Millbrook. I was sitting on the 3rd floor and it seemed like nothing was happening at all. And into the room walked a girl from the community with a pitcher of lemonade and she said, would I like some lemonade, and I said that would be great, and she poured the lemonade, and she poured it and she kept pouring and the lemonade went over the side of the glass and fell to the floor and it went across the floor and up the wall and over the ceiling and down the wall and under my pants which got wet and it came back up into the glass -- and when it touched the glass the glass disappeared and the lemonade disappeared and the wetness in my pants disappeared and the girl disappeared and I turned around to Ralph Metzner and I said,

"Ralph, the most extraordinary thing happened to me," and Ralph disappeared!

I was afraid to do anything but just sit. Whatever this is, it's not nothing. Just sit. Don't move, just sit!

So I had had experiences where I had seen myself completely create whole environments under psychedelics, and therefore I wasn't eager to interpret these things very quickly, because I, the observer, was, at those times, under the influence of the psychedelics.

But neither of these categories applied in this situation, and my mind went faster and faster and then I felt like what happens when a computer is fed an insoluble problem; the bell rings and the red light goes on and the machine stops. And my mind just gave up. It burned out its circuitry ... its zeal to have an explanation. I needed something to get closure at the rational level and there wasn't anything. There just wasn't a place I could hide in my head about this.

And at the same moment, I felt this extremely violent pain in my chest and a tremendous wrenching feeling and I started to cry. And I cried and I cried and I cried. And I wasn't happy and I wasn't sad. It was not that kind of crying. The only thing I could say was it felt like I was home. Like the journey was over. Like I had finished.

Well, I cried and cried, and they finally sort of spooned me up and took me to a temple about 12 miles away to stay overnight. That night I was very confused. A great feeling of lightness and confusion.

At one point in the evening I was looking in my shoulder bag and came across the bottle of LSD.

"Wow!  I've finally met a guy who is going to Know!  He will definitely know what LSD is.  I'll have to ask him.  That's what I'll do.  I'll ask him."  Then I forgot about it.

The next morning, at 8 o'clock a messenger comes.  Maharaji wants to see you immediately.  We went in the Land Rover.  The 12 miles to the other temple.  When I'm approaching him, he yells out at me, "Have you got a question?"

And I take one look at him, and it's like looking at the sun.  I suddenly feel all warm. 

And he's very impatient with all this nonsense, and he says, "Where's the medicine?"

I got a translation of this.  He said medicine.  I said, "Medicine?"  I never thought of LSD as medicine!  And somebody said, he must mean the LSD.  "LSD?"  He said, "Ah-cha -- bring the LSD."

So I went to the car and got the little bottle of LSD and I came back.

"Let me see?"

So I poured it out in my hand "What's that?"

"That's STP ... That's librium and that's ..." A little of everything.  Sort of a little traveling
kit.

He says, "Gives you siddhis?"

I had never heard the word "siddhi" before. So I asked for a translation and siddhi was
translated as "power".  From where I was at in relation to these concepts, I thought he was like a
little old man, asking for power.  Perhaps he was losing his vitality and wanted Vitamin B 12. That was one thing I didn't have and I felt terribly apologetic because I would have given him anything. If he wanted the Land Rover, he could have it.  And I said, "Oh, no, I'm sorry." I really felt bad I didn't have any and put it back in the bottle.

He looked at me and extended his hand. So I put into his hand what's called a "White Lightning". This is an LSD pill and this one was from a special batch that had been made specially for me for traveling. And each pill was 305 micrograms, and very pure. Very good acid. Usually you start a man over 60, maybe with 50 to 75 micrograms, very gently, so you won't upset him.  300 of pure acid is a very solid dose.

He looks at the pill and extends his hand further.  So I put a second pill -- that's 610 micrograms -- then a third pill -- that's 915 micrograms into his palm.

That is sizeable for a first dose for anyone!

"Ah-cha,"

And he swallows them! I see them go down. There's no doubt. And that little scientist in me says, "This is going to be very interesting!"

All day long I'm there, and every now and then he twinkles at me and nothing  -- nothing happens! That was his answer to my question. Now you have the data I have.

ASHTANGA YOGA

I was taken back to the temple. It was interesting. At no time was I asked, do you want to stay? Do you want to study? Everything was understood. There were no contracts. There were no promises. There were no vows. There was nothing.

The next day Maharaji instructed them to take me out and buy me clothes. They gave me a room. Nobody ever asked me for a nickel. Nobody ever asked me to spread the word. Nobody ever did anything. There was no commitment whatsoever required. It was all done internally. And that day I met a man who was to become my teacher, Hari Dass Baba. 

Hari Dass Baba is quite an incredible fellow, as I found out. I spent five months under his tutelage. He is 48 years old. He weighs 90 pounds. He is a jungle saddhu. He went into the jungle when he was 8 years old. He is silent (mauna). He has been mauna for 15 years. He writes with a chalkboard. He only uses his voice to sing holy songs. He reads and writes six or eight different languages, including Chinese, English, French, Hindi. He taught me always in beautiful English.

This guru -- Maharaji -- has only his blanket. You see, he's in a place called SAHAJ SAMADHI and he's not identified with this world as most of us identify with it. If you didn't watch him, he'd just disappear altogether into the jungle or leave his body, but his devotees are always protecting him and watching him so they can keep him around. They've got an entourage around him and people come and bring gifts to the holy man because that's part of the way in which you gain holy merit in India. And money piles up, and so they build temples, or they build schools. He will walk to a place and there will be a saint who has lived in that place or cave and he'll say, "There will be a temple here," and then they build a temple. And they do all this around Maharaji. He does nothing.

Hari Dass Baba -- this little 90 pound fellow -- architecturally designed all of the temples and schools, supervised all the buildings and grounds, had many followers of his own, slept two hours a night. His food intakc for the last 15 years had been 2 glasses of milk a day. That's it.  His feces are like two small marbles each day. His arms are about this big around, tiny, but when the workmen can't lift a particularly heavy rock, they call for 'Chota Maharaji' -- the little great king. As in a comic strip, he goes over and lifts the rock, just with one-pointedness of mind. He had met Maharaji in the jungle 15 years before, and he had become a disciple of Maharaji.

As an example of Maharaji's style, I was once going through my address book and I came to Lama Govinda's name (he wrote Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism  and Way of the White Cloud) and I thought, "Gee, I ought to go visit him.  I'm here in the Himalayas and it wouldn't be a long trip and I could go and pay my respects.  I must do that some time before I leave."

And the next day there is a message from Maharaji saying, "You are to go immediately to see Lama Govinda."

Another time, I had to go to Delhi to work on my visa and I took a bus.  This was the first time after four months that they let me out alone.  They were so protective of me.  I know know what they were afraid would happen to me, but they were always sending somebody with me ... They weren't giving me elopement privileges, as they say in mental hospitals.

But they allowed me to go alone to Delhi and I took a 12 hour bus trip.  I went to Delhi and I was so high.  I went through Connaught Place, which is the western hustle part of New Delhi.  It's mostly BOAC and American Express and restaurants that serve ice cream sodas.  The whole scene, which is right in the middle of India, has nothing to do with India particularly and all the Indians who hustle westerners walk around in this block.  And I went through that barefoot, silent with my chalkboard -- I was silent all the time.  At American Express, writing my words it was so high that not at one moment was there even a qualm or a doubt.  I got so high that I went into some stores to buy things -- right in Connaught Place, which is designed to hustle westerners ... And everybody knew I was a westerner, and yet they insisted on giving me the stuff free!

"You are a saddhu -- it's a blessing to me that you'll take my goods."  That's how powerful the thing was that I was into at that time.

So after all day long of doing my dramas with the Health Department and so on, it came time for lunch.  I had been on this very fierce austere diet and I had lost 60 lbs.  I was feeling great -- very light and very beautiful -- but there was enough orality still left in me to want to have a feast.  I'll have a vegetarian feast, I thought.  So I went to a fancy vegetarian restaurant and I got a table over in a corner and ordered their special deluxe vegetarian dinner, from nuts to nuts, and I had the whole thing and the last thing they werved was vegetarian ice cream with 2 english biscuits stuck into it.  And those biscuits ... the sweet thing has always been a big part of my life, but I knew somehow, maybe I should be eating those.  They're so far out from my diet.  It's not vegetables -- it's not rice.  And so I was almost secretly eating the cookies in this dark corner.  I was feeling very guilty about eating these cookies.  But nobody was watching me.  And then I went to a  Buddhist monastery for the night and the next day took the bus back up to the mountain.

Two days later, we heard Maharaji was back -- he had been up in the mountains in another little village.  He travels around a lot, moves from place to place.  I hadn't seen him in about a month and a half -- I didn't see much of him at all.  We all went rushing to see Maharaji and I got a bag of oranges to bring to him and I came and took one look at him, and the oranges went flying and I started to cry and I fell down and they were patting me. Maharaji was eating oranges as fast as he could, manifesting through eating food the process of taking on the karma of someone else.

Women bring him food all day long. He just opens his mouth and they feed him and he's taking on karma that way.  And he ate eight oranges right before my eyes. I had never seen anything like that. And the principal of the school was feeding me oranges and 1 was crying and the whole thing was very maudlin, and he pulls me by the hair, and I look up and he says to me, "How did you like the biscuits?"

I'd be at my temple. And I'd think about arranging for a beautiful lama in America to get some money, or something like that. Then I'd go to bed and pull the covers over my head and perhaps have a very worldly thought; I would think about what I'd do with all my powers when I got them; perhaps a sexual thought. Then when next 1 saw Maharaji he would tell me something like, "You want to give money to a lama in America." And I'd feel like I was such a beautiful guy. Then suddenly I'd be horrified with the realization that if he knew that thought, then he must know that one, too ... ohhhhh ... and that one, too! Then I'd look at the ground.  And when I'd finally steal a glance at him, he'd be looking at me with such total love.

Now the impact of these experiences was very profound. As they say in the Sikh religion -- Once you realize God knows everything, you're free. I had been through many years of psychoanalysis and still I had managed to keep private places in my head -- I wouldn't say they were big, labeled categories, but they were certain attitudes or feelings that were still very private. And suddenly I realized that he knew everything that was going on in my head, all the time, and that he still loved me. Because who we are is behind all that.

I said to Hari Dass Baba, "Why is it that Maharaji never tells me the bad things I think?", and he says, "It does not help your sadhana -- your spiritual work. He knows it all, but he just does the things that help you."

The sculptor had said he loved Maharaji so much, we should keep the Land Rover up there. The Land Rover was just sitting around and so Maharaji got the Land Rover after all, for that time. And then one day, I was told we were going on an outing up in the Himalayas for the day. This was very exciting, because I never left my room in the temple. Now in the temple, or around Maharaji, there were eight or nine people. Bhagwan Dass and I were the only westerners. In fact, at no time that I was there did I see any other westerners. This is clearly not a western scene, and in fact, I was specifically told when returning to the United States that I was not to mention Maharaji's name or where he was, or anything.

The few people that have slipped by this net and figured out from clues in my speech and their knowledge of India where he was and have gone to see him, were thrown out immediately ... very summarily dismissed, which is very strange.  All I can do is pass that information on to you. I think the message is that you don't need to go to anywhere else to find what you are seeking.

So there were eight or nine people and whenever there was a scene, I walked last, I was the lowest man on the totem pole. They all loved me and honored me and I was the novice, like in a karate or judo class, where you stand at the back until you learn more. I was always in the back and they were always teaching me.

So we went in the Land Rover. Maharaji was up in the front -- Bhagwan Dass was driving. Bhagwan Dass turned out to be very high in this scene. He was very very highly thought of and honored. He had started playing the sitar; he was a fantastic musician and the Hindu people loved him. He would do bhajan holy music so high they would go out on it.  So Bhagwan Dass was driving and I was way in the back of the Land Rover camper with the women and some luggage.

And we went up into the hills and came to a place where we stopped and were given apples, in an orchard, and we looked at a beautiful view. We stayed about 10 minutes, and then Maharaji says, "We've got to go on."

We got in the car, went further up the hill and came to a Forestry camp. Some of his devotees are people in the Forestry department so they make this available to him.

So we got to this place and there was a building waiting and a caretaker --"Oh, Maharaji, you've graced us with your presence." He went inside with the man that is there to take care of him or be with him all the time and we all sat on the lawn."

After a little while, a message came out, "Maharaji wants to see you." And I got up and went in, and sat down in front of him. He looked at me and said,

"You make many people laugh in America?"

I said, "Yes, I like to do that."

"Good ... You like to feed children?"

"Yes. Sure."

"Good."

He asked a few more questions like that, which seemed to be nice questions, but ..:? Then he smiled and he reached forward and he tapped me right on the forehead, just three times. That's all.

Then the other fellow came along and lifted me and walked me out the door. I was completely confused. I didn't know what had happened to me -- why he had done it -- what it was about.

When I walked out, the people out in the yard said that I looked as if I were in a very high state. They said tears were streaming down my face. But all I felt inside was confusion. I have never felt any further understanding of it since then. I don't know what it was all about. It was not an idle movement, because the minute that was over, we all got back in the car and went home.

I pass that on to you. You know now, what I know about that. Just an interesting thing. I don't know what it means, yet.

Hari Dass Baba was my teacher. I was taught by this man with a chalkboard in the most terse way possible. I would get up early, take my bath in the river or out of a pail with a lota (a bowl). I would go in and do my breathing exercises, my pranayam and my hatha yoga, meditate, study, and around 11 :30 in the morning, this man would arrive and with chalkboard he would write something down:

"If a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets."

Then he'd get up and leave. Or he'd write,

"If you wear shoeleather, the whole earth is covered with leather."

These were his ways of teaching me about how motivation affects perception. His teaching seemed to be no teaching because he always taught from within ... that is, his lessons aroused in me just affirmation ... as if I knew it all already.

When starting to teach me about what it meant to be 'ahimsa' or non-violent, and the effect on the environment around you of the vibrations -- when he started to teach me about energy and vibrations, his opening statement was "Snakes Know Heart." "Yogis in jungle need not fear." Because if you're pure enough, cool it, don't worry. But you've got to be very pure.

So his teaching was of this nature. And it was not until a number of months later that I got hold of Vivekananda's book "Raja Yoga" and I realized that he had been teaching me Raja Yoga, very systematically an exquisite scientific system that had been originally enunciated somewhere between 500 BC and 500 AD by Patanjali, in a set of sutras, or phrases, and it's called Ashtanga Yoga, or 8-limbed yoga and also known as Raja or Kingly yoga. And this beautiful yogi was teaching me this wisdom with simple metaphor and brief phrase.

Now, though I am a beginner on the path, I have returned to the West for a time to work out karma or unfulfilled commitment. Part of this commitment is to share what I have learned with those of you who are on a similar journey. One can share a message through telling 'our-story' as I have just done, or through teaching methods of yoga, or singing, or making love. Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.

For me, this story is but a vehicle for sharing with you the true message ... the living faith in what is possible.

--OM--

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