T

AL BROOKE flew to New Delhi, quickly becoming immersed in the vast subcontinent of India as he pursued a radical pilgrimage of consciousness. After quickly exhausting the “Grand Tour” of landmarks popularized by the spiritual tourists of the West, Brooke plunged into wilderness India where he met a “miracle-working godman” and the journey shifted into high gear.

Within Sai Baba’s enchanted realm, Brooke saw and experienced things that seemed to obliterate all Western conceptions of reality as his journey vectored further into an alien universe. What had appeared as the prized state of godlike enlightenment, which seemed just within reach, became a precipice—not of enlightenment—but obliteration, even possession. Brooke was becoming a captive soul of an ancient inner transformation, while Baba’s outward divinity concealed a timeless, demonic presence.

After two years of surrender to a Being who claimed to be God on earth, something remarkable happened. The end-game of spiritual powers ensnaring one man’s soul turned abruptly and miraculously. Poised on the edge of a precipice, Brooke was rescued from above.

Since leaving India, Tal Brooke, has authored 10 books and his work has been recognized in Marquis Who's Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, and The International Who's Who of Authors. A graduate of the University of Virginia and Princeton, Tal Brooke has spoken at Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, and other top universities.

Other books by Tal Brooke:

One World, the millennial edition

Avatar of Night, the millennial edition

Riders of The Cosmic Circuit, the millennial edition The Mystery of Death, the millennial edition Virtual Gods (Edited by Tal Brooke)

Conspiracy to Silence the Son of God (Edited by Tal Brooke)

When The World Will Be As One

The Other Side of Death (Early abridged version of the Mystery of Death)

Lord of the Air (Abridged version of Avatar of Night)

AVATAR

OF

NIGHT

By Tal Brooke

©1990, 1999, 2000 and 2015 by Tal Brooke First End Run Edition December, 1999

First Printing, December 1999 Second Printing, July 2000 New edition, 2015.

Manufactured in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, except as provided by USA copyright law.

India

Descending into the

Cauldron

A

fter flying from Karachi across a stretch of the Arabian Sea, the plane carrying me to Delhi drifted high above the northern plains of India. Contrasting with the living blue of the sea, I saw

a land wrinkled with age and parched from the heat. I felt like an ant riding the shoulders of a giant.

Below me, stretching from horizon to horizon, lay a dry ancient face of sand that stared back enigmatically. A quiet enchantment filled me as the Rajasthan desert passed far below. I was convinced that from out of this expanse of sand and clay had arisen a race of mystics whose inner searchings had unveiled the ultimate answers to existence—answers that baffled the green lands and empires of the West until the mystical frontier dawned upon my generation.

Suddenly I could see the outskirts of Delhi disappearing under the brilliant wing of the plane. What distinguished mud-huts from hotels, cars from push-carts, I could not tell, since I had no idea whether these tiny fragments below were huge or minuscule. Indeed, Delhi resembled a dried-out wafer that had been channeled and gnawed down by woodmites. As we went down into the wafer by spirals, I got glimpses of color.

When the wheels hit the airstrip, the film-like quality of the flight ended. It had been an almost interminable flight that had started in London, with layovers in Athens, Damascus and last of all, Karachi. Now this endless day was about to recycle itself yet again when the globe was afire with change—Pentagon marches, Kent State, Vietnam, Golden Gate Park Be-ins. That summer, landmark events such as Woodstock and the Apollo moon landing had also recently taken place. My leap was of a different kind.

Now, as a soldier materialized suddenly into the heat of war, I realized that I had to route my own path as quickly as possible. I had no friends, no schedule, no routine, and little preparation. It was just a giant leap of faith.

No sooner had I emerged from the plane, a heat wave almost bowled me over. The air was unlike anything I had felt since Egypt, ten years back; it was as though nature had dammed it up on this side of the world, not allowing even a single drought to cross the land or sea. Unlike London’s cool and familiar breeze moving among strolling people in parks, the air of India was like the dead heated air inside a sun-baked sarcophagus. The effect of such intense heat was to give the atmosphere a feeling of close, lingering aberrancy; it was as if each door prized open to the mystic void had raised the temperature a few more infernal degrees.

Once I was out of customs, I waited in the reception room for a young Indian student whom I had met earlier in the flight at the Damascus stopover. He was returning to his family, having been for two years at London University. When he entered the outside lounge, I realized that the entire entourage of strange looking people who had been bobbing and chasing around in the lobby, must have been his extended family. As I was thinking of ways to bow out of the scene politely, the young Indian pointed over to me, and that was it. The weird group was on its way, aglow with smiles—a kind of bizarre cosmic welcoming committee.

In pungent clouds, they pressed into me in a tight circle. I was immediately bedecked from all sides with flower garlands. I would have been hot as blazes wearing only a bathing suit. But hemmed in by this crowd, and wearing a tweed coat and a tie to boot, I felt as if I was in a waiting room outside the gates of hell. Sweat soaked my garments. As I craned my neck to make sure my luggage was still by the wall, what looked like the chief of the tribe threw something over my head that I had hoped he wouldn’t. It was a giant metal tinsel wreath, tombstone-sized that he held almost threateningly. I thought I had made my point to him the way I had been eyeing the thing, but he seemed oblivious.

I transmitted obvious displeasure to the chief in order to avoid this coming torment. He stood back, gave me a dazed smile and lifted the thing back over my head. As he did this, I got a closer glimpse of him and spotted some of the specific things about him that had been troubling me.

The chief patriarch was larger and more arresting in appearance than the others. None of the dishevelled clothes he wore fit, and like all western things made in India, they had glaring flaws. The effect was clownish. This extraterrestrial quality about him derived from his bowling-pin shape and the lizard-like proportions of his face. The face, in turn, was covered with a white opaque powder giving his face an off-greenish caste. Running down his forehead were two fine red lines that joined and continued down his nose. Between the lines in the center of his forehead was also a large blood-plasma-red dot. As he stared at me with bulging expressionless eyes, I located his most arresting feature. He was rolling his giant mouth around, chewing some kind of substance that looked like bits and pieces of whatever creature may have happened to scurry by him. His teeth, gums, mouth, and lips were crimson from betel leaf.

The face finally spoke, and after that, the others chimed in, assaulting me with a barrage of silly questions that I learned later was a standard procedure for any foreigner.

The whole crowd raced me outside the airport where five black taxis waited. Twelve of us piled into the first car, including the guest of honor and his father. The rest swarmed the other taxis. I sat next to the driver and felt as though I was being squeezed up through the ceiling. The son and his father were in the back seat fused together with an assortment of heads. Our car led the procession at breakneck pace down incredible little roads and lanes. From that point on my attention was wrapped in awe at the scenery. To my amazement, the passengers started asking me questions, almost completely ignoring their long-parted relative.

We flashed down mazes of little roads through occasional patches of countryside. We were going from Palam airport towards old Delhi, bypassing as much of New Delhi as possible by sticking to the suburbs. Some of the areas must have been extremely old, perhaps even ancient villages that had been overtaken by the sprawling mass of New Delhi, and now incorporated into the diverse character of the city. Contrasted with these primitive huts and adobe houses were the new constructions going up right beside them. The net effect of grafting New Delhi upon ancient India was perhaps the most peculiar anomaly that I had ever seen, like the final campaign of an architectural madman.

In this hazy post-monsoon season of October, the afternoon sky took on a peculiar smoky glazing that seemed to burnish everything in sight. This gave things a certain otherworldly quality. Yet the vividness of the experience jarred me time and again.

For forty minutes, the car raced through nether worlds. My reaction was to look for something familiar. I had heard about the sheer numbers of people in India, but now faced with it on the road, I knew that I was unprepared for what I saw. Like a slow-motion replay, streams and processions of people drifted up and down the road. Some were so dark that they were almost blue-black, and all were emaciated and worn down to a nub. Many almost naked, some practically choked by their tribal ornaments, and some painted and striped, they walked barefooted on the scorching road across occasional rivulets of semi-fluid tar. The feeling hit me time and again, as I looked into their faces, that a great fear was in each of them. Not that it was always evident, but it sat beneath the surface waiting to emerge in moments of quiet.

In fifteen minutes we must have passed by ten thousand gaunt faces. Where did they go at night? Did they all stop in their tracks at sunset and, like June bugs, curl up in mud holes and heaps of refuse where the night world would scurry over them? And if they fell down in the noonday sun, did the procession just stroll over them as they were glued to the road in puddles of tar?

All over the landscape were small fires, glowing coals, and things going up in smoke. Acrid mixtures of odor filtered in through the window. Tar and oil-soaked rags burnt while fires smoldered beneath metal drums. Blended with this came various kinds of smells of other burning things, amongst them, dried cow dung. And then there were odd human smells. And when we passed open sewage canals, a putrid odor filled the air to contaminate everything.

Because of disease, the Indians battled as much with the inner enemy as they did with the outer enemy—or nature gone mad. While they starved and burned on the outside, parasites gnawed from within, so that they hung on the very edges of life itself from birth until death. I felt that they had been cheated. This aberration of nature, which was theirs, had made it impossible for them to have even once inhaled a breath of fresh air, drunk from a fresh stream, or for that matter, eaten in the festive abundance of a Thanksgiving dinner. It was as though their land held a curse.

The new constructions sprouting along the road became commentaries on India’s present physiology. Four months prior, in July, when I was in Spain’s Costa Brava, I thought that I had seen the worst civilization could offer in terms of holiday resort skyscrapers. The plaster cracked before the buildings were done, water seeped through the walls, the exterior paint washed away in the rain, and in about three years, the “luxury flats” would become slum tenements.

By three years’ time, half the pipes would burst and clog with minerals, much of the plaster would crumble, and most of the electrical wiring would no longer work. By then, deep rivets and cracks would run along the outside walls of these Spanish oceanside skyscrapers until they ran the length of the building and steel beams protruded. It would take little more than a fire-cracker placed strategically to get the entire wall to fall apart, leaving the building open like a doll’s house.

Yet compared to these new constructions going up along India’s highways, the Spanish resorts were bastions of immortal rock. In contrast, they looked like Versailles and had the indomitable strength of the Parthenon or the Great Pyramids. I wondered how the Indian buildings were even able to stand. Just then, a passenger in the back seat asked me if the buildings in America were really much better. I told him a little better, wondering what India’s worst would be like if this was India’s best.

The outer scaffoldings were logs tied together with rope, like crude tinker toys, while handmade cinder blocks were cemented in place with a mixture of mud and a trace of cement powder. The result was an array of buildings that leaned every way, resembling a work of modern cubism.

Another thing occurred to me: that many of the painted zombies along the road were the builders of these eyesores. The workmen stumbled around in the burning sun with cankers on their feet, carrying stones and cinder blocks. I wondered how much mileage each got per handful of rice. Their construction was like the desperate struggle of a wounded soldier realigning the sandbags of his bombed-out trench. How could there be artistry or beauty here?

By what rationale was Delhi modernizing? Was it not in pursuit of some illusion by which India could walk into the drawing rooms of the western nations, and have problems in common with them, problems in megatechnology? Yet the fuel for this illusion of modernity was India’s dying men constructing symbols of affluence on a stark desert.

Down the road, I saw four men teeter and sway as they tried to carry a large stone across a gangplank onto the upper story of a building. The children around the base of the building stared up vacantly, flies swarming their faces.

The car swung out of the suburbs towards the heart of old Delhi, the twin of New Delhi. After a mile we stopped in a main street that resembled a back-alley thieves market in Cairo. A crowd immediately gathered around our car and stared in vacantly. The host told me that they were stopping for cokes at a family-owned store to celebrate my coming. When they told me that the slipshod little stall was a chemist shop, I became depressed, I felt even worse when I saw how the cokes were refrigerated, in an oil drum outside the store. As they were lifted out, the bottles dripped a brownish liquid.

I resolved to remain with them as briefly as possible, no matter how blunt I would have to be. Contemplating the brown liquid, I wondered what gave it its coloration. I could just see it used in a Peace Corps seminar on “Death in Asia.” They would fly back a specimen in vial, subject it to microphotography, blow it up on some huge auditorium screen at a convention and almost wail in dread while the speaker muttered something about “the genuine death experience.”

In minutes we stopped next to one of many public dumps. It lay in an open space between a cluster of buildings. The relative’s home, an apartment building, was down a filthy dirt path, where I followed a little boy appointed as my guide. He scurried ahead, assuring me in broken English that the other people would be bringing my suitcases.

As it turned out, the home of this smartly dressed fellow whom I had met at the Damascus airport was not in the

intriguing oriental gardens that I had pictured, but up a dark crusty flight of stairs where the smell of urine clung to the walls. Soon I would leave. With their help, I hailed a cab. The cab sped through Old Delhi towards New Delhi.

The late afternoon air of old Delhi smelled like sugar syrup, rose perfume, and cow dung. We entered the heart of it, moving down past the Red Fort and the Super Bazaar. We whirled past beggars, cripples, streetsellers, abandoned children among the masses of people. The road itself was a sensory overload, consisting of scrambling people, herds of bicycles, cows, cars, motor scooters, taxis, and auto-rickshaws.

The driver bobbed and weaved at such a high speed and so haphazardly that on about twenty occasions I was positive that we had maimed someone. Finally I yelled at him loud enough to make him jump. He flapped his hands and sped on babbling for a while about “if a man has an accident, it is his karma only.” He quieted down after each refrain as though it was a routine that no longer required the use of his mind. Soon we entered New Delhi.

Yet even with a new westernized veneer, New Delhi still contained a basic seediness of character. Comparatively new as much of it was, nothing seemed to keep the process of disintegration in check. Behind even the most freshly whitewashed hotels and buildings loomed this feeling of decay—entropy.

There was a quality about Delhi that no amount of westernization could hide, and yet I could not quite put my finger on it. Perhaps it was more than simply a common attitude of the Indians or their way of life. Perhaps I was sensing a wholly different reality hanging in the air—a philosophic entity that colored and infused everything in its realm. I suspected that this feeling was the thing that was really bothering me, and not the strange sights and sounds.

As we went off Connaught Circus to Parliament Street, I wondered if it would be possible to objectify this discernment by juggling things around—say transplant an acre of buildings from Manhattan or Los Angeles to see if the philosophic entity still lurked behind the settings.

The cab abruptly stopped at what my guide assured me was the best bargain in New Delhi, the YMCA. It reminded me of a modern hotel with its plate glass windows, air-conditioning, terraces, five stories, pavilions, rear courtyard, and a large modern restaurant. I could hardly wait for a cold shower and a bed in an air-conditioned room. Perhaps after two days of sleep I could handle India, but for now the chaos and heat had worn me down.

At the desk, as I was licking my chops in anticipation of the bargain of the decade (it was India after all), the clerk informed me that the minimum price for a single room was forty-five rupees without meals. It was higher than the YMCA in New York City! I could feel a slow rage coming on that I wanted to direct at the hidden enemy who had been juggling everything askew, and shaking apart every pathway that I tried to put my foot on since I’d landed. My mood blackened.

Suddenly I despised the place and the skinny little demon behind the desk with his sickly condescending Parisian-matre’d-at-Maxims look. I knew that with the most serene and urbane expressions, these Indians were asking foreigners prices which violated their whole private sense of proportion; prices that would have staggered and infuriated them. And they had learned to do it coolly, as though it was to be expected; they knew that such rates were a drop in the bucket to Americans.

I gripped the counter so hard that the wood began to crack as I stared into his eyes. As my pupils dilated, the little smiling demon began to waver and fade. My adrenaline was summoning an archetype as alien to his people as the mysteries of the Himalayan night were to mine. As opposed to the cards and enigmas up his own cultural sleeve, he was blind to the few cards that I might have brought from down-home places he had neither

sensed nor seen, anymore than he had been to a stock car race down the side streets of Los Angeles or a hell ride on a motorcycle outside of San Bernadino.

When something in him broke, I told him in a controlled tone that his prices were higher than in New York City, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the thinking of his staff and management. He nodded appeasingly, and I stared at him just a fraction harder before leaving.

In the haze of Connaught Circus, through crowds and pavement-sellers, I managed to get my bags from the cab and up the steps of Hotel Continental, a dilapidated old British hotel. I was moving in no matter what. I had been awake for days. Jet lag in India was like a bad psychedelic. When I entered the room, I was even more discouraged.

The heat of the seedy little room made sleep impossible. All I could do, as noises and smells filtered through the walls, was roll back and forth in bed. The voice of Bill Buckley, who did “the Naz,” rolled through my mind saying, “. . And if you go off to some place. . . and you get stuck there and can’t get back,. . . then there you jolly well are, aren’t you!”

The room was so humid that it was like floating on a cork in a thermos bottle of hot boullion. A lifesaver would have melted on a table in about three minutes. Not only that, but what must have once been a good bed now sank right down to the floor like a hammock, and if you tried to lie on your side or your stomach, it was like a sustained yogic posture on a bed of nails, because the springs came through the mattress like burrs and made such a loud noise that they sounded like the day shift at an iron foundry.

I watched the large blades of the ceiling fan spin around and soon noticed the road map of cracks networked across the whole ceiling and down the walls. I also noticed fleeting movements at the periphery of my vision. When I moved my eyes to catch the fluttering, it stopped. Suddenly from nowhere, I saw the source of the movement.

Fluttering again then freezing, I saw a large Indian Gekko, a lizard. It ran along the ceiling with as much ease as most creatures move along the ground. I pictured it losing its grip at night right above my head, falling on my face, or worse, in my open mouth, where it might flutter for a while and leave an amputated tail to dance on my epiglottis.

Dismissing this last horror, I decided to pursue the movements of the lizard across the ceiling, down a wall and over to another, disappearing. Perhaps it had meaning to its existence, perhaps it had none—to be sure it would never know. It just went on without the thought of not going on. I watched to see how it would get from one point to another over various cracks and barriers.

The movements of the creature across the ceiling and walls became a battlefield of forces on a miniature

scale. It was putting its life on the line for its own ends,

whether a small fly or the logistics of getting from the cellar to the third floor via an interface. I lay there in a growing abstraction in which the noises and smells of New Delhi seemed to vanish, and the scene above my head became a haze of crazy patterns. It began to dawn upon me that these enigmatic patterns were a representation of my own struggle, working through different paths and obstacles towards some sort of incredible goal. Somewhere on the map, be it far or near my destiny, was my present location, where I now lay alone, staring up at the ceiling of an old British hotel in New Delhi.

Then I began to trace the forces and events that brought me to India, perhaps to reassure myself about why I had come.

Chapter Two

A Crack Through Time

A

s I lay in the Delhi hotel room eyeing the ceiling, I became increasingly riddled with self-doubt. The culture shock I was experiencing hit me with the terrible realization that I might be

dead wrong—about everything. I began to question things that I was so certain of when I boarded the plane in London. I started looking for almost any excuse to fly back to the West—out of the chaos and stifling heat and poverty. It was all humiliating to that core of beliefs that I had been willing to stake my life on. Now I needed to search my mind and soul to salvage this costly trip, and above all, those beliefs and mind states that spurred it on, goaded by years of anticipation. Suddenly my foundation was cracking under me.

Enervated by heat and fatigue, I mulled over my life as it seemed to unravel in the cracks above me. I chose to view the more arterial cracks as representative of the major experiences that brought me to where I was— presently under a ceiling fan in a sweltering downtown Delhi hotel room.

I had come to India with the impassioned intent of reaching enlightenment, which various forerunners—mystics, yogis, saints, rishis, godmen, and illumined seers—all claimed to have attained. Nirvana, Samadhi, Moksha, Cosmic Consciousness were all names of this super-conscious state, of unity and oneness with the godhead—of knowing “the Supreme Self.” Vedanta taught that “the highest self is one’s true identity, which is none other than the godhead, the ocean of being.” It was a promise that paled anything that this world seemed to offer.

If I chose to say, “I am God,” in Sanskrit— Aham Brahmasmi or Tat tvam asi—full of esoteric phraseology, using the name of

“Brahman” or “Overmind” for God, then the little

ripple in my conscience wasn’t too bad. If the defini

tion for God began to drift more to the Biblical God,

I was not so sure I could pull it off. A nervous afterthought lurked in my mind, hinting of the event between Eve and the serpent. Did he not promise her godhood through the vehicle of higher knowledge? It was a chilling thought.

Suddenly the lizard lunged into a hole, and my mind’s eye came out on the other side.

A friend and I were on our motorcycles. We crossed Memorial Bridge into Virginia. Soon we plunged down abandoned highways, through forgotten towns and villages into a part of Virginia I had never seen, nor have

seen since. The grocery stores and houses we passed seemed to have popped out of the nineteenth century. Even the roadside leaves sat as though they had not been moved in fifty years.

The rains that had covered the Atlantic seaboard for the past few days left the air crisp and clean. In the late afternoon, mists sprang from the ground, lacing the forests and roads with mystery.

In the twilight, we passed down an archway of eight-foot hedges. After a maze of rivers, paths and hills, we turned on our headlights and entered an abandoned farm. The farmhouse sat alone, and we passed it towards a neighboring meadow. We parked in a distant field and laid our sleeping bags against a giant old oak that rose into the sky, its branches like tremendous ganglia. The fog cleared almost immediately as the stars popped into view, one after another, through the branches of the black tree above us. Neither the sun nor the moon was present, only the stars which stretched across the cool sky like burning jewels.

Our purpose was to take the largest dose of LSD-25 either of us had ever heard or known of anyone taking — 3,000 micrograms —- or ten times the standard dosage. But before we took it, we followed the recommended procedure of “coming to terms with one’s past” at the base of the tree. At midnight the pills would go down.

I was not sure whether I believed in God or not, but I was willing to do almost anything to find the truth. Our world, in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Counterculture, seemed in the throes of a huge identity crisis.

The masses in our culture skimmed the surface of life, hiding in materialism and empty socializing. Their unexamined lives sped by immersed in trivia, junk food, entertainment, and contrived dramas to lend significance to life where there was none. They certainly did not know the answers. It was obvious to my generation that something was lacking in our world. But where were the answers? The exalted institutes of learning? modern science? mystics? Jungian therapists? psychedelics? (certainly not the dead liberal churches).

I had briefly looked to psychotherapy as having the answer. Then one day it got out: my psychiatrist really didn’t know the answer. Like everybody else, he had “copped out” of the real question and made little concessions here and there, lying to himself when convenient, to make things work. What he was left with was a sort of closed-off bottle of the eternal present where he simply did not allow himself to think about either the future or ultimate issues. Whether he was reading some obscure Spanish poet, riding his motorcycle, or sailing his yacht, something gnawed away in the back of his mind. He knew it, and finally I became sensitized enough to know it.

When he confided that his demands on life were not so ambitious as to require knowing whether life really had any ultimate meaning, that he was content merely to be holding a glass of brandy on the open seas, I knew that he had successfully amputated a whole side of his nature. He was the logical positivist whose system almost fit together, and when loose ends started flapping in the wind, rather than face the truth, he was too old and tired, and too proud of his neat system of learning, so he looked the other way. Living in the moment was his bottom line. So I finally took responsibility for my own life and left my psychiatrist. It was an act of liberation. Mysticism seemed to be the doorway that I was looking for in my search for ultimate meaning. And there was a chemical key.

I was sold on the psycho-chemical approach in a celebrated book by Alan Watts entitled, The Joyous Cosmology. Here was the testimony of a contemporary mystic. He did not pray in the desert; he did not fast in the wilderness, he did not stick to rigid covenants, nor was he required to spend months in isolation. Rather, his meeting with god was as subdued as a New England tea party, in part because he took LSD on a farm in the country and spent the time surveying deeply significant things in this newly altered state of consciousness. Watts was propelled perhaps by his academic learning in Oriental metaphysics, for he, too, like Alpert and Leary, was a Harvard professor. Watts the explorer could record his observations to a world in waiting. In flowers and leaves lay subtle mandalas; behind winds blowing through fields was a joyous cosmic dance. And behind all things, asserted Watts in a characteristic statement for mystics, was an absolute consciousness; one that was all permeating, that expressed itself through diversity, and yet was not that diversity.

The early psychedelic “trips” of the 1960s were modeled after Watts or Huxley and done with reverence. Early pioneers read Jung, Blake, Emerson, and Martin Buber and then took their trip in a wooded setting, blasting off with LSD-25, Mescaline, or psylocibin. Only later were people taking off in droves like hordes of lemmings. The pop subculture would “OD.” at rock festivals or while watching a film. They would “toke up” on “Panama red” and ride around chortling in packed convertibles. All awe vanished as they soared on STP while watching Donald Duck cartoons or tripped at the drag strip, on the Los Angeles freeways, and laundromats and super burger hangouts. Stoned people in shopping plazas were getting the cosmological eye and could discern great nuances of truth

in the most pedestrian things. The real groovers could sit at a soda fountain all day long behind some incredible concoction and glean deep truths from the way “the cat on the other side of the counter flexed his nostrils, while sucking a limeade through a straw.”

Timothy Leary Live

S

even months prior to the motorcycle trip to the old abandoned farm, before the era of seasoned trippers, I was

walking by Tasso’s cafe near Dupont Circle one day.

I saw a billboard posting a seminar to be given by

Leary and Alpert, the world ambassadors of LSD,

who were to preach their version of the gospel at

the Unitarian Church off Columbia Road. I could

n’t wait.

Their manual, The Psychedelic Experience, was one

that I had studied extensively, and it seemed to go

beyond Alan Watts. Based on the Tibetan Book of the

Dead, translated by Evans-Wentz, it was only

geared for the “ego-deaths” and bardo experiences

encountered during the drug session. They claimed that the parallels were perfect between the Mahayana Buddhism of the original book with its elaborate Tibetan symbolism and the experiences under LSD. The cover design was extremely clever. It was taken from a print of Hevajra Buddha in ecstatic union with his Shakti, the Tantric female who represented pure energy (Calcutta Museum sculpture), the kind of thing that would titillate the imagination of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I peered through the door of the Unitarian Church that October evening of ‘65 and saw that the aisles were overflowing, the center floor was packed with chairs, and people were leaning against the walls and squatting on the floor. In the dim light of center stage, leaning against the podium was the main speaker, Tim Leary, the psychedelic revolutionary himself.

Leary’s face creased with a strange kind of wisdom, and his voice, soothing and pensive, drew us deeper into subtleties and concepts. It was evident that Leary had found a key of terrible power and knew with this that the world could not remain the same. Whether through flower power or mass

ecstasy, the world would be transformed, and nothing that the “straight society” did could stop the momentum of the truth that they had found. Eyes met, heads bowed, as people uttered “wow” and knew that the whole thing was happening.

“LSD does not produce the transcendent experience, it merely acts as a chemical key. It opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures, and in turn releases an enormous amount of awareness-energy. Understanding, describing, and intelligently using these released energies has puzzled scholars for thousands of years. Yet herein is a key to the mystery passed down for over 2,500 years, the consciousnessexpansion experience, the pre-mortem death and rebirth rite. The Vedic sages knew the secret, the Eleusinian initiates knew it, and the Tantrics knew it. In all their esoteric writings, or road maps, they whisper the message. They have figured out the pathways and landmarks. It is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to tune in to neurological processes, which flash through at the speed of light, and to become aware of the enormous

treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in the body. Psychedelics can open this door.

“Are you aware of the complexity of the human nervous system? Let me tell you a few facts, because

this is truly amazing. For us, the voyagers, the following neurological numbers take on the meaning of mantras.... The human brain receives one thousand million signals a second. . . or . . . we possess between ten and thirteen billion brain cells. . . or . . . each brain cell is connected to, on the average, 25,000 neighboring neurons. . . which, by the way, has been estimated by some scientists, if you consider the thirteen billion and the 25,000 possibilities per neuron, to equal the estimated number of atoms in the universe, if you trace down every possible permutation of each cell. And that’s mind-blowing, isn’t it?

Leary paused with an amazed look on his face. His tone became confidential as he went on to share profound secrets, almost talking in whispers.

“We know that you cannot describe the ecstatic moment in static terms. Nor can you produce ecstasy from static symbol sequences. Indeed, there is no need to communicate because everything is already in communication. You are plugged into the multiplex network of energy exchanges. The only communication you might need is a mantra, a prayer, or a brief syllable with a guide—who knows and is grounded beyond ego-games.

“Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, and I, since the Harvard IFIF, and Castalia explorations into awareness, have become very conscious that right now there are no existent road maps or languages that totally and satisfactorily describe the psychedelic experience. Due to this, we have become very careful not to impose our own models on the experience. I shall give you an illustration.”

Slouching on the podium, alert yet looking tired underneath, Leary drew up on his elbows and perched his heavily lined face on a thoughtful finger. I wondered if in all his hundreds of trips he had not somehow burned himself out. Was he siphoning off energy from what might not be an infinite source at all, but a limited God-given biological source which, like a fool’s gold, would show up in time?

Leary spoke in allegory. “The difficulty of charting a completely new universe of awareness for which we have no language can be compared to something far more mundane.”

“Picture, in some barren primitive region of Australia, an aborigine tribe that has been completely screened off from present-day civilization. They have not seen the world beyond a twenty-mile radius of their cave dwelling, they have never seen a two-dimensional picture or drawing, they have never seen the wheel, or woven cloth. Their only instruments are stones, and their only garments are furs and leaves. Nothing that they have is symmetrical outside the natural symmetry. They have not even seen a truly straight line, or metallic surface, or glassy surface. Their language, in morphemes and phonemes, does not exceed a given vocabulary of a thousand words, and none of them has abstract meaning. Their light is the light of day and the light of the moon. None of their food is cooked, or for that matter grown; it is wild and, therefore, picked, and so depends fully upon the moods of the forest and the generosity of the season. They live controlling almost nothing in the isolated wilds.

“Now presuppose the existence of a device that allows for the disintegration and simultaneous reintegration of matter, that is, a teleportation machine. Picture the savage standing alone in the woods. Next, picture his

instantaneous reappearance in a totally alien universe, the very center of Manhattan, perhaps in front of the United Nations building or Rockefeller Center. And let me make an interesting footnote here: unless the savage has a stable grounding in some form of religious truths, he will experience utter terror.

“Once he is teleported back to his culture, hopefully sane. . . in a higher sense . . . then he has yet to cross the gulf of semantics to tell his tribesmen of the amazing experience. To do this, he will be required to invent a completely new language. Even this is not enough. For even if he has catalogued memories of sensations into new words, he has still failed to understand the new sensations in their own context. Therefore his road map will be gibberish. He cannot describe the height of Rockefeller Center, for instance. Chances are his memory will be scrambled due to the fact that his nervous sensor is only used to taking in a very tiny percentage of sensory input that people in a modern city are required to process. He will be in a synesthesia of car horns, sirens, construction jack hammers, juke boxes, underground subways, jets and helicopters, the rumbling of cars and the whine of a million engines. And while he hears this cacophony, he will be seeing millions of tons of glinting steel and glass; shiny metallic objects travelling at a frightening speed, colored lights and glowing neon, colored fountains, and foreign shapes behind windows. He will smell almost every type of sophisticated hydrocarbon. Anything from AquaVelva and Channel Five, to ozone, propylene, phenylhydrazine, chewing gum, super detergents, germisols, synthetic flavors and all manner of esters and ketones, methane and other assorted sewage gases, exhaust, and restaurant smells.

“After an LSD experience, we emerge as overwhelmed, intrigued, frightened, or as ecstatic as the savage teleported to New York. And our mission of finding a language, and creating a road map may very well be more difficult than his.”

In white Chinos and tennis shoes, Dr. Timothy Leary, ex-professor at Harvard University, stepped behind the podium, beyond such ego games as needing to look chic: indeed, oblivious of his effect. He walked over to a control panel and touched a switch while reminding us, “The nervous system, in its complexity, can deceive us by rearranging and integrating sensory input; none of us experience the raw data of pure sensation until ecstasy. On a very fast level, here is how data first come to us. . . by very fast vibration.” He said this with a knowing smile (perhaps conscious of the parallels with mirthful Buddhahood).

The lights in the hall went out just as the brilliant flashes of a stroboscope saturated the room like the light of day in intermittent pulses. The effect was disconcerting. Suddenly the room became an animated cartoon, as all flowing ceased. Abrupt and mechanical, the auditorium became a palisades park for robots. I looked and saw the entire hall dancing—head turnings, arm gestures; grimaces were jittery, like the movement of insects. The reaction of the audience was gleeful and intoxicated. In this new freedom, inhibitions were chucked out of the window for fun and games, like a birthday party for twelve-year-olds. When the lights came back, the audience had broken down, and it was a very satisfied Leary that gazed out into an audience of giggles and bobbing heads. It was evident, through Leary’s eyes, that due to the level of cosmic truth present, the audience’s ego-facade and its static perceptions had been reduced.

Closing the session, Leary assured, “Remember that throughout human history, millions have made this voyage. A few whom we call mystics, saints, or Buddhas have made this experience endure and have communicated it to their fellow men. You must remember, too, that the experience is safe. At the very worst you will come back the same person you were when you started. Whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that it is the mind that creates and projects them.” The psychedelic movement was becoming a quiet revolution.

The Leap

A

t a fraction past midnight, I swallowed the capsule, unscrewed the top off my canteen, and took a large gulp of water. While I had time, I arranged everything in order at the base of the tree, knapsack, sleeping bag, flashlight, while I

zipped up my motorcycle jacket, an Air Force bomber’s jacket, to fight the cold dampness of the night air. While I had spent the past three hours reflecting, my friend had fallen asleep. It seemed that fate had ordained me to go it alone, something that by most tripper’s standards, even considering a quarter of the dose I had taken, would make me a local hero.

Trusting my own resilience, I accepted the fact that I was in effect sitting on top of an atom bomb. I theorized, after emerging from an irreversible reaction, that I would either come out on the level of Gautama Buddha or the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoon. An hour later, propped up against the base of the tree, I opened my eyes.

What looked dead was conscious, as all of creation crackled in dialogue with itself. Meanwhile my thoughts and perceptions began to fuse. Stars joined together like drops of mercury across the night sky, forming multicolored webs—breathing and arching across the heavens, across galaxies and onto the very ground where I perched. Grains of sand, pebbles and trees, ebbed and flowed with this impersonal consciousness.

If my own consciousness was layered and branched in a million places like a Banyan tree, it was now as though the rest of my being had squeezed what was most essentially me, into the top stem of the uppermost branch. Down to the deepest root, there were a thousand astral levels at war within me, as my uppermost self was fighting to stay aloft through the aid of a million subordinate parts that were straining and tugging. Even below these, there were endless rumbles and shifts, like a subterranean city, while every archetype that I had ever encountered in former LSD trips was presently being encountered and held at bay.

Soon I was above even the dazzling beings and demigods that were so special before. The celestial cities and realms were like the lower strata of a pyramid whose fascination I had sacrificed—things great enough to inspire the master poets and painters, I later reflected—in order to approach the level of the truly abstract: pure thought, pure knowing and pure being. If I did reach the purest state, I could diffuse like a drop of bright Mercurochrome throughout the ocean of thought.

Every second that passed, one of my million parts was answering something comparable to the riddle of the Sphinx to propel me on to the level of super-consciousness. A new truth came: I, like every man, was a hierarchy of men, a living society, a kingdom and a nation, and before I became enlightened, I would have to bear the weight of all truths to encompass the total history of my nation within a fraction of time. After a thousand other thoughts, I passed on to the next level of realization.

I shrank and became so small that “humbling” doesn’t describe it—I became insignificant. Far less than a blade of grass that has just been given the brief consciousness to realize what it is. It might hear the voice that shakes the mountains of the worlds, “You thought you were a god and you stir only to find that you are a blade of grass lying helplessly on the forest floor—even the ants walk over you. How tiny you are. Your delusions end. Can you bear this, and yet live?”

Then the sheer jet-like force of what was happening to my mind became too great. I became a twig riding a tidal wave and knew that all I could do was hang on for the ride. I clutched the field as though ducking the rigging of a hurricane-swept deck. It seemed that something other than the drug had taken over, something supernatural perhaps.

As a force drove my mind at a speed greater than thought, I could feel something far older than I navigating my course. I passed ten thousand crossroads per second, and took the proper turn on each one of them. I feared that if I tried to grind down the gears at this point, I might wake up on the outer edges of the galaxy, not much higher up on the phylogenic scale than a cucumber. And after all the billions of years it took me to work my way up to becoming a human being, I didn’t want to blow it now, and enter a form of loneliness that was unthinkable.

My speed increased even more, as I became a diamond wedge cutting the finest possible arcs, from one juncture to another. Then it occurred to me that on some level I was helping to open the doorways for the wedge. That I was being asked questions in which a correct turn could only be made by means of a totally spontaneous truthful answer. Anything else would veer me off course. Like the Day of Judgment, a lie would be impossible damnation, because there was not an atom of time to deliberate. And anything but the truth, it seemed, would have fragmented me all over the cosmos.

Immediately before I lost all grasp of language and thought, I saw a doorway into a new universe. It was a pinpoint of light. To fight the acceleration required to approach it was to fight the mass of the entire universe. I could not tell whether the distance within the pinpoint of light was as minuscule as the angstrom units or wave measurements between atoms, or almost infinitely huge, as the distance from one side of the universe to the other.

At the barrier of the pinpoint of light, I enter the eternal present. All thirteen billion brain cells within me seem to turn inside out, as though reforming into a complex and higher structure that was latent. Each cell recites one of my former names, and as a nation, I hear the thirteen billion names of my subjects who are me. Once in the pinpoint, all ties with the world vanish. I enter ‘the unborn.’

A caterpillar cannot experience the butterfly transition and remain a caterpillar; one structure cannot be smuggled across into the other—that is impossible. That also went for me. Thus at most, my experience could be paralleled from one universe to another, but nothing could cross the barrier.

I have never been able to summon what happened for a stretch of time after going through. Months later I assumed that I had entered into “the void,” also known as the clear light or the Ocean of Brahman. That I had been allowed by a gift of God to experience the highest mystical state, what the Hindus call Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

Before dawn I was coming down fast, yet still within a hallucinatory sea. My main object was to remind myself of the great truth I had learned and not lose hold of its intensity. From past psychedelic experiences, I knew of the distracting irrelevance of the post-peak comedown and how it could quickly muddy up anything before it, no matter how overpowering and brilliant it was. Therefore, I preferred to go sharply from one continent to the other and be in the world crisp and awake with a clear memory, not battling bullfrogs and hearing monsters scream in the swamps.

As the dawn broke, I chewed a Thorazine tablet, the popular LSD antidote. But that didn’t stave off the invasion of absurdity. Indeed, I could hear what I termed “the cosmic super chuckle” well on the way.

While I spit out stems and weeds to kill the taste of the tablet, which was about the bitterest thing I had ever eaten, mocking sounds filled the air. The trees started to scream with laughter; they shuddered, flapped, and wailed with scorn.

In the harsh glare of dawn, amid an earful of gnats, I could hear squawks, quacks, screams and whistles amidst a constant babble of innuendoes and trivial conversation. It sounded like Resurrection Day for the social snobs of the world, and to coin a Twain phrase, the air was “all full’ a tears and flap doodle.” Through the bickering, it sounded as though all the former members of the Boston social register were in opposition to the royal lords and ladies of England. Perhaps, I thought, I am tuning in to a sector of hell where this really exists, where every self-important fool has to battle it out with armies of other “creme de la cremes” for an eternity. They’ll have incredible maps, charts and tables referencing genealogies and purity of family blood, cross-referenced and carbon-dated for authenticity. And there will be libraries of photocopied family emblems, shields, ribbons, and coats of arms, and all hell will break loose over these things.

Then I saw the source of the sound. The trees, on that early spring morning in the mountains and pastures of rural Virginia, were weighed down with birds that hung like clusters of grapes, of every size, shape and color. Quadrants within a given tree would be in opposition to other quadrants in the same tree or in other trees.

When I caught them out of the corner of my eye, the heckling began, in hoarse impersonations. “Kothmick Conchussness . . . honk honk, peck peck .... Kothmick Conchussness ... honk peck . . . KOTHMICK CONCHUSSNESS????” And scornful laughter rippled from tree to tree .... “Don’d bee Prupostrus....”

Finally I saw about five giant crows hogging an entire section of a tree, cramping the other birds. They were smoking cigars, wearing top hats, and dressed in different formal dinner jackets. Amazed at this find, I looked around and noticed that sure enough, all the other birds were rather fashionably attired, some in recent Paris fashion, others more sedate. The babbling got louder.

Within ten minutes I had blown a circuit and was climbing the tree like a demon, stoning and shaking other trees, and finally flinging huge sticks and logs at all the trees. My friend awoke by the time I had emptied every tree in the neighborhood and told me later that rather than resembling a “Maha-God-possessed-what ever-it-is,” I looked like a werewolf, covered with twigs, drooling, and almost purple with rage.

Still feeling in shaky territory, dizzy and semi-rational, I came back to my senses and conceded that it was time to head back. I knew that were it not for the Thorazine, it would have ordinarily taken me four days to reach the point of being able to ride a motorcycle.

My friend led the way, and my anger abated as the profoundness of the experience hit me. I had in some way been recreated and would never quite be the same again, almost as if my molecular configuration had shifted. There was a new freedom and a new impunity to life. Certainly physical death was no longer a threat, now that I knew something about eternity— I was part of eternity. An oil streak or not on the highway, I would proceed through planes and bodies until one day I would forever permeate everything that has ever existed or will exist. Not quite so burned out now, I began to feel mellow. Perhaps I should say cosmically mellow, whatever that is.

I tried to tell my friend about cosmic consciousness over peppered eggs and hot coffee in some roadside cafe in the hills of backwoods redneck Virginia. I was intense as I spoke. “Man, this whole thing is no joke, if you even smile right now, you are betraying your fundamental nature and may forfeit an unbelievable chance.”

Then some hillbilly music blared out of the jukebox. So I had to start screaming at my friend on the other side of the booth. “Right now while I’m eating these eggs, there is an underlying consciousness at work inside them that makes their existence possible. I know; I’ve been there and that was only five hours back.”

Suddenly the whole place started filling with rednecks; it got noisier and more absurd, and we must have looked weirder and weirder, screaming about god being in the eggs . . . and the table salt. And the jukebox sound became more outrageous with Nashville hollering.

Here you’re trying to talk about the most important secrets in the universe, and they roll out the worst scenery possible. Even the wallpaper had badly painted cacti, dude ranches, deformed cows and bramble bushes.

If only hours back, I reflected remorsefully, some neurological cybernetic had shifted my cortical relays and boosted my IQ to half a million to give me a mystical experience, I must be somewhere near the bottom of the rain barrel right now. So the answer was to split before the pinball machines exploded, and before a whole crew of really sophisticated demons, dressed like true-blue, hominy-grits-eating cowhands, appeared on the scene to yodel, howl, stare, finger triggers, and tear the place apart.

In the shimmering air of American highways, en

route to Washington, D.C., we motorcycled back

into civilization, passing glinting chrome and neon

signs in the suburbs. The midday sun was baking me

like a reptile, and I felt dull again and a stranger to

all the truths that I knew so deeply only a few

hours earlier. I knew that as soon as I returned to

my room, I would sleep for a long time and

slowly emerge in the quiet hum of an air-con

ditioner to redigest an experience that, even if

only a tenth as powerful, would still have

changed my life dramatically.

Chapter Three Immersion Into the Subcontinent

W

ith the cowboy cafes, country stores, glinting chrome, and hot exhaust

of rural

Virginia still hanging in

the air of my mind, I lay in

the New Delhi hotel room

staring up at the ceiling

fan. My doubts about India

still remained, in part

because I knew that I had

blundered in my imagin

ings. My preconceptions

from all the guidebooks

were almost irrelevant to

the India I was now in.

And I wondered if my spiritual preconceptions were not equally divorced from reality.

After my “trip”, when I returned to the University of Virginia, things started opening up. Truth became, in fleeting glances, like a medieval lover in the window of a palace, sweet but remote. And the ecstasy of life was the pursuit of those rare glances, as I, like an enraptured lover, would try to discern her form as she changed to more elusive guises. Truth became not only the rock hard surface of the Bible, with the dazzling power of the parables of Christ, it was also the sublime and the beatific, and came as a cosmic lover. Like the

woodwinds of Krishna in Brindavan, it danced across planes of existence, bringing all things to their source. Yet like the Universal Form that Krishna showed Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurushetra; it was also awesome and imponderable.

That fall, expecting a revelation around every corner, I was walking one day down a section of Alderman library I had never examined before, containing books on mysticism, Vedanta, and metaphysics. Feeling a quickening of the spirit, I eyed the shelves intently. Standing apart from the other books was a thick umber book printed in India entitled, Sri Ramakrishna, The Great Master, by Swami Saradananda. After flipping through its 900 pages and many photographs, I landed upon a picture of “the Master,” so incandescent and blissful, I took it home.

I trusted the thick umber book above almost all other books, mainly because of its tone and the thrilling possibilities of its philosophies. Beside it sat an authority I considered without peer, that I felt it was equal to saying essentially the same thing, only with greater depth. It was an adjunct to the Bible, unfolding higher mysteries, and I assumed this was because the present age was now ready to ingest a more sophisticated spiritual food than the peasants of Judah. Could they have fathomed concepts like Ayurvedic and Tantric physiology, a science of the hatha yogin to gain mastery of his spiritual metamorphosis into atma paramatma (impersonal Godhead) from Jivatma (limited time space soul)?

Immersing myself in the mystical book, I decided to overlook any disagreements it might have with the Bible. When I was more spiritually mature, then I could synthesize all “apparent” differences and spot the unity between the two traditions. Of this, my intuition was certain.

Other enlightening books soon joined it on the shelf. The common denominator of all of them was that with amazing optimism, they portrayed a universe free of any ultimate evil or absolute peril. And the seeker was prodded to march ahead fearlessly into the center of a cosmic playground.

Contrasting with the simplicity of the Bible, the path of the mystic was, in the higher esoteric systems, labyrinthine and fraught with introspective paradoxes. Yet to the seekers, such challenges magnified their own sense of achievement, exalting in their efforts like a climber on the crest of a mountain peak. To be sure, mankind at that hour would be ignorant of the incredible triumph, but to the man standing on the peak of the mountain, this would not detract from the victory one iota. The further the mystic went, pursuing his microcosmic nature, the more he would come to realize his sense of dominion over ordinary people. The more “conscious” his actions became, the more they would affect the entire universe until self-realization totally abolished the difference between self and cosmos.

My bookshelves mounted with books from India’s holy orders; Sivananda’s, Aurobindo’s, Ramana Maharishi’s, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s, and Yogananda’s ashrams. Each school claimed to have the most evolved means of yogic salvation and enlightenment for the Kali Yuga (the present age by Puranic doctrine), be it Naad yoga (the concentration on the sound currents of the primeval Om within); Mantra yoga (using a combination of the “ten thousand” names of God as a vehicle for purification); Hatha yoga (mechanically attuning the nervous system to transmit the high voltage of enlightenment); Vichara Atma (pure philosophical self inquiry into the nature of self); or any of thirty assorted systems of Kriya, Raja, or Kundalini yoga. LSD led to Indian mysticism, which in turn brought me to India. Yet my perplexity in the Delhi hotel room was unabated.

I reminded myself that another key axiom within Vedanta was, “Don’t let outward appearances sway you from the bastion of truth within.” I was still overreacting from the trauma of culture shock. Yet what could I trust?

I wondered if the entire mystical system was not a subtle deception in itself. The yogic antidote to doubt is, “Do not think. Do not conceptualize. Trust and relinquish yourself totally to the process.” Perhaps the final barrier to trust would be the abolition of that last inkling of a suspicion that such an admonition was not the cosmic mind after all, but Satan.

To dispel such insecurities I had to work through my beliefs. I was positive fundamentals could not be wrong. That God existed, I would stake my life on. That God was eternal, ever-present, omnipotent, I would stake my life on. That God was present throughout creation, thus formless, and probably impersonal, beyond time-space, I was most sure of.

I was also quite sure that all created things in the universe contained God and, in fact, were God on some fundamental level. That because of this, an immense universe drama was unfolding where God was enacting a billion parts, and that such a movement was an eternal cyclical self-revelation.

Therefore, it seemed that since the universe was pure consciousness frozen into variant energy states, it took on different appearances to beings whose own awareness differed in magnitude. Enlightenment then was absolute identity with the radiant self of God, and only then did the physical universe, as we see it, disperse like a haze within the twinkling of an eye to reveal, forever and forever without end, an ocean of light.

By this same definition, “evolution” was merely a speck of this eternal consciousness working up the ephemeral scale from protozoa to superman, to rishi, through more intermediate characters than Shakespeare could have imagined, had he lived ten thousand years. Ultimately, the self became God.

T

he answer to my stalemate was to get out of bed, and take a walk in Delhi. Ten minutes later, I emerged into the night air of New Delhi amidst a smog of curry and spices from the jumble of sidewalk cafes and stands. Beggars and peanut-sellers still lined the pavements. Apparently my probings had not changed the nature of Delhi.

As I moved ahead, it was as though I had become radium coated in a Geiger-counter society, instilling the thought I should get over the notion of ever having peace of mind on an Indian street. It would never be like a walk in the park of Brussels, but more like being under the spotlights of World War II Munich at curfews where every movement is indelibly recorded by a thousand searching eyes.

Cars drove on the left-hand side, so even the flow of traffic was disorienting. When a policeman would signal one lane to move, it looked like a cavalry charge on the flow of pedestrians on the other side. Vespas would explode out from the front line followed closely by motorcycle-rickshaws and taxis. When they plunged into the crowd crossing the street, bobbing and weaving around them, I expected to see the road strewn with bodies. But it all seemed to work out as if by a higher law of logic, like looking down on a huge ant-hill where thousands of ants are in a constant boil, but rather than knot and tangle, the flow goes on endlessly.

Not wanting to drift too far, the first evening I stayed in the area of the huge downtown Connaught Circus, where half a mile of stores formed a circular arcade around a circular park. Near my hotel block was also a square park connected to the circle. It had a parking lot for hundreds of taxis at one end, and a modern, almost Mediterranean restaurant at the other end.

As I crossed the street to the square park, I looked back and saw that diagonally across from my hotel was something that was either an amusement park or a bazaar. I headed towards it, trying to acclimate to Delhi. It had more colored lights than most amusement parks. The high wall around it was painted muslin with a barrage of disproportionate ten-foot demigods, like a madman’s Disneyland. Over these chain-linked perversities blared big metallic loudspeakers. They looked like British military surplus goods from World War II, dented and banged as though forever being packed off on trains with the fair.

As I stood in line to enter, it was so noisy that I had to plug my ears. Apparently this was pop music from Indian films, called ‘Bombay cinema,’ a far cry from my impression of an India bathed in a rich harmony of sitars at every street corner. Within the fair, despite all the to-do outside, nothing of consequence was happening. Makeshift stalls were selling small trinkets from different Indian states, incense from Bombay, scarves and kurtas from Benares, sandals, cigarettes, Coca Cola, brightly colored candies, bracelets and bangles, nose rings, earrings, paintings, posters of gods, and all manner of statuettes of the Hindu pantheon. And amidst all this, bored Indians stood around either smoking beedies (betel leaf cigars) or chewing away the spice filled betel leaves that they called paan. One of them told me that the giant demon whose open legs formed the front gate was not a demon, but the monkey creature Hanuman, who was the mythological consort of one of India’s God men, the avatar of Ram.

As I left the fair to head back to the square, connected to the larger circular park, I saw the fifteen-foot Hanuman fluoresce above the fair, winking and scowling, perpetually ready to hammer a huge mace down on the people with its giant muscular arms. At the fenced-off square, facing a large downtown cinema house, I stood for a long time scanning the lights of Delhi. The sounds were beginning to quiet down as most of the stores closed, and much of the crowd thinned out. People went in and out of a westernized nightclub near the cinema house, and then over to my far right, the bright neon lights of the American Express building glowed above the city. Under the dark arcades of the circle were the glowing coals of peanutsellers as well as a number of human forms stretched along the pavements. Hunched against the whitewashed pillars were the deformed silhouettes of beggars and cripples, while inside the arcades, taxi drivers pulled up and stretched their meager bedding.

After scanning the circle, I looked over the fence in front of me, noticing something that seemed to pull my attention. Beyond the glow of hashish pipes and beedies, I discerned that the small group of people, though dressed as Indian peasants, were gigantic in size. Then as I took a closer look at the lightness of their features, I visualized who they were: the original trippers from Big Sur, Laguna Beach, and Los Angeles leaving their crash pads and geodesic communes for an Indian pilgrimage.

Now in a seedy downtown night in Delhi, sprawled out in a public park in clouds of hashish smoke, they gave off distinctly wasteland vibes. As though what they had found was such a terrifying ‘bummer,’ their only resource was to shut it out and pretend that, whatever it was, they never saw it.

Nevertheless, they kept their cool as they passed around chillums, knowing “it’s all a dream,” because life was a child’s paradise of candy cane gardens and lollipop boulevards. And who needs to be responsible when there are no rules and no final ultimates? Just freedom and plenty of room for truckin.’

Even if their teeth crumbled and their arms atrophied like toothpicks, they would nod their heads to the melody and clap their hands to smile at desolation in the face, like existential heroes, only to blink out in the final beat of the dance tune.

I saw what was no more than a ninety-pound frame strain. Teetering against the night lights of the cinema house like a skeleton, I saw that it was a girl. Then bending over a sprawled body, I saw her proceed to lift it, as her back faced me while she pulled at its shoulders. It didn’t appear as though she had the strength to lift a small bundle of newspapers, and yet, knotting its shirt like a rope, she tugged and leaned all her weight back and jerked again and again, straining and stumbling. Finally the body managed to turn half-sideways, while bracing an arm on the ground to begin a gradual process of lifting up. She stood rigid as a lamppost, as the arms of the body worked its torso up her as if shimmying up a tree. Finally it stood up and swayed against her, perhaps a head taller than she was, and I saw that it was a man. While balancing him, she reached down and picked up two giant black pretzels. Then, as he got into the two body braces while she continued holding him, it resembled an insect dance. Apparently he was paralyzed from the waist down, and judging from the carved wooden pretzels, it had happened in India.

They entered the streetlight as the stoned-out chortles of their California buddies intimidated the night air. He looked like a decadent ‘Jesus’ with stringy blond hair, goatee, hollow eyes, and a single large brass earring. Bare-footed and dirty, he wore a ripped and shredded white cloth, wrapped robe like around him, revealing two gray bird-like shoulder blades. Around his neck were Hindu prayer beads, and tightly pressed between his fingers was a tiny smoking beedie that glowed against one of the braces. The girl was equally wasted, a little scared, a little defiant, holding her own, and proud of it. I would learn that there were many like them in India.

They had become obscene. It was as bad as watching a man who has to carry his stomach and intestines in a clear plastic bag that flaps over his belt buckle. Yet I wondered if the humbling fact of becoming an abomination had lessened their arrogance. Or did the pride of defiance grow like cancer?

Straining for equanimity and trying to numb the raw edges of the experience, I watched the two hippies make their way slowly across a downtown street. At a distance they pumped up and down like two rusty automobile cylinders, as his lower half dragged and swept the hot pavement like a giant paintbrush till they vanished into the shadows. They were a chilling vision.

In a matter of days I moved out of the hotel at Connaught Circus, after I discovered an upscale international youth hostel in the diplomatic enclave. Brand-new and four stories high, with restaurants, lounges and a library, the Vishwa Yuvak Kendra was funded by a number of major foundations. It had clean bunk beds in dorms with ceiling fans, showers, and a large modern dining room. Its prices were in line with what I initially expected in India. From the constant flow of foreigners passing through, I collected information on just about every facet of India, from how to handle cobra bites to temple-exploring in South India. And I made a list of the most talked-about holy men, gurus and ashrams.

By the end of three weeks, either things had changed or I had adjusted. Whatever the case, I was ready for full immersion into the vast body of India, like sliding into a scalding bath by inches and degrees.

A Himalayan Journey

M

y first jaunt, at the end of the three weeks, was to the Himalayan hill station of Rishikesh, one of the four or five most sacred places in India, famous for its hermitages, ashrams, and yogis. (Briefly, my companion was an acquaintance from the youth hostel on board to share expenses. He was a Californian, had a Sanskrit name, a ponytail, spoke English like an Indian, carried a flute, dressed like a monk, and continually reminisced about Lord Krishna. I couldn’t stand him.)

We blasted to the huge, crusty, clamoring railway station in old Delhi at one in the morning by motorcycle rickshaw. We raced through back alleys and slums, bouncing along cobblestone roads as our luggage bounced around in the open booth. At the railway station, we waded over bodies half-asleep, pushed through crowds with our luggage over our heads.

It was hard to believe. At two in the morning, the platforms were loaded to the brim. Like all huge formerly British pre-war terminals, the old Delhi station had over eighteen platforms, two-thirds of which had long steam locomotives hissing and blasting. And the empty platforms were no less packed with people, luggage, freight, and farm animals. Our platform was halfway across the station, a good quarter-mile walk, where the narrow gauge trains pointed to the mountain regions of Punjab, Simla, Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh.

When we got to the platform, a hooting train was about to leave for a destination we did not know, since the only writing on or around the train was in Hindi. As turbaned porters flocked us grabbing at our bags, the train slowly began to move. In a small area at the base of a fifteen-foot high mountain of burlap sacks, my companion threw down his luggage that I was to guard. He ran off looking for the platform official, who at that point was in an hysterical crowd of screaming Indians, and shouting louder than any of them. We still had ten seconds to do something worthy of an obstacle course at the Olympic games. Namely, with armfuls of luggage, run up and over a hill of burlap sacks, through twenty yards of solid people to a point along the train where people did not hang out of the windows like clusters of grapes. Not only that, but the way the train was moving, we would finish up near the end of the platform at full sprint right on top of the faces and heads of the fruit sellers and beggars perched along the platform edge like birds. I gnashed my teeth and muttered, “the answer to this is a bulldozer with a jet engine.” Then my companion motioned me that there were now two trains behind schedule, and that ours would not be pulling in till three in the morning.

When we finally boarded the right train, I realized why people reserve berths three weeks in advance when riding third class; I had a narrow wooden board to lie on, perched above the seats, where the skeleton of a midget might just barely have room to turn over. And at peak hours, lying on one of these resembled being tucked on a ledge overhanging the abyss of hell. Thirty people right below me played cards all night long amidst the clucking of chickens. And anytime we pulled into one of twenty-five stations, tea sellers would pop their heads in the window to scream “Chai,” giving a stupid smile every time you rolled over to give them a look of disbelief. By early morning we had gone less than a hundred miles in eight hours, and that was as far as the train would go. The next train to Rishikesh was in five more hours. So we were stuck in Hardwar, the town of Guru Maharaji, which was no more than an hour’s car ride from Rishikesh.

We immediately hustled a taxi with a number of middle-class Indians and roared off. After an hour’s driving, I asked the driver when we would get there, while we were driving through one of the many noisy mudholes en route. As dust spilled in the window from some cow-packed fruit bazaar, the driver, said, “This is it.” I almost went into shock as the other passengers filtered out in front of a tea stall with a blaring radio. Controlling my temper, I told the driver that he would have to do better than this, and drive on till it even vaguely resembled what I had expected. He didn’t understand me, but kept on driving, seeming to know where to go.

“So this is the timeless abode of the great yogis and meditators, and the perennial source of vedantic inspiration,” I thought. I had pictured caves, waterfalls, and forests tucked in the evergreen foothills of the Himalayas where men of vast wisdom sat in ethereal silence. I did not expect this. Rather, I had been led to believe that this was a spiritual magnetic pole on the earth, like a geological cosmic leak in the universe, occupying both this world and the realm of spirit. And certainly with such a history as this place had, at least some kind of transcendental aura should infuse the area.

But the actual town of Rishikesh had no such magic, and that hurt. “The Woodpecker,” a name befitting my companion, and I were the only ones left in the taxi and beginning to wonder if there was any place worth getting out for. When we got to the famous Sivananda “Divine Life Ashrama,” we

got out above a chain of crusty nondescript buildings overlooking the Ganges. I was hoping that this was really a nightmare and that I would wake up any minute now. Our goal was the ashram of the famous Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

After we passed through lines of beggars, many of which were lepers at the base of the Sivananda ashram, by the blackened press building and the ashram ayurvedic medicine stalls, we crossed the Ganges on a motorized barge. Along the other bank, we passed scores of multicolored temples until we reached a gravel path that went up a mountain to the barbed wire gate of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ashram. This was our point of separation. They let me in, but they would not have a thing to do with the woodpecker, who was becoming increasingly hysterical, He ranted and threatened to write the President of the United States, the United Nations, Indira Gandhi, as well as Interpol. Then he spent hours sitting hunched up at the gate, to protest their persecutions and hyprocrisies against him, to embarrass them before the world, and to hasten cosmic judgement upon them.

Once in the ashram itself, I was reminded of the more plush areas of New Delhi transposed to the mountains. By any Indian standards it was high class, and by Rishikesh standards it was like an elite country club overlooking an abyss of confusion. Here in lay a fragment of a chance that my eastern dream would leave the rubble that it had fallen into, and find some kind of a resurrected hope.

Maybe Maharishi’s proselytizings and commercial ventures were justifiable in a contemporary world unreachable by any other means, I speculated. And his rock tours with the Beatles, Donovan, the Beach Boys, and his later appearances with Mia Farrow did not taint the meditative superstate

he had gained from meditating in a cave for twelve years.

As I sat patiently in the reception office near the gate, I looked at all the pictures and billboards of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, on television, in San Francisco, boarding planes, and sitting in transcendental serenity. One pamphlet I read added a finishing luster to his growing charisma, giving glimpses of his own coming of age. It stated that while he was a physics student at an Indian university, he went to one of the national holy festivals given once every twelve years, known as the Kumbha Mela. There

amidst half a million people, most of them yogis, he met with a spiritual lighthouse, one of the four Saraswatis of India and the Pope of the northern quadrant. Maharishi was summoned as a disciple, made to give up all his attachments, and follow his master. He was given an apostolic mission by the great guru as being the eventual bridge between Vedanta and the world of technology. But this was only after twelve years of intensive sadhana in a cave where he would be the first to use the same technique that he was to teach the rest of the world. Now he was methodically fulfilling that vision, hence expansion, and hence, an organization that was growing across America and Europe like spores.

One of the minor pawns was the dark-skinned yogi who ran the reception office in front of me—feet up on the desk and screaming over the telephone—he would give an occasional smile of supreme satisfaction. At first he had been bedazzling, with almost theatrical features. Shoulder length jetblack hair, deep set eyes and high cheek bones glistened darkly in contrast to the airy white brilliance of his gossamer robe. But now as he yelled over the phone, he looked less like a young master and more like someone hired from the Calcutta underworld to act the part.

Cranking the wall phone and flicking the dial like a one armed bandit, he screwed his mouth up and yelled, “Hallo, hallo. . . Operator hallo, Rishikesh

pharmacy.” Then after a lewd smile, he would make a side comment about “no good, hippies is always smoken a hashish, comen here and makin too much troubles.” When he got the pharmacy and ordered canteen supplies, he spoke in guttural tones.

After eating a fiery hot vegetarian meal with the yogi on the floor in a back room, it was now time for all of us who had gathered at the gate to finally be led into the heart of the ashram for a ‘Darshan’, or face to face meeting with Maharishi himself.

The house sat on a far corner of the ashram, perched on an overlook where far below glinted the Ganges and vistas

of Rishikesh. The building itself was unique for India, resembling a contemporary medium priced structure in a woodsy suburb outside of Omaha, Nebraska. Nothing stupendous by American standards, but for India it was another matter entirely. And here it reminded me of some Hugh Hefner layout for bachelor yogis.

The multi-windowed living room, actually the darshan room, like many Indian residences in the upper classes, was without furniture except for a large rug, front altar puja table, behind which sat an elegant chair. The rest of the residence could only be entered behind Maharishi’s chair, where hung thick curtains. The table itself, covered with a rich Varanasi silk, had an arrangement of fresh flowers and several sticks of pungent incense burning. And sitting on the wall behind the chair were pictures of Maharishi’s guru, the late Saraswati, as well as a few posters of himself at a recent Los Angeles darshan.

After forty or so Indians gathered on the floor, as close to the front as possible, Maharishi entered from behind the curtain, as the room went quiet in response to his patient hand gesture and smile, which immediately established the gulf between the enlightened man and the average person.

Throughout the session, Maharishi spoke in Hindi. I later found out that his sole contact with his fellow countrymen was through these biweekly public darshans. Yet the meeting itself was anticlimactic. The Indians seemed bored, second-guessing Maharishi’s replies, but asking questions anyway, and Maharishi didn’t seem particularly animated.

By the end of the meeting I was depressed. Maharishi had not given off a really noticeable aura of spiritual incandescence. I wondered if some of his public stalemates in the West, as when the Beatles publicly disassociated with him, left him with the only alternative of sitting in Rishikesh in his own fortress. At least few could judge him, while he grew fat on successive waves of zealous disciples. And like a yogic Howard Hughes, he could remain in hiding while the empire kept rolling on.

Throughout the meeting, Maharishi toyed with one flower after another, breaking off the petals as though to marvel over the exquisiteness of his own handiwork. His hair seemed brushed in some areas and dishevelled in others to create an overall effect of rugged indifference. An almost perfect line of silver white hair cut down the center of his beard. So much did it enhance his features that it became a sore point of my suspicions. His laugh, too, had bothered me. Lacking the glee that it once had on recorded interviews across America and on his latest record album, it seemed deflated of force. And underneath I repeatedly sensed sadness, perhaps even a bitter irony, smuggled across and transformed into benevolence that would soon die in midair. Behind the curtains came waves of musty air carrying wisps of ponderous flute music that seemed to weave the air with spells, yet beneath this came the haunting beseechings of an icy void.

What kept me from heading out of the ashram at the end of the meeting was a very knowing look from Maharishi. It made me reconsider some of my gut reactions, and say to myself, ‘Maybe one day in eternity, God and I might be laughing about how a little bit of flute music almost tripped me up for another million years on the wheel of rebirths.’

By late afternoon I had explored most of the ashram, the rows of cabins near Maharishi’s house for his long term disciples, the cabins and dormitories for his three month trainees, the large lecture hall full of modern recording equipment, where I attended that afternoon’s lecture, and the large vegetarian cafeteria where I filled myself on soybean pie, herb tea, gruel. Maharishi agreed to initiate me “free of charge” and let me attend lectures like others, saying that my enthusiasm of launching out to India alone was proof of my sincerity.

Maharishi told me to go to the front office and that his disciple would find me a place to stay in Rishikesh, a clean quiet villa of a devotee. It turned out to be a large compound, like a Moorish villa, owned by a wealthy outof-towner who had appointed the owner of the Rishikesh pharmacy to oversee it.

Back at the reception office, my new thrust of enthusiasm suddenly died in midair as the yogi behind the desk said almost mockingly, “Hey cowboy, we initiate together. Maharishi call me and tell me to fix date. I will give your mantra and special ceremony.” I could feel my own yogic serenity boil off into a heated anger. This was the last dude I wanted initiating me. Deciding not to insult him, I waved and ran off looking for help. In five minutes, generating energy like a beacon, I ran into Maharishi’s number one disciple, the thirty-five year old Canadian, Dick Britton-Foster, who looked like a combination of the Schweppes man and the Cambridge mystic. He respected my sensitivity about who should initiate me, likening it to a marriage, and offered to perform it himself under Maharishi’s guidance. But only with the approval of the guru.

When I busted into Maharishi’s private darshan, he apparently already knew about it. With a generous smile he gave me the go-ahead to have the Frenchman initiated with me in a few days, and that he would arrange for it to take place in his own private cave beneath his house.

The night before we were to be initiated, Rishikesh was ablaze with one of its major yearly festivals. All night long, loudspeakers screamed away, parades combed the streets, and firecrackers exploded amid religious rallies and local plays. By eleven, the Frenchman and I gave up trying to sleep. We wandered from festivities to street corner debates between yogis from different holy orders. One of them, who looked like Little Stevie Wonder, complete with wraparound shades and fire engine red tunic, latched on to us till 2 a.m., giving us his life story with the inside word on various local gurus.

By the time we reached Nirulas restaurant, mentioned in Fodor’s Guide, as marginally acceptable and yet eight levels above any other stall in town; it looked like Jazz Festival Week at The Heavy Metal Kid Cafe, East Village. One guy looked like Bob Dylan, a group at another table resembled

the Fugs mooching off “The Mothers of Invention,” another dude looked like “The Thing From The Year Zero,” but the center of attention could be heard a block away.

“Listen Ya Schmuck, the Guys One Wid Outa Second.” When he told us he was Yogi Schwartz for the fifth time, we believed him. He also ran a Hatha yoga school in Brooklyn. With a Miami tan, beads, bare-chested, and swaddled in cloth, he looked like the proprietor of a fourth rate Miami hotel who had lost his marbles and gone native after driving his Cadillac into the bay, walking off donned in a hotel sheet.

I sat at a nearby table, giving him incredulous looks as he yammered on, occasionally toying either with his beads or his horn rimmed glasses. He told me his story.

“Listen to me for a second, pal. I’ve spent a billyun yeahs lookin for the guy with the answas. He turned out lookin like Bozo the Clown. So what. If he wants to play with crackers like a two-year-old, that’s his business. I was judgin him right, left, and centa, when I walked up to him in that crazy circus tent down the way. I figured him for a klutz. Ya know what a klutz is? It’s sometime worse than a schmuck. He had my brain mapped out before I even left the States. And afta he gave me this compasshunate smile, let me tell ya, he tuched me on the head like this . . . BLAM . . . my brains were blown out all ova the place. I had to cry at his feet for two hours. He’s one wid outa second, don’t let anybody fool ya.”

After maybe three and a half hours of sleep, we were up with land at fivethirty, jarred out of our sleep, as usual by the tubercular hackings and coughs of the janitor of the badly deteriorated premises. In the raw morning air, we dashed across the crusty cement courtyard to take douses by squatting under a freezing faucet in a dark slime-coated metal shed.

By eight we were making our two-mile walk on the Rishikesh side of the bank to reach the river barge in front of the Sivananda ashram. Not far down the winding road, most of the dilapidated houses and confused smells had thinned out, leaving only two unpleasantries on this side of the river. The first was the circus tent housing Yogi Schwartz’s guru, plus about a thousand disciples including most of the crew in Nirulas the night before. The old power yogi from Calcutta had a hundred watt amplifier on full power that morning, playing bhajans and mantras, and sankirtans that had carried all the way into Rishikesh.

The only other unsettling thing after that was the odd silence of the religious arcades on the opposite bank. The temples interconnected with weird gates, entrances and hallways painted in ghastly bright pastels that highlighted their other worldly shapes. The most unhinging section of all was a temple with a courtyard of huge cement lotuses and figures that portrayed scenes out of the Hindu epics. Above the main pathway at the entrance, elevated glass cases protruded from the walls containing life-sized manikins of the main Hindu Gods, clothed, four-armed, blueblack with enigmatic death mask expressions that either stared far off or right down at you through either two or four perfect glass eyes.

On every trek to the ashram they confronted me from their elevated dusty cases, and I inevitably wondered what state of mind a man would have to be in to see them as divine. Certainly the smell of cotton candy and saltwater taffy combined with the sickly burblings of a Wurlitzer organ would end my ambivalence. But for now, there was always the possibility that I was hung up by ‘cultural variables.’ Their system would say that for every man, there is a unique way of approaching the absolute. Yet why did these temples generate a feeling not of exuberance or sanctity, but rather a voidness, desolation and death? And if this feeling was a sample of what the rishis called Nirvana, and should Nirvana be an absolute increase of this force, then perhaps it was the most terrible cosmic insanity conceivable.

Half an hour later, with flowing beard, serene blue eyes, and wearing a cleanly pressed white silk kurta, Dick met us in the garden of Maharishi’s house, signaling us with silent gestures. Pausing for a moment, Dick looked down the overlook to the clutter on the other side of the sparkling Ganges where the tent ashram of the Yogi from Calcutta could very clearly be seen. We heard a faint din of honkings, gongs, cymbals, drums and chants. Then

DESCENDING INTO THE CAULDRON 47

with a look of almost transcendental remorse, Dick said, “I really wish those idiots would learn to shut up.”

As we continued around the house, I envisioned a hundred transcendental yogis of the Maharishi camp attaining at least a “causal plane” consciousness, siphoning off some of the creative energy of the universe, and then erecting an impermeable barrier around the tent ashram. Then I pictured old “One wid outa second,” calmly wandering outside, with hands on hips scanning the local geography, and then with a calm blowing of the nose and perhaps the utterance of a mantra or two, obliterating the entire mountain from the face of the earth on the other bank, while simultaneously expunging the memory thereof from every conscious being within a radius of hundred miles. He might then resume his place and begin chanting again.

The cave beneath Maharishi’s house was dark except for a little flickering candlelight. Built entirely of natural stones cemented together, the inside wall had an altar beneath which sat a wooden carpeted platform rising two feet above the flagstone floor. The altar was a compartment built into the wall containing flowers, and incense, and other initiator items, including fruits, flowers, and white handkerchiefs that we were told to bring.

In the dim blackness I knelt with my eyes shut and hands on knees. Dick was slightly behind me on the elevated platform. He had apparently put on some very faint music, which continued to float in from some remote corner. I tried not to use my ‘conceptual mind’ as I had been warned.

After a long silence, Dick recited a Sanskrit prayer in a subdued voice that resounded about the cave as though it would continue ringing in the rocks forever. Then he began a series of chants, following this with the slow repetition of a single word, “Iyengar . . . Iyengar. . . Iyengar,” that though quietly spoken, still mounted in force as though to suggest a greater volume that wasn’t actually there. Without a single skip in rhythm, the mantra went from Dick to me, as I now carried it on, somewhat puzzled over our perfect unplanned synchronization. Dick then shared his feeling that my nervous system was probably pure enough to combine pranayama, that is, power breathing, occasionally with the mantra.

By the end of several weeks or so, after Bernard and I had meditated steadfastly every day at the prescribed hours from early down till late at night, my mantra had lodged itself into such a fixed tape loop, that it would reappear of its own accord at all times of day and night. Maharishi had enthusiastically queried if I was getting good results, and not wanting to seem ungracious, I replied that I was. Though in fact my mind was as noisy as ever, and the only experience that I felt might even hint of some higher consciousness occurring, as one might expect, on the bank of the Ganges beneath a tree, where, for an instant, I felt that I had a visual flash of the Pacific Ocean while repeating the mantra.

When I told Dick about the experience during a routine checkup, he nodded his head knowingly. Dick told me that eventually I would be brought to the source of all mantras, using my own mantra as a vehicle, and for that time, however long it lasted, would enter a plane of transcendental superconsciousness.

Then Dick told me that Maharishi experienced this incessantly, and I felt dubious. And then he confided that he experienced it quite often, and I felt even more dubious. And by the end of another week or so of hanging around the ashram, I felt dubious enough about the whole system to want to leave. And I was afraid that what was happening with my mantra was no different from amplifying any convenient, insignificant, sensory Will-o’the-wisp into a cosmic supernova.

I was still no less persistent in my belief that the real McCoy existed somewhere. I simply decided that Maharishi’s followers had been waylaid in a yogic maze. Like the vulnerable chip of bark floating down the river by reeds and bog, I wondered how far I would be required to skirt down the rapids before I reached the open ocean. Certainly the prospect of combing India after this was no welcome thought.

I knew that to rationalize away the search or freeze at the sight of the spiritual desert, would invite certain ruin. I had to look on. And I felt lonely. Where were India’s spiritual dynamos?

Chapter Four

The Ocean of Light in Sandals

I

nervously stood waiting in the large walled compound of a private residence on the outskirts of the city of Ananthapur, South India. It was an evening in mid-January 1970, and no more than forty or

fifty close Indian devotees were allowed inside. A large crowd surged at the gates. Three limousines quickly entered the driveway.

In the back seat of the main car was a figure donned in a brilliant red gown, whose hair raised up like a giant cumulus cloud of wiry black strands. This was Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, the most powerful spiritual personage in India, who counted his devotees in the millions. Claiming to be God incarnate as the world savior, and backing this with a profusion of miracles, Baba was known throughout the continent.

As Sai Baba emerged from the car, I felt an instant shock wave it would be hard to describe. It was quite unlike any feeling I had ever experienced before.

Traps and Landmines

B

y the time I had arrived in Ananthapur, I accepted the fact that, after four months of travelling around India, I had been defeated and that my search had reached its end. I was almost sure there was nothing to be found in India but dust and fools gold, making my pilgrimage to Baba nothing more than a last ditch effort. Indeed, I almost hoped it would be a failure, so that I could leave the exhausted continent and think things out all over again in some land of the living.

If Baba was as disappointing as the other gurus, that would be the last straw. I would leave satisfied that I had persisted in my

search beyond reasonable expectation. The one thing that kept me in India this long was my dogged refusal to accept the invalidation of my beliefs, no matter how much evidence to the contrary kept rolling in. I wanted to be dead certain they were wrong before letting them go.

I knew that if I scrapped the entire mystical system that I had so deeply loved, the ordeal that I feared most was having to start at ground zero in the search for Truth. If my greatest cornerstone, intuition, had betrayed me and could no longer be trusted as a standard, I would be in limbo.

I had been through a number of disillusioning journeys. The Calcutta episode was a shocking three-and-a-half week experience that could have been a book in itself, with me ever swimming through oceans of people as I headed to ancient temples and ashrams on the bank of the Ganges. I left Calcutta on a huge Indian train with demonic images in my mind of a possessed man at the Dakshineswar Temple glaring at me. Then there was the chaotic and oppressive worship service at the ancient temple of Kali. I had come to join the Ramakrishna mission, founded by an Indian mystic whose life story had radically changed my worldview.

Further disillusion had set in at Goa, the tropical ocean state on the Arabian Sea. When the boat pulled into Panjim, Goa, I was convinced I had found the ruby in the dung heap of India, especially after sailing three hundred coastal miles from Bombay to Maharashtra and much of the old Portuguese Indian state of Goa. Riding on the deck in the breezy sunshine and the temperate night, the small passenger ship rocked gently on the blue green of the Arabian sea, passing beaches dotted with lush palms, black fish

ermen, and brilliant white sand reminding me of a south sea “Typee.” This I loved.

But soon the pristine natural goddess of Goa began to show signs of acne. Calangute and Anjuna beaches were the main hangout for various Western head trippers besides Katmandu, Varanasi, and Kulu Valley, and were inundated with people who ‘burned’ each other on one hand, and then complained about the depersonalized societies from which they came without seeing any contradiction.

I rented a hammock on the porch of the Royal Hotel, about a hundred feet from the water’s edge. I could read in the shade, talk, or take a quick swim. I could walk a few hundred yards to the government-built multi-story tourist hotel that towered above the palms, thatched huts and thousands of hand-built sailing vessels used by the native fishermen. In the dining-hall, I could eat rice-fish-pilaus for thirty cents and watch the same dudes from the East Village, who crop up no matter where you go, swaggering, hip, and looking for a quick roll or a joint. Now and then, in the French sector of the dining-room, someone dressed like Mahatma Gandhi would stand up, hold a wine glass above his head, let it drop, and scream at top volume an inch or two from a bewildered waiter’s face.

My stay in the fallen paradise ended with a frenetic rock festival instigated by the local guru, an ex-Harlem jazz artist named “Eight Fingered Eddie.” It was on Christmas Eve, when the mean temperature of the night air and the sea was around eighty degrees. The five hundred participants looked like what Woodstock would have become had it lasted for three years instead of three days. From late afternoon onwards, processions of hippie tribes strolled up the beach from every far corner along a two mile stretch, emerging out of their thatched hut communes, rented cabins, tents, or VW campers. They gathering twigs and sticks for a giant bonfire in front of the “host’s” rented house. By dusk, sand dunes were littered with semi-clothed people whose bodies had been painted, striped, polka-dotted, nose-ringed, long-haired or head-shaven, and any combination in-between.

I approached the mass gathering, joining the throng several times. By midnight I headed back for my hotel porch. By then things were really “groovin’” in a constant roar of Nepalese gongs, ceremonial Tibetan thigh bone horns, guitars, violins, sitars, and top volume acid rock. As columns of red smoke billowed up into the moonlit sky from the glowing bonfire and hundreds of hashish pipes, the scene reminded me of Mount Vesuvius erupting on the foul city of Pompeii, pressing depravity to the limit.

The next day I left on the return boat to Bombay, and I got to hear the rest from two guys who decided that the Goan hippie scene was not the answer. During the all-night party, one group of soul brothers ransacked almost all the cabins along the beach, grabbing anything from cassette machines to passports, including the host’s cabin where the music was provided. There, they made off with the entire stereo system when everybody thought that the record was just being changed.

Three French hippies sold scopolamine instead of LSD to several girls, then raped them, stealing their passports, and almost killing one of the girls in the ocean. The girl was found naked on the beach unable to speak. By late morning it had turned into a manhunt as half the beach was out for blood.

There were also nine or ten people who were either dead or completely insane discovered in a cabin at a far end of Anjuna Beach. The cabin looked like a hurricane hit it. The living room had been laid out with black sulfur candles, pentagrams, occult curios, stashes of the California powerhouse psychedelic, STP, and several dusty volumes on sorcery and witchcraft. Local rumors were that the group in the cabin had been constantly tripping for over three days while trying to summon up and control some sizeable demonic force. Evidently they got their wish.

It was no wonder Indians were becoming hostile to what they saw as defiant and depraved hippies from the West.

B

ombay was the last debilitating episode after Goa. I stood in the huge Bombay Victoria train terminal and played Russian Roulette on what region of India I would go to next. I spun away from the ticket window for the northeastern regions of Bengal, and went over to the Madras booth. I knew without a doubt that my last resort was the miracle worker, Sai Baba. Plans to see Krishnamurthi, the Aurobindo Ashram, or return to the Ramakrishna compound in Calcutta were dropped.

With ticket in hand, I had one last afternoon and evening in Bombay, a Saturday night, and I decided to spend the evening changing money. I had met an Indian at the tourist office early in the afternoon, and he told me that his brother needed dollars desperately to go to an American university and would pay a very good price in rupees for them, since there was no official means of obtaining dollars in India.

I had seen this same Indian before when I ate lunch at a B-class snack bar near the YMCA where I stayed. Always wearing the same purple shirt, black pointed Italian shoes, and black stove pipe trousers, he could have passed as a second-rate university student in India. He was a fast talker and would often change tables several times, speaking confidentially to whoever was there, and darting his eyes about so quickly I could not tell whether he was just hyper or, unlike most Indians, had an aggressive streak.

That Saturday night at around nine, we met in the rear gardens of the fanciest hotel in Bombay, the Taj Mahal hotel, conveniently near the YMCA and the waterfront. My feelings were divided. Strictly speaking, I sensed that I was breaking the law. But by a more liberal interpretation, I would be helping an Indian student by virtue of a direct swap of “property,” which turned out to be about double the normal exchange rate. And which, according to Time and Newsweek’s table of international monetary standards, was the ‘true value’ of the rupee.

Soon to part with over fifty dollars, I was nervous since this represented a good percentage of all the money I might have for some years if I were to stay in India.

On the way to the hotel, I did an instant replay in my mind of every solemn warning I had been given about money-changers, from Calcutta back alley counterfeiters, to Delhi con men who double count, palm notes, and call false police raids midway through the deal to scatter in five different directions with your money. And considering the loot by Asian standards, he might even be willing to crawl across half of Bombay’s sewer tunnels on knee-pads to make enough cash for an Indian with hustle to get into the contraband market or just buy a plot of land and get married, depending upon predilection.

As these fears mounted, I was awakened to the reality of evil as being not just as an abstraction to be easily transcended, but a power as concrete and lethal as a manta ray. Then I began to feel like a goat going for slaughter.

In the rear garden of the hotel, the guy in the purple shirt, the studentmoneychanger, squirmed in his chair as he talked to me across a small English tea table. He stressed that the sum of rupees at stake was an amount he could not carry around, and that I would have to wait while he went to get the money from an intermediary in room 306. His voice wavered, as a trace of fear shot across his face, which he subdued while mentioning that a delay could arise while his friend examined the notes for authenticity with a magnifying glass. This was the minute to pull out, screamed the witness in me. It smelled of a con game a mile off. But by now I was too hooked on making the whole thing work out. I was low on rupees and had been drooling over the deal all day.

Just before he got up from the table with the envelope of notes, I stood up, reached over, and pulled it out of his hand. “How do I know I can trust you, buddy?”

He tried to remain composed, but underneath was a starved street mongrel scowling at a washed, collared, pedigreed German Shepherd, but nonetheless, a German Shepherd. At first looking insulted, as though I had forgotten his brother’s need and had approached him instead of vice-versa, his expression changed to a testy bravado look of, “What’s a big rich American like you sweating over a couple of bucks—you big pampered fools, what do you know about real backstreet toughness?” As he talked, he almost forgot the transaction, occasionally looking slightly badass, “I wish that you had told me before that you were not really serious. This has taken a lot of trouble, and this friend is waiting up there now. This is risky for me and due to the risks, this is the way I have always done it. Besides, your traveler’s checks can be replaced.” It wasn’t his words that got me; it was what was coming through the punk.

As I stretched my arm back across the table to give him the envelope, I felt a blip pulse out of my eyes. In an almost psychedelic abreaction of hellconsciousness, my stare proceeded to “out demon a demon,” saying, “Now you’ve thought all along that I was basically a big amiable naive American hot dog who would probably whine in dread if you pulled out your rusty pen knife . . . so take a long look into these pupil while I open them up for you to see a few things. Don’t let the force scare you, after all those slums you’ve been through. Just take a closer look and don’t let me see you chicken out and break the gaze. Now what’s this stuff about you being a bad ass? No. It’s no joke, there’s something, a thing, back there called the Tennessee Mountain Spirit, and it’s going to jump into your mind for a second . . . and . . . if . . . you . . . don’t . . . show . . . the . . . right . . . kinds. . Of. . Terror. . it’ll . . have . . to . . tear . . out . . your . . large . . intestine . . pull . . it . . up . . through . . your . . nose . . sinuses . . and . . out . . through . . the . . top . . of . . your . . skull . . and . . then . . over . . your . . head . . like . . a . . cellophane . . bag . . . And . . if . . you . . whimper . . once, . . it’s . . going . . to . . clean . . out . the . . membrane . . with . . turpentine . . and . . a . . wire . . brush.”—A Burn Out of Silent Abyss Demon Consciousness—Well, . . . I bet you never thought this could come through a stare, eh?

As he left the table, there was really terror in his eyes, and I was no longer quite the same person. I had unleashed a mounting fury. I waited and waited.

Half an hour later, I was burning up with a kind of rage I had not felt in years. In a classic predicament, I was tied down and unable to confront the enemy. Not only had I been conned, but I was a laughing stock to many accomplices stationed around to keep an eye on me. “In fact . . . ” the dying machinery of my brain concluded as the last traces of lucidity vanished, leaving a psychic Doberman Pinscher . . .’ every jaded Indian in this garden knows just what happened.”

And I pictured them snickering under their breaths while I continually fidgeted, trying to hold back the rage and anxiety so as to look perfectly normal, if for no other reason than to deprive them of the pleasure of seeing me sweat it out. Yet the more I tried to hold my cool by looking reflectively up at the sky the more my face twitched and the closer to violence I was, and I was sure that this probably looked hilarious. And if one of them laughed I’d rip his arm off and make him chew on it for a while in front of all the others, and then go on a few little friendly visits from table to table, staring silently at some of them, and giving others a neighborly smile, while laying a meat axe on the table with a modest collection of internal organs and severed limbs.

I sat in the shadows, eyes enlarged with rage, staring up at the Bombay night that seemed to shimmer and ripple with a jet-black liquid energy. Knowing all along that he wouldn’t come back, and wanting revenge almost more than the money, I knit my brows in a familiar tough expression and whistled to myself just audibly, “Man . . . I should have just smashed his face before he left, phew. Now I’ve lost my chance and gotta stay up all night lookin for him.” As much as I wanted to ransack the hotel, it wasn’t quite time yet. And as little chance as there was of his returning, even that would be thwarted if he saw me hunting him down.

I agonized through the minutes while my metabolism revved away at 9,000 rpm. Cold sweat was pouring down my face. Added to my rage was an element of fear, that I had been seduced into opening the wrong spiritual door, and there was no way of telling what I had let in, or how long it would take me to stabilize The main horror was that I had lost control to the extent of allowing a baleful force within me to go into the Indian’s mind like a psychic wedge, all stops pulled back and mind dehumanized.

I got up looking for movement out of the corner of my eye. Because it boiled down to the point that if I saw a sharp movement by one of the Indian’s possible scouts in the garden, I would play naive till I worked my way over to his vicinity, and then absolutely take him apart from the face down in about a quarter of a second.

But no one in the garden even twitched. So I headed for the lobby, glaring forth hostility

like a beacon, hoping, if nothing else, that fear would make the right person jump and bolt.

Within minutes I was on the streets, pacing the area of the Salvation Army—where they had a warning on the bulletin board about an Australian and an Indian masquerading as money changers—then I went to the Gateway of India on the waterfront, and then the delicatessen. Soon I resorted to asking people about the moneychanger, giving a description, then stood in alleys, and rode a taxi to the area of the American Express, even though it was late at night and almost everything in the city was closed. I looked for him late into the night, and ended up too tormented to sleep much.

Early Sunday morning, I went off hunting him until an hour before the train was to leave for Madras in late afternoon. Finally on the train, it began to dawn on me how extensively I had blown it. I felt a pained remorse. There were still many areas in me that needed a complete overhaul. I only hoped that God was not yet too remote to hear my plea. I knew that while I had been in the hotel garden, I had either gone insane or suffered some kind of anti-mystical state. My nerve endings had been unshucked and torn down to bare wires. Such was my condition only days before meeting Sai Baba. Now I no longer felt I had anything to lose by casting my fate to the wind.

The First Encounter

T

he Bombay episode jabbed at the edges of my mind as I stood in the Ananthapur compound. I wondered whether Sai Baba would detect it, and my consequent despair. The door of his limousine closed behind him, and I felt the contradiction of emotions one feels when head-on to a presence that is superhumanly great. On the one hand I felt totally insignificant and inconsequential. On the other, I wondered why God—if Baba’s claims were true—should arrange for me a face-to-face meeting with his messianic embodiment. If Baba could peer through people like so many tumblers of water, I thought, then he could test their true worth. It made a confrontation with him something of a gamble.

Baba was the most magnetic human form I had ever seen. Unlike every other Indian holy man I had visited, Baba did not project deathlike serenity or an austere severity. He was incredibly youthful, fresh like a spring flower and with the vibrant energy of a spring bee.

I felt a second jolt as I saw Baba talking to an Indian near the car whose arms remained held up in a prayerful gesture. The Indian had made some kind of request which Baba had already foreknown, telling the devotee the problem before he could even get the words out, in a quick musical raspy voice. As the devotee’s mouth dropped in awe, something else happened.

I had been studying Baba’s physical structure, which, though six inches shorter than the man he was standing with before, or for that matter any Indian there, resembled a dwarf-sized giant. His huge head of wiry black hair flowed above a neck so thick and muscular that it looked as though it was transplanted off of Bronco Nagurski of the Chicago Bears. Underneath this floating head was a diminutive well-muscled little body narrowing down to two tiny feet, cloaked from neck to foot in a brilliant red robe, which made Baba’s head appear to hover over an eternally frozen fiery jet of red flame.

Suddenly the flame flickered as Baba pulled his sleeve up. In an abracadabra motion of spinning his arm in circles with the open palm down, I did a double take, noticing suddenly that the hand was no longer empty. My God, he had worked a miracle! From nowhere he now had a hand full of gray powder that he was pouring into the devotee’s hand, instructing him to eat it. While the shaking devotee gibbered a thank-you, Baba spun around flashing me a large sparkling smile. Before I could even react, he was busy talking to another man, explaining the man’s personal family problems before the devotee even had a chance to tell them to Baba.

There was an immediately obvious non-human quality about Baba, but I wasn’t sure I could define it. All that I could conclude was that “non-human” suggested “super” rather than “sub” humanness, and only a full master could transcend the human condition. As Baba proceeded from person to person, he seemed to act in absolute spontaneity, suggesting the busy impersonality of a bee vibrating pollen out of a flower. And this rebounding from person to person made me ponder a key idea of Vedanta—Baba’s access to people’s thoughts in spontaneous short order could only be explained by the concept of ‘thoughtless-all-knowing.’ That only an enlightened person without the limiting ego could harbor the infinite impersonal mind of god, as the mystics explain it. And this implied to me that Baba was like a walking doorway into the absolute, and when he talked or acted, it was merely the meeting point of the impersonal nature of godhead tuning down the comprehensible personal aspect of deity, - - never to be mistaken for just another guy.

Baba suddenly spun away from the people he was talking to, presumably a family with a common need, and came straight over to me, while I reminded myself not to blow it by losing my poise.

Baba’s English was practically baby talk, while his black eyes told an entirely different story, radiating unearthly awareness. He didn’t seem to assess me, but already seemed to know me. He began with a tone of unusual familiarity.

“Hello, Rowdeeee,” he chimed with taunting playfulness. Then looking concerned he asked, “What’s wrong, some sickness in the stomach?” Then, almost without thinking, I patted my stomach, looked up from the ground and said, “Yeah, Baba,” more astonished at my informality than anything else, “a little stomach trouble.” Which was true, of course, since I had been having stomach trouble on and off since entering the country, switching from one brand of bacillary dysentery to another with probably some amoebas to boot.

Turning my head sideways a little, I looked down from his hand to his eyes several times and gestured with a look, “What’s that stuff, Baba, do you have any for me?” The answer was a quick audible “Oh yes,. called vibhuti— divine ash.” Again Baba’s hand began rotating in wide circles for at least the fourth time in five minutes. In an instant he had a handful of gray powder sitting in his hand, which he immediately poured into mine saying, “Eat, eat, it is good for the health.”

Feeling almost like a different person than when I walked through the gate, I stood there licking off the palm of my hand as a slight tremor ran up and down my arm. Baba was still smiling as I cleaned the last traces of ash from my palm. Then as suddenly as he had come over to me, Baba left, quickly entering the house on the compound owned by the principal of the local engineering college. Meanwhile I stood there absolutely stupefied, thinking to myself, “Naw, no big thing—just about half an ounce of stuff miraculously summoned into existence from the casual nexus by a single act of will. Just elaborate lattice structures of crystallized carbon, whose sumtotal energy quotient would melt a subcontinent if unleashed properly.” Yes, for the first time in my entire life, I had just witnessed a miracle—because I had taken the leap and come to the right place on earth in southern India. No, I was not in law school or out on a date with some beauty. I had gone beyond that; I was with a spiritual powerhouse.

It was getting dark outside, and the few of us permitted inside the compound were immediately invited inside the devotee’s house for what they called a small Bhajan, a kind of worship service with the object of their worship before them live.

As I entered, there were about forty people seated along the living room floor, men on one side, women on the other. The room was fragrant with incense and fresh flowers, and on all the walls hung assorted pictures of Hindu deities, and in key places, large mounted photographs of Sai Baba. Facing the audience in the front was a large flower-garlanded chair and footstool for Baba that was draped with a tiger’s skin—a Hindu symbol of transcendence. And on the front row sat the bhajan leaders, and several men and women, who led in the singing and played a number of instruments including the tambourine, small brass clackers, and a floor organ called a harmonium constructed like an accordion.

Directed by the Indians, I sat right on the aisle near the wall, waiting like the others for Baba to emerge from his special quarters upstairs. Music lit the room about the time I heard Baba’s raspy voice from behind the kitchen curtains, as the host and hostess skittered in and joined us. Baba sat down, keeping time with his hands, and the singing became louder as faces lit up all over the room.

Baba nodded his head from side to side with the music while tapping his foot on the stool. Then I noticed that he was rolling up beetle nut leaves and popping them into his mouth, which in a matter of moments, turned a bright cherry red, lips and all. And like a broken record, couldn’t escape the semblance—God or no God—Sai Baba resembled a big happy Pollywog. If he gave someone a special look one second, the next moment he would appear bored with the whole room. Repeatedly he looked at me as he swayed his head and chewed away, as if to say, away, “I know who you are.”

Suddenly Baba was on his feet. As Baba sprang out of his chair, the Indians stood up and chanted a Sanskrit praise to Baba and then stood in silence. A few people came up to Baba, knelt down, and touched his feet.

The words of an aristocratic Indian girl I knew in Delhi rang in my ears, “You foreigners will accept anyone as a guru—people like Maharishi are export items as common as tea, but we Indians will have nothing to do with them. There is only one I have heard of who the Indians trust, he is Sai Baba—he doesn’t go politicking like the others, they come to him, from all over India. His miracles have been discussed by almost all my countrymen, and after fifteen or twenty years, they have been accepted without question. There have been far too many instances of his miraculous abilities for peoples to doubt any longer. People may doubt whether he is equal to Lord Krishna or Jesus as he claims, but they have ceased doubting his miracles.”

I felt propelled by an enormous energy to walk up to Baba, who immediately switched all his attention on to me and do what the Indians call Pada Namaskar. I knelt down and touched my head to Baba’s feet, and remained there as he patted my back saying, “very happy, very happy— santoshanam.” With both hands he finally grabbed my shoulders and slowly raised me up, smiling affectionately. The host waved those of us up front to resume our places.

As Baba walked down the aisle on the way out, he ignored everyone in the crowd but me. He then stopped right in front of me and whispered in his raspy voice, “Tomorrow, sir, tomorrow.” When Baba had left the room, almost half the room encircled me asking what he had told me. Sensing this was a supreme gift of confidence from Baba, I held my silence and left. As I passed the host on the verandah, he called me aside and said that Baba had told him to make sure to tell me that he wanted to have a private audience with me on the following day. Seeing my joy, the host remarked, “There are very few who Baba notices this readily. You have no idea how fortunate you are.”

I was driven back to Ananthapur that night by one of the wealthy local businessmen, owner of the largest automobile parts store, who had been a Baba devotee for twenty years. He told me what I was starving to hear, details about Baba, his childhood, his miracles, his behavior patterns, his claims, and every bit of it was astounding. “You are indeed fortunate that Bhagavan has plans for you—just accept these things by faith. They are no mere coincidences, but the will of god.”

As I entered the door amidst a whine of beggars on the porch, the owner pointed to a greasy section of the wall where there was a permanent menu painted. It was the only non-vegetarian menu in town, revealing another fact about south India: the predominance of vegetarianism.

Soon a boy in rags plopped down a small glass of water that he had been carrying with his thumb halfway down the center. The contents splashed across most of the slab. As he ran to get a rag, I noticed that the glass was not transparent but rather translucent with what looked like a yellow glaze of coatings of accumulated grease. As usual in predicaments like this, I yelled for a Coke, which by international standards should ensure against amoebic dysentery and jaundice. Sure enough, the same boy came trotting back holding the bottle not in the middle but right on the mouth, and I swore that if I found his thumb jammed in the mouth, I’d break it on the table, using the bottle as a hammer. He was lucky; he had the good sense not to cork the bottle with his thumb.

Suddenly, in mid track, I realized that I was already quickly falling from the grace that I had just received from Baba and that India’s squalor was like a raw nerve.

By the end of a boiler hot meal of mutton curry and rice biriyani, my mood had evened out as I stared up at a forty-watt bulb and recalled the high points of the day. It didn’t even bother me that my stomach burned with a blend that was almost was routine for me now—chili peppers, masala, curry, Coca-Cola sugars, and carbonated water. Nor did it bother me that night that there was a new spiritual presence in my room, softly whispering on the edges of my mind.

Chapter Five

An Embrace With Eternity

A

t six in the morning, not feeling exactly refreshed, I rolled out of bed to begin washing up. Before I could even finish my coffee on the verandah, I could hear a cycle sputtering outside. It was the

son of the merchant who had driven me to the hotel the previous night, coming on assignment to take me to Baba.

We buzzed off on a medium sized Indian motorcycle shooting through crowds before I could even get a grip. Passing various bazaars and markets, we headed to the outskirts of Ananthapur.

The strange, barren Andhra Pradesh countryside was beginning to look almost beautiful in the yellow morning light. I noticed in the distance several conical mountains that jutted out from the flat ground in almost perfect symmetry. Anomalies of topography, they resembled immense termite mounds that, instead of shaping along the contours of the ground, looked as though they had been plopped down as land grafts from some prehistoric volcano world. Already the sun was beginning to bake the air, even at 6:30 in the morning, at a time of year when most countries were knee deep in snow. And before too long it would be soaring up into the nineties.

We pulled into the driveway of the compound in an almost irreverent cloud of noise, between a long line of Indian devotees who instantly saluted us. I felt like a caricature of Arjuna on the horse as I looked up at Baba’s window. His silhouette was shaking a chiding finger in my direction. Then I heard Baba’s low laugh addressing attendants in the room, from where I thought I heard, “riding on a motorcycle.” After dismounting and waiting for a long time, I became anxious that perhaps Baba

had reconsidered it and I didn’t quite qualify. With the rest of the crowd, I stood quietly listening for the faintest stirrings in the house while eyeing the windows for movement, hearing nothing more than the occasional buzzing of Baba’s voice.

By the end of over an hour, suddenly Baba emerged from the house. The crowd jumped to attention, making way for Baba as he headed towards a car. Near the rear, I had to stand on tiptoes. He briefly glanced in my direction but gave no acknowledgement.

Then I noticed people waving to get my attention. The merchant, who had driven me home the night before, ran over to me sputtering, “Baba says you are to come with him. I am to drive you.” Baba had not misled me, and a new hope appeared. Out of all the hundreds there, Baba had singled me out to come with him, even making sure to supply me with a car.

We made haste out of the driveway behind Baba’s car, while the merchant informed me that Baba was inspecting the site of a new school to be built in his name. It would be the largest girls college in the state and would have an allotment of as much as “forty lakhs of rupees” or several million dollars, which will get you a lot of laborers, materials, and a whole lot of building in India. He told me that there were already ninety-six schools of one sort or another named after Sai Baba, including the host’s engineering college and the recent extension of the University of Bangalore near Baba’s Whitefield Bangalore residence.

Once we were on the barren plain for forty minutes or so, the jaunt almost seemed irrelevant. Not much was accomplished apart from our wandering around a respectable distance behind Baba on a desolate tract of desert. At times, Baba would strike out in different directions, and a small party of architects and engineers would go running after him with palms constantly cemented together and blue prints rolled up under their arms. And every time one of them tried to unroll a blueprint to show Baba, it resembled an elaborate ritual of eating an ice cream cone without using any hands. Meanwhile Baba seemed to pose, wink at some people, smile at others, and essentially make light of the whole thing.

The upper-echelon devotees continued to be as stiff as penguins, as with morbid solemnity they walked about as though carrying the crown jewels. Motioning, waving, and trotting back and forth, they inscribed huge arcs along the ground with their feet to delineate vital parts of the future structure. I was sure that if Baba had proposed bulldozing one of the local volcano mountains and paving a palatial driveway with hedges and date palms straight up it at a seventy-degree angle, they would not have flinched, but

would have dutifully called Bombay to get it underway, and ship up the machinery.

While the engineers and architects continued flapping and wailing over what appeared to be empty ground, Baba suddenly headed over to his car, got in and was driven off. The show was over, as conversations soon lost their intensity.

A Private Meeting

When our car pulled into the compound, almost immediately the surging crowd was calling for me in a low voice. “Go, go. . . in the house. . . bhagavan has called you.” The verandah and front room were packed with people of all ages. And I saw to my relief that I was not the only one summoned to see Baba, as I followed several people single file up the stairs. Among them was a white man in his early thirties who looked like a cross between an Old Testament prophet and the perfect occidental mystic yogi of such classic proportions that I wondered if he had been discovered by some exhaustive MGM screening survey.

Baba stood in the open doorway smiling as we walked in. The room was fairly large with a stage, and he motioned us to sit in the traditional Indian manner at the foot of the stage, on which he was to sit before us, perhaps elevated a foot or so above us. About eight of us gathered together including me, the mystic, one or two single men, and a small family from Pakistan. The fragrant room was so opulently decorated that it bordered on garishness, but then it was to be expected as a certain cultural variable. Our audience with Baba was given a feeling of exclusiveness from the rest of the world as the curtains were drawn.

Remaining in the room near the window were a handful of the engineers, architects, and (I assumed) financiers of the building site that we had just surveyed. I was bothered by their presence. Somehow their awkward insensitivity led me to suspect that they lacked the capacity to appreciate who Baba was, grunting and flustering over engineering symbols, stress points, relative strengths of materials, and what not. How could they be oblivious to what I perceived as paramount issues of the messianic calling and Baba’s true significance? Yet they still bickered on, occasionally freezing like penguins when Baba moved, but apparently satisfied with a worm’s eye view. They naively wagged their tongues, idly discussing a little detail here and a little detail there, before One, who if he revealed even a facet of who he was, like opening the panel of an atomic pile near critical mass, would release a dazzling brilliance that would blind them and leave them quaking in terror. It was no obscure secret in India but a proverbial sign of divinity in Krishna’s well repeated declaration to Arjuna, “If you saw me as I truly Am, you would not live.” Baba made the identical claim. He dismissed them in a note of chiding as they tiptoed out. With us, it would all be love and light, free from the humdrum meanderings of the world.

The door closed and there was a brief silence. No matter how hard I tried, I could not keep in mind who Baba was. There was a familiarity and yet a distance that would not mix. I felt like someone with amnesia hearing the voice of his father, and searching through the family photo album, feeling a strong inward pull, but never quite dragging the memory to the surface. It was disconcerting.

With quick bristling movements, Baba’s gown swept by me as he mounted the stage on tiny child-sized feet. He sat on the floor on the platform, supporting himself by an extended arm, with feet curled up beneath him. It called to mind the emperor in “The King and I” whose head was always slightly above every other head in Siam.

Everybody was slightly nervous except the mystic who was beginning to resemble a lion, exuding a fiery boldness out of his eyes. And when I met his eyes, they didn’t flicker; they just burned on like two steel beams as two of the most powerful eyes I had ever seen. Perhaps he had gone through a thousand “dark nights of the soul” and knew something about the avatar that no one else did, and maybe he had gone through so much that he could take in a lot more than other people could. I didn’t know, but this is what he seemed to project with an unflappable self-confidence as he sat in a half lotus with widening nostrils. My eyes would run into his huge lion’s mane beard and flowing head of hair and I’d begin to think, “He’s no hippie. That’s the real McCoy that the sheep have been imitating for the last decade—solid as the wall of China, and he knows that he knows.”

I looked back at Baba on the platform. Unlike the lion who looked like he had fallen through the center of hell and come back heavier than mercury, Baba was an immortal flower. Stronger than anyone on the continent, he didn’t need to come on strong, yet could probably melt the center of the moon with one single titanic thought.

Baba spoke, “God is Love. God is everywhere,” cutting to the core of everything in utter simplicity.

“God is like the sun and man is like a flower. The sun shines on the flower and the flower grows up towards the sun, becoming beautiful and giving off sweet nectar. The nectar is Prema—love— God’s love (“lowve”). Love is one, love is God. For love is to know god.” Baba nodded while his eyes affirmed beneath their sparkle, “I know of what I am speaking. I am not just spouting of silly words to titillate you.”

With some sadness Baba went on, “But if the clouds of ignorance, ego [Yeego], jealousy, and hate come in the way, then the light of the sun is on the flower. There is no prema, no nectar, and the flower is wasted. The sunlight of god’s love is always shining. It is only the clouds of man’s thoughts

that get in the way.”

Baba’s parables were almost like modern day billboard slogans. Maybe, I thought, the only thing that can cut though our twisted complexity so that we can be brought to the heart of the issue.

“Life—samsara—is like an ocean with big waves. To cross the ocean, use the lifeboat of god’s name, always calling on it. Repeating the name is called Namasmarana and is the lifeboat. At the end of life, you will reach the shore of eternal peace, Prasanthi. No more waves, no more sorrow and suffering, only bliss, Ananda.”

Baba spread his hands, about to tell a great story. “God— Paramatma— is like a big ocean, all one. The soul—Jiva—becoming moisture in the air, forms clouds. Now it is separate from the ocean. The clouds move in all directions over the land. The small raindrop is the jiva, the soul, separate from god. It falls on the mountain, becomes clouds again, and falls again over long period of time, many lifetimes. One day it enters a small stream, it slowly goes down the mountain and joins a river, medium size river. After a long time, it joins larger rivers like the Ganges and flows many hundreds of miles.” Sighing with relief, “Finally, the river becomes very wide, very slow, flowing into the ocean again.

“Now there is no difference, water droplet is one with the ocean, the same everywhere—all God.”

From Baba’s viewpoint, enlightenment seemed almost pedestrian; so easy, so inevitable, that the idea of undergoing the required tapas—discipline—was almost superfluous.

Looking over the entire group, Baba waved his hands to ask, in a standard Indian gesture, “What do you want?” He looked at the Pakistani family and asked in a light chiding tone, “What is it, family arguments?” Then he shook his finger at each one of them playfully indicating he knew their deepest secrets and was by no means fooled by their best behavior. He saw them when they were being nasty, but he was not fazed because Baba had the strength to cope with every single sordid secret on the earth, and could see down to the divinity behind the rotten little areas of human nature.

Baba diagnosed their problem, “Anger, ego, jealousy, hate, greed, desires. Too much desires and no understanding, just confusion.” They bowed their heads in shame. Baba’s tone became kind again, and they perked up instantly.

Baba looked at the father who was flushed with emotion and said, “Love is very important.” But Baba’s tone also said with a note of warning, “The discipline to love that you are afraid of is nothing compared to the impersonal and harsh justice that can befall a negligent man.” As Baba became

stern again, the father was brought practically to sobs, as the other members

of his family began to gleam in triumph. The kids sat up, the mother looked

proud, arching her back like a painting of Sita.

“Anger,” Baba declared, “is weakness, big sign of weakness, not

strength.” The man’s face flushed in shame to hide the source of his weakness, his rage “A strong man has self-control, gentleness, not rage.” The

wife and kids reflected the quiet satisfaction of those who have been suppressed now standing by as the bully, their suppressor, gets cornered by

someone who is ten times as big. Suddenly he becomes like them, cowering and humiliated. And the rage in him knew that if it escaped, it would get

utterly creamed. The Pakistani pleaded with Baba, holding out his hands to

indicate helplessness, and Baba soothed him like his mother and showed

him a standard to follow: love.

And they huddled together, children’s heads on their mother’s noble and

long-suffering lap, as they refused to accept the stench of their own sin,

playing to the hilt, righteous victimization.

In their greatest moment of weakness, Baba forgave the entire family,

endearing himself to them forever. With abundant kindness, he smiled at

the kiddies, told the parents to cheer up, and said that he would soon see

them privately to give them “special help.”

As a ubiquitous force seemed to fill the air, Baba began rotating his open

hand, palm down, clutching something. Then opening the hand again,

Baba revealed four metal plates with a photographic likeness of himself in

color on each one of them. The plates were at least three quarters the size

of Baba’s palm, maybe two inches and a half oval, a bit large for prestidigitation, even if one were wearing a London fog overcoat, which of course

Baba wasn’t. Baba’s thin, silk, one-piece gown clung tightly to his body

without a single opening other than the neck, the bottom, and Baba’s

sleeves, which, incidentally, had been rolled up beyond the elbow. Both

Baba’s hands were in crystal clear visibility the whole time, one hanging

limply by his side, the other way out in front of him, over us, and the

stretched out little arm had been bare from the elbow down. If this wasn’t

enough, right after Baba handed the four plates to the Pakistani family, he

began rotating his hand again. The same shock wave undulated through the

air, sending up and down the static acrylic fibers of my trouser legs, only this

time Baba’s palm was full of gray powder. Vibhuti Baba cheerfully

announced, “divine ash.”

Baba turned to me then. “You have a nice place to stay in Ananthapur?” “Sure, Baba,” I replied with total abandon, hoping not to lapse into incoherence. “Hotel on main road, best one in town, Baba. Good facilities—not important though, Baba, anywhere will do.

“Yes, I know, Rowdie. What is the name of the hotel?”

“Oh, you know that, Baba, Vidya Bhavan, or something like that.”

“I know, I know,” Baba laughed, “Food is good?”

“Yeah, Baba, the food is OK, not bad at all.”

“No, Rowdie, the food is not good. Too hot, too dirty, too much spice, not pure food, not satwic.”

Baba gave me a look of mock chiding. “Driving on a motorcycle, very noisy, very rowdie.” He motioned at the group, “I see him this morning, driving through the gate, sunglasses on, looking like a gangster.” We all laughed.

Baba looked at the Western mystic and nodded to inform us who this creature was. “Mr. Freedom,” Baba announced as I heard a low groan. “Freedom means moksha, no more birth, no more death, only union with God.” Ahab rolled his eyes like a suffering lion and groaned loudly. It was one of the deepest male voices I had ever heard, and it resonated in base tones like the bellows of a huge organ in an old European cathedral, suggesting to me that there was a supernatural potency added to his natural voice.

Baba responded reassuringly, “Be patient, freedom coming, freedom coming.” He looked at Baba with a gaze that didn’t soften in the least—the two implacable eyes fixed on Baba and became the eyes of a samurai swordsman pinioned between a blazing forest on one side and an approaching armada on the other—never showing fear, but remaining aggressive, even in the face of certain annihilation. Such was the difference in magnitude between him and Baba. But Baba seemed pleased with this sort of audacity and exclaimed under his breath, “What a man!” He smiled gently and let the suffering lion roar. Something I was sure was an out-of-bounds relationship with Baba for the Indian devotees. And I was sure that if any of the former penguins tried to pull it off, Baba would verbally slap them down, and they would decompose on the spot like gelatin aspic spooned out on some burning equatorial concrete.

Then Baba addressed the whole group to say that enlightenment is no easy matter or random gift that one happens to stumble upon. It is difficult. But without grace, Baba assured, it would be impossible to attain.

Baba arose from the platform and went over to the door, bidding the Pakistanis to follow him into the room across the hall, at the top of the stairs.

After ten minutes, the door of the adjacent room opened and a troop of bleary-eyed, hyper-emotional Pakistanis filtered out in a haze of powder filled air. Their foreheads were smeared with a bright red powder, known as kum kum, that Baba had materialized for them. Someone ignorant, for a second, might have gathered that a grenade went off in the room. They carried a handkerchief loaded with vibhuti, plus a large gleaming silver container. The child announced to the entire room that Baba had materialized the silver vessel for them as well as the sack full of vibhuti, staggering me with the fact that something weighing several pounds as big as a grapefruit cannot be palmed.

In the next breath I felt as though I was going to float away like a helium balloon as Baba’s eyes and mine locked. “Cyam on, Rowdie.” Legs wobbling slightly, I went through the door of the little side room as Baba’s hand slapped me on the back.

My viscera seemed to know that the stakes were incredibly high, and it would take a while for my intellect to really catch up. Exactly how much free will I had, I wasn’t sure. I could not take freedom to react lightly. I was convinced that it was not all the sheer mechanics of genes and complex molecular reactions rebounding off an infinite set of environmental inputs.

As though hearing the voice of an archangel, the thought entered me as a siren from heaven; that by a single act of free will, from some vast summit of choice, a man can either be glorified beyond measure or impaled for eternity. I should take heed.

The Godman, Sathya (truth) Baba, whose robe today was the color of blood, closed the door behind me. I knew that even if there was a remote possibility that this Being was not who he said he was, the only way I could win in the end was to be absolutely honest with myself. And nor could I get hung up over the fact that millions across India were teeming for even one word or a smile from this person, which would be enough to send them back to their villages rich in blessings for the rest of their lives.

The room was small. It had a little window on the far end, a chair or two, a dresser, and a bunk bed. Baba stood in front of me, a full head and a half shorter, and spoke in the sympathetic tones of a pitying mother who is tending a son convalescing from a catastrophic accident, still wincing from the pain. This simple gentleness of Baba’s disarmed me, soothed my fear of being vulnerable, and bathed the thousand-seeming inner centuries of desolate cold.

Certainly the tenderest part of me I had fortressed like the Wall of China around the Temple of Solomon, and almost no one was allowed into the temple of my heart. My own emotional past had been a wasteland of the spirit where I was rarely able to love, simply content, aloof, and always ruggedly independent. Those times I had opened up to love with any intensity, I always burned out like a meteor over some Cinderella flower of a girl, knowing that it would never last forever, that something brutal and harsh in the world would stifle the love, like frost killing a honeysuckle. Spiritual love, I knew, was the next step, but I hadn’t found very much in that either.

Describing my runnings to and fro, Baba said, “Confusion, much confusion. Not happy, not happy. Often travelling from America, Europe, India, Bombay, but only finding trouble. I know, sir, you are looking for the truth but finding only confusion, no peace.” I nodded as though to a doctor cleaning out a wound with salve and dabbing other wounds, “Yeah, that’s where it hurts. That too.”

“Not happy in America, too much materialism and no love. Always looking for love, the pure love of God, but only finding a small sample.”

“Yes, Baba, just a sample.”

Then came a dose of tonic. “Dedication to the truth, sir. Coming to India alone—very brave—taking many chances, bad food, pains, always alone, thieves ....” And Baba’s eyes gleamed, but I wasn’t going to say anything about the Bombay moneychanging fiasco yet.

“Yes, Rowdie, money stolen in big city, causing great spiritual fear and confusion.” Baba was humming like a top.

“Yes, Baba,” I was breaking a little.

“I know your whole past. Very unhappy childhood. Bad adjustment to the world. Hating school, not happy with family, looking for love, but never finding. Not satisfied with selfish love, looking for divine love.” With a note of reassurance, “That is the way to God, never give up, search with a pure heart, and you will reach the goal in the end.” Feeling awkward looking down at Baba, who stood about six inches away, I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked up.

“Some worldly desires, many impure thoughts.” I agreed to that, wondering what the spiritual X-ray would dig up next. “You must control the mind, the mind is like a drunken monkey. More desires, never-ending from birth to birth, can only be conquered by faith in god. Life for most men is only eating and sleeping, food coming in and going out like a tube.”

“You still have some doubts, some questions?” Baba asked. “Yes, Baba, but they are difficult to translate simply, very complex metaphysics, Baba. Subtle things.” And I wondered if I shouldn’t scrap all that extra luggage and be like a child.

“Yes, I know; I am in your heart.”

A sloka from the Bhagavad Gita suddenly pricked my mind. “The guru appears when the disciple is ready.” Maybe my whole future weighed on my response to Baba right now.

“Baba, I want to be under your guidance. What do you want me to do?” It was like letting steam out of a cooker.

Baba dazzled. “I want only love. That is my life, that is my mission, to love my devotees. Krishna once said to Arjuna, ‘I am your servant, I am the servant of my devotees’ love.’ This is true.”

Rubbing my belly, Baba suddenly noticed, “You are still having stomach trouble.” The room filled with a crackling force. Baba stepped back, sleeve up and hand twirling with palm down. I warned myself to accept whatever it would be with the humble grace of an orphan—but I was still swept off my feet.

Baba’s hand in a fraction of a second exploded from an outstretched empty palm to a massive half-open fist clutching an egg-sized object.

In one second of the world’s history, I had stood silently witnessing the kind of gargantuan miracle that would have caused pandemonium in the major scientific institutions of the Western Hemisphere. But none of these considerations mattered to Baba, who held the object like any other object. It was a large crystal structure of pure transparent white, which looked like quartz at first; but was in fact a large chunk of rock sugar. Trying to ward of the beginnings of a gem collector’s greed, I wanted to study it forever and build a glass case around it as a monument of the miraculous.

But the “incarnation of Truth” would have no such thing. He motioned and I tilted back my head and opened my mouth like a baby robin as Baba jammed the entire thing in my mouth. Then Baba wrapped his arms around me and held me in a tight hug as his hair bristled in my face. While returning the embrace, I didn’t want to seem ungracious of this sacrifice of mindblowing affection, so I tried to gather what wits I had left and use them to dispose of the miraculous chunk as unoffendingly as possible, muffling the slurs and crunching sounds. There was a brief moment of infant-on-thebottle helplessness, as I stood there gagging and watery-eyed, but I was determined to get all the gravel of sugar crystals down my throat so that I could more heartily return the embrace and really be the prodigal son returning to God.

After thirty more seconds of hugging I thought, “. . . not a door left open to construe rejection after I leave here . . . and he takes this kind of risk to prove it. He’s gotta know people pretty well, the wrong person might flip out. Lord, they all blubber when they are even near him. He just can’t hug anybody who comes along, not with those millions out there.” I felt I should weep, but I was just too stunned.

From my earliest days, hand-to-mouth affection invariably made me feel awkward, because I always insisted on holding my own. I noticed then that the thing about mothers’ boys that always turned my stomach was that they seemed to enjoy the degradation of being powdered, petted, and stuffed. And they’d sit, fluffy-haired, holding hands with some matron like little Liberaces just digging the passive dependency while fifty feet away the other boys might be playing football, and they would still feel no shame. My reaction as a kid when some lady tried it was to push her off, give her a hard look, or leave as quickly as possible. I didn’t mind it if a girlfriend wanted to hold my hand, but not any mother figures. And as odd as it might be, I was almost feeling this particular flavor of doting mother’s love coming from Baba.

Then I brushed it all out of my mind. If I was putting pig slop on the holy grail, it was the poisonous suspicions of my own heritage that could misperceive divine affection and read “effeminacy” where there was total innocence if not something far nobler. I gave Baba one last squeeze remembering that the gender of his body was irrelevant to the deity that filled it. From my brief moment of doubt, I went from quick repentance to hope and joy. I was hungry to learn what great promises lay in store for me.

Baba forecast a glorious future. Consolingly, then Baba exuberantly said, “Do not worry. You will be very very happy. It is in my hands. Very lucky, very lucky.”

But I wanted to hear more. No matter if I did win the Irish Sweepstakes in today’s spiritual achievement so far, what about the Daily Doubles? Why not go for broke and find out about whether Nirvana, or Mokska, or whatever word for enlightenment you want to use, would be a part of the winnings? As I posed the question, I could just see every pre-planned model concerning my future for the next decade fragment and spin off in all directions. And I hesitated.

But I went for broke, and Baba responded with a smile that took up half his face, “Do not doubt, never doubt, sir. Time coming soon. No more fear. Very Verrrry happy, Bliss.” That did it. Baba now moved back a pace or two, and I began to get the signal that my time had run out. But there had been something that I simply had to get out.

“One more thing, Baba,” I exclaimed urgently.

“What is it, Rowdie, say it,” Baba replied impatiently in the manner an uncle might tolerate a favorite nephew who wants to show him the same card trick for the fiftieth time.

“I had an experience, Baba, four years ago . . .”

“Go ahead,” Baba encouraged with eyes widening in enthusiasm.

“I was alone in the country and I took something like Soma. . . you know, in the Upanishads, Baba.”

“Yes, yes.”

“My nervous system restructured, Baba, total jump in energy,” I whispered loudly as the air shivered in and out of my lungs in a constant rapid tremor.

“Yes, I know,” matter of factly.

But I had to verify the metaphysics just to make sure I hadn’t been misreading all the signposts on the way. “Well, you know how light goes through a prism and breaks into many colors . . . well, in reverse order the colors rejoin on the other side, and turn into white light again. Well, on the meadow, Baba, ego, cells, body structure, mind awareness like broken-down light, before the experience. After a while, I was taken back up through the prism . . . I went through a pin point of light, Baba . . . very tiny, like atom . . . had to turn inside out.” By now my eyes were beaming and I was gesturing with my arms.

“Everything was consciousness . . . Chit . . . I . . . fields, trees, grass, pebbles, stars, all pure consciousness, Baba. Cleverly disguised consciousness everywhere.”

Baba quietly nodded and mumbled below his breath in another language while knitting his hand through the air in a peculiar way.

“Everything melted away, Baba, and became God—pure light. I want to go back. This is what I have come for, Baba.”

“Yes, I know, Rowdie, I know this.”

‘Baba, did you cause that experience to happen?”

“Yes, that was your due. Reward from the past. Just a taste, you were given a taste until you were brought to me, but temporary experience not good enough. Complete samadhi, Nirvikalpa samadhi, never ends. It is forever bliss. That is the goal, sir.”

With the “Tree Experience” verified, my faith that had been slowly eroding for the past few years, leaped out of the ground like a phoenix. And the dying battery of Eastern metaphysics had suddenly been moved aside to reveal a giant electric power terminal that could do much more than make the previous flashlight bulb glow orange. It could drive elevators and illuminate ten thousand miles of tungsten in a metropolis of bulbs. Holy God, I thought, I have stumbled upon the avatar of the world.

Baba opened the door and ushered me out with his hand. And I floated down the stairs sideways, waving goodbye, just marginally there, enough to know when to stop waving. Baba leaned on the banister almost appearing surprised as he looked down. Just as I reached the final bend to disappear from view, Baba saw the last traces of my face eclipse at about the speed a good healthy tugboat passes behind a pier to dock.

The Price Tag of Truth

W

ithout any plans from one minute to the next, I decided to sit it out for a while, as I headed towards the front gate across the now almost empty compound. I was still too rattled to do anything, so I just climbed up on the front wall and continued thinking.

If I got into the maze of pursuing the possibility of Baba’s being a deception, then it might mean the strange limbo of never quite believing and never quite disbelieving, and it would become an eternal approach-avoidance stalemate.

Certainly if I lingered on in proximity to Baba, yet keeping my distance all the same, it would be absolute folly. Without the crucial faith to submit, I would show as much understanding as the fellow who takes his toothache to the best dentist in the world but never quite trusts him enough to open his mouth. Even if he spent every minute of the day in the waiting room, it wouldn’t improve his chances any more than spending the day at the films. Proximity to the dental chair would work no great magic.

The spiritual highways of the world were packed with people who never went beyond the waiting room. They went on through life sacramentally sniffing the disinfectants and anesthetics in the air, while assuming that the ills of their souls were being magically bleached away. But to make the commitment of mounting the chair, well, that was simply too much to ask of them.

I resolved to stick it out with Baba and climb the chair. If the operation turned out to be a painful high-level quackery, I might lose a few teeth, but if my heart was still earnestly looking for the truth, at least I would be released from that particular waiting room, which might have been my doom either way.

I looked up from the wall and saw the Lion-man who resembled Ahab rapidly approaching. For the first time, I saw him smiling. Still soft-spoken he said, “You know, the interview was not over when you left.” Much of his hard veneer had gone, leaving a contented Rumplestiltskin.

“If I’d stayed, it would seem like I was asking for more, and he’d already given me too much.” He laughed sympathetically. “How do you celebrate a day like this?” Ahab responded with a personable country bumpkin smile, almost out of character with his features but not quite.

His voice deeply resonated as he began speaking with slow, well-chosen words that took on the classic phrasings of a Lao Tze. Ahab’s face changed back to a timeless solemnity.

“I seldom speak, and when I do, it is never for long. So hear me, brother. In a manner of speaking I have to come down from the mountain to talk, and I never like to, it is extremely painful to me and unbalances my whole sadhana (path to enlightenment), which is to slow down, sloooow doooownnnn.”

He took a long breath, changing his word tempo almost to Zen Haiku. “All I can tell you is what Baba has done for me, and his nature that I have experienced. His nature is to love. He manifests this patiently and unceasingly. He is not human, so do not mistake his outward form with who he is. He is God manifested in the highest sense and in the fullest embodiment. I have never seen one who gives so completely and continually as Baba gives, yet his material gifts are only a shadow of the spiritual boons that he can give when he so chooses. But you have to be ready to receive them, and he will test you to see if you are ready.

“He is very child-like when he gives love sometimes, but don’t let that fool you; he is a perfect master. Sometimes his love can seem harsh to us. But he doesn’t love your ego—he loves the real you. And do you know who that is, brother? That is God. That’s who you are and who Baba is, and he can be spanking you with one hand and feeding you candy with the other, but it is for the sole purpose of waking you up. And that is that secret. That his greatest gift is love. It is freedom, freeeeedommmmmm, release from being born again and again in this ignorant life of the world. And liberation is the only gift he really likes to give, and the reason he came into the world to free souls and take them back into him.”

I was fascinated in his perspective.

“I cannot put Baba into a category for you, he is a mystery. I have seen many holy men, none are like Baba. When an avatar kills a man, as Rama once did, he is released. That is why I ask Baba for death, it is the most complete and immediate means to the void. He first wants you to become weary of this world, and know how it separates you from God. Then he may catch you one day, feeding your ego goodies and trinkets with its defenses down and giggling. That may be the time he takes the sword and kills you — forever. What you do not know is that it may have taken him aeons of patience to set you up for that one perfect moment. Only a master can operate beyond time like this. So remember, do not limit his love to the tiny acts of this world that you have mistaken for love for so long.”

I mentioned the “pin-point of light as the doorway into God;” he registered it but did not show any emotional response. Not wanting to lose the thread, I wanted to find out more about him. “By the way, my name is Tal. Who are you?”

“Just call me Gill, that is enough,” he finally responded after I had gently prodded for his last name.

For a moment I watched him like a hawk, probing the black chasm beneath his irises and the range of characters in his features. There were less than a handful of people I had met who registered dead zero when you tried to read them. They were opaque. Most people were as plain as Cornflakes, sitting happily in the middle of the bell-shaped curve. But when their eyes were the mine shafts of Ahab. ..now that was a totally different thing. Perhaps some consolation was that he appeared to have equal difficulty in assessing me. He had never met anyone like me.

The lion came up to the surface for just a second, perhaps weary of the confinement of having to relate, and maybe tired of being probed, but it disappeared soon enough. I wasn’t sure whether it was going to depersonalize, and soar off like a rocket, or turn at me for the kill. Instead, Gill told his story in smatterings, hesitatingly, and at times almost grudgingly, but nevertheless, with considerable resolve. It was something he felt he needed to do.

“The time that this happened is not important, but for a two week period while I was living in a coastal town in California, I experienced without interruption, the state of samadhi, suddenly, and by no visible cause. I had knowledge, and there was no limit to what I knew. When I saw people passing along the streets, I knew them better than old friends. I knew everything there was to know about them. And complete strangers would stop in their tracks, look into my eyes and in reverence and trembling ask me questions about the meaning of existence and about who they were. I would begin teaching. On street-corners, by the market, wherever I would be. And by the end of a week, crowds followed me around, many earnestly beseeching that I be their teacher.

“I prophesied, and all that I prophesied came true. Many returned to me, offering to lay their possessions at my feet, but I refused. That was not what I wanted. I loved so much, that it was not possible to love any more, yet many also hated me. I don’t know, some of it I can still remember .... But the freedom, my God, the bliss.”

Gill for a time looked away almost dejectedly, with his lion’s head of hair, large broad face and abundant beard standing out against the sandy white of Andhra Pradesh like a sphinx.

“When I would will it, there were miracles, but it was neither my habit nor my interest. They simply occurred spontaneously in my presence.”

Longingly he explained, being in the absolute center of the flow, the Tao, “Every act was as effortless as moving a hand through the air, as the world tended to my movements and needs, instantly without friction. If I felt hunger, someone would appear with abundant fruits and melons. If I needed clothing, it was there.”

A look of torment appeared on Gill’s face. “I did not think it was possible to come back from that perfected state. But at the end of two weeks, after knowing God, after being one with the Light and without ego, I plunged. I fell into the outer darkness, and all the loneliness and despair of the world weighed on me like an anchor. I was back in the world again, and had my ego and desires, and fears, and it took everything I had for me not to kill myself.” He stopped to take a long breath, half closing his eyes and muttering, “Freeeeedoommmmm,” and it sounded like “Aaaauuuummmm.”

“How did it happen?” I asked consolingly, well aware that this was a minefield.

“I thought that I could go to bed with my wife and remain untouched. I didn’t need it, nor did I want it. It was more of a test than anything else to make sure that I was free from attachments forever.”

“After that I went into the deepest depression of my life, deeper than I thought possible, as I tried to find some way to regain my former state. It was then, two years ago, that I knew that I would keep looking until I found it or died. I left my wife, my kids, house and friends, went off alone to live on a beach, and I meditated, and meditated. I talked to no one, vowing silence. I wore only what I was given, and slept on the ground when I did sleep. But most of the nights I spent meditating.”

“What kind?”

“The void. But to do that, brother, you’ve got to slow down. Sllllooowww Dooowwwnnn, the mind and everything about it that is not who you really are, and every lie that this illusion is capable of. And that includes people and that includes nature. Those are two enemies that are going to trap you till you cry to be released. You’ve got to be ‘up-front’ all the way, and you’ve got to do it alone, on the line, with nobody to hold your hand unless he happens to be God.” This wasn’t yogic play-nursery with macrobiotic picnics and co-educational Friday night hatha yoga class with all the groovies. This was spiritual mountain climbing on the level of the Upanishads, and separated the trendies from the men.

Whether or not Gill had known it, he was following an ancient path taught in the Vedas five thousand years ago. It was sanyasa, the fourth stage of life, and all true Brahmins in later life followed it, leaving the world to go into the forest to meditate and live off of roots until death or liberation caught up with them. But detachment or vairagya was essential.

There was only one note in the ensuing conversation which repeatedly struck a bad chord with me, and that was Gill’s sole interest in reaching cosmic consciousness and promptly leaving the scene, leaving his fellow men to flounder in the maze, in the same misery he had departed with the help of the guru. Something in me was outraged at what appeared to be callous indifference.

But Gill had transcended it all, weary of guru-games and spiritual Boy Scouts, wanting nothing but the void. He deliberately spelled it out. “My sole aim is to enter the state of Nirvikalpa samadhi, in which if you remain for three days uninterrupted, you proceed into Turya samadhi. The body lives for twenty days, all normal functions cease, and then it expires. During that time, the atma will have reached the full identity with the Absolute, never to return to ego-consciousness again.”

Then I wondered if his entire ambition was not due to some deep-seated gnarling of his personality, indeed, the very thing that Baba might be trying to work out of him. He went on.

“About three and a half months ago, I was in the desert of Tecate, California, meditating at about three in the morning. I had taken mescaline, a practice I had not done once during my long sadhana. Not in years. I was desperate I guess. All of a sudden, the trip, and it was a rough one, ended and everything became clear again. I saw Baba in my mind, standing before me smiling. The next thing was that he was right in front of me. He reached over, touched me in the center of the forehead, the ajna chakra, and then his face grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger and started spinning round and round . . . and I got higher, and higher, and literally soared to the same place I been when I had been in samadhi, I was free. Just when it became unbearably blissful, when I thought I would be going home forever, Baba pulled me right out of it. He suddenly disappeared and left me sitting alone on the desert, stone-sober and back to normal.

“Well, the next day I saw a movie about him at the Baba ashram near by and learned I could actually get to him physically, that he was a real person, not just a figure in my vision. From then on, things fell together perfectly, visa, passport, plane ticket, and I was out of the country within a week and sitting right in front of him.’’

Gill chuckled, “Ya know, my whole mind was prepared for it to all happen the minute I met Baba. He would just reach over and touch me like he had done in the vision, and that would be it. It would be all over and I would be free as a bird. I never dream I would have to go through what I’m going through now.”

While he described the initial misunderstandings, favors, tests from Baba, I remembered that every story in the ancient books portrayed the path to enlightenment as a titanic cliffhanger. Whether it was Bodhidharma sitting at the Wall of China for ninety years, or some ancient Tibetan rites of initiation, where the adept at the final stages has to turn into a dragon and lie at the bottom of a freezing murky mountain lake in the black depths for ten thousand years to reach the next stage.

“You mentioned ‘going through things.’ You seem a lot lighter than during the interview. Has Baba taken you through something or am I misperceiving?”

“No, brother, you see right,” Gill responded ponderously. “Now and then when I am meditating, I still leave my body for no apparent reason. This started some years ago in California, when I would be lying beside my wife one minute, and floating around the ceiling looking down at my body and my wife’s the next. Last night this happened again while I was meditating under Baba’s window. My body became numb as I found myself staring head-on to a very frightening man-sized creature, which was as real as you standing there. Maybe the moonlight helped me see it, I don’t really know. But its skin had the smooth-scaled oiliness of a snake. Its head was humanoid, but flattened out, like a man with a nylon stocking pulled over his head. It had even a long flap of skin coming out of the top of its head, like a stocking. The word for this kind of creature is a ‘familiar,’ you may have heard about them in Chinese lore. They are a class of demonic spirit beings. Well, it scared the hell out of me.” Gill exhaled in repugnance, slightly trembling.

“Before I knew it, I was out of my body and wrestling this thing all over the ground. I don’t know how long we fought, but it seemed like an hour and it took everything I had. Finally, I pinned it against the ground. But when I saw its face close in the moonlight, I knew I couldn’t handle much more. I called on Baba and it vanished into thin air. However, I have been shaken ever since.”

Gill laughed ironically, “Baba had mentioned to me three times that day that I would see a vision. But I wasn’t prepared for that and, consequently, did not remember what Baba had told me until the incident was over. Yes, I am relieved. When I saw Baba just now, he explained the meaning of what happened, but I cannot discuss that.”

Brightening, Gill said, ‘By the way brother, you look a little lighter yourself. Did Baba give you anything?. . . You don’t have to say.” Gill was a merry Rumplestilskin again.

“Yeah, he did,” I responded while looking up at the house across the compound. “I never expected it, but he probably gave me what I really wanted. He hugged me like a long lost son.” Gill’s face became solemn, almost ashen, as he said, “That is a considerable gift. Baba, to my knowledge, almost never does that, especially during a first meeting.” For a second, the child in this deep mystic who resembled a Bible prophet, looked dejected, almost sulky, then he shrugged. Both of us walked out of the gate.

As we started discussing Baba’s central ashram, a hundred odd miles away, an Indian devotee drove up and eagerly invited the two of us to ride into town. As we got in we heard, “As Baba wills, I am only his servant.” I smiled and Gill went back into his vow of silence, choosing not to respond, his face taking on the stony solemnity of Mount Rushmore.

Chapter Six

Greenhouse for An Avatar

T

hree weeks had passed since I first met Baba. His entourage left Ananthapur the next day and I decided to clear my head out for the long haul by taking a much needed vacation away from

India’s squalor. So I headed from Bangalore to Madras, en route to neighboring Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon). I needed some space to ponder what I believed to be a life-changing encounter. I could be in India for years, perhaps the rest of my life. I also had another problem: my three month visa to India was about to run out, and the best way to get an extension was a simple reentry visa from a nearby country. If you apply in India, they can and often do turn you down.

True to the strange force of synchronicity guiding my life, there were “tests” en route. In the Madras train station, I waited for our steam locomotive to leave for Rameswaram on the tip of India where the boat left. We were late leaving. As usual the platform bustled with people, including vendors and beggars. My time in Calcutta had taught me to immunize myself from all sorts of pleas. Beggars were a perennial part of the fabric of India (they were working off bad Karma).

So I unfocused my eyes at the pleading tearful face of the young boy entreating me through the train window. He wept and wept, extending a hand through the railing for an offering. The tears were deep, his despair and pain real. Finally, something awoke within me as I found some lost region of compassion. Then I started breaking within. Almost in tears, I thrust a ten-rupee note into his hands (very generous for India), and tried to reassure him of God’s love.

As the train pulled away from the platform, my parting image of the boy was a face streaming with tears of gratitude. I repented that I had not done more for him. A kind of dam burst within my soul. In a strange sort

of way, God seemed at that crossroads of choice—opening up something farther down the road of my own life’s journey.

Once on India’s tip, it was a welcome sight for me to stand on the decks of the old steamship heading to Sri Lanka after leaving the “oven on wheels,” as I referred to the older Indian trains. I watched the ancient temples of Rameswaram retreat into the distance. Ceylon was a hundred miles off the tip of South India and it was a refreshing overnight boat journey. The next morning was a joyous awakening.

Ceylon’s emerald shores leapt with vibrant tropical foliage against a deep blue sapphire sky. It was lush, under-populated and clean. This ocean state was considerably more upscale than India’s oceanside jewel, Goa. Colombo, the capital, felt almost European as it bustled with activity. Modern hotels, cafes, and restaurants lined broad streets. The ocean was warm, the air a comfortable 80 degrees even in late January.

I immersed myself for several weeks in Ceylon’s splendor—swimming numerous beaches, aqua-lunging in Hikaduwa, eating succulent pineapple, papaya, mangoes, and coconut from beach sellers, hanging out and reading in Monte Carlo-esque hotels, restaurant hopping, and driving all over the luscious island with newly befriended foreigners.

Suddenly I was satiated. It was time for round two of India’s ascetic wilderness and clamoring cities. I did manage to run into some of the “beautiful people” I had met in Goa, including a familiar pretty blonde California girl who kept giving me signals that she wanted to latch on to me (now that her guy had gone off to Bhutan or whereever). I perceived it was another test and knew she represented a doorway that could undermine my whole mission to India. I was strongly drawn to her, and wanted to encourage her, but knew that I had my own formidable journey ahead on the horizon. I also got my second three month visa to India. I quickly returned to India before the “world of appearances” ensnared me.

A Magical Realm

A

t about four in the morning in early February, our old dilapidated Indian bus pulled up to the side entrance of Prasanthi Nilayam, Sai Baba’s spiritual community—the New Bethlehem deep in the Indian wilderness.

The bus journey had averaged ten miles an hour! I had taken over ten hours to go a hundred miles, not including a four-hour layover in Penukunka, thirty miles away from the village of Puttaparthi. Each ten miles deeper into the South Indian State of Andhra Pradesh was like a time machine journey going back a century every ten miles. I was convinced that things could not possibly get any more primitive. But they did—dramatically—within thirty miles of Puttaparthi.

The landscape was desolate and strange, knotting and twisting in the moon and starlight into all sorts of weird shapes, like giant cryptic writing. The shapes seemed to suggest a supernatural noumenon within the terrain itself. The road had turned into more of a giant water buffalo path by the end as it crossed rock beds and streams. At times it dropped sharply and climbed at hideous angles, resembling something more reminiscent of the bygone eras of the Ramayana than the twentieth century.

The final hub of our journey abolished the last traces of civilization— except for our bus—as we entered the incredible silence of the night air, and the absolute piercing brilliance of stars above us. Not so much as a cloud could be seen in the arid night sky to obscure as much as a photon of starlight, lifting us at times so that we seemed to be veritably perched on the shores of space. Finally, at four in the morning, the bus quietly rolled into town, stopping at the big gate of Baba’s realm.

In the dim streetlight, fifty of us unloaded in front of a row of crude little padlocked wooden stalls, presumably the local stores. As I carried my bags through the large gate of Baba’s realm, I expected to see a private house of regal construction, where I might tiptoe up and unroll my stuff somewhere on some porch, and then go to sleep. But I got my first jolt--the sheer size of the compound. An Indian girl on the trip came up motioning me to follow her.

She led me across a wing of the large compound where there were long rows of interconnected housing suites. We mounted a steep driveway up the hillside overlooking the entire ashram. As we approached the verandah of a fair-sized modern building she whispered to me, “If you care to sleep, you are welcome to use this verandah of the hospital. Otherwise you can stay up, and wash soon, because the residents generally get up before 4:30 in the morning to begin bhajans, sankirtan, and meditation.” I chose to sleep.

From the hospital verandah where I unrolled my sleeping mat, I could see a large building that rose in height at least equal to where I was on the hill. It was not only the ashram worship and meditation hall, it was also the private residence of Sai Baba. Lit up by the ashram street lighting, its upper stories and roof resembled the upper decks of a battleship or an aircraft carrier with different lookouts and walkways. It reminded me of something out of Thebes or Karnak with maybe the ground dimensions of the temple of Jerusalem, roughly ninety feet by thirty feet.

I tried to shut two eyelids that were as dry as sandpaper. Just then a ringing harmonic filled the air like an ethereal freight train coming through the mountain. In fact the sound was coming from the large prayer-hall, and as I listened more intently, it turned out to be a good thousand voices chanting Om, “AAAAUUUUMMMM,” twenty-one times, each time drawing out to fifteen seconds. Then I heard the faint wisps of a woman’s voice floating out above the yearnings of a sitar, beseeching the night air like a minstrel from fifteenth-century Verona. Full of pathos, the voice adored Baba, as Sanskrit phrases floated up into Baba’s upstairs suite. This was a magical land.

As I was almost completely lulled to sleep again, something far louder started up like a midnight lawn mower. It was a human train flowing under one ashram streetlight after another. Hundreds moved in a long chain singing one song after another, moving in caterpillar formation around the entire ashram. Then suddenly from my wing of the ashram, on the other side of the hospital, below the hill, shrill singsong voices of children filled the air. Some inherent fascination in the Vedic chants made me tune everything else out, as couplet after couplet rhymed ending in “num.”

The words cascaded down to the familiar nursery song tune of “Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring,” only this time it was an ode to the overmind of the universe, as each word resembled some element or compound on a vast cosmic Periodic Table. And in no time instead of Sanskrit, I was hearing, “Gall-ium Dyspro-sium. . . German-ium, Euro-pium:

Lanthan-um, Magnes-iem. . . Lithium, Molybden-um;

Nio-bium, Pallad-ium. . . Osm-ium, Plut-onium, Polon-ium, Potassium. . . Prometh-ium Rhen-ium; Scand-ium, Rubid-ium. . . Stront-ium, Selen-ium,

Tantal-um, Vanad-ium. . . Thor-ium, Zircon-ium.” Somewhere in all this, I managed to doze off.

By ten in the morning, near the canteen, I ran into the caretaker of the whole ashram, a six-foot-three Indian in his seventies named Suraiya. He ambled over to me and said, “Yes, we have been expecting you. You are the one Baba calls Rowdie, is it? Follow me.” I learned immediately that Baba had been gone three weeks and was due within a day. So I planned to explore the area and factfind from Baba intimates.

As we headed back across the ashram to the large compound of suites on the other side of Baba’s prayer hall, I learned that in his youth, during the lifetime of Baba’s previous “appearance” as the Moslem-Hindu avatar, Shirdi Sai Baba, Suraiya had been a devotee. When the former Baba “departed” from the previous body in 1918, he told Suraiya that he would serve him again one day. This would be the first of many such accounts, as numberless as the sand on the desert.

At the foot of the hill that the hospital was on, there was a long line of suites, six rooms in a row with a common verandah intermittently separated by little gardens in between. I later named them “the luxury suites,” somewhat tongue in cheek.

Suraiya pushed open the door of the end one along the first complex, and then ambled off distractedly. I had my own quarters—amazing! The first room was newly whitewashed and was stone bare except for a mosquito net which opened up like an army tent in the center of the room, with a small straw-mat underneath it. Evidently the occupant was absent. I threw open the door leading into the next room and found a Western man with a cherry-red face doing a yogic posture sometimes called “the spider.” He grunted and spewed, composed himself, and said, “Hi,” forcing an effort to be friendly as he extended a hand while uprighting himself. This was my roommate—a seasoned Baba insider.

After a brief hello, I approached the next set of doors fully expecting someone on a bed of spikes or buried up to his head in concrete. It turned out to be the bathroom. A large terracotta urn held the water supply for bathing and flushing the little cement hole in the floor, an Arabic toilet. The room was dark, damp, and smelly, its walls covered with mosquitoes, and in various rivulets of water running along the floor. I could see mosquito larvae. Trying not to lose my appetite, I unpacked in the first room, then headed back towards the canteen to eat, agreeing to talk to my roommate later.

The main hall of the canteen was a large shed with a flagstone floor and a corrugated aluminum roof. Hundreds of people ate on the floor, sitting on long-woven carpets of jute and eating off banana leaves or leaves woven together to form a mat. As I saw them playing with the food with their bare hands, rolling the rice up into little balls; I began to lose my appetite again. I was immediately guided to an adjacent dining room with stone tables for foreigners and privileged Indian devotees. My worst visions at the American Embassy snack bar, of what lay ahead, rarely fell lower than this. I just hoped that the food was up to concentration camp standards.

Initially, I had to hold the walls like a blind man, the room so darkly contrasted to the dazzling brilliance of the Andhra noonday sun. I noticed stone benches jutting out from the walls, front and back, so I slid over to sit at the table next to the door. When I finally adjusted to the twenty-watt bulb, I noticed that the entire lower half of the room, which was not a smeared whitewash, was the raw granite gray of cut stone, making the place resemble a prehistoric Fred Flintstone snack bar. Over the door into the kitchen was a photo portrait of Sai Baba. The “waiter” pointed outside at the rusty oil drum full of water where I was supposed to wash my hands with a tin can.

When I came back, the Indian, in his early twenties, leaned in from the kitchen with a puerile smile and asked, “Meals, saab?” I nodded my head. Still grinning, he mopped the table with a greasy rag, plopped down a woven leaf, sprinkled water on it, and I grabbed his arm to make sure that he didn’t mop the leaf off with the rag. He left smiling again, while I seriously wondered if this was a tactic to rot out the mind of white saab.

He returned with a stainless steel bucket of hot steaming rice that had come out of a huge iron cauldron on the kitchen floor, and spooned a mound of it on the woven leaf. Next he brought in two buckets of sambar, and dal, then bhajee and “vegetales” after that. The sambar I had to rename pepper water because that was literally what it was, boiled red pepper powder and whole peppers with a trace of salt and a few spices. The dal was simply boiled lentils mixed into a soup. And the vegetales were vegetables boiled to the “nth” degree, mostly chunks of turnip, rutabaga, carrot, and black pods that resembled scorpion tails. I greedily spooned a huge mound of the mixture in my mouth. I was starved.

The hottest pepper in the world, so I have been told, is something called the “New Orleans Blue” and is a bluish mutant species growing in the marshlands. It is hotter than a Habanero. Next in line is a black little pod in south India that resembles a scorpion tail—that might well be because the inhabitants are jaded enough to actually use scorpion tails.

At any rate, those who have ever seen a Chinese air-raid drill will have some idea of how I looked in the aisle after placing the empty spoon back on the leaf, arms rotating in a pattern between rotary blades and dragonfly wings, and feet jumping up and down. My next mouthful came twenty minutes later after I returned from a short walk. Only this time, I spooned out all the scorpion tails. Now I could safely eat the food without having to walk around between bites. Indeed, all my bodily movement could be done in the stall itself, as I rocked back and forth between bites, occasionally shutting my eyes.

As I left the canteen, I mused over the fact that not only was one’s intake of this type of food limited, but that it had almost no food value. Ninety percent of it was boiled rice and the other assorted over-boiled vegetables added up to negligible amounts of protein, minerals, and vitamins. More amazing was that the people out here were on the brink of starvation anyway, and still they polished the rice till it was snow-white, removing the protein and vitamin-rich pod. “It’s hard enough to live off of brown rice, but white, not a chance,” I reflected apprehensively.

Exploring the Locale

B

y four in the afternoon, after a siesta, the raging heat had quelled sufficiently for my roommate, the older Westerner, and me to go down to the dried-up riverbed half a mile from the ashram. I was anxious to take it all in. He stopped by a tea-stall out on the road, removed his shirt, rubbed himself down with coconut oil, tied a handkerchief over his bare head, then bought a lime drink costing a penny or so. Of course, this was a crowddrawer, but he had that angle worked out too by sign language with the stall-owner, who shooed the onlookers away.

The path to the riverbed was a water buffalo trail that felt like burning embers whenever a rock went into my shoe. The sand was so fine that it was almost liquid. It was also rich in dried animal excrement. As this was really my first chance to observe the local surroundings, I took note of how pebble-strewn and rocky the rising slopes were on one side of the path. Eventually, near the entrance to the riverbed, the slope became a mountainous ridge. On the other side of the path was a barrier of underbrush, trees, and thorns, closing off one of the local well-irrigated paddies, a lushgreen little area compared to the starkness of everything else.

The white sand of the riverbed itself was blinding as it stretched an eighth of a mile across and as far as the eye could see. The remains of the river trickled by, a shallow murky soup, starting and ending out of banks of sand only a few hundred yards away.

“Herman,” my new roommate, told me that the river was the bathing ghat for the entire area. He wrinkled his nose disgustedly and said with an accent hard to place, sounding like a cross between Detroit and the Bronx, “Dey come here by da hundreds, bathin in it, washjin in it, brushjin du teeth

in it, pisszin in it, garglin in it, washjun da clothes in it. It’s unbaleevable why they all don’ die tomorrow. I can’d understan.”

We leapt over the river and headed for the center of the cauldron, as I tried not to touch any moist sand for fear of hookworm or trichinosis crawling under my skin.

“If it’s this hot in February, Herman, what’s it like in July?” “Unbaleevable! You notice thu animuls can hardly walk as it is. Ya aughta see em in the summa, they stagger like they was drunk.”

The accent it turned out was neither from the Bronx nor Detroit, it was Russian. Herman disclosed his story in snatches. He had been an Olympic swimmer in the late 1930’s, and soon skipped the country to go to America. I pictured him in some sub-zero Siberian night crawling under a locomotive, clenching on the bottom with hands and teeth, and hanging on several days as ice welded him to the brakeage system. After that he might have rolled out half-frozen in some ditch, only to run on as a fugitive from the secret police.

Herman and I turned around after walking almost a mile down the center of the riverbed. I felt much weaker. For good reason—it was hotter than the Syrian desert in mid-summer. I questioned Herman about the handkerchief on his head, and he replied, “Sunstroke. You get that and it’ll put ya in a coma, and that can kill. Godda be careful in this sun, no kiddin. If ya feel nauseous, stay outa the sun for a few days.” My mouth was parched. I kept my eye on the ridge over the bullock path entering the riverbed and was reminded of “God’s Anvil” in Lawrence of Arabia.

Herman was tough as nails—short, bald, and stocky, resembling a Bruegel medieval peasant. While we were walking along, I noticed that he had worked out a rather odd ritual. He collected hundreds of dried-out little shells of river snails, bleached bone-white by the sun. He explained that they helped him figure things out. I kept probing.

“It’s suddle, suddle stuff. I have problems getting to it. Baba teaches me through these things. It has to do with time, it has to do with who ya are, and where you are goin.” Perhaps he was defensive about looking crazy, he sighed off, “I cand really talk about it tho. You’ll learn, you’ll learn. Godda way to go though.” He looked slightly contemptuous. So I reminded him that I had come to India alone, without anybody giving me any road maps.

Suddenly there was a loud trumpeting screech from behind us. Looking back, I spotted a tiny man riding an elephant along the side of the riverbed. It screeched and blasted several more times, waving its trunk in the air. This was the finishing touch to put us into story land.

“That’s Gita. Thad means ‘the song of god.’ Thad’s whad Baba names it. Somebody gave it to Baba, so he keeps the thing. It lives in a shed, right next to Baba. It even knows how ta worship Baba. I tell you one thing, it knows a lot. Baba tellz me in id’s former incarnation, Gita was his pet dog. But it wanted to be with him so bad, he brought it back higher up on the scale.”

As I eyed the “song of god,” flapping and honking up and down the riverbed, I was well aware that this kind of talk in the wrong company could easily be misunderstood. Herman went on, getting to the meat of his story.

“When I come to Baba a couple a’ years back, he tellz me it’s no accident. He treats us real special; me, Cowans, Charles Penn, Indra Devi, Murphets, just a few older Americans. Then there weren’t so many big crowds. Baba, he talkin to us individually each day alone. Sometimes he come to my room several times a day. But you don’ find him doin that now. One day he tell me I was a yogi in a former life, that’s how come I go to India.”

“I ask him why I am born in Russia, go through hell all the time. He tell me I almost reach enlightenment in last life as Indian yogi, but at the last moment I blow it. I gotta realize it’s all his grace. He’s stronger than we can ever think.”

Herman eyed the ground, walking very carefully, and conscious of every movement. His face knotted in determination, as he whispered grimly, “I tell you somethin so you don’ make same dumb mistake. Don’ blow it like I did. I got big temper. Sometime blow my stack and don’ care ‘bout nothin. Baba give me a test in doz days when I had it so easy. I begin to doubt him. Don’ ever doubt Baba. I start to think I know better than Baba. I get angry at him. Finally one day he correct me in front of people, I blow my top, pack my bags, and stomp off the ashram. Baba still love me though. He tells me before I go that one day I come back, head bowed low. I be sorry for what I did. But it be a little harder next time Baba predicts. I not be so close.”

“I have big regrets for blowing it first time. He teaches patience the hard way. After leaving, I go to America, cool off. Life goes downhill and I get mad at everything. Work hard in the photo business, make good money, but still not happy. When I recently come back to Baba after a couple a’ years, he tellz me, ‘So you’ve decided to come back. I am waiting for you.’ Then he tells me first lesson is to think before speakin, that way no trouble. Now I keep my big mouth closed, and Baba don’ talk with me so much, but maybe he’s closer in other ways.”

Herman squinted his eyes in the distance. “I tell you, he’s got power unbaleevable. He knows every word we’re saying right now, just like he knows everything. He’s a great mystery that nobody can understan. He once tell me, ‘If the whole world spent ten thousand years trying to figure out all that I am, they would not even scratch the surface with all their intelligence and all their learning.’ I tell you a little secret, he’s God, don’ never doubt that.”

My curiosity was unquenchable. I had followed Herman’s whole dialogue with “yeah, yeah,” trying to keep the pump going. When we jumped back over the rivulet to the bullock path, Herman pointed up to a huge boulder on a stony ridge towering above. A medium-sized tree grew on it. “That’s called the ‘wish fulfilling tree.’ Ya know why? When Baba was a boy, he’d go up there and pick people any kinda fruit they asked for—in season, outa season; tropical, cold weather, you name it, he picked it. One time, it be a pineapple, then a mango, apple, banana, orange, grape, pomegranate,

watermelon. He even picked cherries that they only find in the Kashmir Himalayas, thousands of miles away, and even if they had cars around here then, they’d get cooked after the fifteen-day ride. Hundreds of Indians around here swear to this. You even find it written up in some of the old Andhra newspapers.

“That’s not all that happened on this hill. It takes us ten minutes to climb it, and in this heat, we pant like a dog on top. Well, one day there’s whole crowd at the bottom here. And Baba tells them he’s gonna go up in the time it takes them to blink. Sure enough, one second he’s down here, and the next second he’s way up there on top waving down at them. Everybody falls down on their knees. They know he can’t be just an ordinary yogi with that sorta power.

“So Baba he yells down to them that he’s gonna give ‘em special grace. They wait for something to happen. It does! The center of Baba’s head opens up, and a light brighter than the sun comes out and blinds them for half a day after. He tells them that that’s his real form—pure light. His whole head is a ball of light. They fall down and start worshipping him like God. And that’s why he came here instead of the States--where they would try to make him a circus act.”

By early evening I was ready to do some exploring alone. My sights were on the hill springing up in the rear corner of the whole rectangular township ashram rising above the luxury suites and hospital, forming on a plateau above them. Typical of all the local hills and mountains, it was stark, pebbly, and boulder-strewn.

T wo-thirds the way up, where much of the ashram below came into view, I met a tall elegant blonde in her early twenties standing amidst a small grove of trees encircling the famous Tree of Wisdom. Her name was Victoria, she was English, and had the sort of angel food-cake prettiness that reminded me of an overgrown Alice in Wonderland. Her speech added the finishing touches to the portrait, as her words flowed in immaculate patrician English. For a moment I felt a romantic twinge for her, but subdued it with the trident of Vedantic philosophy. Every detail added to this living mosaic of lives that Baba was putting together.

She and a travelling companion named Anthony had come to India from London on an overland bus tour, presumably because the trendy life of Britain’s hip culture was becoming “a bit much,” leaving an existential hole. After shuttling about the main youth-infested hip circuits of India, looking for a non-definable high (pot was only bringing them down more), they ran into one of India’s minor gurus who was staying near one of the beaches of Kerala. Swami Chinmayananda would expound Vedanta with the authority of a highly educated Brahmin intellectual, and the two would sit stunned at this new way of looking at the universe. Almost immediately, they visited a local Baba temple in the house of a devotee, whose zeal and accounts were unending. When they saw some of the miracles taking place about the house, they were on their way, reaching the ashram at about the time I first met Baba in Ananthapur.

Our talk ended and Victoria floated down the hill with a farewell wave, blue sari blowing in the breeze as I heard the loud Om of the “phantom ghost train” issuing from Baba’s prayer-hall below, the signal of the evening bhajan.

The Second Day

D

uring the next day my explorations continued as I toured the ashram post office, printing press (with three small presses), a staterun bank by the side gate, the Vedic school, and finally the hospital on the hill with its two wards, surgical unit, public clinic and X-ray unit. It even had a police station.

After lunch I went to the bookstore, bought every available book either by or about Baba in English, and started reading them. I also sat in the shade and studied Baba’s prayer hall.

I thought to myself that this thick stone bastion isolated Baba from the depleting elements much the same way Regents Park Botanical Gardens shielded its flora from the harsh sleet of the London winter. And with its chlorophyll greens and whitewashed whites, Baba’s hall reminded me of a greenhouse for an avatar.

The building was ninety feet along the front and thirty-five feet along the side. The inside public auditorium was the main portion of the building. It was sixty feet long from the rear curtains to the front stage, its ceiling twenty-five feet in height. Baba’s private quarters, along the side ends of the building, interconnected along the upstairs balcony in view of everybody.

It was more than just ornate. It was rococo. Welded to the railings of the massive extended front porch were two silver-painted iron sculptures of Siva and Vishnu. Christmas tree-lights were woven along the rest of the railing of the upstairs balcony. Over the roof of the extended balcony were the Prasanthi Nilayam flagpole and an elaborately decorated pagoda in which

sat a huge carved Shaivite fertility symbol, a Siva Lingam. And there were statues as well as a bust of Baba.

With its Reno, Nevada, undertones, I wondered whether the ornamentation represented a level of high aesthetics I was unable to appreciate due to “cultural bias,” or whether, as my gut sense felt, it was just plain gaudy.

Suddenly people were spreading the word that Baba would be back that night. He had been gone from the time I had met him, three weeks. A car pulled up in front of the ashram police station, and several wealthy Indians got out. Then I saw Gill, looking slightly disgruntled, crawl out of the rear seat.

“It’s great to see you brother. How ya doin?” I asked extending my hand. No answer. Gill looked past me and headed for the trunk to get his bags. I took them as a friendly gesture. Continuing to ignore me, Gill grunted something and headed straight for the steps of the luxury suites. I could feel my heart drop, after just having reassured myself that on such a large ashram I could avoid close contact, if Gill became a pain.

I followed Gill down the porch, passing every door except the one at the end where Herman and I stayed. He entered what had apparently been his room all along, dropping a handbag at the base of the mosquito net in the front room, where I had been staying. Without saying a word, I began to collect my belongings as Herman leaned in the doorway from the adjacent smaller room saying, “You ought ta move in ta here.” I sensed a coming standoff and it was an unwelcome damper on my enthusiasm at being there.

It is a costly thing to flippantly brush aside an act of friendliness, I mused. Perhaps he needed a different sort of greeting, a mind ripping super-aggressive confrontation. Yet I did not want to get sucked in the very hour Baba was to return.

I said to Herman, “Why hasn’t Baba straightened this dude out? He’s acting like a prima donna; he’s gonna remain stuck until he swallows his presumptuous self-importance.” Herman just nodded, holding back his own rage.

The last thing I moved was my mat, by which time Gill finally spoke, giving ultimatums in the form of ashram disciplinary rules. In turn, I showed a part of me he had never seen before as I gave him a cinder-block stare— the kind that can explode into a broken nose. Gill shut up, exhaled angrily, and crawled under the mosquito net to meditate.

The lingering voice behind the stare quietly said to Gill, “Sometime in the future when you feel like a steam cooker about to explode, you’ll realize with some remorse that it would have been far easier if you’d done as I had done, and come on like an eager friend. But you wanted to be a hard ass, and that means that somewhere along the line you are headed for an ego death, and you’re ultimately gonna have to swallow your pride—and that’s gonna hurt, cowboy.” Yes, this was bringing out the wrong parts of me and I did not like it.

Soon Herman and I were on the road awaiting Baba’s arrival. In the long crowded line, I met Vickie’s companion, Anthony, whom I immediately liked. Tall, serene, and handsome, he was the sort of person that Gill needed to take lessons from. Herman could be “heavy” enough by himself, but with me—and then Gill piled on top of that—the suite was a potential land mine. It needed a neutralizer like Anthony, not a catalyst like Gill.

Muffled shouts in the distance brought pandemonium to the crowd. We moved down the road where the crowd had sufficiently thinned out.

In the diminishing evening twilight, a phantasmal trail of dust arose from the road in the distance. I suddenly felt a particular brand of energy that I had experienced only one time before in Ananthapur. But I could feel it now, a vast sweeping hurricane of spirit flooding across the land. I thought to myself—Forty miles in front of him, forty miles in back of him, forty miles to the right of him, and forty miles to the left of him, the spirit moves like a free-floating magnetic pole.

A wave of dust sped at us in a widening parachute as its source, a little cream-colored Fiat, gleamed in the forefront. A hundred feet away I could see a red-robed figure sitting in the back seat. Moments later, as the car was face to face with us, Baba smiled and waved, gleaming radiantly, then sped on.

In a haze of excitement, I kept apace with Herman and Anthony into the ashram to cut the car off before it reached the inner compound through the front entrance. We bolted through the side gate, around the back of the prayer hall, to the men’s front side—women stood on the opposite front end. People already lined the entire entrance. Within only seconds, Baba’s car sped down the center avenue as shouts of “Om Jai Sai Ram” filled the air. It raced around the fenced-in cement lotus, and pulled into the flagstone driveway beneath the extended balcony in front of Baba’s private door.

Several ashram policemen held the crowd back, while specially appointed devotees motioned the crowd to calm down and remain still. Baba sprang out of the car athletically, and headed to the center of the inner compound near the lotus, amidst the crowd’s gasps. Baba smiled, made enigmatic hand gestures, blessed the crowd, and then turned to walk back to the prayer hall singling me out on the way with a smile, calling “Rowdie.” I waved back numbly as I felt the crowd’s attention turn to me.

When Baba had gone into his private quarters, I assumed that was it for the night. It wasn’t. Bhajans were now beginning, and word was out for everybody to go inside the hall. Those who couldn’t fit remained outside sitting on the ground. I leapt inside and sped down the center aisle to a row up front. The crowd funneled in behind me. A Brahmin priest patrolled the aisle, motioning the thousand or so people to quickly sit down and shut up, making a hissing sound to quiet them. The women’s entrance was across from the men’s, entering via the rear side of the hall, which was exclusively for the women. As I soon learned, the center aisle was the dividing line between the sexes.

Devotional songs, Bhajans, then alternated between the men and women bhajan leaders, with the crowd always echoing each refrain. Most of the bhajans were either in Telugu, the language of Andhra Pradesh, or Sanskrit, the ancient tongue of the Vedas. The songs themselves were usually written by Baba. Each bhajan would be repeated three times, doubling in tempo each time, until by the end the whole crowd would go like a locomotive. The melodies, fired up by a harmonium and little brass cymbals, rolled on hypnotically. My trying to mouth the words was no good; they were just too alien for me.

Baba’s chair in the front was elevated above us on a platform. A teak and silver affair, a huge “Om” was embossed at the top in Sanskrit. On its armrests were a fresh white handkerchief and flowers. A huge Bengal tiger skin with a roaring head, glass eyes and all, extended out to Baba’s footstool. It was the throne of a Hindu God, no less, layered with symbols of divinity.

Two giant oil paintings of Baba hung on the front wall. Lit from beneath, they were windows into another world. The left picture I entitled “The Old Man.” A wizened mystic stared out into the audience through melancholy eyes, the old Sai Baba of Shirdi, Sai Baba’s “former incarnation.” He was depicted in some twilight-lit alabaster room donned in an ochre robe and characteristically knotted headscarf. The Baba on the right was the present Sai Baba as a young man—handsome, compelling, vital, and innocent—it was an Indian mythical hero smiling out at the women’s half in triumphant detachment, like an unreachable God. Baba’s virtuous face as a youth reminded me of the young Vivekananda, a disciple of Ramakrishna who became one of the nation’s greatest modern heroes.

A life-sized statue of Krishna stood between the two paintings. The blueblack god was frozen in a perpetual mirthful dance, enacting its legendary skill of captivating the hearts of devotees. With almond-shaped eyes and a seductive sidelong glance, the statue held a reed between the lips in the manner of “Giridhara Gopala,” the cowherd avatar. It reminded me of the Greek god Pan. Nearby stood a large coiled silver serpent with the Shirdi Sai Baba sitting on it.

Suddenly a surge went through the crowd. Sai Baba had just emerged from his room and was now outside walking amongst the people. The singing became louder and more frantic as people shifted around trying to get a view of Baba.

Without forewarning Baba appeared in the hall, walking in quick athlet

ic steps. He mounted the wooden platform and took the chair. His radiant smile soon faded into routine coolness as though he had never been away. The more heated the devotees became, the more disinterested Baba appeared, abstractly toying with flower petals and looking off into the distance. The women, all eyes on Baba, wheezed and puffed as they clapped their hands and rocked back and forth, transforming into a giant organ bellows trying to fire up the dying glow of an indifferent ember. But it was no good. They just couldn’t tuck Baba away safely in a box, igniting him as a portable lamp when they wanted. Baba would remain the formless fire, dancing with them for a while, but only for a brief season, reappearing in a hundred thousand other places, a flare here and a glow there. Such was the way of the formless Absolute in its ultimate, almost brutal impersonality.

On the final note of a bhajan, Baba kicked his stool to the side, and sprung to his feet. Instantly one of the Vedic schoolboys in the back vigorously clanged the bell. The crowd jumped to its feet, moving towards the front, while singing the closing ceremonial chant. Baba eyed the audience for a moment, while mysteriously weaving his fingers through the air, turned and left into the doors of his residence. The priest brought out a burning camphor censor while the audience fanned the light towards their faces in a traditional gesture.

Everybody crowded out of the hall as quickly as possible to get a final view of Baba as he appeared on the upstairs balcony. It was the final “Darshan” of their God as night approached.

Baba smiled down then looked out towards the darkened lands of Andhra Pradesh towards the black night sky. He slowly backed into the portal of his room, like a retreating mechanical figure in a cuckoo clock. The crowd dispersed as the air hummed with nighttime activity. Some went off to meditate, others to eat, others to talk. And the rest stretched their blankets on the sands of the ashram to sleep under a clear starry sky.

This was a world unlike any I had ever seen.

Chapter Seven Forging Bonds In the Desert

A

quiet sizzling antagonism soon pervaded our luxury suite. Then there were such continual night-time harassments as the heavy stifling air and the constant assault of mosquitoes swarming from

the bathroom in nocturnal droves. To combat them required a sticky greenish paste that had its own setbacks. Raising the value of sleep even more was the Spartan fact that we were without beds. We lay on straw mats with maybe a cotton spread or two as our ribs and other bones were at constant odds with the flagstone floor, giving us a distinctly bruised feeling when we arose from “sleep.” However the greatest obstacle of all was the 4:00 a.m. wakeup, and this was usually the time I finally dropped off to sleep.

The air of brotherly cooperation between Gill, Herman and myself was about as spiritual as three Oregon panhandlers who have all hit upon a gold vein in a riverbed. Each eyes the others to make sure that no one sneaks out at night to raid the supply or pan for extra gold. And as everybody seems to be sleeping nice and neighborly, there’s a creak from the bathroom door, and three shot-guns go off from different corners of the flophouse.

Gill, when he wore his farmer-brown Levi overalls with suspenders and all, resembled “Shotgun Mountain Bill.” Herman reminded me more of “Sammy the Butcher” from Chicago, especially in his own self-styled Indian outfit that looked as though its origin had been more from the Cosa Nostra than anything else. And though the girls much later named me “Marshal Matt Dillon,” I felt more like “Johnny Flash the Killer from Dodge City.”

As silence became the golden rule of the place, it was evident to me that the particular brand of yoga my roommates followed was a high-octane mixture of mortification of the flesh, ego negation, and yogic hard-ass-ness. “Love,” in any form, seemed to fall away from the picture entirely. Night after night, I could hear Gill’s little alarm clock go off at 2:30 or 3 a.m. as he would sit up under the mosquito net to do pranayam— power breathing— for the next two or three hours and not sleep again till nine the following evening. Consequently a considerable self-conscious anger hit me each time I was forced to stagger off the mat at four-thirty because I knew that Gill in some meditative hyper-sensitive state could feel every fumbling movement. The more quietly I tried to slosh water on my head to wake up—so I at least would not fall over in the prayer hall—the more I resented Gill’s inhibiting presence. I felt his whole approach was wrong, but I knew I couldn’t prove it.

Tired of the “heaviness” of the suite, Herman and I moved our mats outside to the little garden patch between our suite and the next. The three of us drifted further apart. Gill was forever morose and self-absorbed, Herman more and more silent and distrusting. The whole thing felt toxic to me.

At the crowded darshans we would see Baba walk amidst the sitting pilgrims outside the prayer hall. He would bypass stone-faced Gill, then repeatedly single me out to chat, joke, or slap me on the back. If I was on the top step looking out, Baba might sneak up behind me along a crowded aisle of Indians, then stand directly behind me with his legs and robe pressed against my back, pretending it was just an accident as he scanned the mass of devotees outside. He might remain thirty seconds, giving me a little nudge before moving on. Without a doubt, this constant seeking-out of Baba’s greatly fuelled my sense of purpose. Herman never got it, Gill seldom got it, and Anthony—good-natured, well-mannered, and dear Anthony—never got it. He stood resembling a Victorian guard, respectfully in the shadows. What quickly evolved from all this was my transformation into being the king’s noble, as Baba conditioned me to an easy informality with him. It was my rightful domain. Soon I became the messagecarrier and relay station between Baba and the other foreigners.

Herman continued feeling the brunt of it all, which he reflected with his increasing ritualization at darshan. The lines of his face gave him the German river-troll look, grim and paranoid. If he wasn’t sitting on some strategic step that highlighted him, clenched jaw muscles and all, he would circumvent the threat of being ignored by acting very official. With a penguin walk, Herman marched around Baba

with a clumsy Rolliflex, awkwardly focusing and peering down the view screen. If he looked up for feedback, Baba’s eyes would pass over him as if he was as significant as an iron-post. Perhaps to validate himself, Herman would next begin elaborate technical maneuvers with the preposterous device. Baba would grimace, and those quick enough to perceive, giggled. Phase two of the clowning would continue as Baba paced his movements exactingly enough to elude Herman’s lens by a few degrees. Herman never quite tripped, but he came close to it a few times. Even off-stage, the Tom and Jerry stigma pursued Herman, mostly because of his apparel, a mutation of the Indian kurta shirt with cut-off sleeves at the shoulders. It gave him the Cosa Nostra look. As a result, he constantly had his growing paranoia fed by Indians who stared and giggled at him incessantly. Perhaps Herman saw all this as signs of his “heightening awareness.” Nevertheless, soon enough we were no longer on speaking terms.

Early Trials

The final cut came the day Herman handed me the keys for our new room. He included ultimatums and entrance stipulations, making the aside that the best thing for me to do was to stay “shutten up.” He got a cinderblock stare as I pondered the idea of making him a cartoon character in my mind from then on. I pointed out the recent strangeness in his behavior and increasing hung-upness. “You oughta see yourself in the mirror, pal. I’d begin to worry if I were you. The same thing’s going to happen again that happened the last time. You’re about to blow it.”

His eyes began burning, Herman resembled a brain-damaged panda. “Um gonna say thiz one time and afta that itz finish. I no talk to you, you no talkin to me. Thatz best policy. Now I’m givin you the keys to the new room Baba told us to move to. But you can only stay there if you shutten up.”

Heating up fast, I replied, “Hey, you don’t sound very cooperative to me. I just told you that if you come on like that, you’re gonna get burned. I’ve got a question for you. Is that your room to give away or is it Baba’s? And if it belongs to Baba, who the hell are you to give ultimatums? You’re playing with dynamite, friend. Now I’m afraid that I’m going to have to go to Mr. Kasturi and find out if Baba really relayed all that stuff to you, qualifications about my shutting up and all. And if he didn’t, here’s my advice: you’d better make peace with yourself and God fast, because you’re going to blow it.”

Red as a pimento, Herman dropped the keys into my hand and stomped off, gibbering at the injustice of even having to relate to me. What he needed was a young, green-eared yes-man who would follow the orthodox yogic school of a Herman. Zey would valk alonk and agree, “Dat’s what um sayin. . . ya just gotta keep shuttin up da mouth and keep de earz outa other people’s affairs. And be real careful. Dat’s de way to spirtchul enlightenings.” And the American archetype would respond, “Sure, Jackson, with the cosmic love of Chairman Mao.”

Gill meanwhile had drifted a thousand light years more from either one of us. He moved into the blue Colorado caravan tent of Indra Devi, the American yogess, pitching it in the garden patch between our former suite room and the next row of rooms.

The reason Baba was moving us out of the luxury suite was that it was nearing one of the three biggest festivals of the year, Maha Sivaratri, when over 50,000 pilgrims would swarm the ashram, converting it to a human termite-mound. Naturally, this included those who had financed and built their own rooms, including the luxury suites. The luxury suite owners were the super-rich, Bombay shipping magnates, governors of state, surgeon generals, and the like.

Our new cubicle was in a row of thirty rooms and faced the luxury suites across the compound. Herman inspected it, sniffed it, and when I walked in, he took his bags and moved into a guest lodge outside the ashram. I could see the omens lining up for him. The difference between the new room and the suite was that it was a quarter the size and had a tenth the light with its twenty-watt bulb. And added to the swarms of mosquitoes, it had swarms of cockroaches, some as big as mice. It also smelled. Since the rooms lacked bathroom facilities, many residents used the back of the building as a lavatory. That was when they were too lazy to do what everybody else living on the ashram had to do, and use the neighboring hills, be they old men, women or children, no matter what time of day or night, cobras or no cobras. My greatest fear was having diarrhea and having to run up a hill twenty times a night, treading on a scorpion on the way. Still I had to “transcend the shacklings of the world.”

Now that Herman and Gill were out of the picture, the forces of synchronicity continued to bring more interesting people from the West. One thing you could be sure of: no one was ordinary.

Two new Americans from New York City were to become my roommates. I would partially oversee them until they adjusted.

One was a fairly attractive Jewish girl named Michelle, who seemed selfsacrificing and agreeable . . . and well-built, with whom I envisioned nighttime devotionals. (I knew that to allow the demon of lust to knock me off path would be a really blind way to go). With lust settled, I knew I was safe with Michelle. With her companion, Jai, I could see that I would have other problems.

When I saw Jai at Darshan, it was hard to believe that he existed outside the comic strips. I began to suspect that Baba dragged him across half the world just to blow my mind. He was a Brooklyn Klutz; obnoxious, he wore glasses thick as coke bottles that expanded his eyeballs in the concentric circles of an onion. And he was interpersonally oblivious to the point of being a social moron. When he talked, he screamed . . . “like he was yellin’ at sum schmuck across Grand Central Station.” After two minutes of seeing him make Cherokee Indian “how” signs to Baba, I wanted to take him behind the ashram and quiet him down with a tire iron.

When he greeted Herman, it was my first true glimpse of homicide in Herman’s eyes. With Gill, it was even worse. Gill took Jai to some inward plane of non-being and unmade him. But Jai persisted, oblivious.

In baggy, wrinkled pants resembling diapers, and a bright Miami flamingo shirt, Jai puttered about blipping non-sequiturs to strangers. After several days, I noticed that he neither washed nor shaved. He didn’t trust the water supply. He claimed at one point, in the monotonic intonations of Robbie the Robot, that he would probably have ninety-three days of physical existence left before he expired. After sampling the food, he decided that his intake would be close to nil. He smiled as though we had reached a new level of rapport when I told him he was an idiot.

After seeing him grimace and agonize one morning, I also realized that he had problems regarding the bathroom situation, severe problems. He stated that he was a “being” who was “totally modest,” and therefore could not use anything during the day but an American toilet. And the only way he would use the great outdoors was in total darkness. I could tell Michelle had “had it up to here.” So Jai, with the “forbearance of a true yogi,” would have to grip his bowels like the doors of the Kremlin until nightfall. It was a close contest. By late afternoon, he was crawling about the porch as though going through labor, undulating his head in pain.

To the dismay of many, Baba was perfectly friendly with Jai, though he passed Michelle for several darshans, as she sat neat as a pin, freshly washed, and sitting like a bunny rabbit in a new Indian silk sari. It hurt, but she tried to hide it. A new fire leapt into the eyes of Herman, Michelle, and maybe even Gill when Baba came up to Jai and asked, “Hello Sir, are you happy?” And Jai, wearing something like a Polish bowling T-shirt, smiled as though he had just won the double-bubble chewing-gum contest, held up his hand as Chief Grey Cloud, responding with a loud “How,” and then dropped his arm limply, swaying back and forth like a baby hippopotamus. Baba gave him parting smiles then headed towards me. “Tell other foreigners, there will be an interview coming very soon.” Everyone cheered and danced afterwards, except Herman and Gill who kept their cool.

Back at the room, Jai and Michelle told me how they had met, through a mutual friend, Lila, and consequently through their New York guru, Hilda Charlton, under whose guidance they had grown as brother and sister disciples. Not that it was easy. Their natural animosity for one another was explained by Hilda, who stated that it was a carry over from past lives together where there still remained a residual “karmic debt.” But she encouraged them all the same. After all, they were exceedingly high souls, differing only in their individual approaches to God.

Michelle’s story was classic: communication barriers with her family, rebellion, irreconcilable differences with the norms of society, and finally the arduous pilgrimage through the ’60s counter-culture with LSD trips and being on the road. The limbo got increasingly worse as her state of depression fell down the graph. When she was “just ripe,” she met Hilda Charlton, a Manhattan New Age guru, who was the only woman she was ever able to really love and respect.

Hilda took her in like an orphan, trained Michelle in different techniques of yoga, and finally gave her the authority to lead numerous sessions of Hilda’s growing following of eager aspirants, maybe fifty youth in all. They sang together, meditated, did pranayama, concentrated on the inner light, got words of wisdom from the ascended “masters” such as “Master Hillarion and Master Kutchumi,” and received visions of Sai Baba in India, where Hilda herself had traveled as an entertainer before meeting some of the gurus. As a virtuous single woman looking for the truth and spiritual love, she sought her perfect master. It had been an arduous chain of testings from one guru to another until Hilda met Nityananda (the guru of Muktananda), a God-realized yogi, an avadhut. Finally she met Sai Baba, and knew that he was “Lord Krishna come again.” Even though Baba had given Michelle a vision to come to him in India, she was already finding it less glorious than what she had planned.

Jai, speaking with as much feeling as if he were reciting strings of binary digits, went on to share what sounded like a well-planned, tape-recorded autobiography. He had obviously shared his amazing story with quite a number of people.

Jai reminded me of “Yogi Schwartz,” whom I had met in Rishikesh, as he spoke in Brooklynese. “I was nevah a hippy, nevah a dope fiend, I was totally straight. I lived a completely Koshah life, Bar Mitzvahed, that made my motha very proud from the time I was a liddle baby. I nevah had an impure thought, I remained chaste throughout my adolescence, always working hard.”

As Jai unwound, Michelle straightened up the room in a rigid, quiet, selfenforced tolerance. She must have known the facts by heart. She lit a candle in the wall box, then some incense, and finally set up an altar comprised of items out of her suitcase, pictures of gurus, gods, goddesses, Hilda, plus tokens of various types.

But Jai was of legitimate interest---after all, he had made the weeding process to make it all the way from New York to this distant and magical realm in wilderness India. That alone gave him merit.

Jai’s first contact with the higher forces occurred when he was seven. “Night afta night, I had the same dream. I would be sitting cross-legged on a large river—it turned out to be the Ganges— whose banks were near a city, which I also found out was Benares. At any rate, as I recited the name of my chosen deity, doing a special type of breathing, something happened that really frightened me. A tiger approached from behind out of the forest, jumped and mauled me, finally killing me. I’d actually die in the dream. There’s no death worse, believe-me. As a kid, I’d just sit up in bed sweating with the lights turned on. Later on, when I was older, I learned the dream was a leak from a former life, when I was a yogi.

“In high school, another thing happened. I was in the row back of my history class. Suddenly as the teacher was talking, he changed right in front of me. His head got huge and gray, his eyes separated, his ears hung down, and he grew a trunk. It was an elephant head on a man’s body. He talked like that for ten minutes and I was the only one who saw it. Not only that, but I heard things that the class didn’t. He told me to read the Puranas. I did, and soon found out that he is a god, one of my own personal deities. He is the son of Siva and Uma. His name is Ganesha, the god of overcoming obstacles. In fact that’s how I got A’s in high school. It was through him. He told me to work super hard. But when I was in trouble, he’d come to my aid if I invoked his name. During one examination he told me the answers to each question. I got an A on it, of course. But one night he appeared in my room and told me that he wasn’t my highest personal deity and not to worry, since at the time I’d find out, and know her immediately since she was a goddess I had been worshipping for hundreds of lifetimes.”

“Then I got my first mystical experience when I was a student at New York University. I went to one of the India exhibits on tour at the museum. I walked into the special exhibit of ancient Hindu gods, and before I knew it, I was in a corner facing this two feet bronze statue of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I fell at her feet and cried. Suddenly . . . Blam. . . from outa’ the center of her forehead came a blue ray of light into my face. I saw lights and stars, and ended up dancing around in the room for maybe twenty minutes. Then the statue started speaking. I can’t reveal all she said, but she instructed me in practically all the yoga I know now, telling me her name was Lolita Devi. From then on, any time I closed my eyes, I could see her. And any time a major thing came up, I always asked her advice.”

Lolita Devi guided Jai into a doctoral history program at Columbia University, until he was later told to drop out. By then he had met Hilda Charlton, who was to be his guru. He was to see her earthly embodiment of the “Divine Mother.”

Jai and Michelle, sitting on the floor in our new room, chimed in together, singing a song composed by Hilda called “Divine Mother.” When that ended, it was a one-man show again as Jai rattled off song after song he had composed about Lolita Devi. One sounded like a Rumba with strings of complex Sanskrit words a yard long following each refrain, which he spit out like a computer. He kept timing with the standard baby hippopotamus gestures and idiotic grins. Finally Jai and Michelle withdrew into the silence of their afternoon meditation, sitting stiff-backed against the wall in either the full lotus or semi-lotus positions.

Close Encounters

At nine the following morning, on the one day I had really overslept, I was caught red-handed by Suraiya who stood in the door and announced, “Baba has sent me to wake you up. He knows you are oversleeping. Come on, he is waiting for you. He will not start the interview until you are there.”

I dashed across the ashram, through that crowd right up to Baba’s door, feeling a combination of embarrassment, guilt, and exuberance. Baba flung the door open, while the crowd held up its hands in prayer as Baba playfully chided me with a shaking finger and a smile. This was my second interview since Baba had arrived. The first was a week before, when Baba ignored Herman and Gill, and invited me, Anthony, Victoria, and a number of Indians into the interview. Most close Indian devotees will be lucky to get several interviews through the course of a lifetime.

Baba announced “Oversleeping, oversleeping.” I carefully eyed Herman and Gill for signs of condemnation. Herman looked grim, Gill disgruntled. And I thought. “OK fellas, he’s gonna catch you with your psychic pants down too, so don’t gloat.” With those two there, it was a real damper on me. I liked to relate playfully with Baba, but their constant heaviness made it a lot harder.

Baba directed me to sit right beside his chair, to his left. This would become my permanent place, literally right next to him. Then he explained that this would be the last interview for a while until the massive Mahasivaratri festival ended. Fifteen to twenty thousand pilgrims were already camped either around the grounds or under one of the huge sheds. Baba predicted that there would be over forty to fifty thousand coming from Ceylon, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Madras—companies and organizations, officials, ministers of state, and cabinet members. Hundred of buses were already chartered from Bangalore, bringing pilgrims from distant provinces all over the land.

Baba gave the confiding laugh of one not swayed by the visible obeisance of millions. Crowds or no crowds, he would still be the same Baba, undefined by the vicissitudes of the world.

Baba satirized some of the illustrious people who were coming, and pointed out how men can so easily become bound up by life and the conventions of the world. “Single man walking has two legs,” Baba said wiggling two fingers in the air. “A man and a wife are four legs. Now man goes slowly.” This time Baba used four fingers. “Then there are children, then grandchildren, nephews, nieces—many legs, go very slow like a caterpillar.” He laughed ironically. I suddenly had the horrible vision of being tied down like Gulliver by lust and other life-urges.

The gushes of Baba’s energized attention proved that private fears of falling away from grace, when Baba was showing the impersonal mode, were unfounded.

Gurus have been known to cut people off. Hilda told numerous stories of how Swami Nityananda—Guru of Swami Muktananda—had not spoken to her at all during the first six months that she came out to Ganeshpur to see him. The “tests” could be brutal.

Many there were in a constant self-absorption regarding a moment to moment staying in the will of Baba, the old guru chela method. If one’s inner “onlooker” sensed an attitude of surrender to Baba, that was a good inner sign of being on target. Due to the complexity of this inner navigator, a visible confrontation with Baba could be important feedback concerning one’s real progress and direction. That’s one reason interviews were life-changing events. The godman would drop deliberate evaluations.

Baba was in a “lite” mode, then we sensed a spiritual I. Q. test coming on.

“God is like a giant current of electricity. It goes through all the different wires and bulbs. Man is like a bulb. Each bulb a different capacity, giving off different brightness. One man is a five hundred-watt bulb,” and Baba pointed to an old Indian in the room—just to illustrate the example, or was he doing more? “Another man is four hundred-watt bulb.” And like an arrow in the heart, Baba pointed to me as all the Americans stiffened, especially Herman. Gill was three hundred, Jai two hundred, right down the line until Herman. We still waited for Herman, whom Baba finally rated as twenty-five watts. It must have been a Christmas tree light, because Herman turned into a red-faced pimento again, at times grinding his teeth.

Jai was allowed to sing a song about Lolita Devi, after he had asked whether it was all right to continue worshipping her as his chosen deity. After two frantic stanzas that could be heard outside, Baba halted Jai as Gill impatiently looked up at the ceiling. Baba gave a tolerant chuckle in Jai’s direction then switched to Herman.

With patient chiding, he shook his finger at Herman and said, “Too much talking.” Baba flapped his hands making blah-blah quacks in the air. A little exasperation entered his tone, seeing that Herman’s irritation had not subsided. “Going around talking to everybody, mind restless, very restless like a monkey. Here is some advice; keep quiet, talk little, and speak only sweet words.” As Herman protested in defense, Baba shut him with a tolerant “Ah!” This happened several times more before Herman got the point.

The ripples of agitation in the air were soon smoothed away as Baba dismissed the tiny moods that still lingered. A waterfall of force emanated from him, quickly transfiguring us, as we realized once again the unaccountable value of each private second in Baba’s presence. He was adoring us, almost swooning over us with an innocent open-heartedness. The old colored mammy in him smiled from ear to ear as Baba told us again, “Love is sweet,” with unaffected abandon. For a moment he was somewhere between Ethel Walters and Aunt Jemima.

“You are hungry, want some sweets, prasadam?”

“Oh yes, Swami,” we nodded as Michelle’s voice chimed a little louder and higher than the others. Gill’s eyes narrowed in a contented gratitude.

Baba’s sleeve went up, and he leaned out over the others. I gripped the arm of his chair, looking closely from his side. On the final wave of his arm in the familiar abracadabra motion, a baseball-sized object suddenly appeared in his hand. The same familiar ionized force hurtled through the room the instant it appeared. We saw a modern miracle done with casual finesse.

Baba looked around, smiling to indicate what fun it was to share. I came to my senses when I felt his elbow leaning down on my arm, which was still running along the armrests of this chair. “Open your hands, Rowdie.”

I rose up on my haunches, making a bowl with my hands. Baba crumbled the large ball up into a soft gravel that quickly filled both hands. “Ladoo. The sweet is called Ladoo. My workmen work very fast.” Baba laughed knowingly as he heard a mind-blown “Yes, Baba.” Then he passed it out, a kind of Indian fudge.

As we were prepared for Baba to open the door and usher us out, he announced “special grace,” waving for us to sit down again. He went over to a velvet curtain and stood halfway through it: “Private interviews.” A thunderous sound suddenly issued from out of the prayer hall on the other side of the wall. It was the 11:30 bhajan, and we were being held over, a considerable breach of the normal routine, just for us. I smiled at Anthony, and got a merry twinkle back.

A familiar nervous anesthesia filled me as Baba’s eyes radiated from the velvet-draped doorway. I was the first. He opened the curtains to let me in, then slid them shut. We stood alone together at the bottom of a compact little stairwell that led up to Baba’s private suites on the second floor. The sound of the adjacent auditorium gave me the feeling of being within the bellows of a huge organ. This was not my first private interview with Baba on the ashram.

In my continuum of private moments with Baba, I had thus far made a considerable leap of faith, especially during the last private interview a week back. So far there seemed to be no ceiling on the limits of his kingdom that he was willing to bestow on the faithful. And both times earlier he unleashed a slightly more dazzling glimpse of his supernature. It was light years ahead of anything that Don Juan had shown Carlos Castaneda, or anything Tim Leary had experienced. It was right out of the guru epics that I had read at Alderman library. Such encounters shattered Western convention, fitting an ancient pattern.

A week back, in this same stairwell, I made a bold pledge, spurred on doubtless by every kind of motive—the preciousness of what might be my final ticking seconds with a Messiah. I knew Baba could become so globally flocked as to be virtually unreachable within a few years. After all, Newsweek magazine had done a big spread on Baba as being India’s miracleworking Christ. I sensed the possibility that I might become one of his apostles, but that it depended upon my most all-out response. If I were given three magic wishes, I knew I had better not blow them on trinkets.

“What do you want?” Baba asked as the godhead on earth.

I swallowed, looked into his eyes, and said, “I want to love you with all my heart, soul, and mind, Baba. I want your will to be mine.” He beamed. I continued, “Baba, I know you are God. You cannot fool me. Maybe others don’t always know. . . but.”

Baba climbed up on the lower step so our heights would be equal, and embraced me. It lasted thirty seconds, while I constantly wondered what great invisible boons were being offered. Perhaps he was cleansing some of my past karma or opening some chakra, I didn’t know. But some kind of power was at work in the room, that I could certainly feel.

However as I stood before him this time, I was far less satisfied about myself. Whether it was my increasing alienation from Herman and Gill or such elementary crimes as oversleeping that morning, I wasn’t sure. I just felt far from perfect, though our object as disciples was to learn the opposite.

“What do you want?” This was my second wish.

“Baba, I can’t stand the evil in myself. Help me get rid of it and other obstacles, Baba. Anything that holds me back.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Baba, I really want victory this time, too many failures in the past. I want to be certain. No failure this time, there can be no failure, Baba.” I held up a clenched fist like a battlefield gesture, saying “Jai,” the Sanskrit for victory. The goal was cosmic consciousness, solving the ultimate riddle of existence.

In patient understanding, Baba abstracted over my sins. “Too many bad thoughts, impure sanskaras (traits from past lives). Mind running around like a monkey. Thoughts of material things, anger, ego, jealousy, hate, quarrelling, and thoughts of girls. Not good.” He wrinkled his face in disgust, in such a caricature of the usual expression, I wondered if the wavelength of the original thought impulse from overmind to avatar had mutated in transit. I had been briefly tempted by Michelle the night before in that fleeting moment.

Baba mounted the lower step again, as he had done on the last interview, smiling more like a playmate than anything else. He wrapped his arms about me, hugged tightly, and I pondered.

If the hallmark of this session with him was my own impurity, then I was presently under a spiritual magnifying glass as never before. And any kind of unexpected key might open a new skeleton closet. Baba’s hug grew tighter. Then that subterranean spider of a thought crept out of some dark abyss within. I almost repelled it before I fully sensed it, if that were possible.

Nevertheless, the thought got through in an icy quiet, speculating deep questions about what was happening right then in the stairwell with Baba: Notice how his breathing has become a pant, deeper, more intensified. Feel his pelvis twisting. Why does he need to twist his pelvis? Especially in the region of the loins. Is it accidental? No, not for one who is that conscious. I doubt a detail slips by him. So is this some strange kind of divine passion that only the initiates encounter at the higher stages? Could that be some kind of . . . well. . . non-specific pan-sexuality, or bisexuality? Then I stopped the thought. Indeed, what was going on? Was I twisting something that is innately pure into something that it is not because of my own suspicions and evils?

Yet Baba’s pelvis kept nudging and twisting from my abdomen on down, not hard but gently, almost as though it had the nerve endings of a hand. It was not a comfortable feeling.

Yet if Baba were healing me or opening some hidden skeleton closet, it was not without risk. You only take risks with things you value. Then I feared that Baba might perceive my edginess. Baba could not be unaware of this if he was omniscient. But I feared he might choose to dwell on my circumspect reaction. Could my suspicion be a primal insult to God—reading evil into his act instead of good— and therefore a form of blasphemy in the most profound sense? What if the penalty for this might be expulsion from his presence? Yet could he now be testing me beyond my capacities, knowing I would stumble? Would love do this?

I felt an electric flash of self-conscious anxiety as Baba broke the hug. He held me back and looked penetratingly into my eyes, asking, “What’s wrong, you do not like it?” Then I knew that I could not possibly bail out now or call his cards. For I would hang forever in space with insufficient evidence to satisfy me either way. And I would go through life without a way of ever knowing for sure who or what he really was with the constant question, “What about his miracles?,” hanging in mind. And certainly a hug was not as bad a cliffhanger as the least of the initiatory rites of the Himalayan nights of the rishis, or certain yogic rituals at Lhasa, and it probably all panned out as angel’s dreams anyway. I had to persevere.

‘No, Baba, I like it very much. Great gift, great privilege.” “You are not pulling hard. Very weak hug. You do not like to hug?”

“Baba,” I justified, hoping I had some ground left not to back out, “I was afraid to hug too tightly, maybe some discomfort for you.”

“No, Rowdie.” In an instant we were embracing again until he was satisfied. I really locked in, giving almost a chest-crushing squeeze. His pelvis moved far less, still it moved. I wished I could just shoot the whole area with novocaine and forget about it. Maybe to a saint walking in, it looked like the gates of heaven opening. But to someone without the pellucid heart of a saint—the scene juxtaposed ironically in my mind—it might look like some incredible scene out of a work by the French film directors Godard or Truffaut or a moment in San Francisco’s Castro district.

Baba looked content, and I felt relieved, if not on the brink of a new breakthrough in understanding. I was now ready to suspect my own sin first—the sin of projecting—in any but the most blatant and precarious of events. And that was the way it would have to be from now on.

The curtains opened and eyes glistened back from the dark corners of the room in ravenous wonder. It had been a long interview. Soon the others were whisked through, and we were let out into the bright sunlight before a massive crowd who sang out and looked at us in awe. To my right, leaning against one of the porch pillars was one of the familiar young ushers, an attendant of Baba’s when school was not in session. Frozen against the pillar, he resembled some marble sculpture of Adonis. The lad gave me an almost admiring grin which I returned with a “how ya doing trooper” wave, wondering if he was on a sufficiently high plane of awareness to have sensed my growing discipleship.

Searching For Answers

Later that day, I decided to go to the “old mandir,” where Baba started his mission as a teenager. It was a mile down the dirt road towards the actual village of Puttaparthi. That first ashram was not much more than a whitewashed adobe building closed into a compound by flagstone walls.

On the advent of one of the greatest festivals of the year, and with the day’s interview still ringing in my ears, I felt pressed to get my hands into the soil to try for more than just a superficial taste of what was going on. Certainly the thrust of my experiences so far put an added seal to my burden. From every slogan I had heard, I knew that it was folly for the mortal mind to try to understand Baba, but I felt compelled to do so. I knew that what clues there were at the mandir would not magically widen my comprehension. But it was a good starting point. Time, I suspected, was the only thing that would give me the overview that I was trying to grasp.

The afternoon waned into a gray twilight as I stood in the old mandir after two hours of searching, with more questions than answers. Sandal paste and rose perfume seeped through the masonry, and crept across halls and rooms. Red kum kum and rainbow powders streaked and splotched the walls, which were the backdrop of a photo exhibit of hundreds of pictures of the young Sai Baba.

A number of old women in the back rooms kept the temple up, making daily sweets, ceremonial offerings of flowers, and going through daily rituals, perhaps hoping that all this would bring their forlorn young Baba back. Yet artistically it was all bankrupt. Like every village temple I had seen, there was a certain sloppiness that offended an inbred, occidental sense of orderliness.

As I examined picture after picture, some faded, some out of focus, or hand-colored, one theme predominated like a pungent nectar. And that was the unisexual godlike beauty of the youthful Baba. “Cultural variable” rang out in my mind, while the more prosaic side of me protested with a stubborn fearful respect for the hard line between the sexes. It was a line of separation that was a sacred ordinance of God, whose violation or perversion didn’t promise a new Eden, but an abomination of the natural order.

A philosophic voice of authority within answered this gut response: “Among men, this cold and hard division is necessary and constant. But if you want to apply such a standard to demigods and avatars, here is where the difference of the sexes is another language of obsolete meanings. Obviously Baba is beyond single gender.” The voice eulogized, “He is a composite of the highest attributes of both principles, male and female; strength and beauty, gracefulness and power aggression and passivity.” I finally heard my mind agree, “Ah, yes, Siva-Shakti.”

But this argument didn’t change the photos on the walls. As I spotted a picture of dainty longhaired Baba reclined on a couch like Jean Harlow, I mused, “Why is it necessary, and what does it prove?” Maybe this just happened to be the way the local Indians could relate with divinity when it came to them on a personal level.

In another picture, Baba was being carried through the streets of a small village lying upon a large, flower-decorated palanquin. He waved as the throngs showered him with flower petals. Another picture was a threequarter view of Baba with one hand resting on a hip and the other one waving goodbye. It could have been a Saturday Evening Post cover in the early 1950’s of a young pretty black mammy in Starkville, Mississippi, waving the kids off to school.

But the most formidable picture I had to contend with was one of Baba dressed as the female goddess. This time, smiling as always, he waved arms bedecked in women’s bangles while he wore earrings, a necklace, with a red kum-kum dot in the center of his forehead. And instead of his robe, virtually the only thing he ever wore, Baba donned a silk sari, and smiled almost coquettishly. In the West, we would say that he was in drag. This was a hard one to take, as a sickly feeling mounted within me.

This brought me to the point I was at when I first heard of Baba. I was reading a book about him on the train from Delhi to Bombay, in late November. It was entitled, At His Lotus Feet, and contained 108 pictures of Baba, many of them now hanging in the old mandir. My temporary hang-up came at about 1:00a.m.while I was musing through it, propped up on one of those planks they call berths. Finally I saw a picture that was so effeminate that it triggered a portion of my thinking apparatus that I generally label, “The area of my brain that thinks in

Redneck Logic.” I finally had to say it aloud, lapsing into a soliloquy that brought me a considerable audience, as I leaned against the wall. I held the book out and said, “Either this dude is the most cosmically innocent, unaffected, and pure being I have ever seen, or the most unbelievable closet-queen passing itself off as a love-child, that has ever been perpetrated. Man, this pose sure looks trashy.” After that, my movements didn’t exactly go unnoticed as at least fifty passengers waited for the next proclamation.

A similar struggle was going on now, with different parts of my mind warring— Redneck Logic versus The Erudite Transcendent Thinker. Redneck Logic started exclaiming in “boy, oh boy” fashion, “Man, I sure hope that ain’t a homo. That looks an awful lot like a fey gesture. Probably just waiting for the troops or some cowboy to come along and jam him up the butt ....”

Then the inner Erudite Transcendent Thinker countered, “You’re desecrating the unfathomable, you spiritual Cro-Magnon. Such thoughts are a frightening index of how far you still have to go to even see the light ahead. You should realize and repent from that whole cancerous level of thought. Surgically remove such thoughts before they exempt you from discipleship under what may be one of the greatest avatars in the world’s history. Imagine ridiculing Christ’s nose.”

But Redneck Logic retorted, “You’ve cut off your gut sense, you transcendental idiot. You’ve so over-cerebrated around your natural thermostat of right and wrong, that you’re calling white black and black white.”

Not twenty-four hours later, Redneck Logic had been weakened, indeed overwhelmed by the sheer drawing power of Baba. Multitudes had arrived. For acres, extending out in all directions, straw-mats and suitcases lay as far as the eye could see, with no more than an inch at the very most between them. Devotees camped out around the prayer hall, in and around the metal auditoriums, in the huge side compound of the Vedic school and luxury suites, up the hill where the hospital stood, and on out into the fields. The

land had become a field of pilgrims.

Kasturi, Baba’s number-one secretary and writer-in-residence, smiled like a proud grandfather, as he looked out at the masses from his private porch. Awed visitors gaped and saluted him, some trying to touch his feet as if he were Baba. We watched a long black sedan pull in the entrance as Kasturi commented, “He happens to be a Bombay multi-millionaire. But what does it matter? He too will be on the ground with all the others. From the poorest peasants to the wealthiest magnates, under Baba, they are all the same, and have equal rank.” Sure enough, the Bombay millionaire unrolled his mat on the ground right beside his car.

And nor was it only the Indian elite who had to humble themselves in the presence of Baba. That evening, as brigades of buses rolled in and lined up on neighboring fields, Vickie, Anthony, and I strolled down the swarming outside road, and entered one of the less seedy local restaurants for a snack. While Anthony ate a masala dosa, a giant pancake stuffed with fried onions and peppers, he told us how John Lennon and Yoko Ono had quietly arrived for Baba’s birthday festival on the 23rd of November. A delightful sense of destiny filled us, as it became clear that neither of the two illustrious pop stars even remotely influenced Baba to seek them out or deviate from his usual course. In fact he had shown far less interest in them than he had in us. They sat with the multitudes and Baba smiled at them with everybody else, but that was not enough.

John Lennon expected an interview, and Gill was about the only foreigner there at the time. So John and Yoko seized upon him. Gill patiently shared what he could with aloof authority, undoubtedly blowing their minds because almost nobody came on to them, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with that sort of indifference. They treated Gill like an equal; his manner remained unchanged. They may have even become somewhat disarmed by then, and sullenly curious about the authenticity of the place. It they didn’t count, it might even be real. But if the ashram had that kind of integrity, where was their bartering power? They were like rich kids in the Olympics where Dad could no longer buy them first place. They had no staying power, and both left. Lennon felt slighted. This evidently outweighed his curiosity in Baba’s miraculous powers. What blinding pride, we concurred, and what presumption—to walk away from such heavenly mysteries and not bat an eyelash.

The Festival of Siva

The following morning, the day of the festival, I was soon caught up in the confluence of pilgrims heading for the large metal shed. It was expected that about ten thousand pilgrims could fit into the large structure, cooped up along the floor in sardine packed rows. As I shuffled past the side of the prayer hall towards the central compound in front, I glimpsed someone who looked like an angel. Head and shoulders above the Indians, this walking lighthouse had a flare of red hair that was as much of a shock in south India as the sudden appearance of a Watusi warrior in Grimstad, Norway. He was swarmed by convection currents of people immediately. Then he vanished from view as the same currents channeled me beyond the six-sided festival building towards the side of the auditorium.

Soon a line of ushers, all upper-class Indians with armbands and badges, spotted and rescued me from the river of bodies. They led me into an open area that they had roped off near the front of the vast open shed which had been packed with bodies since the early hours of the morning. Packed, that is, except at the very front, where stood the VIP entrance that they were guarding. It was for special guests whom Baba had blessed with the honor of getting absolutely front-row seats beneath the rather wide stage. The sexes were divided down the middle by a thick red carpet patterned with flower petals.

The front VIP section went back thirty feet from the stage and was covered with Indian carpet, the equivalent of the royal box at Wimbledon. A flowing lava of people quivered at its edges. An usher directed me to sit at the very front, right below the center of the stage, the prime seat. Undoubtedly it was the most envied seat in the whole auditorium, right below Baba’s microphone where the jute carpet met the stairs that Baba would go mount. My privileged seat was almost too ostentatious. It was like driving a Rolls Royce to a small-town Georgia picnic where the mayor is mighty proud to be driving a ten-year-old Cadillac (a Rolls Royce that’s just been flown in after a jaunt through southern France).

I would soon learn that in the eyes of many highborn Brahmin devotees, I was a similar threat. My unique seat was a gift of grace from one worshipped as god incarnate. This crowd would give practically anything to touch the hem of his robe. And he had invited me to share in his glory. For the first time in my life, I would have a front row seat overlooking the massive festival taking place at spiritual center of the world. You bet it was interesting. It was all new.

The air exploded in the thunderous screams of Cape Canaveral during a rocket liftoff as Karnatic horns wailed away, followed by sharp drumbeats. Then came the Vedic chants of a long procession of school kids, and then the priests. In the outside brilliance could clearly be seen this human train escorting Baba, and moving towards the central entrance of the auditorium. In front of Baba was a gigantic behemoth adorned in mirrored tapestries, braided cords, and saddled in elegance. It was Gita, Baba’s elephant.

As wealthy Indians filtered in quietly beside me, tiptoeing up from the VIP entrance, I learned that by Baba’s side and holding his umbrella was Governor Dharma Vira, the diminutive Governor of Mysore State. The umbrella shone over Baba’s head like the classic Puranic sun-umbrellas seen in the traditional captions of the gods and avatars—Krishna on the chariot, Rama with a drawn bow, and so on. Baba’s gown shimmered a brilliant red,

as his hair, more voluminous than ever, encircled his head like a halo as the sun ran through each strand. He was less human and more godlike than ever before. The crowd inside and outside surged in hysteria as Baba passed by. People raised hands in prayerful namastes, and many lunged across on the ground to touch his feet. The elephant caravan and the Vedic boys parked by the side of the auditorium, and the hall fell into a dead quiet as Baba entered. Karnatic horns still screaming eerily away in the background.

Baba was in the impersonal mode, scanning the audience and smiling out at generalized quadrants, rarely if ever singling anyone out. I turned around and looked up just as Baba was behind me, a wave of force rolling down the carpet, his eyes shining like two discs. Lo, he left the impersonal mode—smiled, twinkled—“special seat, special seat,” mounting the stairs with gymnastic leaps.

Right beside me, to my left, sitting behind three microphones with harmoniums, cymbals, tablas, and tambouras, was a cluster of closely packed musicians coiled up, and ready to explode. They were the bhajan singers. An energized live-wire resembling a cross between Clark Kent of the Superman comics and Henry Kissinger got the whole hall rolling with freight train intensity, with two vibrant, excellently controlled songs.

Baba paced the stage gracefully, occasionally stopping to weave his hands mysteriously through the air. Then he sat down on a silver and tiger-skin throne. For ten minutes he kept timing, smiled, gazed out, or narrowed his eyes and even shut them, sometimes leaning his head back and clutching his hair. Suddenly Baba arose, and went to the center of the stage where the large silver statue of Shirdi Baba sitting on the coils of a huge snake stood. The statue became an urn when the serpent’s head was removed. The priest stood in the background, while Mr. Kasturi picked up an amphora-shaped vase the size of a large Greek urn.

Songs rolled by as Kasturi raised the vase upside down directly over the statue. The singing became louder. Suddenly Baba thrust his hand up into the vase, making the same circular motions inside the vase normally associated with his materializations. The singing was at full pitch.

Immediately a steady fountain of gray ash cascaded out of the vase, on and on and on, through several songs. The only break in the flow was when Baba stopped to change hands. A small mountain of powder rose around the silver statue, waist-high and higher as clouds of dust filtered out over the stage into the audience, covering some with a light frost. Little hailstones

bounced off the figure and on to the carpet as they emerged from out of the waterfall of cascading vibhuti powder, occasionally rolling off the stage. The women would scramble to get them; gems, cardamom seeds, and crystals of rock sugar, hungrily eyeing the stage but fearful of displeasing Baba.

Baba yanked his hand out of the vase, spun around and left by the rear stage. The volume of powder was several times that of the vase. The lead singer surprised me again with what appeared unusual liberty around Baba, as he leapt up on the stage and followed Baba behind the curtains. In the flood of excitement I craned my head to study the hall. The once empty reserved section was now full to the brim behind me. I locked eyes with the angel. The face was strange—pale, sensitive, and almost feminine in a preRaphaelite sense. His chestnut-auburn eyes oscillated from melancholy to impish glee, and finally sheer amazement. I nodded as though to say, “Isn’t this whole thing more incredible than any story-book?” He nodded with

reddening eyes, this time resembling the Dickens good lad, mistreated by the world, the fugitive of brutality, but forever gentle and innocent. Here too was another “high soul” called by Baba from the distant places of the world for some kind of cosmic event unfolding.

My thoughts then wandered to a conversation with Vijaya Laxmi, the ashram’s number-two doctor. An Indian woman educated in England, where she received an M. D., Vijaya Laxmi confided to me, “I could spend days telling you all the miraculous healings Baba has performed, but even they, in their thousands, fall short of the mark. Because they say nothing of the millions of invisible things he does for his children that we never see and that he never receives credit for.”

Vijaya Laxmi then told me about Dr. Thathachari, a Professor of Dermatology at Stanford Medical School, who had an incurable carcinoma. When you are a staff member at one of the most advanced medical centers in the world and even your colleagues give you the prognosis of being a terminal case, it’s time to start surveying burial plots. But something called a miracle intervened. A little man in a red robe massaged him in the cancerous area, and he started to feel better. Soon Dr. Thathachari came back from India and electrified his colleagues. No matter how many tests they ran on him, there was no trace of the malignancy. Now he was a Baba devotee.

Soon bells clanged, the bhajans stopped, the audience leapt up and sang the closing hymn of praise. The morning session ended.

Chapter Eight

A Fork in The Road

E

ach new pilgrim who made it here from the West was like a missing puzzle piece searching for the cosmic puzzle being put together. If Baba was the world avatar, then he was the

guiding hand bringing in the different puzzle pieces and placing them in the puzzle. Each seemed to verify Baba’s world mission in unique ways. Every story, every insight was added evidence that it was all true.

I had other analogies. Apart from gathering, there was also the process of sifting. Those who made it here were like salmon “nosing up the impossible” and swimming up a waterfall. Only the few made it to the spawning ground. The pilgrims I had met were all highly unusual people. They were on the pioneering edges of our generation and had been called out of the West for a role in a cosmic drama now unfolding. It took courage and great sacrifice to come here and few were able to make this leap.

Indeed, all those passing through Baba’s gates were part of the emerging drama. And the “angel” was a perfect example of this “gathering” process. Suddenly I saw him with one other.

The moment I was washed out into the side compound by the current of people leaving the festival, after Baba departed the hexagonal enclosure, I saw “the angel” and a girl sitting on the steps outside my old luxury suite. I felt a kind of exhilaration.

“Say, you look familiar,” I exclaimed, laughing and feeling like St.

Peter at the gate. I was quickly entering a new role of greeting fellow pilgrims from the West. This would later involve become something of a gatekeeper.

Shaking his head with introspective profundity, in the John Gielgud tradition, “the angel” proclaimed, “He’s God. The minute I saw him I started crying, and all I could say was, ‘He’s God, He’s God, He’s God.’ It dawned on me that I had finally found what I have been looking for all this time.”

He shook his head with his mouth wide open. Baba had summoned an interesting puzzle piece whose blazing mane of red hair reminded me of a fusion of the archangel Gabriel and the Spirit of Ireland. He was also the nephew of Marshall McLuhan.

“So Marshall’s your uncle.”

“Yup.” The tone communicated that, although Marshall McLuhan had been an enzyme of his generation, with bestselling books about the effects of the role of the media in global unity, he hadn’t pierced the spiritual barrier. “Nope, he’s got some idea, but....” Kerry guffawed knowingly, “He’s still got his ego invested in being an armchair academician.” There was a wry brilliance speaking behind Kerry’s downhome jargon.

“Well, how did you get from what . . Winnipeg . . .? Canada to here?”

They looked at each other as if to communicate that it was OK to talk. Janet, Kerry’s wife, struggled for a starting point. “Well, we didn’t exactly hear about Baba, we were guided here.”

“How?” I asked hesitantly, sensing that it was only revealed to a few. Channeled Guidance to Baba

“W

ell, since Janet was around five, she’s been psychic. She often sees things through an area in her upper visual field, around her forehead, and it can be anytime, anywhere. It’s like she had an invisible screen in her mind. In fact we call it the Screen. And these things appear superimposed over the things she normally sees.”

Janet broke in, “It really used to scare me sometimes when I was a little girl.” She giggled reasuringly. Then she proudly held up her head like Judy Garland marching up to see the Wizard of Oz. “But I got used to it.”

I quickly established common ground, assuring them that they were not alone in this area. For years I had felt the odd man out, but suddenly every vein of intuition was proving correct as I came into the company of more and more kindred souls. “We’ve had to brave an awful lot alone—things that would blow most people’s minds. Everyone tells you you’re wrong, but you’ve gotta go ahead anyway, following that spool of intuition—maybe that’s why so few get through in the end.”

They nodded, beaming with smiles. They were also impressed with the fact that I had sporadically astral-traveled from the age of eleven— when I got the mumps in London—onwards. They both knew the symptoms too, reiterating what I told them.

Kerry and Janet were beginning to resemble two tenderhearted over-grown children, a modern Hansel and Gretel. A context of innocence colored the character of the dialogue between us, as Walt Disney exclamations became more and more common. This was a breath of fresh air as it became even plainer to me how adversely both Gill and Herman had affected me.

“Come on, I want to hear the story,” I insisted, beside myself with expectant curiosity. I could actually relax with these two.

“Well, hmmm. To start out with we met a few years ago in a London tourist office. It was a close call though, if you choose to look at it that way. There was a five-minute interlude, and that was it, and for two Canadians in one of the biggest cities in the world, just passing through town, and going opposite ways, eventually to return to opposite regions of Canada, that was a pretty tight schedule. But we managed it though,” Kerry reminisced good-humoredly.

Janet’s eyes twinkled. “Something just gave Kerry the impulse to step off Saint James Street and go in. He wasn’t even planning to go into the tourist office. That’s all it took. When I saw him and he saw me, our destinies unraveled just like that. We knew we were soul-mates immediately.”

Kerry broke in, “Ya got a few weeks to listen?” He was grinning impishly behind an intentionally affected Midwestern rural accent. “I’m just kidding. You’re going to hear the whole story until you have to stop your ears up ... haw, haw .... But the thing that got us here isn’t too easy to talk about.”

“Yeah, it’s funny, we’ve told only one or two people. And they were very special friends we had known for years,” Janet confessed. “Don’t feel you have to. But I must confess that I am interested in how all these bits and pieces fit together.”

Kerry got up to move, so we could all sit on the steps together, and it was a bit of a shock seeing perhaps the second or third person in three or four months since I had come to India who was over six feet three. The thick mane of red hair hanging below his shoulders accentuated his height.

“Janet and I have been looking together since we first met. And we’ve done it as a team. We’ve had inklings of the truth, but we’ve been led gently through progressive stages.”

I asked them, and the process involved no psychedelics.

“One stage we were called to go through pretty much brought us together. It meant extricating ourselves from the psychological gamepatterns and hang-ups of our folks. We spent seven bitter cold months in an abandoned cabin in the mountains high above Vancouver. We just stocked up on grain and vegetarian supplies that we got at a surplus depot. The cabin just appeared out of nowhere—on a completely desolate chain of mountains. We had to chop wood, carry water, the whole bit. And when it’s sub-zero all the time, it puts you through some heavy changes. By the end, we each knew what the other felt anytime of day or night. But it went beyond that—Janet and I both had a number of major psychic breakthroughs.”

“Then suddenly we were told one day to up and leave. And that was it for the isolation phase.” One would utter something, stop, and the other would continue the sentence.

Kerry continued for a while, “Yup, within several weeks of the order to move on, we were on the way out of the country. We just packed, took care of a few details . . . went through some psychodramas with our families, who’ve never understood us ....” Janet went on from there, looking up and rolling her eyes with a sigh, “Yeah, never try to play by their ground rules, or you lose every time. If you’re firm enough, after a while they learn you really mean it. They mellowed out a little after our seven-month haul in the cabin. So when we told them we were on the way to the Greek Isles, they just accepted it. We love them but we just can’t submit to their little models of how they would like us to be, and that has required cutting them off more than once.”

“At any rate, within several weeks we were in the Greek Isles living in an abandoned house that we got for next to nothing.”

“Not to sound like an idiot, but what did you do for money?” “Oh.” They looked at each other as Janet pointed her head at Kerry and said, “He inherited ten thousand dollars.”

“Finally we were moved on. And that’s when things really began to happen. Most of all, we met our guide.”

“You see,” Kerry interjected, “Janet’s kind of a medium. I guess it runs in her family.”

“Now and then I would either see this guy, or hear a voice that sounded like thunder, it was so deep.”

“Apparently he has been watching me since I could walk. I just never knew it. I knew something was going on but . . . I guess there’s either a karmic connection or it’s a plan by the powers that be that we can’t imagine. I get a feeling though that he is preparing us for something, and it has to do with the coming spiritual age.”

“Yeah,” Kerry affirmed, “We probably either encountered him in a past life—when he was our guru—or it was on the other side, the death plane. I guess the best way to describe him is to say that he’s an astral master, and fully enlightened at that. Maybe the only reason he’s retained any degree of form at all, and not vanished into the Absolute, is for the coming spiritual explosion. Sorta like a Bodhisatva.”

“In fact,” Janet chimed exuberantly, “He’s a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. His name’s Red Hawk.”

“The real breakthrough was in London when we met this highly developed psychic woman, well known in the inner circles. A lot of the powerhouses know her. Well, she knew immediately that Janet had considerable mediumistic talents.”

“The upshot of all this is that she finally got some key people together for a secret meeting of some of the greatest mediums in England, and they sorta carried the ball. Conditions apparently were perfect for me to go into a full trance.”

“You shoulda felt the air surge; it was amazing,” remarked Kerry. “All of a sudden Janet stiffened, the muscles in her body changed, and she looked completely different. Like a giant hand in a small glove. She seemed twice the size. Her face was transfigured, she sat up proudly, just like an Indian chief, and when she started talking, it sure wasn’t her voice. The whole room shook. It almost blew me under the table. It was the deepest voice I’d ever heard. The lady asked it to identify itself and it said, ‘I am Red Hawk.’”

Janet good-naturedly imitated the voice just to show that normally the idea of a voice like that coming out of her five feet two frame was ridiculous.

“Well, Red Hawk announced that we were to go to India. That he had been guiding Janet all her life, and that conditions were now right for us to go, and that something or someone was in India who was higher than a perfect master. But he could not talk about it. Apparently we were not ready to hear more. He promised that he would protect us, guide us, and provide for every need. And before we knew it, getting things together flowed like a spell.”

“Yup, in one or two days we found a Ford van for about a tenth its market-value. We furnished it, and that became our wheels.” Kerry chuckled good-naturedly. “Like clockwork we got shots, permits, you name it—we had everything except where we were supposed to go.”

“But that was no problem, we just started driving. We went through France, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, across to Turkey. . . then to Iran, Afghanistan. And that’s where we were ordered to sell the van in Kabul where there was a market. It was almost impossible to get a permit for India anyway.”

“How did you know which roads to take?”

“We were just told. I’d hear, ‘Turn there—take a right—stop for the night.’ Whatever Red Hawk said to me, we did.”

I recalled some of the travellers I had seen in Delhi. “You were lucky one of the roadside gangs didn’t turn you inside out, especially in Iran and Afghanistan. Practically every one I met in Delhi who did the overland route had a horror story to tell me.”

“If something was rumbling up ahead, or if we sensed bad vibes, Janet would usually see a fine spider-web of high energy threads of light, sort of a tent, sitting off the road. We’d just drive right into the enclosed area, so none of the car stuck through. Only Janet could see them. Then we knew we were safe. And in fact nobody did ever bother us, or even appear to notice us for that matter. That was another one of Red Hawk’s riggings.”

Suddenly Baba stepped out on to his rear balcony and that ended our talk. Janet gasped, apparently seeing something that she was unable to talk about. She looked up in quiet wonder for a long time, perhaps as a native islander would watch an erupting Krakatoa. When Baba receded, we left in silence, looking for a bite to eat. There was still the afternoon session of the festival ahead.

Divine Proclamations, Signs, & Wonders

Tonight, all over India, the Saivite sect would be paying homage to the great lord Shiva, god of destruction in the Hindu triune godhead. He was always portrayed with a trident, a half-moon in his hair, sitting ash covered in the full lotus position, eyes shut and deep in samadhi as he sat atop Mount Kailasa. Countless thousands would hold all-night vigils, fasting, meditating and repeating the, divine names of God. But those across India who recognized the avatarhood of Sathya Sai Baba would dwell on his name and form, singing bhajans to him in family halls. He was considered by the Saivite sect to be Shakti-Shiva—the male and female principles of the universe combined. They and the devotees of Vishnu agreed that he was Narayana, God come to earth with human and divine attributes.

All over India, Baba’s twenty million devotees were hoping that tonight would bring the really great blessing. That Baba’s miracles would bring them to eternal life, the Upanishadic sat-chit-ananda, the being, consciousness and bliss of the absolute. Freed from their painful, tragic existence, they would emerge into a state of infinite, ecstatic awareness. Baba’s miracle could come at any time, like the uncontrolled spasms of childbirth.

The expectant afternoon crowd stretched out along the ground and filled just about every vacant space in the ashram within a fifth of a mile of the outdoor Shanti Vedica, Baba’s specially built six-sided festival enclosure that resembled a giant Iranian bird cage. It stood in the main compound between the sheds and the prayer hall, right out in the open.

As we sat within twenty feet of the enclosure, right by the center carpet separating the sexes, we could see the lines of people flow off into the distance to the outside roads, on rooftops of distant guest-lodges, and even off on to some of the neighboring hills. Kasturi’s prediction of forty thousand people didn’t seem too far off the mark at all.

There was a sudden deathly hush. Baba was out, and slowly weaving down flower-bedecked paths between lines of people. Thousands of eyes looked up as Baba smiled in full glory, resembling that seasonal “Lily of the field.” Radiating more than usual, more youthful, poised, blissful and dainty, Baba was the perennial savior of love, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but could vaporize a thousand suns.

Baba came around to the front of the structure and down the center path. He stopped right next to me, looking into my eyes and smiling, whisked my shoulder with his leg and robe. Kerry and Janet’s eyes lit with spiritual fire as I gestured to them afterwards, “Well, don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it’s been. He gives me a lot of grace.”

Baba entered the hexagonal chamber from the rear and came into full view on the elevated platform. Baba’s giant chair glistened with a large silver embossed “OM” on the upper third of its back. The enclosure was full of fluorescent fixtures and wreathes of flowers. Sitting to the right of Baba’s chair, slightly behind it on the floor, were the three honored speakers; Sri Nakul Sen, the Governor of the State of Goa, Dr Gokkak, Chancellor of the University of Bangalore, and one other.

Dr. Gokkak, the most pedantic and long-winded, put everything on a vast scale. He discoursed on the spheres in the heavens, the distant antipodes of consciousness, and the divine realm of India’s illustrious godmen, sounding like an expatriated Aldous Huxley. Tens of thousands of eyes looked up in silent wonder, few of which were able to comprehend the English language beyond a few words. It went completely over their heads. Finally Baba gave him a polite little wave, indicating that it was time for other matters.

Baba looked across the audience with a broad, almost maternal smile. The nationwide devotees were on the edge of their seats because of this. While either singing, speaking, or just sitting, Baba would exude either one or several egg-sized spheroids from his mouth that had been growing inside him, made of precious or semi-precious stone or metal—gold, silver, ruby, lapis lazuli, emerald, topaz, moonstone, or opal. Certainly their size alone would make a normal man unconscious from pain, if pulled up from his stomach and out of his mouth. This act was no more bizarre than any number of divine acts recorded in the Indian holy records. Certainly far less alarming than Kali or Maha Durga devouring heads, as though they were figs.

But the lingams were not just breathtaking stone Easter eggs, adored for aesthetic value. They were loaded with significance to every Indian in the land. They symbolized that point in space-time where all aspects of “relative phenomena” go in and out of physical existence. On one side of the barrier is the illusion of multiplicity— physical, astral, and causal. But through the elliptical creatrix is the vast silent “Static-Eternal.” Westerners who were advocates of Buber called it “The Ground of Being,” Gill called it “The Void,” and Herman called it “Dat Place.”

The bhakti devotees worshipped lingams as divine objects, touching

their head, hands, and feet to them as perennial fertility symbols— reciting Vedic hymns of praise dating back thousands of years at any one of the eleven ancient hallowed sites bearing lingams, allegedly planted by Siva himself. But for the Jnanis, Rishis, and sages of Advaita, the significance of the lingams jumped from static points in the realm of dualism to causal principles. And Baba had stated this in speeches of years past. Baba began to sing with perfect poise as the crowd looked on.

In the yearning adorations of a forlorn lover who has too great an abundance of love to contain, and whose mate is separated and tentative, Baba’s voice filled the night air in resonant power. Baba chanted a sloka from the Bhagavad Gita (XVIII-66), stretching his arms like a bird of paradise:

Sarvadharman. . .parit-yajya. . .mem-ekam. . .sarnam. . .vraja. Aham. . . Tva . . .sarva. . .papebhyo.

Moksha-yisyami. . . Maaa. . . Sucaaaahah.

The verse resembled the same wistful tune I had heard while in Rishikesh at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ashram. Kasturi later translated the verse as saying, “Renounce all dharmas and take refuge in me alone. I will liberate you from all sins; grieve not.”

Then Baba began a monsoon flood of highly charged Telugu phrases. Battery after battery inundated the audience. Baba’s tone rose in power; at times it resembled snatches of the voice of Hitler in Leni Reichenstahl’s famous propaganda documentary, Triumph of the Will. Baba “the Lover” had become “the Teacher and Mighty Counselor.”

Kerry and I shivered in our seats, looking up at Baba for secondary clues and communications, distinct and supplemental to the words that eluded us. In the translation the following morning, we learned that Baba’s first words proclaimed, “I am not a human being; nor a god or superman. I am neither brahmin, nor kshatriya, nor vaisya, nor a sudra. Then you may ask who I Am. Well, I am the Teacher of Truth: I am Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.”

After the speech had extended to forty minutes, Baba paused, looked at the audience, then fell back in his seat. He looked away, as though hiding great pain. Labor had begun. He convulsed several times, still trying to be as graceful as possible, took sporadic sips of water, and constantly wiped his mouth and forehead with a handkerchief. He hiccuped, winced, held the arm of his chair, and when possible, smiled reassuringly. A hiccup or a sip of water would then interrupt the smile.

Raja Reddy, the disciple who resembled Clark Kent, took over. He bent forward, only feet away from Kerry and me, eyes squeezed in intense concentration, and vigorously pumped his harmonium. The hand organ rang out and droned into the microphones, suddenly filling the air of the entire ashram, which was wired from end to end with speakers. Raja flawlessly chanted the opening Sanskrit phrase of one of the bhajans. Then, with grace and control, he sang like a speeding charioteer—nonchalant and joyous, yet coiling his energy into a powerful spring guiding it with great self-discipline. The song praised Baba as Siva, and after each refrain, the audience repeated it with absolute fervor, eyes glued to Baba.—“Siva, Siva, Siva, Siva Parti Pureeshwara, Shambho. Shankara Sada Sivaaaaa.”

Then Baba gracefully stood up. Raja immediately brought his song to a halt, and readied his harmonium to follow whatever Baba was to sing.

In sweet, almost defenseless tones, not nearly as demonstrative as the previous opening Sanskrit sloka, Baba chanted the opening of the song. He reminded me of a delicate flower as he sang about Krishna, almost mouthing the words in baby-talk, “Chita Chora Yesoda Ke Baal, Navanila Chora Gopal.”

Baba’s voice was quite beautiful and provocative. That sweetness of character that I felt coming through the songs forced me to repent some of my impressions of Baba the day before in the old mandir.

It was suddenly obvious that my suspicious had been a clear case of cultural projection. Where else, I asked myself, other than twentiethcentury America, do you lose your faith in other people’s values so extensively as to echo football locker-room talk almost automatically? And that was one price of being from a nation of cynics where even idealists had relapses. And instead of saying, “How beautiful,” a line out of Lenny Bruce or Saturday Night Live came out instead.

Fifteen minutes later, halfway through a refrain, Baba abruptly gagged, as though hit by a sudden wave of uncontrollable peristalsis. Back into the chair he sank after sputtering out a few more syllables. He rested his face in his palm, leaning on the arm of the chair. Baba hiccuped, sipped more water, and continued wiping his face with the handkerchief. I couldn’t tell whether he was wiping off sweat or ash, since quite often in the past, he had sweated vibhuti in vast profusions from even his forehead until it covered his robe.

Baba’s head jerked in spasms, and then he leaned back against the chair to control them. It seemed he was trying to hide the pain, perhaps intense pain. More heart-rending were his numerous smiles of reassurance that gently told us not to worry. That this was something he had volunteered to do, and could handle. It didn’t so much as stir the smallest ripple in his true nature, it was merely Lila, the divine play, taken on to rescue us, and reflect the vaster, more universal pangs of creation that he was constantly going through from one side of the universe to the other. The lingam was the primeval particle of creation. The incarnation of God was about to act out a cosmic principle. On another level, this indestructible man of steel was taking on the infinite torments that we deserved. His grace was covering our “karmic debts.”

Suddenly Baba gave birth. In a concentrated thrust, Baba pitched forward as though to vomit holding an open handkerchief before him. His head recoiled like a 120-millimeter cannon, and in an explosive gush, a brilliant stone, larger than an egg, shot out of Baba’s mouth on to the handkerchief. My stomach twitched automatically. Perhaps a wave of spiritual energy had been released at that moment, I wasn’t sure.

Baba held the object high so everybody could see it shine and glisten, then set it down on the table in full view, arose, spun around, and quickly left. Soon he was high above us on his balcony.

A giant metal rectangular gong rang out in rapid beats like the hanger of an aircraft carrier opening up or the alert signals at a launch pad. But that’s not the only sound it resembled; in the mists of time, at the Tibetan monastery at Llhasa, such luminous clangings had become an esoteric language symbolizing the chakras opening up or a saint’s final passage through the doorways of death.

Baba briefly appeared on the wide, decorated balcony of the prayer hall above us, and I almost swallowed my tonsils. He seemed more powerful than ever. The audience fell into a dead hush as the gong clanged on. For a while Baba stood on the wooden platform at the front rail and looked out with a transcendent smile. Right now he was unreachable, and we were specks of dust watching an embodied Indian god. It was as though one of the gods on one of India’s shrines had suddenly come to life. Embodied and full-sized, the god now stood before them. The masses beneath Baba worshipped him exactly as one of these gods. As a non-dualist hating form, I wondered whether he was not diminished through his personalized affections. I wasn’t sure whether I liked it more than I disliked it.

The pitch of the bhajans mounted, and would continue throughout the night. Before Kerry and I left to hold our part of the all-night vigil, we studied the lingam.

Under the street light of the ashram bank, Janet stood shaken and quiet. In an awe-filled whisper she told us that she saw an immense light the moment the lingam emerged. But that was all she was willing to disclose. We needed to be alone. I went up on the high rocky hillside in the pitch-black, to sit under Baba’s tree of wisdom. Janet and Kerry walked off to sit in a large barren field.

The night for me did not pass easily. I used every trick I knew to stay awake, which meant that I did not spend the time meditating. I squeezed rocks, crawled around, lay in uncomfortable positions, held my eyelids open, and fought each attack of sleep as though it was a some knockout drug. By 5 a.m.I looked like a blithering idiot, looking at the stars through one half-closed eye, rocking back and forth, and cupping one of my ears to amplify the sound from one of nearby speakers. Forgetting that Gill’s tent was nearby, I almost fell right through it at one point as I was reeling around. That would have livened up the atmosphere considerably, leaving the Indians to ponder whether the Americans had imported a new type of yoga. By five or so, when the Vedic boys and the phantom ghost train started up, I knew the battle was won, but only marginally.

The Aftermath

F

our days later, in early March, right before Baba was to leave for Whitefield, he granted us one last interview. He was leaving for his other residence in the neighboring state of Mysore (now Karnatica). I longed for an interview more than ever, with some pressing decisions on the horizon. With my large suitcase and typewriter in storage at the Kendra in Delhi, and charter ticket back to London about to expire, I was still going through the motions of leaving the country by the sixmonth visa deadline. I was completely split down the middle on where to go.

By the morning of the interview, Gill had already left for Whitefield to rec1aim his old cottage where he could meditate in the absolute quiet of a semi-barren farm. Herman also had left, by Baba’s command, to wait in Whitefield before returning to the “householder’s” duty of business and family. Baba would give him a goodly number of going away interviews. That left a jubilant Kerry, Janet, Vicky, Anthony, Jai, Michelle,and me, plus four new people who, like Kerry and Janet, had appeared during the festival: two women—sisters whom Michelle had known in New York—and two Germans.

We entered the room for the final interview. Hans and Benno—the German newcomers—crouched in the corner, while Anthony, Michelle and Jai sat between the wall and Baba's chair. The minute I walked in, Baba grabbed my shoulder and sat me down in what was now my customary place, to the left of his chair. I didn’t protest.

Baba addressed many of the stories directly to me, as though we were the only two people in the room. He often slapped me on the back. Finally he invited just about everybody but me to Whitefield. Maybe he took it for granted that “Rowdie” was going to come. I wasn’t sure. If he did invite me, it would settle my dilemma.

As we were about to get up and leave, Baba looked me in the eye. ‘Private interview? You have questions?’ I did. I was starting to panic about my next move.

The dark velvet curtains shut behind me. Baba searched my eyes, “What do you want?” The question came with the force of a psychic whammy.

On a high precipice of choice, I automatically went through several gear-shiftings of awareness that felt completely out of my hands.

The problem of staying in India had now long disappeared. The priorities were suddenly totally different. I had entered the spiritual market-place set to bargain over tables and chairs, unaware that I had entered an exclusive arena where bids for cities and towns go by almost unnoticed. Kingdoms, empires, and dominions balance, then shift, and dance as assemblies of concentrated thought move them across the board like shuffleboard plates. The stakes were cosmic.

“Baba,” I said, “I offer you my life, as a son, as a servant, for your direction—to possess completely and do whatever you will.” As though a covenant had been made, Baba replied, “I am also your property, sir. Yes, I am also your servant.”

I felt I must acknowledge my deepening faith: “No, Baba. You are Mahapurusha, the Lord of the Universe. You can’t fool me. I am your property, your servant. I am yours. I want to be an Arjuna, Lord.”

We embraced automatically. His wiry cloud of hair surrounding my face, I wondered what kind of deep soul-cleansing was going on. Then huge force surged from Baba to me, almost visibly sparking. “Guru kripa, shakti pat, power purification,” I thought.

I stood hugging that same unreachable Messiah who stood atop the pagoda, whom tens of thousands came to see and wept over, straining just for a glimpse, or a touch, or a smile. The same one who sang with such incredible tenderness, before miraculously creating the seedpod of his creative love. A musing voice entered my head. It spoke of great things in the tables of fortune. A prince is being crowned into life and glory. Then there was a moment’s hesitation. How painful to presume wrongly. For me to be projecting now would be a terrible revelation. The voice responds, “What greater sign could you possibly ask for?”

Baba broke the embrace and held me back. “Do you want a wife?”

Oh, God forbid that I become a trapped “householder.” What had he picked up, some lower chakra force sparking away like a dripping faucet that can’t be completely shut off? Had he sifted through my fantasies and found one too many? After all, it was only a physical phenomenon like a runny nose. Nothing that a little grace couldn’t abolish. And as for the romantic loves, they taunted but could never satisfy, and disappeared like mirages. What a peculiar form of sentimental idolatry. My final romance, in my early twenties, I squelched by hammering the pipes of my mind into autonomy—if you didn’t need anyone, the spell vanished. That same love had to turn towards something larger, like the quest for truth. Yet my real fear was that my ideal mate would suddenly appear after all. And then the going would be much harder, as that rippling dam of love stored up for her would still have to be surrendered as fare for passage into nirvana. Marriage also meant that I was also not ready for the fast train to full enlightenment, still needing companionship and sex. Besides, how many marriages became never lived up to the initial honeymoon of attraction?

The response was on the tip of my tongue, “No, Baba, No.” “You are sure you don’t want wife?”

I reeled inside. I pictured an array of past incarnated wives whom I

did not remember nor did they remember me—past loves erased from memory, no matter how intense. And no matter how epic or beautiful it had been at the time, what difference did it make? “Baba, no, it’s never worked. No wife. Minor desire, Baba, with your grace, easily conquered. Time to go all the way.” Surrender to the guru meant what the word said, surrender. If some disciples had to jump off a cliff to pass the guru’s test, then they did it.

“Baba, I don’t need to get married, do I?”

“No, Rowdie, there is no male or female. In the end, there is only God.”

The “Om” in the neighboring prayer hall, a mere cinderblock’s thickness away, struck the hour in the explosive rush of a runway during jet takeoff. Baba had kept me beyond the magical hour. While five thousand remnants of the festival waited in the sun just for a glimpse of him, he was pouring over me.

Baba reached out to embrace me again, pulling me in strongly. An inner voice pondered Baba’s statement, “There is no male or female.” The embrace of Radha-Krishna, the avatar of the Dwarka Yoga and his lover, was the highest resolution of two polarities. Now the musing voice likened the embrace with Baba with the meeting of cosmic lovers. God and God, breaking the wall of Maya to merge.

Baba’s nudging pelvis stopped. Suddenly a hand unzipped my fly, then, like an adder returning home at dusk, the hand burrowed inside.

My mind was reeling. If Truth required these kinds of impossible labyrinths, I had already made my vow to see it through, and was fully committed now to going all the way. I stood my ground and tried not to noticeably flinch.

The voice of reason was getting a little rattled. It began to summon every scrap of my accumulated knowledge and latent intelligence. It wanted to protect Baba’s integrity like a mother whose son has been accused of burning down the mayor’s barn. “When they line you up in an army physical and check each draftee for hernias, is the doctor trying to seduce you or the other draftees, or is he busy trying to make sure that you don’t get killed on the front lines? And if Baba is who he claims to be, it is inconceivable that he would stoop to anywhere near the impurity of the average army physician. Besides, if you’re not getting married, he may be helping to close up those old troublesome doorways of lust—granted in a second what would take some Hatha Yogis fifty years of concentrated meditation to accomplish.”

Baba’s hips continued to shift again as he squeezed a rather unresponsive member—one that was frozen out, and not even a legion of nude exotic women could thaw it out at this point.

Baba’s rapid breathing did not exactly register lethargy or unexcitement. The voice of reason proposed, “He’s cooling your heat center, taking on your sins, and purifying your lower chakra.” However Redneck Logic also sat on the judiciary board, mumbling sub-surface before I could censor the embarrassing thoughts from leaking out. “Man, I sure hope all that squeezing is purification because if it ain’t, Jack—and that’s a strange way to be purifying it—you’ve picked the wrong guy. It’d be a lot easier if you’d just radiate the thing from outside my pants. Somehow it just looks bad the way you’re doing it.”

Rather than blow it by panicking, jumping to conclusions and, consequently, pressing the wrong button at critical mass, I let my autonomic system take over, “relax, and float downstream.”

But my mind was reeling at lightning speed. Was the test not merely that I comply, but that I see and know the holy in Baba’s act? The Indian scriptures had declared repeatedly, “Anything done in total purity is without blemish.” Baba could ask me, “Do you trust me?” And I might reply, “Of course,” forever. But until I was given cause to suspect him or question his integrity, the depth of my faith would remain uncertain.

But if there is no absolute standard to judge right or wrong, and anything goes, I wondered how can you ever fully discern the genuine Teacher from the counterfeit? What concrete evidence can you ever go by? And how do you know that what you label a ‘test,’ to preserve your faith, is not a slip by the counterfeit guru?

It seemed as if all eternity rested on this one crucial moment, the moment of my verdict—to believe in Baba far more than ever, or fall away entirely and perhaps remain confused for the rest of my life. I was checkmated, and in a torrent of confusion.

Was this the ultimate Zen Koan, dropped on a pupil by a master, by creating the perfect paradox of contradictions designed to unshackle erroneous belief—even my fundamental conviction that good and evil are absolutes? If so, I would either see the impossibility and contradiction in the very idea of Baba’s having homosexual lust—the leap towards liberation—or the old habits of belief would win in the end. And I would dismount on a desolate halfway point of metaphysical confusion, perhaps doomed to wander into deeper spiritual labyrinths, with not a reference point on the horizon. The stakes were frightening.

But the agitation remained. Baba showed every pant, every tremor of arousal. Why? “Part of the props for the total existential dilemma,” came the answer. Baba’s motives were not what appearances suggested. He’s using the thorn to remove the thorn. Good stacked over evil like a staircase to walk beyond them, where opposites merge to give a new reference point.

My belief in Baba’s deity begins to outweigh superficial appearances. “Too much at stake . . .it can’t end in a shoddy little stair-well with a queer. Not after all this. He can’t be a queer . . . impossible . . . impossible. I have got to believe in him. The only way is forward. I have to follow him in blind faith. That’s the answer.” I tried to convince myself.

“Lust contradicts Baba’s nature; therefore it does not exist in him. He cannot sin, because it is not in him to do so. Blind faith. Baba is innocent.”

A mounting sense of victory replaced the overwhelming mental weight. I had changed in some way. The boundary around my mind no longer felt impermeable, like a protective shield. Partially gone was that litmus test of duality, my puritanical conscience. In its stead, a heady sense of freedom. I was not necessarily more alive, nor more lucid. But there was nothing to fear.

My legs continued to shake slightly as Baba removed his hand from my pants and zipped my fly. The entire dilemma had lasted about half a minute. It wasn’t so bad, I thought, echoing those first words after once bravely receiving my first hypodermic injection as a very small child.

“Very happy,” Baba said, “Go now.” He waved, and I passed through the curtains as twenty eyes, consumed with curiosity, looked up.

Five minutes later, the others were through. We drifted outside. I suddenly remembered, “Oh, Baba. Do you want me to go to Whitefield?”

“Of course, sir, of course. You stay with me in Whitefield. You are near and dear.”

Consistent with my pledge of turning my life over to him, “But Baba, my stuff is in New Delhi. It may take several weeks to go there by train and get my bags.”

“Go tomorrow. Then come to Whitefield, Brindavan. Then many interviews and lessons in sadhana for all foreigners. I will train you.”

Baba’s car left that night. I left by bus early the next morning, speeding off for the long train trip across India to New Delhi for a quick roundtrip. I had to get my luggage still in storage at the Vishwa Yuvak Kendra in the diplomatic enclave as well as take care of various details.

Chapter Nine

Choosing the Kingdom

A

fter a fifty-hour train ride from Delhi to Madras—feet out of the window, coal-dust and smoke blowing in, fiery hot curries, monkey packs in village stations, a stretch of track in

Maharashtra that transformed the train into a cast-iron oven on wheels— and a brief overnight stay at the Madras YMCA, I was on the final hub of the return journey. The final lap of the journey was on the air conditioned “Brindavan Express,” one of India’s fastest trains. I stared out the large plateglass window of the dining-car as we approached Bangalore. “Where’s Whitefield?” I asked the conductor, hoping the train might stop at this local town housing Baba’s ashram only thirteen miles from the main city of Bangalore. “We are coming to it just now. No, the express has no stops on the way.”

The terrain of Madras State had resembled Utah in a drought. But Mysore was shining far greener as we headed towards the tropical regions. For over a hundred miles, we had passed Mysore rice paddies, wells, dry patches, and the usual primitive villages with water buffaloes and bare-chested natives. I was always intrigued by this raw side of India, a kind of timeless aspect. I pressed my face up to

the glass, concentrating with full force. Whitefield blazed by in a flash, leaving only scanty after-images in my mind of mango sellers kneeling in the road, a nondescript rail depot, scant trees, dirt paths and roads, monkeys, a walled-in compound on one side, and a modern factory on the other. “Sai Ram,” somebody uttered. We had just passed Baba’s compound, but I could not remember anything standing out. Technically, neither it nor the “Whitefield railway station” were in Whitefield. They were in Kadugodi, a tiny nondescript village. The old British farm community of Whitefield was several miles down the road, vacated of its days of glory since independence, and now settled with Indians and AngloIndians. An hour and a half later, I was riding back in a three-wheel autorickshaw. Contrasting with the primeval wilderness of Puttaparthi, the entire Bangalore region exuded the spirit of contemporary progressive India. It was a welcome sight.

Baba’s house in Whitefield contrasted dramatically with his residential prayer hall in “wilderness India” with its foreboding temple design. This upscale estate was once the second home of the King of Nepal. Separated by a gate and drive, Baba’s two-storied stucco house had the distinct architectural flavor of a rambling oceanside home in Santa Barbara, California. It had acres of well-kept garden in the rear and was complete with circular frosted windows of colored glass, a front drive-in porch, and bougainvillea. All it needed was an old Cadillac to complete the picture.

The outside compound was divided between the school and the public open spaces. The school buildings were clustered on the other side of the drive. The rest of the open compound included the shady tree-lined driveway from Baba’s private gate to the front entrance, long stone step-tiers rising up to Baba’s private elevated gardens, where devotees could sit in peace, and last of all, a large Banyan tree in the center of the compound where people gathered for the large darshans. Around it was a circular concrete floor, and fifteen feet up its trunk was an umbrella of corrugated aluminum, sheltering those under it from sun and rain. It also had a chair for Baba to sit on under the base of the tree.

I left my bags with the Gurkha guard at the gate. Sai Baba was inspect

ing a wing of the boys’ academy when he saw me squatting behind a hedge. I was playfully testing him.

Baba’s rasping voice called, “Come, Rowdie.” I walked out into the open sunlight where he stood.

Hundreds looked on as he grabbed my shirtsleeve, and said in my ear, “Tell the other Americans that tomorrow there will be a private dinner and school-day festival. Krishna play, singing, and speeches. You are invited, sir.” Before I ran off exuberantly, Baba tugged my sleeve again. “Invite fat man with glasses ... and ....” He went on to name or describe everybody except Kerry and Janet, which troubled me.

Expecting a banquet table with Baba at the head, we were ushered through the house into the rear garden where sat rows and rows of Baba’s special local Mysore devotees—at least three hundred of them.

We were happy to eat what to us was now very good food, after eating fourth-rate, peasant-class, vegetarian food for the last few months. While the Gurkha guard shooed away packs of monkeys, Anthony or I would motion, and one of the servants with a large bowl of rice, sambhar, dal, vegetable curry, dahi, or bhaji, would come along and scoop it out on our banana leaves.

Anthony and I soon left out the rear door and headed home in the pitch-black for a half a mile or so. We stumbled down dirt-paths, by herds of swine, over outdoor drainage canals, into the primitive village of Kadugodi, where several of us rented a little house in the village.

Our life at Whitefield soon settled into a pattern. We went to the daily darshans, heard a few words from Baba, and then went home till the afternoon darshan. We relished each word spoken by Baba and every little intuition, dream, or psychic experience that any of us had.

Each day, we arose with the land at five, made tea, meditated, dressed, and by 8:30, headed towards the the compound. Our hut was without a stick of furniture, so the cooking was done by kerosene-stove on the floor. Water was hauled up out of the local village well and kept in a large earthenware jar in the courtyard. Some of it was used for cooking, some for bathing—the old rusty tin can routine—and some for cleaning our toilet,

a cement hole in the floor of the courtyard stall. For those of us sleeping outside, the courtyard latrine didn’t really matter because the rest of the neighborhood smelled so bad that we really couldn’t tell the difference.

When we entered the Bangalore summer in April, the tin-can routine no longer worked. So we stopped for a cold shower on the way to darshan by the railway depot. Even this didn’t prevent sunstroke. Vickie had it on and off for weeks at a time, and I almost got it too. Walking that half-mile became a painful chore. We would cover our heads with white cloth and dart in and out of the shade to avoid the burning rays of the sun.

My body was not adapting well to a vegetarian diet. I had very little energy. My supply of canned cheese and peanut butter, which I got at the American Embassy during my brief interlude in Delhi, was running out. The food we cooked for ourselves consisted of rice and bruised, insect-wasted vegetables which Anthony and I bought in the dust-swept village market. Maimed sellers crouched in the dust, and haggled over stacks of stuff on burlap rags. By the time we boiled them long enough to kill anything from amoebas to tapeworm eggs, there was not much left.

Our one escape from the squalor lay in the hour-long bus ride into Bangalore, the famed progressive capital of unlittered streets, wide roads, and modern storefronts. Along Brigade or Mahatma Gandhi roads, there were all sorts of Indo-European restaurants. Our favorite was a cafe snack bar called Nilgiri Dairy, a modern inexpensive place where the educated middle-class and the college set hung out. There we could get a variety of clean hi-protein snacks, from pasteurized milk and grilled cheese sandwiches to milk shakes and ice cream sundaes. The products came from their farm in the nearby Nilgiri Hills, another former British settlement.

What inevitably followed our Bangalore trips was an ensuing interest in bookstalls and shop-windows, like the proverbial line of crumbs before a chicken. We were well aware that we were flirting with propensities that the rest of the time we had been trying to erase, not foster. Because the limiting ego held us in the illusion with these hooks of the senses, it usually took about a second in the darshan line on the driveway for Baba to

look into our eyes and know where we had just been. “Enjoying tourist trips? Too much sweets is not good.”

Gill was the only one who roughed it through all the way, hanging on with the willpower that would pale a lobster. He almost never went into town, except over visa matters. Even if the heat made me delirious, and close to nausea, after walking less than a mile, still Gill’s ghostly form in head-dress and wraparound could be seen shuddering in the distant heat waves far off down the main road, as he walked in sandals on the scorching tar, eating a mango or a papaya. He had his own cabin on an old Whitefield farm. Late March to early April was one of the hottest times, even for the elevated Bangalore district. Soon, though, would come the monsoon rains, and we could barely wait for them to hit, cooling everything down to the seventies and eighties, filling Brindavan with aromatic smells, and washing the ground.

Eventually Sai Baba put an end to this arduous period. Perhaps the fact that one of our group had been robbed the night before sleeping under a local Banyan tree tipped the scales.

“Not a good idea . . . too many dangers, thieves, beggars. . . sometimes rain coming down. No place to leave luggage, no privacy, not good.” Indicating his pleasure in the spirit of their persistence and self-denial, Baba nodded his head with pride and commented, “Not even my Indian devotees take such chances. And you come from much higher standard of living.”

Baba went on, “Last night he loses some money. All that he had; ninety-three rupees.” Baba described the whole event as though he were there.

The long-haired German was mind-blown, nodding that 93 rupees was the exact amount.

“Don’t worry, I will get you your ninety-three rupees. Whatever is mine is yours, your property. . . this house, this gardens, anything.” And Baba looked to all of us and continued, “You have personal needs, just ask, that is why I am here. Don’t be afraid, you need money? Ask.”

Baba looked down at me and said, “Living in Kadugodi dirty, noises, smells, not good for meditation. Now I will open two large schoolrooms, there you stay. Males in one room, females in the other. Now seventeen Americans, too many people. After interview, get all your belongings and come here tonight.”

After a barren month and a half, suddenly we were to get more grace than we dreamed of: “We,” meaning the group. Both Gill and I had already had two devastating interviews. One, a private one, was so devastating that I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I just knew with a quiet assurance that with Baba, I was more or less equivalent to a first-century close disciple of Christ. Gill wasn’t around for that private one—I was in line after him, and the last one left, and the only one totally alone with Baba.

At the following interview, only four people went in to see Baba, Gill, a Ceylonese father, his polio-stricken daughter, and myself. It was fraught with materializations and other paranormal displays of power. Among other things, Baba promised Gill freedom would come. He also looked down at me sitting by his side, as was invariably the rule, and promised visas to stay in India indefinitely as well as hints of my being in his world mission. Baba reminded the father of some dreams in which he had appeared and instructed him. The Ceylonese almost fainted at that. Baba went on to assure that he would definitely cure the daughter’s polio.

Gill groaned at the mention of having to move in with the group. He protested several times, and Baba had to finally tell him sternly enough that it was his will that Gill move. The night before, Gill encountered another disembodied demon from the void. He told Anthony that it almost killed him. He was scared and wanted to know when it would end. Baba uttered, according to Gill, a pat meaningless phrase in his ear.

Baba proceeded on with our first group interview, at times asking me to reword his teachings. “Always keep the name of God in mind, that is mantram, Om Sri Ram. . . like this. It is like a life-boat to cross the ocean of samsara. When physical death comes, and the name of God is on your tongue . . . Bas, no more rebirth. Whatever is the last thought at the moment of death . . . that is what you are. Explain, Rowdie.”

I was energized from sitting beside Baba’s chair, where a constant power flowed out. I elaborated, “We’ve talked about this before (referring to our many group sessions). Just as it says in the Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), the last thought impression in your mind at the point of death will strongly determine your next incarnation. If the last thought is of God, which is only possible after a life of rigorous spiritual discipline, you reach samadhi. If you register fear or anger, then the death experience itself will be terrifying, and your chances next time around will be no better if not worse than before.”

Baba twinkled and slapped me on the back, “Very good.” For ten minutes more he talked about the divine reaching out for man, and man, the jiva, reaching up for God. He likened it to a stalagmite and a stalagtite in a cave growing to meet one another in the middle to form a column.

“I’ll show you.” The air began to hum. Baba leaned forward with his sleeve rolled up, and spun his open palm around in giant circles. There was a huge flash of power. All seventeen of us in the room rocked, as Baba’s hand began to quiver. Something flickered into visibility in his palm and he closed his hand to catch it. He was holding a large smooth stone about an inch and a half long. He passed it to a few of us to look at. Then Baba asked for it again, held it up to his mouth, blew on it, and turned it around for all of us to see. There was a large hole where he had blown. As Baba passed the stone around, he explained that the two cones almost touching in the hole, were like his relationship to us.

Baba gave the stone to Gill, who accepted it in gratitude. As the interview ended, Baba materialized a large lump of “Mysore Pack,” a type of Indian fudge, and handed it out. Then he brought in a box of mangoes, and gave one to each of us. As we left, group spirit reached its all-time peak, as people scattered in different directions to pack and move in to the

new school rooms as quickly as possible.

This marked the beginning of a brief “honeymoon with God,” as our group moved into the two large classrooms in high spirits. Mats were rolled out, mosquito nets pitched, chairs moved aside, as the brand-new classroom was made a modern dormitory for yogis. On the stage of the men’s room, flowers were arranged, incense burned, and large pictures of gods and gurus went up. At center stage, garlanded with flowers, stood a framed photo-portrait of Baba.

For the next two weeks, we felt the full force of undeserved grace as we went up to Baba’s house almost every day to have a group interview. This well surpassed the average quota of interviews per lifetime of even the closer devotees. I got into the habit of recording key points as I sat next to Baba’s chair. Later I would type them up and hand out several copies.

The compound was briefly locked up at night with the midApril school holidays. This left only us, Baba, Baba’s staff, and the Gurkha guard. We were beginning to feel as though we owned the place, especially since we had been given free reign over the entire grounds, except for Baba’s house inside.

We arose each morning at fourthirty or five, washed under the cold taps in the public lavatories, meditated on the porch or around the huge empty water tank. By seven we cooked porridge and tea, and then went to darshan. A few of us in the male section lingered behind for Baba’s room inspection, depending upon whether we suffered stage fright with Baba. Baba would often spend fifteen or twenty minutes with us, revealing facts about the various “holy personages” on our puja table, or telling puns and jokes, stabbing us in the belly with a finger. Or he might sneak in quietly to catch us off guard. If Gill was meditating, then Baba might tweak his ear, making him jump about a foot every time. When Gill turned an enraged face to discover the embodiment and focal point of his meditations, his face would soften into an “Oh, it’s you.” As this exclusive clowning went on, the daytime crowd forty yards away would stand motionless, all eyes and ears. After darshan, when the crowd dispersed,

you’d think we had the secrets of the universe, the way people followed us around, and peeped into our dorm.

At 4:00 daily, we were again on hand for darshan. Baba would slowly go up and down the drive, crossing back and forth from the men’s side to the women’s, blessing people, commenting on and revealing things they did, giving advice, or his other method of teaching—ignoring them. If he hadn’t told us “interview today” while we sat in the long row of bhaktas or brought me aside and whispered directions, he would signal us at the last moment as he went back through the gate towards his house, “Come! Why do you sit? You do not want interview today?”

Early in May, Baba gave us our tenth interview within two weeks to “recharge batteries.” He was going to Bombay for “a few days.” May 7 was an auspicious day. Baba’s English was not clear at first, but we knew that he was about the only one on earth who could really recall the significance of the events that the day stood for. To be with him was a very special favor. And instead of calling in the rishis or the pundits of India, he had chosen a group of foreigners camping out in the school building!

“The position of the earth, the orbit of the sun, the stars in the heavens now converging for the first time in many thousands of years. Some seven thousand years. Today is 7th May 1970. Today is the day of the Seven Rishis, the Seven Oceans, the Seven Planes, the Seven Rays of Light.” Baba ran through other groups of sevens. “Seven is a very lucky number. Eight is a bad number, the number of maya, delusion, desires, evils. Nine is the number of God, Brahman . . . the perfect number.” He revealed that all of his architectural complexes were built on this principle, favoring nine. “Dharmakshetra was constructed in 108 days, which is twelve nines.”

Then for a while, Baba was elucidating various yogic techniques, “Concentrate on one of the forms of God .... Draw in your mind again and again. After a while you will become that form. God is everywhere. Sometimes Ramakrishna became a goddess, he dressed like a woman, talked like a woman, no one could tell it was a man. He saw his face in the mirror and he saw Kali. This was the bliss state of samadhi. But to reach the formless eternal bliss, Ramakrishna had to break the form forever one day by meditating on a small piece of glass.

“For meditation without form, use a flame. Jyoti is light, symbol of God. Imagine the flame in the middle of the brow . . . what’s the name of this, Rowdie?” Baba asked with a laugh.

“The Ajna chakra, Baba, the sixth chakra, next to the last one. Some yogic experiences from this, Baba.” I was half joking with him, since a few weeks back, when Gill and I had an interview, he reached down and pinched me in the region of the third eye, which blasted me into an ecstatic experience reminiscent of when Ramakrishna reached over and touched the third eye of Vivekananda in Bengal almost a century back.

Again Baba playfully tapped my third eye again,

this time not blasting my head off. “Now imagine

the light entering the cave of the heart—the heart

region is called hrydayam. Let this light destroy all

hate, anger, ego, jealousy, and let it fill the body. Let

it first fill the room, then the house, until it

embraces the whole mankind. Do this, and there

will be very quick spiritual progress.”

Baba reached down and positioned me in

the meditative posture. “Then when purifi

cation comes, the energy, called Kundalini

Shakti, can pass from the base of the spine

up. Then one day, it will pass all the way up and

bas (finish) . . . enlightenment, the play is over,” Baba concluded wistfully.

Most of us knew about Ayurvedic physiology concerning the neuroendocrine power centers and their corresponding activity, paralleling changes in consciousness. Baba related that Ramakrishna once told his disciples that if they experienced one hundredth the power that surged through him in a fraction of a second, they would die. They were not ready for full voltage.

“Special grace,” Baba announced. We concentrated on his bare forearm whirling around, and felt a surge of energy as his palm closed. When he opened his hand, there were five rings neatly braided with about seven elements of metal apiece. He handed them out to the girls.

Baba looked over to the male half of the room, “Envy?” A few heads bowed in embarrassment. “Don’t worry, special grace is never exhausted; it is like an ocean.”

Baba’s hand began whirling again in huge arcs. Another surge rippled through the room, only this time Baba’s hand was holding something so large that it glinted through his spread-out fingers. Baba opened his hands to reveal eleven large oval metal plates with a photographic likeness of himself enameled on each of them. There was no earthly way Baba could have done these things, with seventeen of us looking on, his sleeve rolled up.

Baba left to get a box of mangoes. He threw them out to some people, looking one way, and tossing them another. Others he held in his hand and banged people on the head before handing them out.

Before the group ran out, Baba stood at the door to teach us a Vedic prayer.

Baba left Brindavan on the 9th of May—nine being the number for God, we reflected—and the “few days” turned into an absence of several weeks. Almost the minute Baba’s Fiat pulled out of the compound the tempo of things slowed, as if the life had gone out of it.

Many of us headed into Bangalore on protein binges. Mysteriously, Jai would disappear. Then we found out why: Jai had managed to find another guru in Bangalore, to the horror of both Michelle and me. The guru would sit in samadhi and generate such mind-warping power that within five minutes he would have a garden of three hundred people dancing around and babbling in tongues, some hanging on branches like “Hanuman.” Jai would get totally clocked-out. He was like an eel sucking on a broken power cable. As I told him, he got an instant lobotomy. I made my disdain no secret for this minor player in India’s vast pantheon of gurus. He was trading a millennial avatar for a lower-echelon guru. His blindness staggered me. I anticipated Jai’s rapid fall from grace.

Baba’s car returned on the 20th of May and we were ecstatic. The school band had been practicing for some great event, filling the air with wailing trombones, tubas, cymbals, flutes, and fluttering drums as boys in the band had rehearsals that drove us nearly hysterical at times. The more ambitious they became, the more hideous a cacophony filled the air, as they progressed from Sousa Marine Corps marches to Midwest high school football rah-rahs, fox trots, and romance song, from “The King and I” to “The Stars Fell on Alabama.”

Now that Baba was back, the band tried even harder, creating impossible flute solos that fluttered in the air, then fell with a gronk. Ultimately the scenario was perfect for a confrontation between Gill and me—a “roar-out” between us that could be heard a block away.

Shotgun Mountain Gill snorted, turned around, got under his mosquito net, and continued meditating as though nothing had happened. I took a three-hour walk, immediately coming face to face with the girls scampering around the kitchen area, pale-faced, talking in whispers. They seemed to sympathize with me the most, knowing that I was usually the cheerful peacemaker. I told them that somebody had to keep Gill in line, knowing that his sensitive system had gotten a dose of aggression that he hadn’t seen for a long time, and that it would be simpler for him not to insist on living by the gun.

The day after his return, Baba informed me that we should all go up to the house after darshan to hear about his tour. Baba amazed us even more by speaking with the un-selfconscious joy of one family member to another, never allowing the conquests to get in the way.

After chartering a private plane to Jamnagar in Gujarat State and being received at the palace of the Rajamata of Nawanagar with a full honor guard and police band, Baba proceeded on the next day to Dwarka, the supposed birthplace of Krishna, where thousands awaited him at the famous Krishna temple. After blessing it, he drove back to Jamnagar with a huge motorcade, stopping on the sandy shore of Kuranga. As the crowd followed him, he collected shells, walked along the water’s edge, and finally sat down.

“Krishna temple, too much peoples. Very few have darshan of Krishna, so give special darshan.” With a crowd of many hundreds looking on, Baba described how he sat on a completely foreign beach, heaped up a cubit of sand, flattening it on top, and then drew a pattern on top; first a three slanted line, then a circle on top, a small triangle over that, and then a short line across the circle, symbolic of Krishna. After announcing, “It’s ready,” Baba stuck his hand in the mound, and pulled out a sparkling fifteen-inch solid gold statue of Krishna. To be sure, the picture of the miracle was in all the papers, announcing that the idol was far too large for someone as tiny as Baba to smuggle, and the chances of finding something pre-planted on a beach he’d never been to in his life amidst a giant milling crowd was highly unlikely, especially the way he had moved so freely across the acres of faceless sand without landmarks. As they were about to leave, Baba asked the awe-filled chauffeur his favorite god-form. As he mentioned “Amba-Bhavani,” Baba waved his hand, creating a gold plate with a picture of the deity on it.

The second great event was a visit by Baba to one of the most hallowed grounds in India, the Somnath temple, established in 200 AD, and at one time, the richest temple in India. The temple was rebuilt a number of times. The final building was started in 1947, and called Mahameru Prasad, the Hindu equivalent of Saint Peter’s in Rome or the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

Before a titanic crowd, Baba mounted the inner sanctuary, after being received by the temple trustees and high officers of the district and state. Then amid Karnatic temple horns, Baba went along a red carpet, opened the silver door, and proceeded along the festooned pathway lined with banana trees towards the main shrine of Someshwar.

As he entered the “holy of holies,” Brahmin pandits recited Vedic hymns. Baba directed that a silver tray be brought to him. He opened his empty palm, held it over the plate, and instantly materialized a stream of 108 silver bilva leaves, and then 108 gold flowers. Baba poured these upon the three foot lingam of the temple, (inaugurated by the Indian president, Rajendra Prasad) to revitalize the “new” lingam.

In front of some of the highest priesthood of the land, Baba waved his hand to fulfill his promise that, before he left, he would restore the original “Sowrashtra Somanatha.” Instantly a brilliant ball of light appeared in Baba’s hand. Baba claimed that he had brought it up from its ancient hiding place underground (as it was never to be seen), under the shrine of the present lingum. The priests and trustees later confirmed this fact regarding its legendary location. Then Baba created a solid silver stand, gave it to the chief priest, and announced, “Let it remain in the full light of day for pious eyes to worship. The avatar has come to remove all fear.”

We left the darshan room in a dazed wonder, as I flipped through the photo-album Baba had given me.

A week or so later, within the first week of June, we were already beginning to feel the effects of our growing prestige from our association with Baba. We had been special guests when Baba inaugurated a medium-sized iron foundry near Brindavan. After we sat in line with the beggars at a public feeding, the owners of the foundry sought us out and invited us to a banquet at their home. Then, a fairly prestigious Baba devotee invited us to attend his son’s wedding which would take place in Baba’s private rear garden.

After that event, I exited the wedding feast gracefully through the rear garden door, then started to lope the rest of the way home. I was stuffed. One of Baba’s messengers ran up to me. I knew that I had been caught red-handed in the act of gluttony. To my surprise, the youth strained to pronounce an English name. Baba wanted to speak to “Gill Locks.” Arming myself for another roar-out, I later located Gill and informed him. The response was amused incredulity. “Baba’s never known my name, everything else, yes, but never my name.” A message soon followed saying that Baba wanted to see all of us the next afternoon.

Near the end of the interview, Baba briefly left the room and returned with a computerized card, handing it to Gill. Looking shocked, Gill exclaimed, “Good God, Swami, you couldn’t have done that . . . there’s no way that thing could have gotten here by now. Why, I just mailed off my claim a few days ago. How the ....”

Gill noticed that the card from the San Francisco branch of the Bank of America happened to have that day’s date stamped on it, and there was no way that thing could have gotten from San Francisco to Bangalore South India within an eight-hour stretch. Not even a jet hijacked from the Strategic Air Command could clock that sort of time. Gill mentioned that his claim should only be arriving at the Central Bank in the States. Then there is usually a week’s back-up according to the Bangalore branch (they had been unable to replace Gill’s stolen traveler’s checks).

“Yeah, Baba, how’d you get it through the computer so fast?” Baba replied, “I have the whole world in the palm of my hand. Divine will, space and time are no obstacle to Swami.”

After handing out more “juicy-sweet” mangoes, Baba broke the news that there would be no need for interviews in the future. We were to start coming to his house for “private bhajan.” It wasn’t possible for devotees to get much more intimate with Baba, short of being actual houseguests, and hardly anybody had ever done that. But before we left, the girls had a surprise that they thought they would spring on Baba... “Swami? . . .”

“Oh, yes; very happy to come to dinner—you cook the meal.” The American bhaktas had another notch on their record of firsts—cooking an Indian meal for Sai Baba, who, at Puttaparthi at least, wouldn’t eat unless the food had been cooked by one of a handful of specially appointed people.

Preparations were a mad scramble. Inevitably, some of the closer Indian women convinced the American bhaktas that they knew what Baba needed. They created an array of delicacies, blast furnace hot, just as Baba usually liked it. And indeed, it was a great meal.

At one point Baba looked at Gill and me with an amused sneer. We were sitting right in front of him. “Mutt and Jeff. . . the team captains . . . the lion and the tiger . . . like an angry couple,” Baba threw a few more jibes our way, making me feel embarrassed, amused, and complimented. Then Baba went on to build us up in the eyes of the others.

As Baba arose to leave, he dropped another bomb on us on his way out of the door. “The school principal will need classrooms. School holiday ends in a few days, then school starting. Where to put the Westerners?” We knew we would have to hit the village again, but pretended not to look disappointed.

Then Baba answered his rhetorical question, “Kadugodi not a good idea for meditations, too much noise, too much dirt. I know.” His eyes lit up, “Starting tomorrow, all Americans move into my house.” It was staggering.

I wondered if our batteries were being charged to sustain us through some protracted dry spell. I knew the tempo could not continue at this pace. I wanted to collect each drop of grace like a farmer collecting rain before an anticipated drought. I also felt we had been brought here from around the world for a purpose, a cosmic purpose. The West was moving from one paradigm, the Church Age, into another.

Chapter 10

The Cost of Privilege

I

t did not take us long to move into Baba’s private residence. Baba gave us a quick house tour as we followed, stunned at this boon of unexpected favor.

There was to be a strict segregation of the sexes, with the women restricted to quarters at the back of the house. At night, the girls spread their bedding either on the back porch or on the floor of the bhajan hall.

We men had exclusive use of the roof as private quarters, and also a downstairs room. On the front end of the roof sat Baba’s self-contained quarters, utterly isolated from the rest of the house. It had its own porch, bathroom, living room, and ultra plush and sealed off bedroom. The entire housing resembled a large rectangular bathysphere lowered from the heavens. Baba had access to it by a stairwell from his downstairs living room. The exit, a small enclosure of concrete and steel, resembled a hatch on the deck of a ship. The whole roof and “command tower” had a nautical look, enhanced by the low tinted windows on the front of the house.

Most of us chose to sleep on the roof to feel the cool aromatic breeze from the gardens and orchards below. At night we could gaze into the mysteries of the black heavens and celebrate the unique privilege and mystery of being allowed to sleep only yards from the “holy of holies,”the private domicile of the God-man on earth. We felt that at some deep level, an inconceivable magic of purification was going on. Our destinies were being played out.

On our first dinner with Baba, the men were escorted through the living room then through a large two-paneled doorway into Baba’s dining room. As is the Indian custom, men were to eat first. At the head of the room, overlooking the devotees on the floor, was Baba’s private table and chair, with white table cloth, canister of refrigerated water, and accoutrements such as containers of lime pickles, chutney, and the like. To Baba’s rear right was his private refrigerator, where there was always ample cold water for him. In the rear corner of the room opposite Baba was the serving table containing a large variety of South Indian vegetarian food of the highest quality. Already sitting in the dining room along the floor were about seven or eight Indians, from Raja Reddy, the closest disciple, to some of the speakers at the last festival.

I was afraid that my gnawing hunger would steal away the significance of the occasion like some kind of opiate, filling the senses while dulling the mind. After my first bite, I fully realized what I was up against, as the servant ran by me with twenty different types of flavorful concoctions, including tablespoons of ghee (extra-refined butter oil). By the end of the meal, I had the intelligence of a brick, and knew that the only way to hide the dull glaze of my swollen eyes was to look pensively at the floor as though reverently enshrining the occasion in my mind. Whether this was because of monumental gluttony, or some esoteric mixture of spices and pepper, I wasn’t sure. I just didn’t want the eager girls to see my undeserving reaction to the boon. A few hours later on the roof, I was still out of it as I dozed off.

The second evening after moving in, Baba sent word that there would be private bhajans in the hall at 8:00. Since nothing was mentioned about dinner, we learned that the previous night was a special occasion, and that we were to continue as before, cooking in the little side room near our old classroom-dorms.

He insisted that Gill, two others and I should sit in the front row. He picked on us at random to sing what we had memorized of a given bhajan. After one of us had led a phrase, the others would repeat it, while we kept time by clapping. Baba had elaborate clackers with which he could keep flawless time. Any mistake by one of the singers was seized upon and mimicked by Baba—his playful, or Krishna, aspect.

When Baba himself started singing, the girls would sigh, and I would compare his magnificent control with our lack of it, as he would initiate and carry off the most complicated voice warbles, so typical of Indian singing. At one time he did a highly skilled twenty-minute ballad of Ram’s wedding—interchanging the parts of the characters, and singing with remarkable speed and agility, while defining complicated beats with the clackers. And not only was it flawless, but the melody, I thought, was beautiful, with dashes of regal splendor and long romantic, indeed winsome, refrains. By the end of it, the women’s side was leaning forward, starstruck, like the “Girls of Saint Trinian’s” watching Rudolf Valentino.

When Baba wanted some English songs, Gill led with “Kumbaya,” and the whole group joined in to sing, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” By about ten, it was time for bed.

The rest of the week, we continued to have bhajans with Baba every night. Yet our days were pretty much as before. We continued eating in the school buildings, meditating in the gardens, and appearing for the public darshans.

It was around this time that Baba introduced us to a local tailor who had yards and yards of bright red and orange silk. The man, sitting at a foot-driven sewing machine, was making stacks of Baba gowns. He did this quite often, as Baba usually wore a gown only a few times before giving it to some special devotee. Hands on hips and chewing a betel leaf, Baba told the tailor: “Measure all the Rowdies.” He gave each of us a number and in the evening we all gathered again. Baba called out our numbers and we marched up to receive a tap on the head and a pair of identical striped pajamas. We put them on, and stood in a row for inspection.

A couple of days later I was sitting on a couch, while the tailor was humming away, making bright red Baba gowns. I had picked up a copy of the Bible from one of the Bangalore bookstores, and was into the Book of Revelation. After reading about the one who was “faithful and true” wearing a “blood-red robe” and riding a white horse (we had discussed whether Baba was the Kalki avatar, the tenth incarnation of Vishnu who would appear in the Kali yuga, age of wickedness, riding a white horse and wearing blood red), I got hung up on chapter 13:

Then I saw another beast, which came up out of the earth; It had two horns like a lamb’s, but spoke like a dragon. It wielded all the authority of the first beast in its presence, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship this first beast, whose mortal wound had been healed. It worked great miracles, even making fire come down from heaven to earth before men’s eyes. By the miracles it was allowed to perform in the presence of the beast it deluded the inhabitants of the earth, and made them erect an image in honor of the beast that had been wounded by the sword and yet lived. It was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that it could speak, and could cause all who would not worship the image to be put to death.

Around the time I got to the number “666,” the key to the identity of the Beast, I saw a flash of red, and Baba walked in. Feeling a peculiar significance in the moment, I decided to ask Baba, since he was omniscient, what it meant. Baba practically swaggered over to me, took the book from my hands, and started reading where I had my finger. He could barely say the words; in fact, much of it was word-skipping and word-blending. Baba gave me an odd smile, made a silly grimace, and then blew me a loud kiss, turned around and exited, saying something like, “The great and the small, will be all in all.”

Janet said that the day the girls moved in, Baba gave her a similar test: “He just walked into the bhajan-hall in a straight line, no facial expression, right up to me, and clicked his fingers with such force that it sounded like a fire-cracker. He almost looked wrathful. His face relaxed, and he walked on. Boy, he was telling us that if he wanted, he had the power to vaporize us. I mean, it really scared me.”

Baba soon planned to send us on ahead to the Andhra Pradesh ashram, “the wilderness.” Baba called the men up to the roof, found a Polaroid camera, explained to one of his devotee-servants how to work it, and then assembled us in different formations with him for “souvenir pictures.” One of them, he said, would go into his monthly ashram magazine, Sanathana Sarathi.

That evening, a stranger joined us for the evening bhajan. It was Swami Chinmayananda, a fairly respected guru who had publicly criticized the avatars, saying that Rama, Krishna, and Christ all died violent deaths. What had brought him here?

Baba explained: “I see Chinmayananda at local hospital with many medical problems—ulcers, lung perforation, blood disease, a hole in the heart and finally gangrene. Doctors say his prognosis is certain death. They take X-rays, many tests, give him glucose, blood transfusion; but condition worsening all the time. Well, Swami knows. I go for the past week, visit him several times in the afternoon. One day, I materialize some vibhuti and rub it on affected parts, then give him some to drink in a glass of water. Now out of the hospital, a great mystery to the doctors there. Now health is recovering - eh, Chinmayananda?” The guru nodded his head graciously. “Now he can return to northern India on his tour and continue his work, teaching, sadhana, yoga.” Baba smiled, “Wherever there is true teaching, there I am also.”

On one of our final meetings with Baba, the next night or so, before he was to leave the following morning on a day’s tour to Madras, and we were to leave for Puttaparthi, there was a strange incident that broke up our meeting. A servant ran into the interview room informing Baba of something. Now in a flash, Baba was up from his chair almost yelling nervously, and apparently giving instructions. After a few minutes he reappeared in the doorway, speaking with assurance, but still seeming shaken underneath. “Five minutes ago the small child of one of the servants kidnapped and smuggled out in a truck ....” Suddenly there was yelling again, and Baba disappeared for the evening. After five minutes alone in the interview room, we gathered it was over and left, some of us worried about the kid, some smugly confident that Baba had everything under control.

As we were trying to sleep on the roof into the late hours of the night, we heard discussions, cars stopping and starting, and what not. Some of us wondered in whispers—”Why didn’t Baba know of it while it was happening? Or why didn’t he foresee it? Why did he appear nervous, since that seemed to indicate that something was at stake? Why couldn’t he re-materialize the kid? Something like that was an insult to Baba. Besides, the crying of one of the servants indicated lack of faith in Baba. How could someone have the privilege of working in Baba’s house, and yet, doubt him even now?”

That morning as we were to leave, with all our bags on the drive, Baba gave us a brief session. All smiles and full of assurance, he described how Raja Reddy, following his instructions, had managed to track the thief down in half an hour, and recover the kidnapped child, and that it was an ill-conceived plot to expose him and extort money for the child. The result of all futile attempts like this ended such people opposing Baba’s mission in jail.

Patting us on the back, Baba said, “Go now to Puttaparthi. Take these cars into Bangalore and get onto special bus. Swami has reserved an entire bus for near and dears. In a few days I will come.”

What we didn’t know was that we would remain in Puttaparthi for a seeming eternity—five months altogether, from 29 June until 25 November. That is, those of us in the group who persevered and survived the ordeal.

Returning to the Wilderness

T

he bus ride had been exhausting. As we threw down our bags on the long stone walkway across the luxury suites, I looked up at the ragged skyline of rocks and jagged hills in the sunset. I thought once again that if anything had ever reminded me of “God’s anvil,” that bleak and tortuous desert in Lawrence of Arabia, this was it.

We were to live in the row of cubicals across from the “luxury suites.” It was so hot that all seventeen of us laid our bedding out on the stone porch. Settling in again, we awaited the return of Baba.

On the evening Baba arrived, Kasturi (Baba’s aide) came over to me. “Baba wants to talk to you and Bruce [who started singing with us in Baba’s house in Whitefield] privately, as well as Michelle and one

other.”

When we went to him, Baba grabbed my arm, talking softly. “See,” he said, “I am writing you a special letter for residence permit to stay in India. I want you to stay with me. Special trainees.” He gave us a paper to sign.

He instructed us to begin leading bhajans in the big hall at the two daily bhajans. He would make sure that everyone understood that it was his will. The responsibility of singing in the temple in a foreign language twice a day to about a thousand people was almost more than I wanted. But it was further proof of my acceptance.

Before Baba left the next day, he gave one of the harmoniums that he had in storage to Bruce and me to practice with. He also arranged for our instruction. But in time, the two of us became increasingly alienated. And this would take a special Baba interview before the next festival to bring the problem under control.

There were also new problems with having such a noticeable group of Westerners. When only a few of us were on the main ashram, we didn’t draw too much attention. But now we stood out like albinos at a mau-mau convention. Our size, shape, color, and habits were obviously different. And some of our dress was unmentionable to the Indians. Not only that, we did something that is unthinkable to an Indian. We immediately befriended all the local dogs: “We” meaning just about everybody but me. I couldn’t complete the transference. For one thing, these things were two-dimensional instead of three, and had the dispositions of desert rats. And when they were shown even an iota of affection, never seeing it from a human before, they were as hard to pull away as a large octopus. And they smelled, and they had sores and bleeding lesions, and bugs of every description, and all types of internal worms, and, I feared, some of them had the one disease that you don’t fool around with—foaming-at-the-mouth disease—rabies. And so, should one nip you at 3 a.m. because you rolled over, you might sleep through it and wake up one day a few weeks later, foaming at the mouth and screaming. And everybody but a GP would assume you were enlightened and had entered Turya Samadhi.

All the dogs had names given to them, most of them originating from me—“Dying Dog, Boscene Dog,”—later changed to “Boscenesa-Doggies,” with a Mexican accent, “Tinker Toy Dog, Reindeer Dog, Desert Demon,” etc. And anybody with a grain of intelligence went to bed on the porch with a club by his side. And it got bad. They would sneak over, flop right on top of you, and if you smacked them, they would go away for half an hour, and go through the whole routine again. The thing was, they could afford to stay up all night, and we couldn’t. Sometimes we would wake up at 2 a.m. amidst a sound that was like a game of “Hot Potato” in the center of hell, using a hydrogen bomb. This was one of the many “micro dramas” unfolding in our daily ashram life.

Baba also arranged for us a number of activities that packed our days from dawn till early evening and increased group solidarity. But after about a month, most people dropped out of the Sanskrit class because it turned into a chore of memorizing tenses, rather than discussing the epics and Puranas.

One group activity was a daily reading by Kasturi that included letters of miracles from Indian devotees and excerpts from different spiritual books. One of the people included in the listening was a disagreeable, stumpy little woman, Dr Vijaya Laxmi, second in command at the hospital, who seemed to have a competitive sore spot for foreigners, and pressed her authority as far as she possibly could. Now and then, Kasturi corrected her like a little girl, or told her to be quiet, and she obeyed implicitly. She had been with Baba from the very start, part of the old guard, like Kasturi, that had become enchanted with Baba before his world mission in the early 1950s, when he was in his early twenties. This did not exempt an element of romance from entering in either, I suspected. Baba as a youth was extremely good-looking in a sensual way, and she had just finished medical school in London. I assumed later that she had been treated as a second-class citizen, and because of that, had a thing against foreigners.

She was a familiar type: like many European-educated Indians, she was waiting for evidence to elevate India into a position of superiority over every nation in the world—through India’s ancient stockpile of spiritual conquests, with its long genealogies of avatars, Messiahs, and super-yogis. Now that she had found the evidence in Sai Baba, the only problem remaining was that Baba had virtually not said anything to her in about ten years. It was the foreigners, the “fore-nears,” who were getting all the attention. It was an interesting type of frustration.

Some of our group was beginning to thin out and leave the ashram. Jai’s decision to pack up and go shook many, but I had foreseen it and warned him.

Another serious omen was something that crawled by my nose one morning, after scraping and scratching in the vicinity for half an hour. When the shadowy grays of around 5 a.m. started disappearing, I heard a yell. One of the girls was pointing at the bottom of my mat. I sat up, and spent the next three minutes watching a huge black scorpion march and skirmish in the area, occasionally raising its tail and dancing, and then lowering it, so that the whole thing was over six inches long when running. I recalled a Hatha yoga pamphlet in Rishikesh on how the ascetic in the forest should deal with a scorpion sting, since it was not only deadly, among certain species, but by far the most painful sting in the world. If the ascetic is stung on the chest near the heart, it recommended, the thing to do while in semi-paralytic agony, is try to survive the next twelve hours by totally regulated breathing, while lying on the forest floor. Do not move, but conserve all energy in order to breathe.

As I was deciding how to kill it, as painfully as possible, fire being my old favorite, at least as far as ticks and bedbugs are concerned—one of the European guys came over with a box, and escorted it in with a stick. Then making a peace sign, he informed me that he was going off to another hill to let it loose, and that killing it was out of the question. And I said, “Yeah, you do that—that’s a real spiritual idea just loaded with divine compassion. Let’s see how you feel when you squat down to defecate, and sit on one of them or one of the local cobras.” This episode did succeed in giving some of us second thoughts about running up the hill at night barefooted to relieve ourselves. I started wearing shoes again at night, and whenever possible, brought matches or a flashlight.

During this rather arid spell between our arrival and the coming festival in late July, there appeared two new people out of six on the scene to come. They were a young couple from New York, another batch from Hilda’s meditation group, and the guy, Eddie—or Ed—who was to become one of my very best friends. Chris, his girlfriend, quickly blended in with the girls. A quiet spirit, tall, serene and docile, almost with a wholesome Midwestern demeanor, Chris was almost the complete opposite of Ed, who was short, talked out of the side of his mouth in a thick Brooklyn accent, and came off at times like a con man at a race-track or a one night stand “sick” comedian at Vegas. With curly hair, widow’s peak, and sharp ears, his appearance at times suggested a devilish strain, and when he opened his mouth, or “the mouth,” he talked in rapid testy sentences that resembled extracts from gangster movies. Yet I saw in him quite a soft spot—maybe that reminded me of myself—as well as a capacity for considerable loyalty. Ed had heard from Kerry and Janet that I was sort of the spokesman of the group, “the chief.” He briefly tested this, then acquiesced.

By the next day, Eddie and I went up on the hill, and had a heart-toheart talk. Eddie had had a “super-rough childhood,” incredible problems with authority figures, especially after his mother died when he was around five. The only “religious” guy in his family was his uncle, who was a rabbi and the intellectual of the family. Eddie’s dad was mainly interested in money. Being extremely perceptive about getting on “the system” bandwagon for its own sake, Ed couldn’t see doing anything until he had some basic answers. Life grew from bad to worse, and by his teens he had dropped out of school, was hustling on the streets, and waiting for the “bird of paradise to flop out of the sky on the table” where he could see it. This didn’t happen, so he went from psychedelics to army jails, which he broke out of several times, to Ram Dass, and finally to Hilda.

Ed and Chris had just come from Nainital in the Himalayan foothills, where the guru he wanted and had dreamed about, Maharaji, the guru of “Ram Dass,” had sent him on his way, simply stating, “I am not your guru. Your guru is in the south.” It had been a blow, but they had made it across India to Baba.

Ram Dass, ex-co-worker of Timothy Leary, with whom I had met on tour with Leary, found his own guru about the time I came to India. Since meeting him, Ram Dass’ name had been changed from Richard Alpert to Ram Dass, and he had toured the States extensively, giving darshans and proclaiming the esoteric teachings of Vedanta and India’s chain of gurus. He himself had quite a following now, many of whom, like Ed, had become friends. When Ram Dass was in New York, one of the places where he stayed was at Ed’s. But Ed was warned: “Maharajji is funny, unpredictable. He doesn’t want a lot of followers; he doesn’t want streams of turned on people coming over from America. He’s a quiet, hidden-away little Master who looks like an ordinary fat old man wrapped up in a blanket, who happens to be merged with the cosmos. And if he hasn’t called you as a disciple, he’ll be quite blunt.”

After three weeks, with no Baba darshan, Ed was almost about to head back to the cooler air of the Himalayas and try once again with Maharajji: “I couldn’t find him, so now you’ve gotta be my guru, Maharajji.” But I persuaded him to hang on.

The Guru Purnima Festival finally broke the flatness of things in July. The rainfall of grace started up again.

By then, Baba had called Bruce and me into a private interview to work things out. When he was up, Bruce was great to be around, funny, congenial, creative, and insightful, with a certain amount of genteel charm. At other times he would begin to lean towards general perversity, fountaining sick humor. Unfortunately, some of it was morbidly funny. It was a side I had in myself, that I tried to keep under wraps. But I grew tired of Bruce’s massive mood swings and eggshell sensitivity. I also did not think he would last very long.

By the end, I refused to sing along with him. We now walked to bhajans separately; we sang solo, each sitting on opposite sides of the Indian bhajan singers. I was beginning to feel better now that I was ditching him. I had the volume to sing alone; he didn’t, because it was a big hall, and had no microphone except at festivals. Not only that, I was gaining more confidence about being able to stay on pitch, as I was

Baba, Gill, Peter, Tal, & Bruce

gradually gaining the ability to do the vocal maneuvers of an Indian. So Baba called just the two of us, and crowds looked on in wonder.

By his very kindness and forgiveness, Baba convicted us of our sin of being so small-minded. There was no mistaking that he had been aware of our feud. Rather than sit above us on the chair, he sat with us on the floor of the interview room. Bruce, who doubted Baba constantly, became deeply convicted and penitent. From my perspective, I was avoiding a toxic source of disbelief. But more grace was to come.

After an hour with him, he patted us on our backs, and encouraged us to practice together as a team. He then ordered us to come back the next day at the same time, promising that he would show us more. Baba himself would be our teacher, on the very day before the Guru Purnima festival. Bruce transformed into a repentant sinner who had underestimated Baba, and I felt a new hope rekindled from the recent threeweek “dry spell” since late June.

On the following day, Baba sang with us, as I felt even more patently undeserving. Since Bruce and I had ironed things out the night before, Baba was noticeably pleased. He told us a story from the Chandogya Upanishad, about god being smaller than the smallest grain of mustard seed—that the same atma resided in everything. He patted us on the backs on the way out, and mentioned that a surprise was coming our way.

Fifteen minutes before the start of the festival, one of the many badged ushers ran up and said that “Bhagvan” had reserved a special seat for me. He sprinted, and I followed around the parameter of the crowd. When we got dangerously close to the front, I began to get nervous. For one thing, the audience surged up to the very front steps, and was so packed in the middle that I would need a crane to find maybe a place in fifteen thousand people.

Fifteen feet from his elevated throne, side-stage, sat Peter and Gill, with a space for me between. I looked up, and Baba whispered to me, “Singing some bhajans.”

As I gazed back at the brilliant chrome of the microphone, I thought, “Maybe it was a good thing that I was caught completely off guard. I’m too stunned to be really nervous. I think I could sing, in fact.” Baba gave the signal, and whispered, “Govinda Krishna Jai.”

He gave the signal, and somewhat dazed, we started off together. Our voices filled the ashram, not sounding too bad. At least if one strayed off, the rest could stabilize the tune, making the accident sound like a harmony.

I could feel the sheer electric power of Baba’s force as never before. It was almost as though I had become a musical instrument through which this power played. I remembered Baba’s words: “Your body must become like Krishna’s flute: the senses and ego hollowed inside for the divine hand of God to play.”

After about four bhajans, he raised his hand and we stopped. The discourse began, Baba’s voice filling the ashram for over an hour, the Telugu rolling on like thunder.

Baba began his discourse, after a brief introduction by a high magistrate from Bengal, who was to become a comrade of mine on a future project. Baba’s voice filled the ashram for over an hour, rolling on and on like a powerful thunderhead. Though none of us could understand the Telugu being spoken, there were familiar Anglicizations dropped that suggested we were being used as examples and models for the Indians. “Perfect raga, perfect tala, just like Indians . . . American bhakta devotion, pure, egoless . . . called from around the world, twelve thousand miles.”

This verified my sense of destiny—that we had been called for a purpose. A few days later Baba gave the first group interview since we had all come as a group from Puttaparthi. It was an interview that held a moment of drama that none of us could have foreseen.

Chapter Eleven

The Cost of Grace

T

he festival was going at full tempo as Baba took us in for an interview. Clearly this was an important meeting because five of the Westerners were growing desperate to get permission from Baba for residence permits. Without a permit, there is a maximum stay of six months before you have to leave India. All of them were right up to the limit. It was clear sailing legally for three of the five. Not so for two sisters from New York, “India” and Marsha. They faced a serious legal problem.

Even if they managed to get one of Baba’s written letters of permission to stay, addressed to the Indian authorities, they still had to account for at least six months spent in India beyond the allotted six months. They also had to account for the fact that one of them didn’t even have a passport. When they were going through the northeast of India, Darjeeling, India was so caught up in the spiritual idea of varaigya, or detachment, that she either gave away or sold her passport. The Indian authorities knew that passports had a very high black market value. And it was common knowledge that hippies who ran out of money would sell them to the highest bidder. India claimed that these were mere material items then, and it simply did not matter. It was later reported that the passport had somehow found its way into a local museum-exhibit, via the notorious Indian black market.

The next legal hurdle was that, when they reached the Bombay vicinity, they had been declared persona non grata, because they were accidentally busted in the company of a hashish smuggler, an American, who carried Chittral—a powerful Pakistani hash—in empty watchcases. And it was already established that the Indian government had genius in one area, nit-picking and red tape. If the loss of passports and the other incident were somehow correlated, both of them faced a minimum of being expelled from India, if not going to jail.

Baba sat in his chair grinning from ear to ear, as I saw something rolled up like a white scroll in his hands. Presumably India and Marsha had been in communication with Baba for the past few days, with Kasturi as the go-between. Baba knew of their dilemma.

With beneficence and sweetness, Baba announced through an Indian girl named Nanda what he had done. He had explained and pleaded India and Marsha’s case in his letter to the Indian authorities, giving us the details. Nanda, the princess of Kutch, was the only nonWesterner on hand—a lifetime inner circle devotee of aristocratic demeanor. Sensitive and extremely bright, she knew impeccable English and often translated difficult matters.

The gist of the letter was that Baba told a heart-rending story of two sincere seekers of truth coming to India alone, and running into one difficulty after another through adverse circumstances. But Baba was always with them, and had guided these seekers looking for God to his physical form.

Baba then proceeded to read his letter to the Indian officials in Telugu, as Nanda faithfully translated every word with a luxuriant erudition that put many of “the Americans” to shame. She enunciated every word as though it were a final exam in elocution. In the background were enthusiastic outbursts—“Baba, that’s incredible.” Which it was—incredible (most people don’t know that incredible really means ‘not credible,’ not to be believed - - i.e., a lie!!). Indeed, it was a white lie to protect them, and a real risk on the part of Baba.

A few lines later, Gill, who had been groaning and squirming around, finally let the steam blow out, interrupting Baba midway in a sentence.

“Baba, that’s a lie.” It hurt him to say it, and his tone, wounded and bewildered, seemed to say, “Aw, why do you have to make me say this? I don’t like it, but I haven’t any choice.”

Nanda’s face twitched, and she was no longer able to speak. No Indian had ever pulled this on Baba, at least around her. It was certainly rough medicine for such gentle sensibilities, and for so aristocratic a constitution. But for less cultured folk, truth was not always like a subtle hors d’oeuvre on a plate. It was something that even coal-miners have to pick at in their own crude, unapologizing way.

And Gill’s comment almost came like a voice of some Midwest pioneer calling the cards straight and to the point, “But that ain’t no spade.” It wasn’t delivered in delicate metaphor and distant hints, as an obsequious Earl might speak to Henry VIII. It was said plainly.

As keenly as I was now watching for it, and as much as I hated to admit it, Baba appeared to manifest a human reaction, when I had anticipated a transcendental leap into divine equanimity. The scroll in Baba’s hands was shuddering visibly. Baba wound and unwound it nervously. His face seemed to twitch, and although he continued to smile compassionately, there seemed to be a contradictory surge of emotion beneath this.

His voice quavered just a bit as he spoke rapid English. “Not a lie,” Baba replied, shocked that Gill would say such a thing. “Not a lie! Your mistake, your misunderstanding.”

Gill protested. “But Baba, the fact is that India and Marsha were not with you in Whitefield all that time, they were in Darjeeling, when India lost her passport. They hadn’t met you. Couldn’t ya have done it another way?”

“Small mind, not understanding. God is everywhere, I am everywhere, I brought them to me, Everywhere is in me, Darjeeling. Whitefield, Prasanthi Nilayam, is all with me.”

“I know, I know that, Baba, but the facts were interfered with. The fact remains that you told a lie. India and Marsha were not with you in Whitefield at the time.”

There was so much concentrated energy in the room that I wondered if we were going to have a lightning strike. I was strangely divided down the middle. I greatly wanted India and Marsha to get through the obstacle course, but Gill had a point. Was this the right way? And that particular question had been trying to enter my mind. Yet Baba was being loving and sacrificial, and what he was doing was ultimately good by helping them. And I should after all defend him. Meanwhile, there continued in me this ringing fear that we were all treading on very dangerous ground. If we challenged him too far, it might turn the tables in his favor, and we might be expelled en masse. And I felt that this eventuality was nearer than it looked.

Another thought bothered me, and it hovered on the edges of my mind: that, unbefitting omniscience, Baba had been caught off guard. That this had hit him suddenly and unexpectedly, almost as if he hadn’t seen the lie until it was pointed out, and then perceived the error. Nor had he foreseen Gill’s reaction, which was strange, if he was above time and events.

I interrupted Gill, absolutely shaking with “caution” signals.

“Hey Gill, you’ve made your point, now why don’t you listen to what he has to say? You know as well as I do that space to him is a joke. They’ve been waiting for this letter for months, whadya trying to do, deprive them of it?” My intensity was mounting.

Gill flapped his hands and said, “Aw, be quiet, you don’t understand what’s going on.”

As Gill sat in pain, swallowing the pill that he elected to take in full knowledge, Baba extended my remark. “I wrote this letter out of pure love, divine love. Not a lie, sir. My devotees want to stay with me, not break their hearts by leaving.” India and Marsha nodded helplessly. “It is your misunderstanding, unable to see divine love because of jealousy—you want a letter, so when I give extra grace to make a special letter for others, you are jealous.”

“Now Baba, that isn’t so. I’m not jealous . . .,” and then trailing off. “I had to say it, and if the situation repeated itself a thousand times over, I’d still do the same thing.”

Perhaps sensing that he might have gone too far already, and that he might as well get everything out on the table, that there might never be another chance again, Gill unloaded another gripe that had obviously been eating away at him.

“And Baba . . . what about the food in the canteen? You’ve told us for months that we must eat satwic food, pure food, without spices. Yet the food you eat is so hot that it burns my mouth to pieces. And the food in the canteen is so hot . . . I mean, full of peppers this big . . .,” indicating with his fingers, “. . . that it physically torments me to eat it.”

Baba explained, “For Indian peoples, there is special nourishment in pepper, source of special energy, vitamins and minerals. You Americans not understanding. Pepper diet is the same, all over India.”

“But then Baba, why do you tell us to avoid spicy food or food that is rajasic or tamasic? Isn’t it the same for everybody?”

“For Indians, it is all right, but for Americans, it causes wrong desires and wrong thoughts.” That ended the subject. Gill continued staring at the floor, looking puzzled, as Baba laughed understandingly at his ignorance.

Before closing the interview, Baba said, “Faith is very important for sadhana, for spiritual path. Doubts are evils and enemies —doubts come from ego, envy, jealousy, hatred. . . all bad qualities.” He looked down at Gill as he said this. It looked to me as though Gill was going to get his biggest test of faith, though I wasn’t sure how. I also continued to feel apologetic to Baba for Gill’s outburst, which turned what was to be a sweet, grace-filled interview into something so strident that almost nobody could swallow the ill-feeling. And though things had momentarily blown over, the memory of the jarring attack hadn’t blown away one iota, nor the tiny imperfections in Baba’s explanations.

Baba shared a final piece of Indian scripture as what he termed, “a faith-building model.”

“One day Krishna and Arjuna were taking a walk together. Seeing a bird in the sky, Krishna said, ‘There is a dove.’

“Yes, a dove,” responded Arjuna.

“No, I think it is an eagle,”—“You are right, it is an eagle.” “Well, now I can see that it really is a crow.”

“Then beyond a doubt,” says Arjuna, “it is a crow.”

“Then Krishna laughed and chided Arjuna for always agreeing with him. But Arjuna replied, ‘You are the Lord. Whatever you say it is, then it is. For your words are truer than what the eye sees.’”

Baba then dismissed us, smiling. But I knew that a bubble had been broken, something spoiled, resulting in some kind of irreversible damage.

The group left quietly in different directions. As the peacemaker, indeed, the favored son, I wanted to talk to Baba with such urgency that my chest physically ached. Meanwhile the lucky five were joyous at the letters, and mind-blown over Gill.

Gill heavily paced up and down the ashram all that afternoon, and into the next day, not eating, and probably not sleeping. He seemed to be in a total stalemate, as though arguing over every facet of the affair again and again, and then coming to the same conclusion. That given the same circumstances, he would have done the same thing all over again.

Next day, Baba passed Gill by as if he did not exist. Gill came to the painful decision he must go away - at least for a time. He started to pack.

Meantime, I was in an agony at this painful public misunderstanding and acutely felt the need for some apology to Baba. The group all knew what I was trying to do, and in fact looked to me to do it, knowing that I was about the only one with a chance of approaching Baba, and getting another interview right in a row with the other one.

Baba walked over to me at the next darshan, and I looked up in complete earnestness and said, “I need to see you now, Baba,” very quietly. He smiled, patted me on the back, and said, “Go in, very happy.” When Baba asked me in, the mouths of Ed and a number of the others dropped, as they ran off to tell the whole Western contingent that “Tal made it in.”

I went inside. There were three other people in the interview room, all very close Indian devotees, but there was no doubt about the fact that the interview was between me and Baba. They were merely onlookers.

I went from one of my peak depressions into absolute jubilation that I had not been somehow tainted by this ugly moment. I was still in his good books and I wanted to patch things up for the others. Baba seemed overjoyed at my concern.

I sat next to Baba cross-legged on the floor and grabbed his hand. I was so moved by the feeling that I was oblivious to the wide open stares of the Indian devotees, who were taken aback at my intimacy with Baba. None of them would ever have had the courage to grab his hand unless Baba had reached out first.

Soon Baba and I explained to an older devotee the implications of misunderstanding God through lack of faith. It was one of my key moments with Baba, I reflected later, yet I was hardly even conscious of it.

“Baba, great misunderstanding. All the others know it, Baba, only ‘Mr. Freedom’ (Gill’s long term name) is confused. The others have great faith in you. Instead of thanking you for those letters, you had this problem, and I am sorry, very sorry. Great lack of appreciation.”

Baba imitated Gill, “Too much serious, too much sadhana like this, always tapas, but no love. . .” suddenly assuming Gill’s yogic posture of meditation, with a severe face. “His mind now is very confused, and his faith is very weak. And also jealousy, some jealousy for the letter to the two gopikas (term denoting the female adorers of Krishna). I have given him very much, but he always wants more, always asks for more. He is spoilt, that’s right, like a spoilt child. He will now learn a very hard lesson—before it was much too easy for him, now it will be hard.”

Baba then told the others that I was his “nearest and dearest,” and his best American disciple. “Always happy, cheerful, and with much gratitude, not like Mr. Freedom, a spoilt child.” Then Baba told them something in Telugu about my future with him, and their mouths dropped as they were told not to convey it to me, but merely act as witnesses.

Still holding Baba’s hand, I described to the Indians the gulf between the common understanding of Baba that most people had, and his transcendental reality as an avatar, equal to Ram or Krishna.

“Most people see it on this level,” motioning with my arms, “but his height is way up here.” Baba gleamed, talked a while longer, and then we were let out into the night after being with him an hour and a half.

I broke the news to the others. They were in light spirits again and much more joyful about leaving for Bangalore on the morning bus. The real mind-blower remained that Gill, of all people, was getting weeded. Kerry and Janet had always “kinda wondered” if this would finally happen.

By ten that night, out of the blue, Gill came up to Anthony and me, and invited us to spend what he hinted might be his last supper, for all time, in Puttaparthi. He was looser than I had ever seen him before, as though a great weight had been taken off his shoulders.

He put his arms on our shoulders, and almost danced as we went out onto the dirt road,heading for one of the local lit-up tea stalls. Whether he was retreating into an unreal lightness or not, I wasn’t sure. It reminded me of the times at University; when someone busts a course that has meant everything to him, he falls into a real “hang-loose” optimism. Suddenly everything’s gonna-be-alright, not that there’s a way yet, but it’ll happen.

Gill spoke with a new uncharacteristic hang-loose voice, “Did ya know that my son’s the cutest little thing in the world?,” announcing this to us and the surroundings.

“That’s right, he’s got so much talent he does’nt know what to do with it. Why, I used to take him to Golden Gate Park and walk him around . . . you know, around the time they used to have the first beins. He was hipper and more ‘up-front’ than they were ....”

“Where’s he now, Gill?” I had never heard about the son.

“Oh,” suddenly cooling down a bit, “he’s living with my wife and daughter somewhere in Marin County. I don’t know where, but I reckon he’s OK.”

By the time we reached the restaurant, Gill had told much of his life story over again—a dysfunctional Jewish family, his father shooting his mom, then himself, the funeral, the Marine corps for Gill, confusion and violence, going straight with the insurance company that he started, then marriage, psychedelics, his genuine non-drug two week mystical experience, then his fall—the mental wards, the divorce. And his rising—“up front” communes, hitch-hiking down California’s coastal highway, the famous Route One, till he met a guy who was his first true father.

As we sat down at a crude stone table, under a twenty-watt bulb, Gill told us about his surrogate dad, while he ate chapatis, and Anthony and I got hot coffee in crusty little stained glasses.

“This man was one of the few people who ever genuinely cared about me,” Gill said gravely. Then lightening up, “Why, the first day I walked into his tree nursery in Marin County looking for a job, he said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ He was a giant of a man, six feet six, and all muscle. Used to be a lumber jack. But he knew plants; why, he could make em grow just by talking to ‘em. In fact he taught me how to hear plants grow. Have ya ever heard the trees growing in the early morning? That’s something ya both gotta experience.

“He was so kind to me. Why, some mornings he’d walk up to me and say, ‘There’ll be no work today, we’re going to have fun. Come on, we’re going into town.’ He’d walk me through the fruit market with his arm on my shoulder. He wasn’t afraid of anything. He’d talk so loud the stalls would shudder. ‘Now what d’ya want today?’ he’d ask. He taught me how to pick a ripe melon. Say, do any of you know how to pick a ripe melon?” Gill asked Anthony and me like a gleeful Rumpelstilskin. Then he answered his question. “When it sticks to the bottom of your hand, then ya know it’s ready. That’s because the sugar begins to leak through the rind.”

By the time we left the restaurant, Gill was roaring obscenities, embarrassing us before the Indians. We didn’t want the local Indians spreading the word on Americans and in any way giving Baba a bad name. Besides, I wondered if Gill was off limits to me as far as Baba was concerned. Gill was telling us about one of his last experiences in the States before he became a sadhu, the time he was a road member of San Francisco’s avant-garde “The Living Theater,” a theatrical shock troupe dedicated to blowing straight minds.

“Ya heard about it?”—“Yep,” came my answer.

“Why, we used to blow people’s minds to pieces. They’d walk in off the streets, uptight, straight as an arrow, full of roles and ego games, and we’d break em down. Living theater would interact with the audience. We had one girl in our troupe who was so wild she’d strip her clothes off and.... And we had a nigger who’d been in the Eighty-second Airborne. He was seven feet tall, and his tongue was as thick as raw cow liver. And when he used to talk, why he’d talk jus lik dis, . .yeah, muva! . . . and their brains would fall out on their laps.”

Anthony and I knew that it was time to go. By the time we saw him off at the bus where he was going to spend the night till it pulled out in the pre-dawn hours to Bangalore, Gill was singing us a song, which sounded like Old Farmer Oakey—

“Doooooo (low pitched) what chya Doooo (falsetto), Beeee whatd Jya Beee (low again;),

Doooo whatd jya dooo, beee whadjya beee. Do what ya do, and be what ya be (reflective, slogmatic),

(Le Grand Triumphale) ... Doooooooo What Chya Dooo (Screaching falsetto) And Beeeeeee Whatd Jya Beeeeeeeeeeeee. (full bass).”

We all gave each other “up-front” hugs, said “take care and see ya later,” and left. There was no doubt about it, I was concerned about Gill and wanted to see him get it together. Seeing his unprecedented moment of vulnerability made him more likeable and I was sorry that this had to happen.

He said to me, “Now brother, you take care of the others. You’re the strong man . . . and I’ll see ya sooner if not later.”

A week or so later, most of the group came back from Bangalore in a rented cab with news that one of the five had finally freaked out and split, Gill went on to Udipi Taluk in Mysore to meditate on the beach

in a hut, and that Jai was now “more spaced-out” than ever, begging for food, standing on street-corners with grey ash smeared all over his forehead, and as usual, talking at a hundred decibels about Kundalini yoga and what a power-house Siva Bala Yogi was. Then, more discreetly, Jai would pump Michelle for local ashram news, what Baba was doing, what I was now doing. And both of them wrote Hilda for advice, receiving in return, transcendental slogans of supreme loving optimism. All was Lila, cosmic fun and games.

B

aba was gone all the way till mid-September and Puttaparthi was an ancient village again. During the months when there were no festivals, we longer-term residents on the ashram lived in an almost primordial wilderness. It was during these quiet periods that we entered the perennial ebb and flow of village India, getting our water from wells, cooking soojie, chapatis and curry, walking the mountains and meditating alone on the hillside overlooking the ashram—one of my favorite places. A select few of us swam in the irrigation well, passing water buffalo en route into the wilderness.

We could feel the soul of ancient India. But it was also a time of isolation and tedium. The road within could get dull at times, stale. The festivals broke the monotonous routines of the off season, always providing new experiences and entertainment, like the circus coming to town.

Many of our group battled it out with the heat and desolation. Many of the new arrivals were having their first really painful battles with dysentery, sunstroke, general debilitation and various unidentified diseases. Sores and dripping lesions would form on the arms and legs, getting larger and dripping more as the days went on. They turned out to be septic mosquito bites. The only remedy was to cover them with gauze and take daily doses of antiseptic. I suffered frequent bouts of tonsillitis because of the

windswept dusty area.

One of the high points of each day was when a group of us would cross the Chitravati riverbed and enter the area of rice paddies. There we had discovered some large irrigation wells used by the farmers and we could dive in and swim in the cool water. Often I would stay behind and dry off in the heat under some tree, meditating or reflecting. Later we would head back in the Sahara-like heat and more than likely spend the rest of the afternoon in the shade until afternoon tea time.

Baba’s attention was on us again at full strength for a brief two-week spell before one of the three biggest festivals of the year, “Dasara” The festival would begin in October, starting with the first conference of the All-India Sathya Sai Seva Dal and Seva Samithi and continuing as a marathon nine-day festival.

Baba assigned the men a special task in preparation. We were to paint slogans on twenty large granite slabs, eight feet by three. On the eve of the festival, the Seva Dal men would help us plant them around the ashram, with the help of a small army of trench diggers.

Baba came by at least once a day, spending an hour or two with us. Soon devotees began to make a flower bedecked path from Baba’s door to the entrance of our shed. By the time of the festival, hundreds used to gather outside, trying to peep in on the secret project.

One day Baba drew a cryptogram in my notebook and passed it back. Then, as we sat around him he materialized a large piece of rock-sugar and gave it to me. It was later sent to my parents in London via a Baba devotee, the famous Dr Baghavantam - Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, Nobel Candidate in physics, and ex-faculty member at MIT and Stanford. I thought this might help to convince my father of the miraculous - but it didn’t.

About this time we lost Anthony, whose father, a retired English dentist, cabled to say he didn’t have long to live. Baba materialized the $100 note that Anthony needed, and described to Anthony the father’s retirement house in Malta to us. (Anthony, who had never seen it, wrote later to say the description had been quite wrong.)

Anthony’s long-term companion, Vickie, decided to stay. She had been busy, like the other girls, cleaning up the main prayer hall and polishing the silver items. Perhaps to compensate for the flood of attention he had given us, Baba decided to assign this rather menial three-day task to the envious girls.

At one point Baba got me aside and described Gill’s situation in his rented beach hut at Udipi Taluk. “He’s meditating day and night. Crying out for ‘Baba, Baba.’ Having trouble with police breaking into cabin asking for visa. Today he walks the beach, thinks of me, then sees young couple. The man gives him a wave and a special message, and they walk away.”

Baba started laughing. “Both the couple disappear into the air. It was my visitation.” (Gill showed up unexpectedly a month later for a day. When I told him this his mouth dropped, “Then it was Baba. I knew it.” He then headed back.)

Late in September, Baba sent for Bruce and me to join him in inspecting the ultra-modern octagonal building nearing completion above the hospital. It was to be the seasonal residence of Nanda’s mother, the Maharani (the Queen) of Sandur. We ran up and sat on the porch with him and some of his closest Indian devotees. “Bruce,” said Baba, “goes by the heart, and Rowdie is the philosopher.”

He was just about to go down the hill before thousands of people. Then he asked for my hand. I was sure this was no accident or coincidence. Perhaps Baba was showing some of his chosen disciples to the world. First Bruce and I were called away from the other Americans - as Christ called Peter, James and John. Then on the way down there was a second separation - between Bruce and me. I was the only one to hold his hand the whole way down. Bruce walked behind us. Awed crowds below held up their hands in the namaste gesture. Baba had another surprise as he headed towards the side of his prayer hall.

He headed directly to a recently constructed cubicle. “These are your new quarters,” he announced with a magnanimous smile. “These are for men only. Tomorrow is the opening ceremony. This is for longtime devotees under my training.” Soon after, Baba told the men to go to his tailor who had temporarily set up headquarters in the compound. “Special dress for special occasion.” The tailor measured each of us, then showed us the silk from which he would make our shirts and long, gold-embroidered wrap-round dhotis.

Then two days later, I was totally caught off guard. It was another “sign.” I was outside in the village walking through the crowds on one of my typical evening strolls in which I would often get a lemonade or coffee. I was looking at the incense and picture stalls and joking with some of the locals. Suddenly one of the Veda school boys found me among the milling thousands. “Baba wants you, come.”

I ran behind him, seized with sheer excitement. Others beckoned me. Before thousands, I went through Baba’s door and through the empty interview room. I flung aside the purple curtains of the hallway, feeling momentarily like a prince in his father’s palace, and dashed up the narrow cement stairwell. On the landing at the top I saw the doorway to Baba’s bedroom-lounge, out of which he stepped like a morning sun in the early hour darshans.

It was the busy season right before the festival when literally nobody but Baba’s absolute inner circle could get near him—and that boiled down to few people apart from Raja Reddy, Kasturi, the temple priest,

Suraiya, and “Adonis.”

I saw a bright doorway and was almost overpowered by the force inside. A blinding red leapt up at me from the thick rug, the silk pillows and the fiery counterpane—all red. I stepped into the holy of holies, Baba’s inner sanctum where less than a dozen of his inner circle have been allowed.

Baba chided me, “You’re late. I needed entire boys’ school and Seva Dal to find one single Rowdie.”

Baba was sitting on his mythical bed, the subject of so much rumor and speculation. And it was true. Baba did sleep beneath a seven-headed serpent arching over the bed like a huge umbrella. The bed resembled a wide-open lotus pad made of precious inlaid teak and plated with gold leaf. I looked up and noticed Suraiya, the temple priest, and the principal of the Veda school standing at attention like sentries. On the floor opposite Baba was his closest disciple, Raja Reddy.

Baba’s bed was covered with a pile of women’s saris. “These saris will go to American gopikas (female adorers of Krishna). Swami has specially selected sari for each girl. Tell them.”

“Yes, Baba.”

Raja Reddy explained to me in impeccable English the nature of the gifts as Baba made humorous remarks. The others, resembling wall flowers, laughed. Kasturi ambled in and soon became the center of Baba’s humorous assault, as several Telugu alliterations hit the air, and Kasturi made his usual gesture of obeisant ignorance. Kasturi immediately fell in line with the others, at ease, with hands behind the back.

Kasturi, a bald man in his seventies, and one of Baba’s elite of intellectuals, always reminded me of a composite of the three monkeys (hear no evil . . .) when he played the fool. He’d flap his hands and plead ignorance, only to get another battery of derogatory remarks from Baba. It was the same Mutt and Jeff routine that I had seen between Kasturi and Baba, while we had been painting the granite-signs. He would come by with messages, and Baba would point to his temple with a finger and say, “Weak mind, weak mind.”

Perhaps careful not to overindulge me, Baba stuck to the issue, and

didn’t keep me there for longer than half an hour. My mind raced above the disjointing excitement. I attempted to communicate the names of all the girls. Baba and I must have gone back and forth through the stack three times, as he finally wrote down certain names on paper and attached them to specific saris. I would remember a name, and Baba would give me a description—then finally we would agree.

While Raja Reddy and I exchanged comments on what ideal and thoughtful gifts these were, Baba spoke to the others as they nodded down approvingly at me. Invariably, Raja was the paragon of virtue that Baba had brought him up to be over the past fifteen years. He had finished schooling in economics at the University of Madras, and had just met Baba. A prime specimen of manhood and nobility, Raja was an Indian prince and the son of a wealthy Andhra Pradesh family owning a large confection industry. Here he was the most envied man of all the Baba devotees throughout India, and he spoke to me with the zeal, interest, and cheerfulness as if he were the lucky one to be speaking with me. Raja was always like this, and that was one of the many things about him that awed me—his refinement, nobility, and superiority in so many areas. Yet he always retained an aura of mystery because, as exuberant as he was, he was always brief, like a man close to enlightenment who can only stay in this world for a brief moment.

Baba made a stack of saris on my outstretched hands, playfully stacking one after another, and calling out the name. At the end he gave me a big pat on the back, and told me to go.

Five minutes later, I was in the center of the girls’ room handing out saris to the whole lot of them. They were going crazy over the whole thing.

Then the next day Kasturi came up to me matter-of-factly and said, “Oh, by the way, be ready to give a speech to the All India Sathya Sai Seva Dal and Seva Samithi in front of Baba in the main prayer hall on October 3. Baba wants you to address the assembly.”

“How many members do you expect?” I asked.

“Oh, I would say at least 1,500-2,000. And since the Seva Dal is nation-wide, most of the members are prominent citizens, politicians, governors, industrialists, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and the like.” In characteristic detachment, Kasturi ambled off as it hit home in a flood of joyous expectation.

These were signs Baba was showing me. High watermarks of present grace and future purpose—not just hollow acts. The historical pattern of the great masters, such as Ramakrishna, was that their acts were living symbols as they called their closest disciples into their fold. When I was reading the 1,200-page book, Ramakrishna the Great Master, before I came to India, it was clear that Ramakrishna related to his inner circle by acts that were deliberate and in themselves symbolical down to the most minuscule level.

I also knew that in wilderness India I was being prepared for some kind of unimaginable future—a hope that I clung to as I was being refined in the crucible. Yet the signs helped fuel me—staying in Baba’s Whitefield House, entering Baba’s private upstairs room on the main ashram, walking Baba down the hill, and now speaking before the all India groups at the huge festival.

I also realized that it was pure folly to think I might be so rich in spiritual momentum that I was immune from soul wrenching trials and consequent failure. You could fall when least expecting it. Certainly Gill and Jai were sobering examples of how tenuous our standing can be. I feared the inevitable storms ahead and what they might bring. It drove me with a single-minded ruthlessness to do anything it might take to stay on course. I used to picture the statue at the Arlington Memorial of the Marines planting the Iwo Jima flag. It took a total ruthlessness of will.

Chapter Twelve

Sharing the Throne

A

rmadas of buses started to arrive at the beginning of October. The anticipated Dashara festival was similar in magnitude to the Mahasivaratri festival, only it would last two weeks instead

of three days.

The sky was turning silver gray from the approaching Andhra monsoon season. Rains would soon come to cleanse and nourish the parched desert region, lowering the temperature considerably, even down to the comfortable seventies. The Chitravati River would soon come to life, going from a trickling stream to a full river. In time, the depleted wells of the region would fill up. A monsoon in this part of Andhra Pradesh still qualified as only a modest rain shower in the other parts of India—apart from those rare times a full thunderhead darkened the sky. Monsoons here were nothing like the pounding monsoons that hit coastal Bengal causing floods. We looked forward to the change in seasons that would soon bring an escape from the fiery heat.

I knew that soon enough, the side compound in front of our new men’s quarters—which I really appreciated at this point—would be a field of human bodies. We partially dreaded the ordeal of managing the essentials of living in the ensuing chaos. The ashram canteen would run in supershifts, long lines of badged volunteers ladling out tons of rice to thousands, production line feedings of potboiler hot rice, bone-white and practically devoid of protein, but for traces of lentils.

Some of the girls, headed by India and Marsha, volunteered to get a food line going so that most of the foreigners might avoid the canteen. They would cook enough for 15 of us on kerosene burners in their small cubicle (by now, there were 28 of us altogether).

A general in the Indian Army had brought a small division of troops, now encamped on the outskirts of the ashram. They were spraying the area with DDT. Presumably, the army was also instrumental in collecting the 30 or so local stray dogs, already a constant menace of howls near the kitchen area. They packed them in the back of a flimsy open-ended truck, and drove them 30 miles off into the hills. A few of our more sensitive members stood by, deeply offended.

That afternoon, a few days before the festival, word spread that Baba had called a meeting in the large prayer hall for the ashram residents. Up until then we had always felt slightly separated from the traditional ashram community. We had been treated as special guests, not old hands. We were never quite sure what roles Baba used to communicate with the older devotees. We suspected those going back to his early days clung to the earlier more personalized phases of his mission when he was more like a guru or a regional god. They were unable to make the transition to his progressive later unveilings of divinity. The old women were especially sentimental, guarding their fixations on his form. Baba had to continually cut their umbilical cord to the past so that they could wake up to his “universal form.” Clearly some yearned for the early years.

Not ten minutes into the family gathering, we had a glimpse of Baba as the wrathful deity. He was chiding a number of key rumormongers, old women who had been having feuds of jealousy for decades. Now the subject matter of their vindictive little notes to Baba had switched to lambasting the most recent additions to the fold, the American women gopikas. It was human nature in all its smallness, even in the presence of an avatar. Poisonous rumors, washing up and down the ashram.

Baba then pointed a stabbing question to one of the Veda schoolteachers. There was a whining reply. Baba seemed to bring him to tears, then adeptly forgave him. He sank back down, relieved. Now Baba was chiding another school official.

Baba addressed all. Heads sank in shame. They must become beacons to all the visitors and pilgrims of the festival, and to the world in general. They must be becoming of him, and of their true natures.

The storm was over, and repentant nods came from the audience.

Baba told them, “And you need know the answers to two problems only; who is Baba? Who am l? And the answer is, ‘I am the reflected image of Baba. Baba is the original of which I am the reflection.’ That is the relationship whether the image is distorted or correct.”

Bruce’s hand went up over by Baba’s side door.

“Yes?”

Bruce had been squirming in pain. “Baba, I have to go.” “Yes. I understand. Go.”

Bruce trotted off to the hill, I surmised, to relieve himself. The vibhuti that Baba had materialized a few days before for Bruce had not yet taken effect on either the diarrhea or migraine headaches that Bruce had been complaining of.

In the Spotlight

W

hen we entered the large stone prayer hall the next morning, and were handed the agenda, everything was according to schedule. I was the only one of the Americans listed to speak, and my talk would follow the address of the chief guest, the Governor of Goa, in the afternoon session. Then the ``Divine message to delegates by Bhagavan Sri Satya Sai Baba.”

However, after about three hours, there was a sudden change. I sat packed at the very front of the hall next to Kasturi and Raja Reddy. Kasturi leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You are next, Baba says you talk now, not this afternoon.” I looked at Baba and he nodded. Then Kasturi told Bruce that he would be called to say a few words and I heard a low groan. I gave Baba an answering nod that I was ready. Baba motioned me over to where he sat by the side of the stage, and said, “Change of plans. Ready now? Talk fifteen minutes. Bruce is ready?”

I came closer to Baba, “I’m not sure, Baba. Some confusion with Kasturi. Bruce is not really prepared, Baba.”

“Preparation not necessary, when the heart is mine.”

“I know, Baba, but....”

I sat down, and started scratching down an outline on one of the spare agendas. Looking for a connecting theme, I decided to listen to some of the interminable ramblings of the different delegates from different regions.

I noticed each tried to outdo the other in pedantry and irrelevant details, in hamming around for as much personal recognition from Baba as he could muster. One man had brought 20 typewritten pages that shook in his hands as he strained to read them. Baba said, “Bas, bas.” And papers spasmodically shifted as drops of sweat hit them. The man sank in his place after getting through half a page.

Finally a motion hit the floor that taxed credibility so much that it had to be repeated. Indulah Shah, a Bombay magnate whom I knew, smiled apologetically toward Baba as one of his regional underlings put a motion to the floor. A gesticulating, stuttering, winking little man in the back of the hall talked at top volume. His idea was that Baba devotees all over India should have detachments at bus stops whose jobs would be to act as sentries to assist all people getting on and off buses. During the rainy season they should stand there with umbrellas forever ready to shelter those disembarking from the sudden harsh traumas of rain.

At the end of the pandemonium, Kasturi gave me a brief introduction, and I walked to the microphone.

Baba had walked halfway back into the hall, and looked at the rest of the audience, leaning against the wall. He was smiling from time to time with enthusiasm as I made point after point. Again a cloak of energy gave me a bold abandon as I extemporized. In the back of my mind I wanted to score a hit against some of the elitism of a number of self-satisfied Indians, especially the Brahmins. I wanted them to entertain the disquieting question of — what if we from the West were the more evolved souls who had incarnated strategically in the West for the coming spiritual transformation? I could tell this stunned them.

Then I criticized the attitude of small mindedness in the delegates that had put some of the silly motions on the floor. They did not do justice to the God-man and avatar of the age, Sai Baba. What we needed was an overview, a look at the contemporary world on the eve of technological catastrophe. The blindness of the West was always a sore point for me. I portrayed the dilemma of the West of smug atheists and God-denying materialists who had worked themselves not into a utopia, but an impasse. Science had become their religion.

If civilization was vulnerable to the technological time bomb—from pollution to weapons of mass destruction—it was because people in the West had given up their search for truth and were living the lie. We needed a new fusion, East and West. The mystery of the Self and the mystery of Baba were critical to this time of change. An ocean of eyes were surprised, startled, and challenged.

The inspiration had been bold, almost magical. I stepped away from the microphone and walked back to my place. Baba radiated smiles as he looked across the ocean of heads, nodding proudly.

Then the Governor of Goa, Nakul Sen, spoke. He had been upstaged, and he knew it. Not by a learned Indian but by a young American, and that made it all the more humiliating. He had to fend for the honor of Bharat by thwarting this danger of having some Westerner outdo a thousand educated upper-class delegates: doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, industrial magnates, and yes, governors too. Baba was still smiling. This meant the gem performance of twenty years of international political dilettantism combined with the exquisite poetics of Rabindranath Tagore.

The chief guest speaker, as he was billed, waxed long in his oratory, as much of the audience settled into a slump. Everybody was now waiting for Baba to make the formal inauguration, and bestow his divine blessings.

And Baba’s talk, as usual, stirred everybody up. Loud and powerful, Baba took obvious command, giving a flawless speech. He was stern, enigmatic, kind, jocular, childish, sweet, all-powerful, and exuding affection. We felt doubly grateful for the privilege of being in his presence.

At the end, we stood up while Baba left out of the side door, walking right by Kasturi, Raja Reddy, Bruce, and me. He stopped in front of me with a dazzling smile, poked me in the stomach affectionately, and said, “Very good. Very very good. I’m very proud.” Bruce he ignored altogether. Soon I would be well known, as I became a disciple of great promise in the public eye. My desire to be the American counterpart of Raja Reddy was on the eve of materializing.

That evening Kasturi approached me and congratulated me again, informing me that a copy of my talk was to appear in the next month’s ashram publication, Sanathana Sarathi, which it did. It occupied twenty pages of center spread with articles by Baba, Indra Devi and Swami Abhedananda. I soon became a fixture in the press building with my portable typewriter, not surprisingly, using the editor’s desk. Slow hints continued to issue from Kasturi, the editor of the ashram magazine, that he and I would combine forces for an international magazine to be published at the large press in Bombay.

When the festival officially got under way, all activities switched from the prayer hall to the giant open shed. It began with a massive parade to the shed.

All heads were now turned to Baba’s private doorway. Baba emerged and signaled me to form my group to be in the parade. The assembly of participants encircling Baba’s hall began to form columns. Powerful Karnatic horns and drums screamed through the air. Baba’s elephant Gita walked behind us in an armor of shimmering mirrors, flowers, and chalk designs all over her body, resembling a Maharajah’s elephant in the Ramayana.

Bruce walked next to me at the front of our contingent, resembling an altar boy who was trying not to smirk. Maybe it was Gita, or the band playing “Bicycle Built For Two,” but an absurd, troubled laugh of irony escaped him. As we approached the side entrance of the auditorium, he managed to muster a dignified expression on his face. Gita was parked by the side entrance along with the boys in the band. Bruce and I went right down the aisle as thousands looked up. The badged volunteers would not allow any other American to come through the side entrance. We hoped nobody would make any obeisant gestures towards us. That would be riding a little too much on Baba’s glory. On the very front row we took our seats in front of the microphones with the rest of the men bhajan singers, most of them from the big cities or skilled amateurs. The rest of the Americans awkwardly ambled in by the separate men’s and women’s VIP entrances.

The parade set the tenor for the nine-day festival.

A few days later, Baba looked down at me from the stage and said, “Foreigners ready?” The next thing I knew, he was beckoning all twentyeight of us up on the stage before thousands of onlookers. Raja Reddy passed up a harmonium. Baba had microphones in the center front of the stage. Baba then left the stage, stepping down where we had been sitting in the audience, and signaled us to start. Bruce, taking it all in with a forced philosophical calm, turned with the usual ready signal, and said, “Quick, what song?” I said, “Nataraja.”

He hummed so that we could find our key, and off we went before the ten thousand, harmonium and voices surging across the speakers all over the ashram. Baba sat smiling, and I was satisfied that it was up to standard. Now I understood why Baba had all of us fitted in the ceremonial garb.

For a full seven days, from dawn to dusk, the famous Mantap took place on one side of the giant stage in the shed auditorium. Vedic scholars across the land had come to participate in the sacred yajna, or rite of worship.

To the ignorant observer, these great men of letters appeared to be babbling with exaggerated mouth-movements, each in a self-styled sandbox or play area, while making what looked like mud pies or tar babies by the thousands. A little lingam would be rolled vigorously on a rock board, bowed to, decorated, babbled to, worshiped, held up on the air, and then rolled into the mass of clay to be remade again, again and again. Anyone in the West doing what they did would have been institutionalized.

Baba adjusting the microphone for Tal as he leaves the stage

In a less than reverent attitude, Bruce had managed to simulate this out on the mountain.

Later, Bruce and I walked by the front of Baba’s garage, attached to the rear of our new

quarters. He wondered how Baba could have a brand new, air-conditioned Lincoln limousine station wagon with tinted windows if Baba never accepted donations, as he so often said in his speeches. It was shimmering from the brand new shine and wax next to Baba’s Fiat and Land Rover. Impressive cars for even the wealthiest Indians; out here they were doubly so.

Just then Kasturi came to Bruce with the news he had been waiting for. Was Baba going to grant the letter for a residence permit or not? Kasturi had to coldly play the axe-man. “Baba says you’re on your own resources. If your faith is sufficient, then I am sure the Mysore police will grant the residence permit.” If Kasturi had been more like a relative or a friend of Bruce’s before, now he was distant, the school teacher handing out the “F.”

Anguish clouded Bruce’s face as he moaned in incredulity, then walked off sulkingly.

Kasturi later came into the men’s quarters to further explain what the festival was all about. “This festival celebrates Baba as the divine mother aspect of God.”

“For the first three days, Mahakali, or Durga, is extolled. She is the facet of power, worshiped mostly in Bengal. Ramakrishna adored Kali. You know this, Tal. She can be frightening: anger, vengeance, adventure, and destruction. This is the tamasic aspect of the triguna nature.” Kali was the goddess who wore the wreath of severed human heads.

“The second three days adores the divine mother as Mahalakshmi. Here you have the rajasic nature of power, wealth, authority, imperium, and prosperity. In Punjab, they worship her to bestow the boons of

Kasturi addressing the festival volunteers

wealth.

“The last three days are devoted to worshiping the divine mother in her higher or satwic aspect, as Mahasaraswati. Here you see divine energy in its highest sublimation’s; self-control, vision, value, knowledge, virtue, purity, justice, and equanimity.” It was a triune-goddess fest. The only problem was that I was never into the goddess, though the girls were, with a vengeance.

Like a 70-year-old Missouri farmer who starts to get the rhythm in his feet after hearing the first riffs of a ukulele at the local square dance, Kasturi’s eyes lit up in reminiscence. “In the old days, around 1950, when I first stayed with Baba, the crowds were sufficiently small, and Baba, enough like a relative, to permit us to adore him personally as the divine mother. Sometimes he would appear wrapped up in a sari and bangles.”

I recalled the faded pictures at the old mandir. “The women put sandal paste on his feet, and the men would carry him about the villages on a palanquin. Baba became the divine mother for all to behold. Sometimes devotees would see the very goddess they were worshipping transfigured on his divine features. Baba would just smile at them knowingly.”

As Kasturi left, Suraiya ambled in with a large basketful of golf-ball sized sweets known as ladoo. They had come to us night after night as gifts from Baba. Devotees from Bombay would bring them to Baba, and they would immediately rebound over to us. “Prasad from Baba,”

On the way to get something to eat that evening, Ed, Kerry, Janet, and I felt a light drizzle. We decided to have a late snack outside at one of the lit-up restaurants. A carnivalesque feeling pervaded the streets, as though another type of festival was going on independent of the festivities of the ashram. On the way back, gongs and heavy drumbeats pursued us down the deeply worn mud road. We loitered by the side gate as it passed. A small procession of peasants who resembled gypsies, carrying torches and wearing nose-rings and turbans, carried a large platform on their shoul

ders. On it was a miniature altar and a rather sinister-looking god that glared out into the disappearing road ahead. The procession looked defiantly at the gate and went on. A local Indian told us that we would be surprised to know how many of the peasants in this locality of Andhra Pradesh were involved in magic, occult arts, and dark ceremonies.

“They are going to perform a sacrifice out on the mountains somewhere. Who knows where?” He walked off into the crowded road. It was indeed an enchanted realm, perhaps as much on the dark side.

Chapter 13

Ripples in Our Mood

T

he next night, some of us were out wandering the village and saw a local merchant who looked familiar, but whom we could not quite place. He was the ringleader of an ugly road

show. He chanted with a stern harshness to a whole group of frightened-looking children, costumed and frenetically dancing around. Again it was at the side gate. The wealthier Indian pilgrims strolling out of the ashram pitched in five paisa bits on to a mat lying in the center of the open arena of dancing kids. It reminded me of the same malevolence that I saw in Calcutta, where the beggar clans butcher their children so that they can pull in more alms on the streets. Ed and I stood there for a while, glared at the ringleader, and wondered why Baba didn’t just blow him away. Five minutes later, I caught myself doing a familiar head-trip. I was waiting for an injustice to step in and pick a fight. The ringleader was unaffected, but some of his henchman holding back the crowd started looking mean. We glared even harder. After a while the henchmen started getting nervous, and Ed and I left. Kerry, Janet and the others had already walked on.

“Somethin ain’t right, man.” I agreed with Ed, but had no immediate answers other than, “It’s just a miniature theatre of the whole world. You can have the greatest light around and still have people right beside it who either can’t see it or don’t want to see it.” The ringleader turned out to be the local photographer whose office was near the side gate in a seedy upstairs room.

Later, at one of the events, Baba asked me where Bruce was. He was annoyed. Several hours later, outside the men’s quarters, Ed and I saw Bruce come down from the hill. As he approached, Bruce did little dance steps and jigs. Bruce’s rich repertoire of routines were warning signs of oncoming despair and depression.

Resembling a crosscut between Vincent Price and Donald Sutherland, eyes swollen like poached eggs, Bruce, at the twenty-foot mark, did an imitation of the chorus line kicks of the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, Times Square. His Lawrence Welk “Da-deedee-do” version of “Mississippi Mud” mutated, behind a brief perverse grin, into a spontaneous nasal falsetto warble of Gills exiting “Do Whad ya Do, Be whad ja Be.” That ended at the four-foot mark, and Bruce oscillated between mock guffaws and flickerings of indignation and anguish.

Then he produced a modulated mock-hysterical scream from “The Haunted House on Skull Mountain.” “You wouldn’t believe what just happened. It’s the final straw . . . it’s...”

To the tune of Ok-what-is-it-this-time, Ed and I asked on cue, “what happened?”

With a groan of cosmic betrayal, Bruce told us how he had been in the men’s quarters, suddenly experiencing the familiar hypodermicneedle-in-the-abdomen pains of dysentery. Without a moment to waste, he gritted his teeth, held it in, and ran up the hillside, barefooted, fighting time bitterly. We all knew what he was up against. Before he could totally disappear from public view on the hilltop, the pains were like skewers. In a steep, jagged pocket of boulders, nettles, and thorns, he defecated, losing his balance halfway through, rolling down some fifteen feet over his own excrement, rock edges, and thorns. It was too much. Rage against Baba. Why was crucifixion unavoidable on the path to enlightenment? Bruce held out his arms as though on a cross.

Ed and I tried to get at the root of the problem at the side gate, talking to Bruce for several hours. “You’re gonna do penance anyway, you don’t need to invent it.” But soon we felt overwhelmed. Bruce’s problems were far too complex for either Ed or I to verbalize. It was a private maze going back who knows how far---even lifetimes?

Bruce’s problems highlighted what was happening to all of us in this desert crucible. We were being tested and molded, both individually and as a group. It was a high stakes undertaking. Everyone knew that “ego death” was a critical step in the evolutionary step of consciousness that led to enlightenment. In the words of Raja Reddy to me, “It is the most sublime and subtle surgery to cut the roots of the ego from the entire projected phenomenal universe.” If you held on, you got burned and you would repeat the lesson again. Every time. There was another point in this.

Though we were all spiritual brothers, we were also passing strangers on a lonely road. We carried our own karma. Though we might occasionally extend an arm, we were truly alone when it came to working our way out of the maze in the final sense. We were all one, yes, but nobody could walk our particular complex path but ourselves.

Bruce’s root problem was a faltering faith in his own spiritual guidance system, in himself, in Baba, and even the guiding inner light. He needed someone he could trust to meet his perfect standards. Too many contradictions about the festival had fallen short of those standards. Could he really throw his soul into Baba’s hands? It was a deep, searing question.

Before coming to India, Bruce had invested in other higher truths, and they had each failed him. The latest was Scientology. He had advanced on the e-meter (like a lie detector) quicker than anyone on record. So he went to England. At England’s Saint Hill Manor he wanted to advance to “clear” in record time, then sign a “billion year contract” and join the Sea Org. But due to political disagreements within the org, he was soon declared a suppressive. It got ugly, and Bruce fled for his life, sure that they were after him.

He confessed that he was really tired of the uphill path to infinity and wanted out. At his worst points in the past he had even entertained the idea of trans-incarnational suicides until there was nothing left—an idea that began in boarding school. There was too much deception and he just wanted to curl up and fall asleep forever. He was afraid that every path ended up as a kind of futile cosmic joke. Maybe God was a madman. If so, despair was the only logical state of mind.

Ed and I decided to move on as Bruce did the Greta Garbo imitation of “I vant to be alone.” We sensed what could easily become Bruce’s self-fulfilling prophecy. Was he not writing his own dangerous script? Then an event came just in time to deliver Bruce and others from momentary doubt. The spell would last for about a day like Skinnerian alternate reinforcement schedules---alternating between positive and negative. First the positive.

Feeding the Thousands

I

saw a constant waterfall of human movement, starting at the crack of dawn the next day. It was the arrival of the destitute and maimed drifting into the compound from nowhere. From pockets and crevices in the neighboring hills and mountains, as far as the eye could see, along obscure bullock paths out of nearby rice paddies, which in turn ran head-on into banks of arid stark mountains, regions as bleak as a planetoid or a dead star, came ant trails of the starved and the destitute. How far they had come, or how they had gotten word that today was the day for feeding the poor, was just another of an endless series of puzzles.

They shuffled in through the nearby main gate—hollow eye sockets, toothpick arms, limbless, atrophied, noseless, fly and dung-covered, bruised, tortured, swollen, and baked like prunes—and a Seva Dal member, crossing a thousand layers of inbred caste repulsion, briefly evidencing the unity of mankind, would resist holding his nose, and direct each zombie to his place on the ground for the mass feeding.

In the magnesium-white glare, rows of the poor stretched across the entire length of the compound from the Veda school at the far end to our room, and its mirror image connected to us, the “town hall.” They were awaiting Baba’s arrival. It was sunstroke weather, and I could already feel the powerful beams of the sun penetrating the granite walls of our room. I had stayed behind and so had Bruce, who was lying down battling diarrhea and depression. I was not feeling great myself, delaying my exit outside to the last possible moment.

The gale of human voices outside, my weariness from lack of sleep, and my certainty that half an hour out there in the sun’s rays, and I would feel fever, almost quelled my conscience in lying down. Besides, Baba had a mammoth enough problem out there, and my absence would have such a low priority on his gradient of awareness that it was doubtful that either Bruce or I would be missed. So I listened to the human waterfall outside.

Half asleep, a sonic boom, and then a dead quiet alerted me that Baba was approaching the compound from the side. I closed my eyes again. The screen-door quietly opened, then shut. My eyes opened, and Baba was standing in the doorway of our room.

With years of boarding school, Bruce’s autonomic system went “ten hupt.” He was up in a flash and ready to start apologizing. Me too.

Baba looked around at the room. Then, in a note of things-as-usual, announced, “Come on Lazies, service is needed. Too many peoples. What is wrong, some ill-feeling?”

“No, Baba, feel great. A little earlier felt bad, but now feel fine.” “Get ready and follow me.” Baba left.

Even with thousands outside he detected our absence. Bruce and I looked at each other and started scrambling. Yes, it was another sign.

Three minutes later we emerged before the watching world, scrubbed, vital, and wearing freshly starched and ironed kurtas and cotton pants, resembling white sailor’s uniforms. We joined Baba and Raja Reddy in the adjacent garden near Nanda’s porch, ten feet above the compound, and handed down stacks of saris to the Seva Dal below. Every ragged peasant woman would be given a new cotton sari. There were thousands of them.

The army of Seva Dal volunteers soon started to ladle food from huge hot cauldrons that they had dragged from the kitchen area. There were thousands of kneeling peasants. The primitive food was served on plantain leaves in this truly massive feeding. Baba soon joined the feeding and Baba’s form could be seen dutifully working up and down long rows of the poor as Seva Dal men wrestled with the huge cauldrons. Baba ladled out food, paused, then moved on, serving each hungry soul. Baba left and eventually the army of glutted peasants made their way back out the gate.

This was not exactly the five loaves and two fishes used in Galilee to feed the five thousand, and not necessarily any overt miracles of sudden increase going on. Yet it was a welcome sight to see the giant brass cauldrons lugged down paths from the canteen area. The virtue of the moment assuaged doubts in a number of Westerners, at least temporarily. Then there was a counterbalancing event.

Unveiling the goddess

O

n the final night of the festival, a number of us became troubled, even Kerry and Janet, and though I was usually positive and brimming with faith in Baba, this particular event even taxed me in making an effective case on “the master’s” behalf. This was to be “cultural variable” with a vengeance.

The parting scene in the auditorium was an unveiling of Baba’s fuller glory as the embodiment of the goddess aspect of beauty and truth, coinciding with the end of the festival celebrating the Cosmic Mother as Mahasaraswati. It was the feminine aspect in full glory, sort of.

As the mother aspect of godhood, Baba shimmered and dazzled, as he reclined on a large silver-plated swing couch. An invisible row of boys, whose crossed legs could be seen under the couch, were swaying the “jhula” to and fro. Baba was wearing his once yearly, silk embroidered, “Om” and “Sai Baba” monogrammed white gown. To the side, so Baba could be entertained—and so we could be blessed by watching Baba being entertained—was a series of singers and minstrels, each successively worse than the preceding.

We left feeling empty. At the side gate, we all deliberated while Bruce shook his head plaintively with a pathetic laugh, “All I can think of is Jean Harlow.” Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one.

The diagnosis of “cultural variable” came to the rescue once again. Perhaps all of us were jaded after having been burned by a “sick society.” I then added, “If you’re pure enough,” I justified, “you don’t see all that garbage. Clean twenty years of TV and movies out of your head, and you’ll be back in the batting.” I wasn’t convinced of my own argument. It sounded hollow.

Apart from Baba on the couch, the sideshow productions hadn’t been much easier on the others either as they voiced concern. Why would Baba watch that tripe?

I tried to answer that. “OK, when is it ever good enough? Get Ralph Richardson, Olivier, and Alec Guinness doing ‘Henry the Fifth’ as a side-play, and it’s still substandard to the one watching the production. Or get the best production of Bach’s ‘Magnificat,’ and it still falls short of saying it.”

Eddie did the Harlem shuffle. “Yeah, or get Stokely Jackson doin’ Oh, Dem Bones.” A pained chuckle issued from Bruce. In a flash, we went into the gala production of the “Sai Nite” at the Hollywood Bowl. Before we knew it, we were ad libing the whole thing.

At the end, one of us introduced the star of the show with the voice of a Vegas announcer: “Ladeez and Gentlemenzs...and now the Voice of a Thousand Siva Lingams.” And that was it, our knees buckled. A moment later, we knew we had gone too far, quelling our laughter in shame and disgust. Depression set in. Black humor was a way of dealing with despair and anguish, but it was also myopic. And I felt I had indulged in something at Baba’s expense, a kind of blasphemy and ingratitude at the one who had showed so much favor to us.

I went for a midnight walk on the mountain and soon found a large smooth boulder to lie on. The stars were like diamonds on black velvet and revealed an expanse beyond imagination. Nothing like any sky I had ever seen in America, I felt perched on the shores of space. I quietly beheld this black twinkling firmament above that spoke of a truly vast God. Not a random accident—the mantra of empty-headed materialists—but pure design. Then the thought hovered at the back of my mind, Now this is worthy of awe.

Chapter 14

The Wilderness Proclamation

W

e were feeling the toll of being in the home stretch of five months in one of the poorest and hottest states in South India. The “chipper” days of Whitefield, in neighboring

Mysore State, seemed in the distant past. What accentuated things all the more was that due to the heat, our actual freedom of movement was often very limited. We were confined to a monotonous few acres in and outside the ashram itself. I figured out at one point that I had not left the ashram in weeks.

Baba left immediately after the Dasara festival to flush out the myriad pilgrims who would have hung around and further drained the facilities. We were left with two almost dry wells, brown with sediment, and each with its own family of large turtles at the bottom. We also felt the physical depletion after five months of rice and pepper water with traces of vegetables. Sure, we got snacks, Indian sweets, masala dosas on the outside stands at night, but that wasn’t exactly healthy food. When a new cafe opened up—picture a primitive wooden frame and maybe a few low wattage lights—we were the first to check it out. We often got squeezed orange juice and “nimbu pani,” lemonade. Tea and coffee were also a main staple. But I had lost weight and stamina. And for five months before that, I had still been a vegetarian, though the diet was more varied. Altogether I had gone ten months without meat, fish, eggs, and only a few samples of

cheese. For a natural meat eater like me, this was difficult.

A number of our group spent much of the time in Bangalore, ostensibly to get letters for residence permits, but also to settle deep-seated doubts. This was their opportunity to go to Whitefield for the change of air, more intimacy with Baba. They were all but ignored by Baba. Bruce finally moved to the city of Bangalore itself to a popular westernized guest lodge called the Regent Guest House on Brigade Road. It was an oasis for transient Westerners, with an attached diner with piped rock music, hamburgers, milk shakes, and waffles. They were real hamburgers—because it was owned by a Muslim, not a Hindu. Bruce was flirting with dangerous territory, we knew. Not surprisingly, when he came back to Puttaparthi just in time for the birthday festival, he was in miserable spirits. It was a last ditch effort, Bruce invariably hanging by a thread.

One day, when Baba was briefly back, the Canadian Ambassador (High Commissioner) and the brother of Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada and his wife, drove a limo all the way out to the ashram. It was another “event” breaking the routine.

Kasturi, Kerry (a Canadian citizen), and I acted as liaisons. The evening they arrived we served them a five-course meal on silver plates driven up to the new octagonal building—the ultra-plush house on the hillside where they spent the night—in the Land Rover from Raja Reddy’s private kitchen. They had just finished their Baba interview, and could do little more than sit, exclaim, and sigh. They were still in shock. Baba had popped all their defenses. Their smugness and social personae were quickly melting.

At one point Baba materialized a large heavy rosary made out of 108 semi-precious stones. Mrs. Trudeau reluctantly took it out of her purse, afraid to even let it out of her hands. At the bottom was a large bloodstone crucifix, with her name, the date, and Baba’s blessings written on the stone. Their arrival was totally unannounced and spontaneous.

They spent considerable time describing how it could not have been sleight of hand. Baba also touched the gem on a ring that one of them had owned for years. It changed right in front of their eyes, still mounted in the base of the ring. It went from something like ruby to diamond.

Baba also revealed their dreams and some well-guarded secrets. They wondered how he knew. It was all too much. Now they had to make the psychological adjustment that he might be God on earth after all. A little man in south India in a red robe, too much. How would this affect the comfort and fluidity of their lives? Why change when you’ve got it all? Indeed, these were the questions of the ages.

Their limo left the next day as Kasturi, Kerry and I stood in the drive and watched the dust trail rise in the distance. Then Kerry and I automatically started humming the same song. “There’s somethin’ happenin’ in here, but you don’ know what it is. Do You, Mr. Jones?” Kasturi was smiling with us. Kerry smiled at him wryly, “It’s a Bob Dylan song. You know Bob Dylan?” Kasturi shook his head, pleading ignorance with the classic hand gesture.

Five months later, in March, the Canadian High Commissioner visited Baba in Whitefield, this time with a New York publisher. Baba, forever unpredictable, was swarmed with important people and projects and barely noticed them. He could see them the next day, but they were only in the area for that day.

Strange Trials on the Desert

T

here was no doubt about it, we were in the middle of a testing period again. People were having bouts with personal hang-ups and various forms of fractured faith. Psychic guidance systems seemed to be going haywire. A number of minor players just blew out and left. One of the Germans had become near-psychotic. I chewed him out after he punched Ed (who could have cleaned his clock, but restrained himself thinking that it was a test from Baba). I approached him as he lay hidden under a burlap cloth in the dust. As I came closer, he eyed me from underneath like a quavering dog. I pulled back the rag and let him have it. I told him I would obliterate him if he ever did it again and that I did not think he was worthy of the ashram. I left him in wrenching shame. He lay there covered all night in the center of the dusty compound under the street light. Then he crept out the next morning. A few others had left in a quiet stream, with hardly a word.

Doubts were like a contagious disease to be shunned. I knew the answer: grit your teeth, hold on through thick and thin, nose to the grindstone, till the sky lightens up again. Whatever else, keep the faith. Kasturi and I had talked long hours. He had seen many bright stars of promise burn out and fall by the wayside. Yet he and Raja Reddy had been marathon runners. What was their secret? Superhuman resilience, endurance, and persistence. Diamond-hard faith that would not bend in the greatest gale of doubt, immune to situational paradoxes that might delude the mind into doubting.

We were often strangers to one another, doggedly pursuing the complex strand of intuitive thread within each of us. We each drifted along our own privately tailored, internally reinforced route to higher awareness. True, some of us compared notes, had heart-to-heart talks, but our courses were sealed. We knew we were truly alone and balanced on a slightly different precipice on the awesome granite slope of the mountain to God—what the Hindus called Mount Himavat. Spiritual mountain climbing was rough stuff sometimes.

I soon noticed that Kerry and Janet had withdrawn from everybody except for Ed, Chris, and me. Their Indian spirit guide, Red Hawk, had been silent or cut off since they had come to Whitefield, and they needed reference points fast. In some ways they missed Red Hawk’s direct unambiguous guidance. The voice would give the command and that was it. Now they had questions. Who was Baba really? Was he really an avatar? What was his real secret, the final message? And who or what were they? The answer was tabulating slowly, though when they hinted at it, it was with a note of defensiveness in their voices. They went for long walks together and would often spend hours staring at cloud formations and sunsets, looking for a sign. Red sunset tinged clouds became “Baba heads.” Maybe they didn’t need Baba. His outer form was just an illusion anyway. Maybe everyone was the avatar. If so, they were free. No need to conform to some ashram routine if it was all a cosmic game anyway! And how trivial, petty, and small this world could be. Time to emerge from the shackles of Vedantic legalism.

Kerry and Janet soon displayed their new-found freedom and boldness. Like the others, they had to use the mountaintop as a commode. This was grim if you had dysentery. The subject had festered within them. It was an indignity, a degradation, especially when they were sure that the wealthier Indian cubicle-owners looked on with a sense of satisfaction and superiority every time they had to stumble up the hillside with a tin can of water. What kind of dual standard Brahmin hypocrisy was that? Didn’t they realize that the joke turned back on them?

While the high-born Indians were intoxicated with a feeling of cultural superiority, bathing in an idealization of their tradition, the fact eluded them that had their culture not been backward in the first place, such things as squatting like an animal in the bushes would have long ago been abolished. What the average giggling little Brahmin needed to see was the vast, spotless toilet facilities at Dulles Airport. But perhaps he already knows that. That’s why he feels the need to giggle. He is ashamed that as much truth as his culture harbors, in the words of Vivekananda, it can’t even put up the simplest outhouse.

One particular Brahmin seemed to gloat over their dilemma. He usually sat in a deck-chair outside his cubicle, perhaps twenty feet down the long porch from where Kerry and Janet lay their bedding. He was a well to do banker from one of the large cities, reading the equivalent of the Financial Times, perhaps with a few good slokas interspersed for good measure. Since he had arrived on the ashram to reclaim his cubicle, he had made painstaking efforts not to acknowledge either Kerry or Janet.

He scowled when grinned at, adjusted his glasses, and kept reading. Each succeeding confrontation soured worse between them. Kerry finally opened the floodgates of hell, turned on the burners of his intellect to full blast, and stood over the man’s deck-chair, giving him a well-versed, multi-level character assassination that was a work of artistry, if not genius. What the incoherent and stunned little provincial could not explain was how so bedraggled a hippie, as he had often labeled Kerry, was able to effortlessly command levels of fluency, multivac thought structures, that well surpassed him. Of course, he was too unsophisticated to understand the irony of the scene, or the connotative import of the name McLuhan.

Kerry, still as red as an ember hours after the blow-out, confessed to me that this particular type—the smug supercilious hypocrite—was one of his worst stumbling-blocks. Was it an accident that this particular Brahmin was so strategically placed on his porch? Kerry, I knew, could tolerate almost anything. What strange timing for so repugnant an adversary to show up. It looked like the old ashram cosmic chemistry was at work again, unveiling inner secrets deep within the psyche.

With the scoreboard now grossly uneven, and with the battlefield of direct verbal confrontation with Kerry out of the question, the Brahmin banker needed a more subterfuge approach—an opening. Till then, the highborn banker would have to gnash his teeth in silence and summon up the full expertise of a genealogy of subtle and glib tongues, rumormongering. He would damage Kerry behind the scenes in the great ashram rumor mill.

But another micro-drama was in the making. Tired of the hillside trek in the noonday heat, and in protest against so needless a tradition, Kerry had found a new “bathroom.” He could now quietly disappear behind the long row of cubicles whose backs faced a barbed-wire fence, bushes, and trees and then the outside street. In the hidden shadows of the foliage, Kerry squatted down to defecate. Many of the Westerners had learned this expedient method from the Veda School boys. Generally, you were out of sight.

Kerry was in the back of a particular cubicle. Suddenly a battle cry was sounded as he was in the act of defecating. From out of the little barred window directly above Kerry, a shrill hysterical woman’s voice addressed the Untouchable. “Pah, Pah, Pah,” said a voice trembling with righteous indignation. This was a means of addressing the most scab-infested dogs.

Kerry was glued to the ground and couldn’t move. “Pah, Pah, Pah.” The woman wouldn’t stop. It was the wife of the banker. She and her husband had Kerry in the clutches of victory, and wouldn’t relinquish an inch. They looked on and discussed him between them, as though unaware that even foreign Untouchables have a degree of humanity and dignity. There was no honorable escape, and they knew it. For even the most imaginative, resourceful, and sublime of Indians would have melted in humiliation on the spot, and completely denuded of a means of counterattack or escape. However, this is not necessarily so with true yogis and mystics.

The house of the banker failed to account for the fact that a true adept has not only had high-order experiences in the beatific, but has had equal command of the lower substrate of the cosmic order, the subterranean abominations and infernalities. Some of the most astounding all-time vulgarities, traumas of ego busting, were performed by the most enlightened sages. The other half of humanity who could come out the victors in so tight a situation were some of the rednecks of the Deep South.

Anyone so savage as to look on ranked on par with something on a hog farm. A prolonged stare down the old eyes with the Indians didn’t register shame. So Kerry whistled and looked at cloud formations, holding the dignity of an Edwardian polo player as he finished his act. He washed his hands and anus with a quarter of a can of water, as was the Indian method, stood up, looked through the bars of the “hog shed,” and blasted a column of water through yelling, “SOOWEEE, SOOOWAAAY,” and walked off. The two onlookers sank in stunned silence, their faced dripping with water. It was a high octane psychic chess move coming from a totally alien dimension. The banker and his wife had been checkmated. Kerry was chuckling morbidly over the dubious victory hours later.

But I knew that it was like wrestling with a karmic tar baby. It could go on forever.

Kasturi ambled over in the form of the disciplinarian, giving Kerry a lecture on ethnic traditions and local etiquette. He was giving a bad name to the Americans. According to Kasturi, there were already disastrous rumors about. Kerry told Kasturi the other half of the story and he ambled off later in the evening, heading towards the House of the Banker, this time to lecture the Indian.

By our third major stage appearance in the giant shed auditorium— we sang in front of Baba’s throne, center stage—the banker was almost obsequious when any of us made even the smallest gesture of friendliness. By then, my centerspread article in the ashram journal was being distributed along with a full picture of the entire foreign contingent taken the previous time we were on stage.

The Second Wave

A new crew suddenly arrived from the States before the Birthday Festival, effervescing like bottled Californian sunshine. They paled the “old contingent,” already in a malaise of testings and spiritual back-logs. They looked like they had stepped out of the Broadway musical, “Hair” singing “Aquarius.” New York hip, trendy, and oh so very conscious, the newcomers were rarin’ to go.

They had been sent ahead from Whitefield by Baba, who was due to arrive for the next festival. There were fifteen of them, three-quarters were Jewish, and most of them were from New York, similar to the old contingent.

So why was our group looking so wiped out after being around the spiritual magnetic pole of the world? They were certainly high enough to handle who Baba really was. But as groovy and dazzling as they were, the older crowd wasn’t impressed. When they came on high or strong, they didn’t strike awe into the hearts of the old contingent. They might get a nod, or an “uh-huh,” or a lecture or words of caution or advice, but that was it. But they’d had visions, high-order experiences, you name it. “Oh, yeah, what else?”

They were describing a spiritual Brooklyn Bridge to locals who’d seen it just about every day of their lives. But maybe the locals had become jaded and unable to appreciate the subtler nuances. You know, familiarity breeds contempt.

But soon enough, the new contingent had to ask questions about where to go to the bathroom, the word for water, and what not, and the old hierarchy was quickly absorbing the new.

One hard-to-get-around institution happened to be me. I was still “the chief.” If they were slow to learn it, Eddie told them in a language that stuck. A greater authority figure, who was not bowled over by their presence, was Kasturi. But they were emissaries called in to help bring on the New Age. Maybe, but get your footing first. I wondered how many would be left after five months and what they would look like then.

When Baba returned later, things quickly fell into place. At the first interview, they saw me sitting next to his chair. Baba’s attention automatically revealed the natural hierarchy of the Westerners. Most of them got “sky high.” The most dramatic reaction to Baba’s force in the interview came from a new guy who truly resembled a village idiot. His reaction to Baba was a new kind of record. He staggered and stumbled into buildings, swaying and falling from side to side, from about six in the evening until late into the night as he was nursemaided around the ashram by his wife. I couldn’t tell whether he had been attuned to a superhuman state of receptivity by Baba, or whether his capacities were indeed so pea-sized that he was like a flea in a barrel of rum, confusing the thimble with the ocean. He ended up hyper oxygenating in huge exaggerated gasps, heaving his entire torso up and down as his head rolled loosely on top. For hours he resembled a cross-country runner at the end of a marathon. I wanted to smack him silly for being either a pea brain or a cosmic exhibitionist. Later, at the first opportunity, I dealt with him to put him in his place.

I found the new contingent to be a refreshing group of new faces and quickly embraced them as long-lost friends. They were a part of Baba’s unfolding mystery, with their own complex stories. Like the old contingent, they too represented the spiritual salmon swimming upstream to the pioneering edges of our generation. Standing above them all in mental and physical stature was a tall, blue-eyed fellow named Wendell. Uniquely gifted, Wendell had an extraordinary history of epiphanies and consciousness-raising experiences, similar to mine. I sensed he would soon enter my closest circle of friends. And he did, very quickly.

Battling Nostalgia

S

oon after the arrival of the new “flight squad,” the old crew were quick to notice the various personal things that they had brought. India and Marsha were veritable Bedouins, scavenging and then reporting back to me details about food, gifts and other goodies. High-end baksheesh appeasement handouts soon followed, mostly among the New York Hilda crowd.

In no time, Ed, Wendell and I borrowed Arnie’s stereo cassette recorder and took it up to the mountaintop. Arnie, a tall, handsome, hip schoolteacher from Brooklyn—as Ed said, another Jewish guy, but one who looked like Jesus Christ Superstar—had a pile of cassette tapes that he had brought from New York. We couldn’t wait.

We sat on a boulder on the upper hills far out of range, looked out, Wendell hit the switch, and suddenly Sixties classics filled the air. For the first time in a year, I began hearing the first strains of rock and other back home music. I loved it—unashamedly. Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Chicago, George Harrison, the Beatles, James Taylor, Fire and Rain, Country Road. The Band. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Long Time Gone, Wooden Ships. After my extended music famine in the wilds of India, I was more famished than I knew. I was eating this stuff up. It soon infected my innards with an almost haunting

passion for release.

Nostalgia had suddenly entered me like a flash of lightning, an old nemesis, arriving with a vengeance. My mind started reeling back to earlier times—old girlfriends, motorcycle rides at the University of Virginia from the Rotunda to Ash Lawn, Monticello, down Rugby Road to my old place, Rosser Mansion, then out to “the groove ranch” and up Afton Mountain on my BMW. A happy/sad love affair before I graduated. Scenes with friends, total freedom of movement, great health. The glory of my university days—-it was all coming back.

I was disappointed in myself. The ghost of sentimental yearnings had surfaced, bringing me face to face with my human limitations. Same as before.

The barrenness was getting to me. I wanted a change of scenery and a change of pace. And then a spring breeze of ancient Eden rose in my mind. A yearning for the fullness of creation, the fullness of physical life. I felt like a ghost remembering his embodied state. As I stood in the hills, I knew that far off stood luxuriant valleys and brilliant dawns, perhaps a distant lover under a setting sun, and the terrible thing was that this was the very thorn I was to forget, cast out, abolish forever.

I could not hang around listening to these haunting melodies forever. But, oh, it sounded sweet. It was the downside of the privileged sensate life in the West. The more you had indulged, the more you had to work through. It was also a frightening benchmark of how far you still had to go.

Strange Privilege

D

uring the birthday festival, around November 21, I was again called on to balance delicately within the paradox of spiritual leadership. I was to give another speech, this time before several thousands, in the second largest shed-auditorium, where we had painted the signs.

I was addressing the composite of the All India Sathya Seva Dal and the All India Sathya Seva Samithi, a significant cross-section of India’s super-rich, educators and intelligentsia, nobility, as well as a sizeable chunk of India’s crown of political officialdom, cabinet members, ministers, governors, right up to the vice-president of India. This was not a small honor. And the rest of the Western contingent was awed. By then, the new flight squad from the West had fallen into line. . . . below me in the hierarchy.

The famed yogess, Indra Devi, was scheduled to speak before me. Baba beckoned her on stage. Baba leaned his cheek on his hand, and mumbled into the microphone, “Indra Devi.” He smiled at the audience, “Come up Indra Devi.” This great American yogi was being bantered about. Baba, as Krishna, was lampooning the formalities of the world, the audience’s expectation of the woman in ochre. But everybody knew there was great familial love behind it.

Outside all the Westerners would sit, listening to our talks. I had tried to get Ed, Wendell, and Kerry inside, but Kasturi turned them away at the door. “Baba says only Tal is allowed in.”

Indra Devi began her talk. Wide-eyed, shock-faced, and severe, she resembled a Victorian matron passing a bawdy armed guard at a wayside tavern, glaring at their vulgarity. Not that she didn’t know how to rise to the occasion with Indians. She did, having once lived here years ago. She spoke of being in America with the indwelling Baba, and how with his grace she had survived through the traumas of life.

Baba was always guiding her miraculously in the States. For example, she was on a Los Angeles six-lane freeway—her arms widened to communicate the immensity. Her front tire blew out, the car careened, she screamed “Sai Ram,” the car spun around, went into the median as about six other cars and several Mack trucks barely missed her. Baba’s supernatural covenant of grace was summoned at the instant she pronounced his name. His grace was sufficient.

Recently she was also under occult attack. At 3 a.m. after dreaming about a coven, she followed an inner leading, knocked on the door of the household that was trying to decimate her, and in the power of Baba, stood her ground and told them who she was. She removed a certain “threatening” envelope from her mailbox, other incidents occurred, and the terrible power was quelled through the divine love of Baba. Many of the women bhaktas raised their hands with Mataji to namaste Satya Sai Baba. She quickly stepped away from the microphone. Baba smiled patiently.

Then Baba looked right at me and smiled gently. I was a son in whom he was well pleased. As I stood at the front microphone, he whispered to me and I came over. With patient kindness, “Talk ten minutes, Bas. You have a message? Good.” As I talked, Baba left his chair, sat against the front-stage wall, at times curling up in concentration, hand bracing his head. Maybe he was fueling me, or maybe he was straining to decipher my words out of the bad acoustics in the big hall, my accent, and occasional words longer than four syllables. Many of the faces in front strained in concentration, an expression not unfamiliar to me.

As I was winding down, Baba suddenly asked me to sing a song cold turkey to the whole group standing before 2000 at a stage microphone. He named a song I had disliked so much I never really mastered the words. “I don’t really know any English songs, Baba, but I can sing the audience a Sanskrit song. How about ‘Nataraja?’” Baba’s patience seemed a little taxed. “Never mind, sit down, sit down.” This was not like the last time I spoke, when I felt this strong rapport with the audience. Something felt fragmented.

The session soon ended as Baba, whose movements can never be predicted, got up and left from rear entrance. As I got up from one of the front row places, I leaned against the stage to recuperate. Indra Devi did what only Indra Devi could have gotten away with. She stepped over the tabooed red dividing carpet, crossed over into the men’s section, and threw her arms around me like a long-lost relative. “That Vas Turrific. I hope they could appreciate it.” I shook her hand. “Thanks, thanks a lot.” She waved goodbye, and went off.

A funny feeling came over me. I somehow had to get feedback from Baba immediately.

As I ran out into the crowds, where Baba was now out giving darshan, a catastrophic feeling, a sense of loneliness and doom, mounted. Baba hastily walked between lines of people, followed by several close attendants. He came around the rear side of the prayer hall. I was between that and the men’s suite. He saw me. I sensed a heavy emotion in him. I forced my way inside the swaying mass of men shuffling around and making room for him. He almost walked right past me but stopped, looked to the side with a frown. He spoke in low rapid irritation. “Too long. Too fast speaking. Words too complicated. American accent not understanding. Not enough surrender sir.”

“My accent is the same as the last speech. Everybody understood that.” Then he came out with a shocker.

“Indra Devi just now tell me that she not understand, and Indian ladies not understand.” My eyes fell to the ground, I looked back searchingly, and Baba walked on. Either Indra Devi was a patent liar, or Baba had—-and I had to search for the word delicately—prevaricated, fudged, you know, not told it straight. Then the issue of being tested came up.

Had this whole thing been a set-up to put my ego on the chopping block? My mouth felt full of marbles. No self-defense would either justify my performance or get Baba to appreciate my effort on stage any better. And if this was some kind of mysterious mind-bending operation of his, nothing I could do now would free me from this ambivalence.

A feeling of caution stopped me from implying that he was stretching the truth. For one thing, I knew that Indra Devi could not have possibly talked to him. He went out from the back, leaving several minutes before either of us left. Besides, she was with me in the auditorium talking to me. Besides that, she just told me to my face that she thought my talk was terrific.

There were other permutations to this odd dilemma. If she had been double-faced with Baba and me, then what kind of discernment did he have in choosing an emissary who was a pathological liar? Besides, the only way she could have told him would be by running up to him like a college sprinter, and while panting, spilling out her feelings about what a lousy talk Tal had given, as he moved quickly about the ashram. If Indra Devi had not in fact spoken to Baba ... well . . . the implication forced a kind of vacuum inside me. I was back to point one. My heart sank. I also knew that I had to extract the truth from Indra Devi. Whatever it took. When I saw her a little while later I asked point blank, “I need to know, did you run into Baba right after he left the auditorium?”

“No.”

“Well, Baba said . . . .” And I told her what he had said about her supposed comment to him. She was unflapped.

“He must be testing you. I’ve been tested many times. Don’t let it get your goat. He only does that to his most special disciples.”

We were back to the cosmic closed loop mechanism that Bruce complained about. To the Master, all things are permitted. For the devotee, all standards, weights and measures

are suspended. It is a condition where faith and

faith alone is the only thing that can stand and

survive “doubt.” Hence, a closed loop. The

problem with this approach is that if you are

wrong in the object of your total faith, the

wrong guru, you are screwed. Jai could kneel

before Siva Bala Yogi an entire lifetime. And then

when it’s too late on some death plane, Bala Yogi

takes off his mask and says, “Welcome to hell.”

The heaviness of my mood lasted into the night. I could now more easily sympathize with so many of the others who had bouts with feelings of futility and damaged faith. I was not an exemplary model of faith myself.

The next day I ran right into the next trouble spot: the second serious showdown that Kerry was having with the authorities, this time as the divine standard-bearer of humane treatment to animals. Baba had ordered the dogs off again, and some of them had been stoned, indeed cinder-blocked, by a number of Veda School lads. None of the authorities protested. Kerry warned the kids himself. Fifteen minutes later, a number of them heaved a rock on “Talking Dog.” Kerry went over, slapped two of the kids hard, and hammer locked another one. This did not go over well with Suraiya and the others. Dogs were non-entities.

Leaving the Wilderness

B

y late November, Baba wisely and in loving kindness told the entire camp of Westerners to follow him back to Whitefield where they could live for several months with him in a different and cooler setting. The old contingent breathed sighs of relief, and left with various new members to find housing in the Whitefield area.

Baba’s last proclamation at the end of his November twenty-third birthday festival was the proclamation that only an avatar can get away with making. It echoed in our minds as we finally left the crucible in the desert, at least for a season. The distillation of it all, reiterated by the new contingent, was that whatever else, Sai Baba was clearly not a human being—a human body he had and used, but the awareness operating within the body just did not think or act within the human spectrum of behavior.

From the Shanti Vedica, at the end of the November 23rd Birthday Festival, Baba declared his divine mystery in a wilderness proclamation, as his voice thundered across the compound and into the neighboring hills (Kasturi later translated it):

”I am the embodiment of truth. This is the first time in history that mankind has had the chance of being with me in this number. In the Dwarka age and former ages, the rishis would meditate for years, and yet your chance is much greater than theirs. The moment you come into my presence, all your sins are forgiven. I can give you full self-realization, and take you back to the eternal limitless god-consciousness.

“Do not try to compare my power with those petty powers of magicians. My power is divine and has no limit. I have the power to change the earth into the sky and the sky into the earth. But I don’t because there is no reason to do it. If all the fourteen worlds and planes (Indian scripture for half the domains in existence) tried to join up against me, they could not make a dent in trying to thwart my mission. If all the twenty-eight worlds and planes were to try to join up in opposition to me, they could not do a thing. I am beyond any obstacle, and there is no force, natural or supernatural, that can stop me or my mission. Do not lose this chance, it is more important than you will ever realize. Do not forfeit the chance to be in my presence.”

We parted for Whitefield, gladdened but sobered by Baba’s challenge. Again, I reminded myself that a total tenacity of will was required to gain the superhuman reward of God-consciousness. I did not want to slip off the slope because of any test or desire. As Baba had hinted to me, it had taken me lifetimes to reach this point.

I was filled with anticipation en route to Bangalore. During the arduous, ten-hour bus ride out of the wilderness, my mind went to Nilgiri Dairy on Brigade Road and the excitement of the city. My stomach rum

bled. I thought of the grilled cheese sandwiches at Nilgiri Dairy and other food on their menu. Then....

My mind leapt to food long out of reach. . . Salted prime rib, a full garden salad, baked potato and beer at one of Charlottesville’s best steak houses. Then maybe a hot fudge sundae. Then there was the succulent food of Southern France, Belgium, and Spain as I drove my parents, brother and sister from Brussels to Spain on a recent summer holiday. We would stop at various Michelin-rated restaurants, trying European dishes fit for the gods—Filet mignon au poivre, the best Spanish paella in Barcelona with huge chunks of lobster on saffron rice, duck l’orange, rack of lamb, succulent crab....

Yes, the food fantasies were becoming more frequent. Maybe I would grab a banana at the fruit stand en route at one of the stations.....then maybe Nilgiri Dairy in Bangalore when we got there.

Chapter 15

A Brief Respite

O

ur house colony consisted of 12 of us in the most coveted locale of all—an expansive Anglo-Indian house in Whitefield with a Swiss cottage facade and large English windows. The

house stood on an acre of land with a rear well, a rear cottage, and even a driveway, all of it surrounded by a stone wall. Our house was in the old British farm community of Whitefield proper. And it was the cool season, meaning it was in the upper seventies most of the time. Our quality of living was a hundred levels above life in the barren wilderness of Andhra Pradesh. The “Major’s house,” as the locals called it, faced a quiet garden circle surrounded by other attractive Westernized houses.

Our “colony” also included the best and the brightest of the old and new contingents. A few who had gone up ahead “scored it.” It exuded an absolute renaissance atmosphere, full of unending novelty and excitement. Each of us had a room while Kerry and Janet rented the rear cabin. It was what I imagined some communal house in Marin County might be like. I also loved the fact that at a 3, 000-foot elevation, this region had one of the best climes in all of India.

The other Western house colonies were scattered. Two miles away, adjacent to Brindavan, India, Marsha, Michelle, Betty, and Barbara rented a house in the filthy village of Kadugodi, which so many of us objected to. Others rented rooms, stayed in houses, cabins, and a few lived in Bangalore and commuted by taxi.

It was nice being back in the Bangalore area, no matter how pristine and exotic Puttaparthi was. We had the sensory input of a nearby metropolis with the very things all of us were supposed to be transcending: coffee shops, restaurants, bakeries, bookstores, movie theaters and what not. Not that I went often, but at least it was there if I really needed it.

Soon enough we were in a routine of coming and going to darshans on our rented bikes. Baba gave the Westerners an empty classroom at Brindavan where he could walk in for darshan. Otherwise, we did our thing.

After one afternoon darshan session, Baba motioned me to follow him out of the classroom towards the rear garden. The eyes of the entire Western group jealously followed us. Out of earshot, Baba asked me about Jai. I had long ago decided, in agreement with traditional Vedantists, that when an enlightened being engages an ordinary man in conversation, it is a humble act akin to one’s voluntarily taking on schizophrenia in order to compassionately share the level of other schizophrenics. The dialogue can mimic feigning ignorance as a teaching exercise. At least that was one rationale.

Baba motioned his head where Jai had just been puttering around near the big Banyan tree. “Fat man with glasses. Devotee of that Siva Bala Yogi. What is he saying about Swami?”

“Well Baba, some confusion. I think he wants to return to you.” “Not confusion, now spreading bad talk. Go tomorrow and tell him to leave Brindavan. Not to come back. His guru is Siva Bala Yogi. Yes?” Suddenly I had to play the axe man. I nodded as Baba slapped me on the back and went inside his house. (I delivered the news to Jai the next day as he nodded in pained understanding.). I knew I had to immediately go back to the classroom and tell the remaining others the news.

A while later, I carried my bike into the large front hall as Ed’s barking voice plied me with questions. They all wanted to know what Baba had said in the rear garden. I relayed Baba’s message that Jai was to be off limits. Baba continued to relay messages to the Westerners through me. I took pride in censoring anything between Baba and me which might have confounded the others—the delicate high-wire walk a Master required of a true adept. Meanwhile, dinner was not far off.

I could smell dinner wafting through the house, in a peculiar fragrant intermingling of Himalayan incense, sandalwood, and kitchen odors of soojie, bananas, chapatis, fried eggplant, kitchrie (rice and dal), and mango. Togetherness exuded from everyone. The cooks—Kerry, Janet, and Victoria—were heavily absorbed in a conversation about aura fields and the inner light. Jerry, panda-bearish, sat meditating with a japa mala (rosary) in his little side room with an etheric smile pasted on his face. He was wrapped in a towel and sitting on an air mattress. In the long front anteroom silhouetted in front of the English picture windows, Anne, the lithe colored model from Manhattan,

and Arnie, her handsome, black-haired husband who

Victoria

resembled Jesus Christ Superstar, stretched together gracefully, going from one dance step to another to some ethereal tune of woodwinds and sitars from Arnie’s stereo. The other mini event was Wendell.

Others looked on as Wendell painted in the room near the porch. He was doing a painting as lifelike as anything by Salvador Dali. It was the monkey god Hanuman ripping his heart out of his chest with the head of Baba transposed where the heart should have been. It was incredibly powerful. But when bystanders ogled too long, Wendell would often look around with a mock-dumb smile, mumbling cryptograms while hiding the painting out of view. If he was feeling in a light mood, Wendell might break into song, replicating almost exactly the voices of Neil Young, James Taylor, or Bob Dylan. There seemed to be no ceiling to his prodigious talents.

Truly, this brilliant, six-foot-two former AAU pitcher, athlete thinker, mystic, and creative artist was earning my highest respect and vice versa. After having Wendell as a roommate and talking steadily to him since his arrival a month back, I was ever more impressed that he was a critical component to the coming transition. We were also close friends. His fellow travellers from Indiana, who paid his way to India, were in constant awe of this artistic prodigy. To keep Wendell, the University of Indiana art department had been willing to build him a separate studio. But Wendell, a 4.0 student who had flatlined his aptitude tests, was bored by Indiana and soon walked. He was compelled to follow the fast track of enlightenment. His stumbling block had been women. But he had new resolve.

Our activities at the “Major’s House” were a strange mix of East and West. At meals we sat in a circle on a flagstone floor, holding hands and facing the candles in the center. We chanted “Asatoma sat Gamaya” and ate to the music of Ravi Shankar from Arnie’s tape recorder. I started to really look forward to our dinners now that we had access to a vast range of foods from the old Russell’s Market in Bangalore—one of India’s premier farmer’s markets.

By 9:30, the cassette player would be filling the hall with The Band or

Janet giving Ed a shampoo in the garden

Neil Young. We turned on the front porch light, found an old board and nylon ball, used the front door as first base, and played baseball. Wendell and I were the opposing pitchers. By midnight we were all back on our floor mats, silently delving into the mysteries of India’s highest mystics: The Ramayana, The Tripura Rahasya, The Srimad Bhagavata and the writings of Shankaracharya, Ramanah Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, and others.

One day at darshan, I was awaiting word on my father. I noticed Doctor Bhagavantam back from his long tour halfway around the world, which had begun soon after the Dashara festival. I had requested some favors of him, and was anxious to hear the reports. One request was that he see my father, a retired United States diplomat living in London. I figured that my father, a hardened skeptic and atheist, would listen to a world-renowned physicist, a Nobel candidate who was also diplomatic liaison to the United Nations, as well as the chief scientific adviser to the government of India. He had a doctorate from Cambridge and had taught at Stanford and MIT as a guest professor. I had cabled my father about the tight time schedule of the scientist, narrowing down their meeting to a two-hour dinner in a London vegetarian restaurant. As far as I knew, I might never see my father and mother again, and wanted him to at least know that I had not squandered my life away on some unhinged mystic, but was under the discipleship of the most universally recognized holy man in India.

But Bhagavantam, a brilliant, distinguished-looking man, shook his head when I met him at darshan. The meeting was of little avail. My father had asked pointed and probing questions about my welfare, accepted the reports of the miraculous as untenable, short of a first-hand empirical look, and even then, there would remain plenty of room for doubt. He was content to remain a liberal, utopian humanist.

What remained was a deep love between a father and a son, and a gulf of geography and belief in between, frustrating every channel for that love to pass, like an interstellar vacuum. One of my deepest sources of inner torment and anguish, which would periodically emerge from even the most dulled equanimity I might muster, was that the inhuman requirements of the path that I had chosen to walk could not help but cause deep grief and bewilderment in those whom I loved, above all my father and mother. To annihilate the ego, this very cancer that kept me from Godconsciousness, I had to cut every strand of worldly attachment, including those whom I loved, with the brute coldness of a fisherman cutting up an earthworm on a dock.

My pain was the one-sided misunderstanding and deep hurt that would inevitably slam back on my father in his waning years on earth. For every gasp of love that went out searching for me, it would meet a vacuum. My father’s love would bray like an abandoned sheep, forlorn in an arid wilderness, not knowing how or why. Still covered in a dense cloud of unknowing, he would pass out of life, ignorant of the splendor of my fate, bereft of a sense of hope, and instead, anchored by a peculiar sense of injustice. While somewhere in India, his son would have vanished forever, becoming the non-son; the body still living on, yet a different look in the eyes, and a different voice speaking. Just a hollowed-out shell, filled with the soul of the universe.

I returned from darshan deeply sad. Over the past year I had written my folks some brutally honest letters, trying in any way I could to get them to wake out of their slumber. I had tried repeatedly over the years to get them to own up to their own part in our dysfunctional family. Rather than face various problems and grow, I felt they had played ostrich, covered up their own accountability, and erected a host of psychological defenses—-the worst being “the unexamined life.” After all, I had jumped into a cosmic free fall looking for truth, why couldn’t they? I always knew there had to be more to life than brief satisfactions. My dilemma of familial alienation was echoed by most of the others in our house.

As dusk was setting in on the Whitefield house, the electric lights coming on and dinner procedures underway, I tried to enter the flow of our group togetherness. Yet a lingering mystery remained. With all the positive things happening with us, why was Baba seeming more remote? In the impersonal mode, he was a simple on/off switch, an approach/avoidance gradient.

Despite a kind of group spirit and frontiersman’s sense of purpose which our colony emulated, things were not all well. A cold desolation still leaked through my mind in the silent hours.

As far as Baba was concerned, I feared that the togetherness of our colony was little more than a distracting illusion—“feel good” worldly maya—getting in the way of real progress. Even the lure of talented, fascinating people was just a distraction in the end. I could feel my mind arming me for a split-off, now realizing that these new and dear friends might be just as transient as the whole procession of faces that had floated by me in the past. And no group happening would change my own solitary accountability to ultimate truth.

I went out the back door to visit Kerry and Janet in their rear cottage. Lights ablaze at twilight faintly patterning the lawn, and the smell of soojie and papaya melon issuing from the kitchen, both of them chattered while busily cooking, washing, and sweeping.

As I approached the cottage, something suddenly distracted them. Kerry and Janet froze in mid-sentence, laid down their stuff, looked at each other, and put on their most spiritual, brotherhood-of-man, goodwill-to-all-beings smile. If Norman Rockwell could do an illustration of the good-hearted, neighborly, albeit slightly cosmic American-Hindu couple, this was it. I saw why.

An Unplanned Encounter

S

tanding facing Kerry and Janet were two elderly figures smiling earto-ear with Christian goodwill and loving concern.

The tall, hickory-thin man looked down at Kerry from six-feet-five, and cheerfully extended his hand, speaking with a grinning, soft-spokenness, ``Hello. I’m Reverend Carroll and this is my wife, Winona. We just saw your lights from our house across the circle there and thought we’d come over and greet you. What brings you to these parts?”

They reminded me of two tall splendid elm trees, with the fear and reverence of God etched deeply into the bark of their Midwestern faces. Other than as Walt Disney depictions, these two salts were an extinct species that I had not seen outside a storybook setting. The world that I knew had pushed them off the quiet simplicity of their farms and country churches, and replaced them with the high-life of neon-linked boulevards. Today’s liberated modern minds transcended such bygone squareness.

They struck me right off as the types of incredible people who would melt in shame if they told a fib, were honest right down to the last rusty button, and would give you the shirts off their backs while still feeling repentant before God that they hadn’t given you more. The light within us, it was evident from the start, was slightly different from the light that was within them. I was divided right down

the middle, with gladness on the one hand and rebellious contempt on the other.

Smiling back at the Reverend, with a flicker of irony in his eyes, was yesteryear’s face from Small Town High, a rural handiwork of national pride, but with red hair a foot-and-a-half long, knotted back like a Sumo wrestler’s, and a long patterned wrap-around, extending from waist to ankles in the Watusi ceremonial tradition.

“Pleased to meet you, Reverend, I’m Kerry, and this is my wife Janet. We were spiritually guided to India...”

The countenance of the Reverend and his wife dropped with regret when they heard that what had brought all of us to Whitefield was the frizzy haired holy man down the road. But we too were familiar with the Bible verse concerning the prophet not honored in his home town. The Carrolls obviously needed to be ushered into a more universal understanding of the great truths, to shake off provincial prejudices. I fancied it might be my private mission to show them where Christ and Krishna converged. I had long been a syncretist. Soon the Carrolls would meet others from among our cosmic tribe.

At that point, a self-proclaimed “four-foot dwarf from Brooklyn” with a satyr’s smile and a voice like Edward G. Robinson emerged out of the back door of the big house. It was Ed. Mrs. Carroll, a white-haired lady with glasses, alert as an owl and glinting with keen-humored goodwill, looked probingly into Eddie’s eyes while greeting him. His smile widened defiantly as he responded with “Sai Ram... Hare Krishna.”

A sobering concern again slightly eclipsed the smile of the Reverend’s wife. Mrs. Carroll then opened the doors of their home across the circle to us any time. For a chat, for a meal, for help, or medical aid. “And I want all of you to know you are invited to our house for carols on Christmas Eve. And there’ll be treats too.” She winked at Eddie who was somewhat pacified by her.

As the group spokesman, I responded, “And we’ll share with you some of the songs we’ve learned.” The rest of our colony was now filtering out of the back door, all with knowing grins. From out of the motley tribe of all manner of semi-actualized “gods” and “goddesses” surrounding the Reverend and his wife came the assent of “Right on... Sai Ram.” The Reverend and his wife politely waved and went back across the circle to their house on the other side.

When I saw Baba at darshan the next morning, my mellow lightness shattered under the bulldozer of his gaze. He ignored every one of us, walking past us in line without so much as a single look in our direction, barring a look at me. I felt about as significant as a cigarette butt. Feeling a threat to the very existence of my discipleship under him, and not knowing why, I forgot myself, went to his side courtyard as the others looked on, and stood by his side-door till he came out. He looked displeased. Baba looked me up and down as though I had betrayed him.

Butterflies going wild in my stomach, I asked what was wrong, vowing certain and glad obedience. Baba finally spoke, reconsidering his mood from displeasure to slow, reluctant tolerance.

“Not good, all men and women living together. Now Indians think Americans bad devotees. Living like hippies.” In grudging disappointment he continued, “I never make an order, only give advice. Bas. It is always my advice that men and women separate.”

“But Baba, most of them are married. Besides, we lived together in the first Kadugodi house, and there were no complaints. No impurity, Baba, strict Brahmacharya.” It went without saying among all of us that Rule One for serious disciples was abstinence, and as far as I knew the rule had been kept.

“This tall Canadian man and woman in Puttaparthi living together,” Baba’s voice rose in incredulity, “...under one mosquito net on the porch. Not good. Indians seeing and talk bad things. Now is bad reflection on Swami.”

Realizing that Kerry and Janet were the ones, I rose to their defense. “But Baba, they are married, and even still they have told me many times about their purity, Brahmacharya.”

“No sir, bad example. Now faith is spoiling.” I felt fearful for them. The litany continued. “And Bruce, complete spoil. Now, no faith. Living in Bangalore hotel with Americans, running after worldly pleasure.” Baba spoke in a wounded tone. “Complete finish. Mentally confused, bad thoughts, rotten apples, all.” Baba rotated his finger by his temple.

Fearing that judgment might fall on our entire group if Baba’s list of grievances continued, I tried to plead for mercy, forgiveness, and another chance, assuring him we could make the required corrections and split the men and women up.

“Men and women will split up today. Rotten apples will be cut off,” I promised. He slapped me on the back as we eyed the whole group of Westerners standing by the side gate.

I passed on the order that all were to split up and that those who declined should go off to live by themselves; they should in no way jeopardize the others. Two of the most indignant were Kerry and Janet.

By that afternoon the Whitefield colony was scattering. Kerry and Janet remained adamant, renting the rear

cabin directly from the landlord. Victoria moved in

with them, dreading the prospect of the girls’ house.

Chris, Eddie’s wife, in a leap of obedience, moved in

with the other girls. And so on. In the end, that left Ed,

Jerry, Wendell and me in the large empty “Major’s

house.”

The day after I “divided the sheep,” Baba gave the Westerners our only interview since returning to the area. Baba cautioned against disqualifying temptations: above all, doubts that can break the link to the guru. Soon after, to the side, I made Wendell show Baba the Hanuman painting of Baba. Baba was deeply pleased and a new gear had been set in motion.

An Unexpected Journey

T

he next day, Baba suddenly left for the tropical coastal State of Goa in a long caravan of cars. Baba suffered a breakdown in Jog Falls, that he renamed “Joke False,” during a brief awkward return, because the chauffeur had overlooked a thorough mechanical checkup. Some of the newer Westerners, including Jerry from our house, followed in a rented car.

Ed, Wendell, and I remained in Whitefield in the big house until Ed came running in early one morning, four days later, with The Deccan Herald. The front page announced that Baba had suddenly come down with appendicitis at the governor’s palace in Goa. We packed in fifteen minutes and departed immediately. With seeming supernatural assistance, we rocketed into the central bus terminus in Bangalore in record time. An hour later, our British Leyland bus to Goa left. It took an exhausting day and night before we reached the capital port of Panjim mid morning.

Ed, Wendell, and I next took a taxi to Calangute Beach to look for a place to stay. En route we passed rice paddies, dense palms, tropical green rivers with water buffalo and stretches of jungle, reminiscent of a Gauguin setting. When we glimpsed the beach and ocean, we all went wild with expectation. I noted that it was almost a year to the day since I had left this beach after that Felliniesque rock party. It was December 10th and the air was in the 80s like the year before.

And Calangute Beach still looked the same. Ancient-looking wooden arks, Indian fishing boats, still lined the shore from the old Portuguese monastery overlooking one side of the cape to the distant peninsula on the other side. Again, it was a Gauguin setting brought to life. Wendell was in an aesthetic euphoria.

We walked along the beach, drawing in deep breaths of spray-filled air, smiling in exuberant thanksgiving. For Ed and me, it was like a taste of heaven after those long months of wilderness still in our bones. We also enjoyed a peculiar sense of privilege, knowing that halfway around the world, people were bundled up to the neck, traipsing through sleet and snow. But we were in a tropical paradise.

We found a suite of rooms behind the Royal Hotel where I had stayed before. We left our belongings inside, then went off for a meal at the nearby tourist hotel on the beach. By mid-afternoon we headed back to Panjim to visit Baba. All of us had a gnawing concern about his well

being. The latest radio reports were that Baba had burst his appendix. It was enough to kill any normal man.

When our taxi entered the palace gate, we passed the festooned mall through plush royal gardens. Then we saw the luxurious and impressive Governor’s palace, a white Alcazar with huge balconies overlooking a maidan. Pink and turquoise clouds curdled in the sky of the setting sun, while amber reflections from the sea below gave a scarlet tinge to the palace, “Cabo Raj Nivas.” We rounded a formation of military guards to the side of the mall, coming into full visibility of the residence. I now understood the reason for the concentrated quiet of everybody. Baba’s red robe blazed from the balcony as though the penumbra of a divided sun, bringing the orbit of our own journey into perfect timing. This was Baba’s first public appearance since coming to Goa. I suspected he had healed his own illness.

The moment we stepped into view, a welcoming wave from Baba to us confirmed our leap of faith in making the trip, leaving the assembly to wonder who these visitors could be to warrant such exalted attention. Nearby was the Governor of Goa, Nakul Sen, looking edgy and attentive as he held his hands prayerfully up to the true king of the palace.

Baba withdrew from the balcony, and news quickly circulated that as many as could fit were invited to an open gathering in the huge stately reception hall. Uniformed servants tried to regulate the flow as the bottleneck of people pushed up the wide, burgundy-carpeted stairs.

The moment I reached the burnished teak and mahogany landing, an exuberant Kasturi who stood beneath a large crystal chandelier, reached out to greet us. “Well, Mr. Tal,” he smiled eloquently, “I see Baba has brought you into his presence within the very hour of his healing. Go in, I think swami will say a few things about his sankalpa.”

The governor at the door of the hall, with a friendly hand on my shoulder, directed us towards the front row (he had been the one to speak after me during my first major public talk in the Prayer Hall). Raja Reddy quietly sank down next to me at the harmonium, squeezed my leg and smiled as I looked over. The feeling of welcome couldn’t have been more timely for me. This acceptance outweighed any feel-good happening we ever had at the “Major’s house” in Whitefield.

Baba spoke with vibrant passion, lifting our hearts right into the air. His splendid condition belied the fact that he had just overcome, merely an hour ago, a condition that meant certain death for virtually any “mortal.” The reason was later eloquently translated by Kasturi out of the usual Baba baby English: “I had to go to the rescue of a person who had surrendered to me—even his judgment. I took over his illness and went through it. His continued existence in good health is desirable for the task dear to me. Pouring grace on the devout is one of the functions of the avatar. The doctors could only cure the abscessed appendix by removal. He could not have survived it. I have come with this body in order to save other bodies from pain. This body is ever free from pain. Disease can never affect it.”

We left the palace and headed back to Calangute. I was thrilled to be in the tropical beach state of Goa at this historical moment in Baba’s mission —one that had been filling the national headlines. Even better, I had clearly returned to his good graces in this mysterious weeding process: never predictable but inevitably requiring leaps of faith.

Chapter 16

A Return to The Ocean

I

n the temperate shadow gray of five in the morning, Wendell and I slipped out of our bedrolls on the rear terrace, and headed over several hundred feet of sand dunes and beach to the shore.

Through the twilight mist we wandered, passing effervescent sheets of cool spray. Gulls glinted in the sky above and danced along the shoreline as flecks of silver. The far peninsula vanished into the distant haze, passing out through a charged gray tide of breakers rippling into the horizon.

It broke upon my fatigue—the residue of Andhra’s prolonged wilderness—like a beam of light entering through a cellar door, as my thinning frame stretched to sponge the vitality around me. Forty-five pounds less than when I came to India, my body took root in this balmy clime like a stubborn weed, not unmindful of its former prowess. Already less sluggish, aches leaving, and kinks in bone joints gone, I gladdened at the prospect of regeneration.

Shafts of the golden dawn suddenly streamed from behind the tall palms

lining the shore, dyeing the sea an emerald green.

I began to smile within. Then it burst out all over my features. I could hardly contain myself. My God, I was happy. I felt like running through the surf. So I did. I felt like jumping into the foam. I did, and so did Wendell. And then I rolled and tumbled and dove through acres of foam, as though it were the very doors of paradise itself; a place, a thing, or a state of being that my soul, sometimes in broken-hearted beseeching, other times with wrenching anguish, and yet, at other times, rejoicing in the very knowledge thereof, had been striving for all my life to find.

And then after about fifteen minutes, my jubilation subsided. A part of my soul, in sober silence, was shedding quiet tears. It was only a mirage that I had been rejoicing in, lasting no more than the spume which soon vanishes, far from the heaven of eternality, incorruptible perfection, bliss, and ineffable communion with God. The ocean always represented the formless infinity of God to me—the power and the majesty. Yet the thing I was seeking was only reflected in the ocean, and required far more than a splash or two, and this was where my understanding soon clouded.

That evening at the Governor’s palace, the Cabo Raj Nivas, we arrived as the crowd was dispersing from a rather brief darshan. Baba was soon to give special audience to the team of doctors who had diagnosed him. He had consistently forbidden them to operate on him, having just survived a ruptured appendix without surgery.

On the verandah, sitting at a wrought-iron table was an immaculately

dressed man in a vest and tie with his opulently adorned wife. I strode in, leaned on the chair, and smiled. He recognized me.

“Do join us please and take the chair. We are just waiting for a call from Sai Baba.”

When he asked, I told him how I had been drawn to Baba, mentioning a few miraculous accounts. “How incredible. My heavens.” He wasn’t being facetious. Standing behind me, he could see a motley crew with Wendell towering over all of them. The Indian doctor waved politely and went on.

“I just didn’t think this sort of a thing was possible,” Dr Varma, Surgeon General of Goa, confessed with a refined accent. “You know, I went to the Medical School at Cambridge University and became infected with what they called a ‘healthy western skepticism.’ Well, since that time, I have dismissed all these rumors of miraculous accounts among certain holy men as just superstition. In fact, I scorned them. Now, I’m just too amazed. I feel as though I have to start all over again in thinking through what is reality.” I nodded slowly. Then I asked him to relate the details of the whole episode.

Baba had played cat and mouse with the doctors, bringing them to a crescendo of anxious medical certainty that he was going to die, if he refused an operation once more. By the afternoon we arrived at the palace, the day before, Baba emerged in full health. At that point a servant waved to Dr. Varma, who went inside with the other physicians, this time to sit at Baba’s feet. We headed back to the beach. In the cab, Wendell quietly sang “John Wesley Harding,” while I watched the moving tops of palms outlined by a rich blue sky above.

Down on the beach we read, went to cafes, swam, ate at the modern tourist hotel, and relished every minute. At one point as we were approaching the monastery at the cove at the far end of the beach, Wendell broke away from us with a look of sudden inspiration. We later found him kneeling in the sand, molding, tamping, and doing touch-up with a gull’s feather. What stared up into the sunset sky was the most true to life sculpture of Baba possible through the medium of sand. Around the head were seven serpents proceeding from a halo. With the single lens reflex that one of the new arrivals had given me for long term use, replacing my battered camera, I snapped this work of art from a number of angles. Baba, I knew, would be very pleased with it, as it put to shame the cheap plaster of Paris images of him floating around. What I quietly knew inside was that if any

one would rise and either equal or usurp my closeness to Baba among the Westerners, it would be my dear friend Wendell.

Indeed, the artist kneeling in the sand was the same boyhood prodigy who had won an art contest hands down until the judges heard that he was nine years old and concluded that such mature sketching could not come from anybody but an adult who was extremely gifted. The panel declared it a fraud, and young Wendell went home crying bitter tears, withdrawing further from people and keeping his own prodigious creations to himself and his widowed mom.

By high school he had a wild streak. Then the long metaphysical quest followed—through LSD, mystical experiences and psychic openings of his mind. He continued at full throttle, at times soaring on huge doses of LSD. Underneath it all, he was crying for the truth. And there were disappointments, bitter ones, including a tragedy with a girlfriend, his Achille’s heel.

Then one rainy night, on some highway near Indianapolis, Wendell strapped himself into a suped-up Ford, choked back the tears, and took off, soon revving up to a hundred miles an hour. Five miles down the road, he headed for a concrete and steel abutment holding up a four-lane overpass. Within minutes, fire engines and ambulances swarmed the area, cut him out of the wreckage and packed Wendell off hooked up to oxygen bottles and adrenaline amidst an eerie wail of sirens. Days or weeks later, Wendell awoke from a coma and that settled it. God, whoever He was, had given him a second chance and wanted him alive. The truth quest would now be the center of his being. He started to get into superconscious states, even while contemplating mandalas and leaf patterns. Then he delved into the gurus—Meher Baba, Ramakrishna, and Sri Aurobindo. Wendell, the embryo mystic, was on the full path to self-realization and cosmic consciousness.

One day, while looking into the swirling green eyes of his universal face reflected in a mirror, Wendell saw vision after vision—one of which was a gleaming lucid reflection of Sai Baba. Black eyes radiated back from the mirror to Wendell, calling him to India. Then two close friends received independent guidance to pay Wendell’s fare to India.

Now he was a close friend of mine in the crucible of India. The sand-Baba stared back at Wendell from the sands of Calangute.....beckon

ing, beckoning him on.

L-R, Eddie, Wendell, and Jerry at a beach cafe

We stayed in Goa for ten more days, a respite beyond belief. During the time between midafternoon and dinner we were at the palace; the rest of the time we were at the beach or the capital city of Panjim, sometimes off getting meals or books, or just wandering. Before darshan, we had free reign of the palace. Most of that time we were near Baba’s suite. He would often talk to Wendell and me when he passed by us. One day he surprised us with a fitting warning. It was the day Wendell and I had seen a troupe of nude girls that morning at the far end of one of the beaches. It took us both a few hours to deal with the consuming flames of lust within. Suddenly, six hours later, Baba stopped in front of us and said, “For a young man, too much association with girls is like putting ghee in the fire.” His eyes glinted back the knowledge of that day’s episode on the beach. We eyed each other as he walked off.

On most days, Baba would give me the signal from the palace balcony to lead public bhajans on the lawn. Near the end of his stay, Baba agreed to a massive public darshan in the Town Square of Panjim. I joined Raja Reddy up front at the microphones. Earlier, I had been called apart from the others to join Baba, Raja, the governor and several key people in a spacious lounge overlooking the sea. Baba boasted about me.

By the time Baba left Goa on December 21st on a chartered plane to Bombay, we were so caught up in the drama of being on the road with Baba that we followed him. Kasturi and Raja Reddy had repeatedly told me that Baba wanted me to follow them on to Bombay.

Early the next morning, we took the same boat that I had taken the year before, going from Panjim to Bombay. It was December 22, a full month since leaving the wilderness of Puttaparthi. Yet so much had been crammed in that it felt more like six months. And what had begun as a week’s jaunt from Whitefield to Goa would later turn into a month and a half tour with Baba, a far more ambitious itinerary than any of us suspected when we left.

The boat ride was a thrill. We stayed in Panjim the final night at a guesthouse: a bedbug-infested place that caused Wendell and me to go on a three a.m. walk, we were so tormented. Exhausted in the Panjim night, I barely missed stepping on a thick, squirming, venomous Russell’s viper that had been previously hit by a car. I later used a stick and pushed it into a gutter.

In the temperate clime of the 24-hour boat ride, we camped out on the ship’s upper deck on several premier benches. Wendell remained in constant awe of the deep beauty of the Arabian Sea, the Arab dhous in the distance, and the stunning shoreline, shifting and slowly moving by. The ship’s route was parallel to the shore, offering a constant view of the Indian tropics. Occasionally an ancient temple would drift by. Other times we could spot elephants moving logs or water buffalo at work.

On December 22nd, after a wind-swept night on deck

with catnaps interspersing our cross-talk, we pulled into the dark Bombay docks at about 5 a.m. Several hours later, we bussed to Bombay’s Victoria Train Station, had breakfast, and then took the commuter train to the Bombay suburb of Andheri out beyond the Santa Cruz airport. We passed miles and miles of highrises interspersed with unspeakable slums. Then we would pass brackish marshland of sewage conduits and tin can and cardboard shanties bridged over by the Bombay freeways.

When we arrived at Baba’s massive Dharmakshetra complex in Andheri, crews of workers were working twenty-four hours a day getting the reception-hall and stage ready for the coming special Baba Christmas event in Bombay. We entered an immense tent auditorium with a huge stage. Baba told me that he wanted us to stay there at the complex. Then I got him aside and showed him the photos of Wendell’s “sand Baba.” Almost with awe in his voice, Baba responded, “Very good. Perfect likeness.” A moment later I motioned Wendell to join us and stepped back.

Not long afterwards, as Wendell and I watched the Seva Dal crew working on the stage design of the super-stage, Kasturi appeared, calling over the present chairman of the team. In a trice, I was elected head of organization and logistics of the whole thing, and Wendell instantly became the head artist and designer. Hearing about Wendell’s ability, the former chairman stepped down, graciously pledging us his full cooperation and support. And such support was more abundant than either of us would have

dreamed.

The former chairman, whom I had just replaced, was one of Baba’s Bombay magnates. He was an almost Mediterranean-featured man who talked like “GI Joe.” Umong Mathur was one of the largest contracting and building magnates in the land whose empire encompassed a total monopoly of construction equipment. “From Bombay to Delhi to Calcutta to Madras, all construction equipment has to come from one of my assemblies. You name it and we have got it—bulldozers, caterpillars, cranes, jackhammers, steamrollers, steam shovels, cement mixers, air compressors, and the lot. See this huge auditorium, we cleared it out, leveled it, landscaped it, brought in the crushed rock, everything.” While he was trying to talk to three people at the same time, Umong waved his chauffeur to come up the drive. Almost pleading with us not to refuse, he then handed me two crisp hundred-rupee notes to purchase any art materials Wendell might need. He then asked me what he might do while we were gone. It was amazing. Wendell and I left in his luxury sedan in minutes.

We rejoiced down the highways and suburbs into the city, lounging in the spacious car, leaning out the window, and marveling how the tables of providence had flipped since we had left Whitefield. Again the point was driven home to us was that leaps of faith are always worth it.

And what an irony. If we had arrived as urchins in the Bombay docks, it was only to be given the keys to the great city of Bombay. Yet we had another battle, the waywardness of the mind. As soon as we reached the best art supplies store in Bombay, we got the materials then headed on the long journey back to the suburb of Andheri, passing through parts of Bombay that were almost unimaginable.

A strange ominous sense rippled my mood as we drove down a desolate, garbage-strewn highway that was bordered by blackened apartment buildings. Black, scaled bony vultures and condors, wings six feet wide, were circling high in the air in wide arcs. Others dotted the rooftops or hopped around refuse and dog carcasses on the road. Wandering through this blighted region, I noticed two Shaivite sadhus with tridents, yard long knotted hair, ochre rags, and a chalky powder covering their features. These imposing figures were a picture of death. They were part of a dark vision of desolation that had become strangely spiritual, almost as though a greater spiritual presence was setting up the scenery like a motion picture. I quietly marvelled at how India constantly offered these telegrams from beyond. I collected them in a back corner of my mind, including this sobering and haunting vision.

Back at the auditorium, Wendell’s eyes scanned the acres of overhead canvas and told Umong with a distant voice, “I need flowers of every color, hundreds and hundreds of them. I need glue and a plywood disk around twelve feet in diameter.” Within several hours, the green-eyed Michelangelo had detachments bringing him supplies from every sector of Bombay. It was all beginning to resemble the old Barnum and Bailey crews working on the Big Top.

During the evening darshan, I strolled outside the Dharmaketra complex amidst hundreds of bhajans screaming over the loudspeakers and fifteen thousand voices echoing back. I passed several tea shanties a few hundred feet away, just outside the barbed wire fence surrounding Dharmakshetra. Other than a large open field packed with cars, the area was quite barren except for another modern architectural wonder nearby, the Christian Mission Hospital.

I suddenly became conscious that it was Christmas Eve, and that I needed to be alone and reflect for a while. Augmenting my mood of dispassion was a general disgust with “outward appearances” in general and, amazingly, Baba’s form in particular. This may have derived as a subtle training tactic of Baba’s. I wasn’t sure. But at times, I wondered if the paradoxical fusion of beauty and gaudiness—or even bestiality—in Baba’s features wasn’t some higher riddle of sublimity. That at a certain period in sadhana, the aspirant, having been once pulled by the sweetness, but now more and more offended by the gaudiness or insufficiency, is forced to reject Baba’s form as a self-negating puzzle in order to be able to see the fuller nature of godhead underneath. Baba had often warned his followers not to become fixated sentimentally on his form, and that to do so would be the fateful mistake that would preclude their ever really knowing who he was.

As I leaned on the fence, I was suddenly confronted with a scene that reminded me of the Golden Cactus in Reno, Nevada. Sitting on the elevated landscape, with the monstrous full moon just above it, I saw a brightly lit object that fully resembled a flying saucer about to take off from a landing-site. It was Baba’s house.

Then, from the pit of my stomach, before I could suppress it, came a bothersome thought. It was also the logical question to ask on a Christmas Eve. “If Christ were here in this century, would he live in something that looked like a flying saucer on a launch pad?”

As an ocean of voices echoed out of the sky, I could not decide whether the object on the hill was awesome in some strange way or just another modern architectural fungoid affronting all good taste. The large, two-storied elliptical cement wonder was alternately glowing green and red by hidden lighting, paling the full moon. With a thousand and eight separate facets, it represented the thousand-and-eight petalled lotus of the gods. Indeed, every aspect about the structure had numerological significance: the main oak doors with the religious symbols of the major world religions, the gem-like facets of the walls, the moat surrounding it, the ramp leading over the moat, the symbols and murals inside, and the large overhanging arachnidic windows at the very top.

Then I noticed that on the hill beneath the saucer was a cement lotus the size of a small tree. It was backlit with purple light, reminding me of one of those suspended animation pods in a sci-fi movie. As it glowed a deep violet, various objects around it burned with fluorescent fire. This was the lotus out of which Baba would stand giving darshan to thousands in view beneath him.

I stood transfixed on Mahakali Road in all the fanfare of bhajans in the compound. I suddenly saw this Being in a brilliant red robe step on to the platform of a huge cement flower. There the little man, whose head of hair resembled a large anther, blossomed out of this cyclopean flower while radiating some phosphorescent otherworldly light. The crowd went dead silent as Baba’s “divine form” bestowed his grace on them. I was now watching myself watch Baba as a disinterested outsider. From a detached perspective, the Being on the hillside standing in the flower was indeed otherworldly. Indeed, an enigmatic god for the twentieth century.

Afterwards, still bemused and not necessarily in the Christmas spirit nor particularly elated, I sat glassy-eyed in the wooden tea shack sipping tea, while trying to peel away the next developmental layer of the psychic onion-skin. On tour, this kind of mental homework was often neglected, I quietly conceded to myself.

Chapter 17

Ending The Bombay Jaunt

W

endell worked all night painting and decorating the big plywood disc. The former chairman, Umong, who had left at 2:30 in the morning, was back by 7:00, holding a cup of coffee. He peered into Wendell’s hidden studio and briefly reminded me of the King of Milan peering into the Sistine Chapel to see Michelangelo at work. He blurted, “That thing’s a bloody miracle.” I hushed him and chased him away. Wendell had been in super concentration all night, and I hung with him through most of the marathon. In what was becoming a standard pattern, I was the only one he wanted around. By morning, Christmas morning, Wendell had created a staggering work of art for so little time.

At 9:30 a.m., before an already surging crowd, we the elect mounted the stage carrying the huge plywood disc to be fitted in the elevated entrance overlooking the stage. As Wendell and I hooked up the lights behind the disc, making the huge ornament complete, Baba’s limousine pulled up. A hush settled on the auditorium, as the present avatar strode across the flower-covered stage directly towards the disc. He seemed to study Wendell’s work for a long time, not bothering to look at the audience.

On the body of the disc, the “other avatar,” swaddled in a manger, shone in glorious wonder. Clustered around the infant Jesus were the three wise men, and Joseph and Mary looking on in awe as a yellow light radiated from the child’s head. Round the rim of the disc was a plush mat of purple flower buds. Bordering the painting itself was a circle of red flowers. All the animals, vestments and many details of the painting were composed of flower buds. The figures had the kind of moving biblical grandiosity, a self-luminating sharpness of contrast, which eerily resembled El Greco.

Meanwhile, I took charge of leading the surging crowd in bhajans before a battery of microphones when Baba nodded in my direction. The morning message was on the “God Miracle” and its lesson to doubters and those of little faith. For those who would dare question the present avatar came the warning, “There are many who cannot bear the splendor that emanates from me: the divinity expressed in and through every act of mine. They

label them as acts of mesmerism, or feats of magic. Their experience is limited. They hope by these words to cast a slur ... but God can do anything.”

As the days sped by, Wendell and I were treated almost as celebrities. At one point one of the three richest magnates in India invited us to an opening of one of his industrial plants, supplying limousines for all. It had an immense stage for Baba. I knew him—indeed, Mr. Kamani in India was a name equivalent to Rockefeller or Getty in America. I then recognized that he had been the translator at one of our interviews in Whitefield, electing to return to the city on the old crusty train (He was the manufacturer of Ambassador cars, among countless things). Baba joked that it was for show.

Also, a few others from Whitefield had trickled up to Bombay. And we had one more new addition to the fold, “Surya Das” (alias Herb Grubb). He was an interesting character with a twanging Tennessee accent—and knew just about everybody in the countercultural underground. Like many of us, it seemed Surya Das had already gone through the equivalent of several lifetimes of experience. He had even been part of Tim Leary’s Castalia Foundation experiments in Millbrook, New York, at the estate. His former girlfriend Chandra was in nearby Ganeshpur with Muktananda, but he knew Baba was the one. He hinted that he wanted to be art director, having been Botticelli in a previous life. I gave him the standard initiation, and he soon fell into line.

By the time we had been in Bombay a few weeks, we started getting increasing numbers of bad reports from Whitefield. Ed got a letter from his wife, Chris, still in Whitefield. In plain language, the group in Whitefield was hurtling into confusion and schism, with a whole number suddenly going off by themselves. It sounded like chaos.

Their last moment of group togetherness was at Reverend Ivan Carroll’s, of all places, on Christmas Eve. From all reports, it had actually been a brief interlude of relief and contentment, if not joy, for many of them. Forgetting themselves, they all sang Christmas carols and made themselves at home in a genuine American household with chairs, tables, dressers, a couch or two, bric-a-brac, a piano, and regular toilets. But what really gave it that downhome flavor, out in the middle of nowhere, was a midnight snack of gingerbread cookies, cakes, ice cream, hot cocoa, and pumpkin pie. But surely that shouldn’t stumble them. Love was love regardless of divine form.

In another letter before New Year’s, more details tabulated. Bette and Michelle, to escape the chaos of the girl’s house—themselves, seduced like all the others, into pot smoking—went off to a famous Baba devotee’s house in Madras. India and Marsha fled to the simplicity of the main ashram back in Puttaparthi, and word was also out that the fellows at the Blake cabin had all but abandoned ship.

By now, most of us at Dharmakshetra wondered if those at the Carrolls hadn’t been in an emotional confusion, perhaps promulgated finally over two different forms of the same God. I privately speculated that perhaps their sudden witness of the love of Christ (a new thing among many of them who were Jews)—and we were all willing to admit it was real—divided them needlessly. Or perhaps they were answering back to Baba’s neglecting them, grabbing on to a new available God-form. But whatever the case, certainly Baba had affirmed his identity with Christ in no uncertain terms. So what might have confused them? Were not Christ and Baba fundamentally the same?

Wendell and I had discussed this, since both of us were hard-core nondualists and wanted to escape the lower density realm of forms anyway and that included Baba’s incarnated “vehicle.” An allegiance to Baba sheerly through associating his bodily form with his ultimate nature was bound to fail. Instead of being swayed by Baba in the flesh, getting rushes of faith through his words and gestures, we would go for the more sure foundation of the invisible consciousness that Baba embodied.

The other side of the transcendent, Gnostic, and monistic consciousness was that there was more freedom of motion for the Jnanin, one following the path of “wisdom” transcending form. For instance, when Baba drove to the Kamani estate one night for dinner, Wendell and I decided to hit the town alone. We walked the downtown cricket green and more modern parts of the big city. We saw the movie “Woodstock,” and then felt strong enough spiritually to handle a high-class vegetarian meal along a boulevard that reminded me of December Street in Genoa. Naturally, I monitored my consciousness through these variant moments, resisting material entrapment. As Wendell and I agreed, we were using “the thorn of Maya to remove the thorn of Maya.” We even checked that one out with

some of the girls we saw—appreciating them without getting too excited. By midnight, it was time for a banana split at Kwality Restaurant. And again, I felt in full control. I was salivating like a German Shepherd by the time this treasure was laid before me, and I must say, it tasted beyond belief.

A few days later, Baba invited me alone to the executive dining room to join him and a number of dignitaries for a meal. And again, I made sure to walk that difficult edge of both enjoying great food while transcending it. It seemed the more you transcended it, the more of it you would get. On another level, I knew that if this gravy train of favor ended, I wanted to make sure that by then I transcended Baba’s form.

India’s top physicist Dr. Bhagavantum arrived, and I knew that meant that he and I would hang out on the town. I joined him in the taxi to the Bombay Taj hotel. He had just addressed the assembly hall at Dharmakshetra with the final challenge: “And Baba is the only one in the entire world who can stand up and say ‘I am God’ time after time and get away with it. If he were not God, they would have stoned him, but they cannot, he is just too powerful. If you think he is just another guru, you are misguided. He will continue to declare his divinity to the entire world.”

My interest with Dr. Bhagavantam’s was an ongoing discussion we had been having about the cross-fertilization of mystical spirituality to the West as preparation for the avatar. The groundwork for the New Age Movement was already under way. Some of the beacons in the West who were behind this were people I knew, and I had been ahead of a whole number of them. Yes, there were changes in the West: as ions before a storm, America was about to break out into a spiritual monsoon that would utterly wash away the arid dust of rationalism. Then it would be ready for the supramental light concretized as Sai Baba. We parted on a very positive note that lasted only till the next afternoon.

Seeds of Light

T

he sudden arrival of a distraught and despairing Victoria, thin as a broomstick and wearing a dark blue sari, was a fearful omen that the seeds of light in our own community were not taking roots properly. And if the seeds weren’t growing properly right under the direct radiance of Baba, then what chance did those myriads of seeds in America have who never come closer to Baba than within a mile or two?

The same Vickie whom I met under the “tree of wisdom” at Puttaparthi a year back, the companion to the handsome young Englishman, Anthony, who was now exiled in Malta, was wearing her bravest chin-up expression, but it didn’t last. When I escorted her past the sentry gate, the modern complex all completely new to her, up the flower-lined drive to the base of the ramp of Baba’s saucer, she soon began to waver as Baba came out of the door, down the ramp, and stood with us at the base.

A look bordering on inquisitive impatience flickered across Baba’s face. I could almost feel Vickie’s mind leap back in alarm, catching itself at the precipice of a huge fall, “No, Baba, not that reaction, not that. No, you’re supposed to ... right now ... don’t you know?. . .”

Vickie’s whole frame started to shudder as she fought back a slow sob. Baba searchingly looked at us, back and forth. He asked me, “What is it?” I gave him an appeasing wink to not cast her away. Then I told him, “Baba, she’s leaving to Europe now. Wants blessings.”

“Yes, yes, I know, I know.” Baba impatiently acknowledged. At this point, Vickie couldn’t even speak and Baba looked hurried and dispassionate. Baba also showed a lack of awareness of whatever private secret she wanted to tell him. She tearfully agreed in resignation, as he gave her a fortune-cookie description of her life as a disciple back in the West. He told her she would get married and ended it off with, “Very happy, very happy,” and headed on to the limo as she sobbed. For a second she reminded me of Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby, somehow trapped by the powers of evil.

She and I strolled down the drive as the sun sank out of the sky. When we reached the sentry gate, a thousand searching eyes fell upon us as though we were Bombay movie stars.

Vickie said goodbye to the other Westerners while I got dressed to leave with her for the evening. It almost felt like prom night with this once very pretty honey-blonde, now fading and needing some long-term healing. As I said, I had always liked Vickie, and I knew the feeling was mutual. Out of my ascetic’s suitcase I located my old blue denim jacket and wheat jeans, and she and I left in a taxi. I am sure Wendell gave me a look of caution.

And indeed, I was in an odd mood. I wanted to forget that I was in India that night. I was feeling my own battle fatigue from the complexities of sadhana, the Whitefield apostasy, Vickie’s deterioration, the deep changes

going on within me, all combined with our recent encounter with Baba on his drive—Baba, dismissive and disinterested, indeed, seemingly unaware.

At the dining room of her hotel at Juhu Beach, Vickie stumbled through the story, frantically dropping cutlery and battling with her food. Bruce, Peter, Benno, Martin, Kerry, Janet, and Vickie had held nightly get-togethers in Whitefield. Apparently, they had been having many similar perceptions and doubts about Baba. Then grievances were aired, along with feelings about India in general. The blight became an epidemic, one rotten apple had

spoiled the barrel, and all of them became alienated not only from Baba but also from one another. Each was proceeding along his own course. But just before complete ruination, Vickie, too weak to hold it on her own, repented. What the others had said about Baba just could not be true. She knew she had to get away from the other backsliders as quickly as possible, leave India, and think things out again in the quiet of Dorset or Malta, or wherever she went.

How sad to have been with Baba for a year now, and leave by such ignoble means, no stronger in faith, and not visibly anymore built-up than the day she and Anthony alighted upon Puttaparthi. But when all else failed, all other foundations collapsing, Vickie could clutch at the diminishing microbe of her first love, faith in Baba, and like a marriage vow, she would faithfully hold on to this if nothing else endured and all else perished. Namely, a great generalized hope, above the strata of particulars, just an airy cumulus cloud of blind faith, fully divorced from materiality, circumstance, historicity, logic, and the wiles of the mind, and therefore free of attack from lies and inconsistencies. The final resolution had to be that the dance of life must go on at all costs.

What about marriage to Anthony in respect to Baba’s prophecy? Oh, the vicissitudes of the world would take care of themselves came the reply, in the tone of one brought up in aristocracy, yet with equal self-abasement to nullify that familiar class pride. Accustomed to estates and manor-houses in Essex and London, nursemaids since childhood, and the English easy life of gentry such as her parents and other lords and ladies, Vickie now had her own trust fund from the family estate that would insure her from ever having to worry about the struggles and inconveniences of living. I wondered if this rather inviting door, always open to her, combined with the soft life of her past, had gotten the better of her. “Heavens, no!” came her response.

Vickie

For a while there was wounded gossip, little shockers on the highway to perfection.

Then inevitably, the same artillery of judgment that had been focused on Kerry and Janet turned on Vickie, despite my very real affection for her. I felt the loneliness of the adept as something coldly announced to my heart, “Look how your friends are being weeded away. Now are they your friends?” This same impersonality would cut at the roots of every attachment to the world, as systematic and unrelenting as the microbe or worm in the machinery of death, gnawing away on a decomposing body, splitting, spewing, and foaming apart the cells and fibers of the once-beloved.

The verdict fell. Vickie would remain her own sweet self, puttering through the householder’s life, but she would not become that neutrino of desperate acceleration capable of jumping across the void.

After a fond embrace at a second-floor motel door, I bade farewell to another disciple who had fallen by the wayside in Baba’s increasingly subtle screening. She flew out the next morning.

I walked by the door of the saucer a few days later and Baba’s playful voice emerged. It was time for a tour. I got the others. Out of Baba’s puppet closet of identities, Baba the formless summoned Baba the proud tour guide. We saw it all—antechambers, side rooms, the large circular stairs and displays. A night later I returned with the others for a special concert in his luxury chamber with one of the best musicians in the land. The cologne drenched singer warbled oratorios. My mind drifted as the singer preened. Baba’s smile turned almost to a tolerant sneer as something seemed to say, “You’re a flea fluttering in the face of a huge sun, and some day, on the other side of death, you will know and tremble.”

Such alien epiphanies continued:

We are standing one night in the foyer, cleaning out the last traces of ice cream from our Dixie cups. Baba walks by and, like a drill sergeant, yells out “CREM” with a Mick Jagger mouth roll. Some chuckle nervously. While we are recovering from the last little jab, in comes an uppercut from the cosmic ringmaster.

Baba walks near a small baby, and it lets out a scream as though someone had jammed a red-hot poker through its skull. The mother is nervous and apologetic as Baba leans in towards the baby. The more the dazzling and powerful being tries to humor it, the more it wails. Whenever the brilliant red figure moves around the room, it screams. Baba turns to look at it again, and it screams more, in spasms, like a baby sparrow pinned down by a tomcat. Finally, the red-gowned figure leaves the foyer, pursued by screams, as it heads under the awning, up the ramp, and into the saucer. The howling quiets immediately.

Sometimes Baba might saturate us with nonsense puns. Or with a mock voice, he might announce something: “The seven rishis, seven sounds, seven oceans, seven planes, seven foreigners, now the Seven Rockets.” For a second, it might be a mutation of the voice of General Curtis LeMay giving out awards for valor, but with a twist in intonation at the end. Or the way someone talks to his pet German Shepherd. We would emerge into public view, psychically limping as thousands of eyes look up in wonder from behind the roped-off auditoriums. Our subdued ironic whispers would elude them. “They probably think we’ve just seen Brahma Loka.”

“Yeah, well, I feel like I just came back from sledge-hammer loka, Jack.”

“Well, they never advertised ego death as a picnic.”

The process of ego death sometimes had a strange effect on us. When we were lavished with favor, the inner process was almost in reverse, like visits to the vampire. It was evidence to us that Baba was burning away deep impurities, the deep roots of the ego—the very thing keeping us from the ocean of light.

Finally, after a month, Baba’s Bombay tour came to an end. In that time, he had solidified us into a group of seven, with me still at the head. As the faithful remnant, we had been lavished with greater riches. Not so for those who had stayed behind in Whitefield.

By the time we left Bombay on the express train back to Bangalore on January 15th, 1971, we had been gone for a month and a half, four weeks in Bombay and two in Goa. The long train ride was one of reflection, deep reflection. Ancient monuments would pass beneath the train window, as I reflected that we never quite knew what was coming next.

Chapter 18 The Anvil of God

“P

ah, cracks, all cracks,” the hard face of God declared, with a tone of wounded anger resembled a father disinheriting a recalcitrant son. Across the Brindavan darshan line as we

arrived was a sad collection of faces: the unfaithful long-crippled Western remnant now deep in shame. Facing us on the girls’ side was a motley of

pale faces with quivering mouths, making it evident that they were slowly dying inside and now looking back pitifully at Baba.

Baba hurried up to me as I approached the darshan line and said in a whisper, “Faith of others now complete ruin. Your group, all seven, go to Puttaparthi now. Stay separate. Soon, I’m coming also. Huhhhh?” “Yes, Baba.” He abruptly left back towards the private gate, passing the others without a glimmer of recognition.

Now that exclusion from Baba’s presence was imminent, the question of even a tolerant glance from Baba was beyond measure, to say nothing of the original hope that Baba would chase them around with tears in his eyes, so common with penitent parents who have ignored their children for far too long.

While the Western “cracks” remained in the outer courtyard, resem

bling pariahs begging for re-admission to the estate of their offended master, I hurried past the Krishna fountain, up the tiered steps, and down the center path into the inner gardens. A spiritual fire burned inside me. Too much was at stake to risk a wrong move, and I needed his approval. In some way, I felt like Arjuna approaching Krishna, and my mind shifted gears into a classic Hindu epochal mode.

I begin peering from behind the trees into Baba’s living room. The brilliant-robed figure within is giving counsel to several heads of state. But it comes to a halt.

The eyes of Baba penetrate out the door. The governor is left in midsentence, as Baba springs up from his chair and on out the door in quick, athletic steps. A hush falls on those outside as the red figure hurries to the apple orchard where his chosen disciple in white dashes before him into plain view. We are face to face, and I feel my mind switching into overdrive.

Images of Siva looking into the Sun Lake and a billion heads reflecting back, going out like a tide, into all creation. Movements in the garden are frozen like a jammed music box, and all the surroundings become paper images. The Master has put the entire universe into idle gear for the infinitely more precious jewel of a single man’s hunger for God’s love. Indeed, what an unearthly bargaining power love must have. Solar bodies and galaxies drift in their courses as mere objects of delight, reminders of that moment of God meeting God, one the disciple, the other the fully realized avatar. Drum rolls pass across the sky like thunder from horizon to horizon.

Therefore, again, what is a star but a teardrop of God’s concern for those whom he loves, when Jiva meets Ishwara?

Ye tu sarvani karmani mayi sannyasa matparah

ananyenai va yogena mem dhyayanta upasate

tesam aham samuddharta mrytchu samsara sa garat bhavami nachirat partha mayy avesita chetasam. (Bhagavad Gita, 12:7)

As we stood face to face in the orchard, rushing in on the silence came the inevitable dictates of the outer world. Baba’s eyes filled with eager concern. “What, Tal?”

“Baba, Wendell has a taxi waiting to go. Can we take it now to

Puttaparthi?”

“Yes, you have my permission. I am coming to Puttaparthi in a few days.

Stay separate. Only the seven now permitted to use the foreigners’ room.

Others not permitted. Don’t speak with the others. Now faith is complete

spoiled. . . . I want only your love. Don’t worry, if you have physical needs,

moneys, don’t worry, Swami knows everything. I am always providing.”

The tone shifted, “Who is in the car?” Everyone was approved but two

friends of Wendell’s. “I know, Bungaah, faith is not good. Go now, you have

my blessings.”

I fired out of the gate, and we were gone in minutes as broken faces

looked up, looking infinitely small. Being itself continually shifted size

through its various human vehicles.

A return to the wilderness

A

fter Baba’s command, we were on our way to Puttaparthi in a rented car, as the timelessness of village India rolled by. I was sated with the cosmopolitan offerings of the big cities and the sheer energy of the tour. Now I was ready for the gearshift into the wilderness. Beyond that, I was writing my book on Baba to be published in Calcutta by the Chief Justice of Bengal, Sri Dutta. I wanted to capture the freshness of the Goa healing and the Bombay tour. It also meant I had something to do, a task in the wilderness. I planned to use Kasturi’s editor’s desk.

Baba’s absence expanded from several days following our arrival to several weeks. The old hangers-on at Whitefield would be ignored by Baba, and a completely new group of arrivals from Hilda’s group in New York would first reach Baba at Brindavan. He embraced them as long-lost children, and then sent them up to the main ashram, where we would welcome them warily.

Others among the cracks would continue to remain in Whitefield after Baba left for Puttaparthi, Anne and Arnie among them. They would perhaps search their hearts in Baba’s absence.

Once we arrived on the main ashram, I carefully looked at the hard-line hold-overs, who either never went to Whitefield in mid-November or returned soon after, for signs of change. India and Marsha conveyed that they had grown in grace. Others survived. Now they almost dreaded the arrival of boisterous “worldly” New Yorkers with fast city vibes, hang-ups, and hustle.

Sandy the Australian and Zolt the Hungarian had taken a fascinating turn. Sandy was the same, ever resembling a thinned, sparkling water nymph, though perhaps sparkling less. Zolt, who before resembled a Bruegel medieval peasant, now vied for the dubious distinction of the Simple-Simon village idiot. He had a new emaciated, knock-kneed, wateryeyed look that spoke of an ostentatious self-denial bordering on torture. The prematurely wizened Zolt would now be escorted around the ashram with the same vacant stare as those in sanatoriums, while Sandy could take pride in holding up her own budding little rishi and Vedic ascetic, head wobbling on a chicken-bone neck. He needed his rib cage a little bit bonier and a slightly larger walking stick to resemble Ramana Maharishi. It was sainthood through torture, one more path that a grinning, perverse ego could hide behind, the ashram equivalent to a Porsche in a parking lot. Sandy just loved gliding her man, or perhaps “non-man” around.

Only a few of the girls would get to use the usual cubicle reserved for the girls in the long row facing the luxury suites: India, Marsha, Sandy, the pregnant Barbara, and several shining recent arrivals from New York. The hangers-on and “cracks” would arrive and start congregating like Bedouin wanderers along the far end of the ashram, some along a roof accessible from the hillside.

When it was rumored that Baba’s car was finally coming—a hotline phone call from Brindavan to the phone in the ashram postmaster’s office to Kasturi—a wild plan of reconciliation was thought out by the “crack ringleaders” in the turbulent short hours following the call. The idea came through a channeled voice as many of them, now somewhat removed from the herd of the ashram, turned to signs and inward psychic channels to reaffirm their closeness to Baba. The surface rejection was to test the mettle of their faith in the ever-constant love of Baba. This was because they were now test-worthy in their walk.

In the hustle and bustle of the final hour, six or seven of them skipped, walked, and ran out the side gate, holding hands and beaming knowingly with a new found exuberance. They went down the barren road, running for a stretch, swaying a bit, skipping again, and marching with flowers in their hair, lapels, and bunched up in their hands, as children bearing forth their true playfulness. This enviable, childish spontaneity was a hallmark of essential purity and innocence. It showed that their inward nature was without blemish. The fornications of the past were mere passing clouds over the clear moon of the eternal atma.

In the final lap of the journey, Baba’s car edged around that one narrowing section of road clustered by trees on both sides. Meeting him head-on was a human roadblock, daisy-chained across the road, smiling, singing and prancing, now jumping up and down in jubilation as the car strained to a dead stop. Inches in front of the bumper, the ringleader gazed through the windshield with a goofy grin plastered across his face. The gleeful girls, giggled, shrieked, and pranced, adorning the car with flower petals, while the human tentacle wrapped around the car. Now for Baba’s forgiving delight.

The window rolled down, two black orbs radiated fury. Then came the judgment, tearing up the air with the force of thunder rippling out in waves of blackened light. “Pssssttt. Foreign cracks get out of the way. Go away from Puttaparthi. Acting like hippies, not my bhaktas. Go. Get out.”

The car sped on. Exuberance turned to wrenching despair. The inner message had betrayed them, and now they stood doubled up, feeling like something in them had been torn out like a rotten onion skin. They came slinking back into the ashram, returning to the roof community.

On the roof an infuriated Kasturi attempted to carry out Baba’s command of eviction. The “cracks” lay back and moaned. If it came to it, they would have to be dragged away to the fence where they would lie out and die in the sun rather than leave.

Contrasting with the “cracks” was the new wave of Americans who had recently arrived, effervescing over their destiny. In their presence was a plump Indian girl named Tatu from a prominent Bombay family of film producers. She commanded sufficient charisma and eloquence to quickly take over the emotionally bankrupt rooftop community of outcasts. She was “the rooftop prophetess” claiming a psychic channel to the very heart of Baba. Her activities carried the fascination of a game room discovered by a wandering horde of bored tourists aboard an ocean liner. She had “guided” the group to meet Baba’s returning car. They should not let outward rejections fool them, she told them later. Now, instead of the wasteland of exiles that the roof was supposed to be, it hummed and crackled with messages from the “higher Baba,” proving that theirs was the greatest access to the coveted master. Soon, a small group of girls was selected as sufficiently anointed to share Tatu’s most cryptic confidences. All but one of them was from the new arrivals. It was indeed to be quite the cosmic mini-drama.

Even though Kasturi, by Baba’s command, declared Tatu off-limits, the inner circle knew that it was merely a high test designated for the final unshacklings preceding enlightenment in so stupendous a soul as Tatu. In the dead of night, the spirit voices had hinted more than once that hers was to be a great mission, and none but the “three American sisters” knew it, and they weren’t about to tell. Wendell and I looked on in grim amusement. In our private suite, I had the main bed roll location, with Wendell, Ed, Jerry, and Surya Das nearby.

But just when the “cracks” seemed irreparably alienated, Baba suddenly called everyone in for an interview.

A wounded and gifted generation

O

ur group had grown so large that Baba directed me to assemble everyone in the prayer hall, closed off from the outside. Baba looked out over the 40 others in the spacious prayer hall and rested his foot in my lap, using it for a footstool. He twinkled merrily down at me. A hushed, wide-eyed amazement passed over the group. When one of the newer fellows tried to touch his foot, Baba moved it and said, “Not ready, too much current. Not like this Rowdie.”

Sitting before Baba was a crowd of vulnerable and broken people and any word of kindness, at this point, would endear these lost people to Baba forever. And those words of restoration came. Baba hit dead center when he began to outline what is now known as the dysfunctional American family. Family estrangement was a common trait among this bold group of seekers.

Our assemblage was a daring and visionary generation, as well as a wounded one. More often than not, their parents had rationalized their inability to love them as children or form deep emotional bonds—that true nourishment that would make a child robust, stable, and complete.

The parents of the generation that sat before Baba were all self-admitted nice guys and reasonable people whose gods were science and materialism. As people of reason, they would intellectually stone the prophets and deny the supernatural, God above all. These were humanists out to better the world through education and reason. Their situational morality was invented on the fly. Looking for any ultimate meaning was seen as a vain pursuit.

Some of the parents of our group were among the very leaders of science and education who would transform the world. Respectable on the outside, they were rarely consistent with their beliefs. They had created homes that had everything from saunas to vibrating toothbrushes, but they were barren emotional landscapes. For the youth in India whose dad was a Stanford mathematician, Baba’s words of love would fall from the sky like spun gold. They would affirm that he had been right all along, that he was a soul and not a biochemical supercomputer founded on some random cosmic accident.

Baba addressed this broken and gifted generation:

“Many of you coming on a long journey to India, taking many risks, going through many difficulties. For many years searching, searching for love. You did not get parents’ love in American families. See, American family is divided. Selfish. Each person thinking of himself, not his duty. Not good, very bad. Parents in America give many material articles but no prema, no love. I am speaking of human love, not divine love. Human love far less, but still important. Without human love child is like a plant without water, withers. Growing up hurting, angry, even hating parents.

“Indian family different. In India, there are large families, growing together many generations, all members: father, grandfathers, sometimes great-grandfathers, uncles, mothers, grandmothers, many relatives. Not separating from home at 20 years like in America. Members in Indian families are loyal, very dependent. The child is molded better. He is obedient

and takes pride in pleasing his family. Very afraid of displeasing parents with moral sin. Moral sin selfish. If he is bad, the whole family suffers. Yes, his mistake tarnishes the family name, and all suffer with his mistake. But all over America is complete immorality.”

And then came the missile to the heart:

“You come here for love...the mother’s love you missed. I love you more than a thousand mothers. And a thousand times more than your mother.”

There was a long pause, the silence welling underneath with choked emotion. “This is also a privilege, because this is divine love. God’s love.”

Baba gave us a long, searching look. “I would give my blood for you.” Many of the girls from the old contingent started sniffling. I just squeezed Baba’s foot, and looked up with contrite gratitude, as his gaze seemed to envelop me in an oozing nectar. “Yes, I also need your love.”

The interview ended with many people in tears. Baba’s mercy seemed overwhelming. The Avatar with the sword of perfect timing had left his victims pierced to the heart and broken by his will. With such forgiveness, who could resist his command to worship him as God, as he proclaimed in the early days? And what more suitable sacrifice than a human soul should one offer upon his altar? Such was the fabric of divine timing.

Within days Baba would be moving back to Whitefield, and that meant the uncertain shift of the Westerners, who would be hunting for houses again. The weeks seemed to speed by.

On the tumultuous day of mass departure, I stood by the side gate and felt jealousy for a fellow disciple for the first time. Wendell sat mysteriously in a black sedan after being called in to see Baba. He was headed to points unknown. Here was the Good Ship Lollipop going to Treasure Island and I was being left behind. Then I recalled images of a gleeful Kasturi toting around charcoal sketches and oil paintings of Wendell’s to and from the prayer hall. There was even the painting to be used for the cover of one of my books: a dazzling portrait of Baba with galaxies flowing out of the dark thunderheads of his hair. Wendell told me all he could, and I waved as my counterpart, the artist, was glorifying Baba as much as I, the writer. His mysterious caravan rolled past the side gate, cutting across arid plains to head towards Bukhapatnam.

Chapter 19

A Different Light

O

n the night of February 27, the cab took us from the central Bangalore bus terminus out through the 12 miles of countryside to the quiet little town of Whitefield. We stopped on the

large circular park in front of the “Major’s house,” where all eleven of us had stayed before the Goa trip. My backup option was the Blake cabin out in the open fields over a mile away, an impossible target for an ordinary car, considering the riveted boulder-strewn approach road.

Then, sure enough, what I feared most happened. The light coming from the Major’s house revealed that the once-bare rooms had since been filled with furniture. I checked all the doors, running around the house in the nippy air. Ed soon found out from the Anglo-Indian student rabble next door, drinking and playing poker in their little cabin, that some “blokes” just started moving in the day before. I had my heart set on this large house, hoping a better era would follow. Now we had to let go of the cab, for we had nowhere to go. We might even have to camp out with our luggage till morning.

From out of the chilly darkness, a slow inspiration dawned on me as I caught the yonder light emerging out of Carroll’s frosted windows— something I hadn’t banked on as an alternative.

Indeed, I had all but forgotten the two missionaries whom I had seen only once on that November day when they came over to Kerry and Janet’s cabin to invite us all over for Christmas carols. The breadth of their offer, should we ever have any needs, came to mind.

Ed and Surya Das noticed me caught up in thought as I tentatively moved in the direction of their house. “You all guard the luggage, I think I’ve got the answer,” I yelled back.

What concerned me as I went through the gate was the delicateness of the moment. One spiritual block would be facing another: the broad and subtle path to God with its resilient brilliance, facing that ever-sofaithful remnant of “straight-and-narrow-wayers” whose relentless grip on the hem of that one avatar, Jesus Christ, was of such magnitude that, for me to march in upon their own encampment and split that bond asunder so that they might acquiesce to the Godhood of more than that one single Messiah, would be a spiritual victory of titanic proportions. Perhaps sensing the weight of this, my spirit welled up within as though nervous before battle, seeking every full breath of air available before the doorbell was answered. To be sure, we needed no help from them; if we had to, we could brave the chilly air in the little park, for Baba’s abundance was with us always.

“Hi,” I projected with stout-hearted abandon, as the door swung open, revealing the two clear eyes of Mrs. Carroll beaming back warmly behind a plain pair of glasses. Then another face popped into view, more or less through the crack along the top of the door, grinning down goodnaturedly at me. “Well, hello. Come on in, we were just thinking about you.” It was Reverend Ivan, smiling like Jiminy Cricket.

Within a minute my plan was in effect. Soon after, Ed and Surya Das emerged out of the blackness into the porch-light after I called them, perhaps resembling two Mexican banditos in waiting. On up the path they smiled, Ed somewhat impishly and Surya Das as transcendentally as ever. Inside the house, the Carrolls’ helper had all but reset the dining room table, having already put out three cups of hot steaming chocolate. We mutually nodded to shelve the debate on higher truth till the food, soon out on the table, was disposed of.

The table scene must have, at times, resembled the tenor of W. C. Fields as Dr. Quack, lodging in with the good old simple folk in “Pioneer Days Is Here Again.” A trickle of spiritual banter was maintained, no matter how overpowering the next bite of food was, putting in evidence our true ascetic willpower. This was a true Midwest farm feast, from home-style mashed potatoes to the roast beef, which we religiously avoided, though I wanted to eat half the side off it, being a carnivore by nature. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches instead. I had noticed recently that my hands trembled when I ate food this good, the deep constant hunger in me was so great. The fork in my hand shook noticeably as I tried to conceal it.

Playing in the background, I heard for the first time in any depth, the first traces of classical music since coming to India.

After the sumptuous meal, I opted for an excerpt of Wagner, and sank into an armchair. Mrs. Carroll asked Eddie what sort of music he liked.

A wry smile disengaged an imaginary Havana; he looked over to her and responded, “Ya ever hear of ‘Aqua Lung’ by Jethro Tull?”

“No, can’t say I have. I’m sure you all listen to brands of music that we don’t even know exist,” Mrs. Carroll responded diplomatically.

The tall Reverend finally broke his long stare off through the ceiling, and said, “Reckon it’s time for us all to hit the hay. In this house we generally have a moment of prayer with the Lord before turning in. Are you folks averse to joining us?”

“Oh no, not at all,” came our unified response.

As the two missionaries prayed, the lightkey feeling of the evening went away, bringing in a quiet might of conviction, a power I found to be most baffling. Another finger than that of Baba pointed to the secrets of my heart, exposing thoughts and attitudes in a different light from the standpoint of holiness that would have no yoking with what I called “the negative polarity.”

I could also feel a quality of love which the Carrolls seemed so familiar with, suggesting that unpleasant notion of my own unworthiness and how far short of perfection I was in terms of...well, some kind of godly standard. This was an experience that I found to be most radical, especially since coming to India where this sense of deep “goodness” was nowhere to be found (it was certainly absent from my atheistic upbringing). Ecstatic, exalted consciousness, yes, I experienced that, but “goodness?” Not really. During the Reverend’s heartfelt prayer, it felt on the horizon of my mind as though some fiber of consciousness in me was on the fulcrum of oblivion. A resolve soon mounted in me to stockpile my own spiritual arsenal for the morrow.

As the Reverend and his wife escorted us down the hall to the main guest room, they urged all of us to unabashedly feel at home, that what was here was not theirs but the Lord’s. In certain ways, we fellows reminded them of those times their son Dale was with them. A picture atop a dresser revealed a large, athletic, blond fellow in glasses with short hair and strong eyes: the ideal son of devotion, integrity, and thoroughbred moral character—what Eddie would call a “straight cat.” But it

seemed that it took a wholesome family to produce such an honest good guy.

Eddie grabbed the adjacent laundry room, which had a small cot. Surya Das and I got the main guestroom with two handsome beds. Naturally, we insisted on sleeping on the floor while unrolling our mats over the rugs. Perhaps we thought we might convict them of their sin of sleeping on beds when other people slept on the floor. It might have even occurred to Eddie to drive the point home by curling up in the washing machine. Advanced adepts just didn’t need beds. We knew that the only way of escape from the prison of maya was to divorce oneself from all comforts. Yet our explanation didn’t put them to shame about their excesses. They were rather amused at high-sounding nonsense, and I felt like the infantile martyr who insists upon eating out of a dog’s bowl, while the others sit at a table: the same food mind you, but rather in the corner, slurping, where one can look morosely around at those eating at a table—those who would dare feast, while you undergo such hardship in the name of truth.

In a cozy room with all the furnishings but a triangular pennant on the wall saying “Penn State” to fit the genre of true Americana, Surya Das meditated on the floor in a full lotus as I raided the shower in the adjoining bathroom. Once in bed, we reflected on how the present set-up had been farthest from our minds as we left the arid wilderness of Puttaparthi that morning on the four-thirty bus. Now, facing us on the wall to greet our eyes before the lights went out, was a reprint of a painting of Christ which happened to be my favorite, capturing one whom I always knew to be too great to capture.

But evidently the painting and the house brought to mind a different train of thought in Surya Das. Thoughts of backwoods redneck Tennessee at his grandfolks’ house, where dwelled rigid little clingers-on to the institution known as churchianity. Lacking the love of a living faith, their lifestyle became a travesty of legalism, backstabbing, smallmindedness, and self-justification with all but what the Sermon on the Mount spoke of.

“God, they used to scare me,” Surya Das chuckled with a twang. He recounted the horrors of being caught sinning in his early teens. Then when the 60’s counterculture came, he grabbed it like a life-raft out of this ghetto of fundamentalism. His tales of frustration on the old farm continued.

“Did I ever tell you about Granddaddy?,” butted in Surya Das. “He was hornier than a bull toad. Used to keep dirty pictures hidden around the house. Talked to me about girls sometimes. If Grandma ever got wind of it, I ‘spect she woulda just about died, but no wonder. Hell, I doubt if they’d boned-out even once in twenty years. I tell you,” Surya Das chortled, “He was hurtin.’ Sometimes when I used to lie awake late at night, I’d hear him callin’ down the hall, ‘Thelma ... Thelma.’ And a weary voice would answer back, ‘Aw, what is it George? And there’d be a long silence, and then Grand-daddy would think of somethin.’ ‘Uhhh, what time did you say that picnic was tomorrow? And she’d answer back, ‘Come on George, 4:30. Now I was practically asleep.’ Half an hour, later it’d start up all over again. I’d hear, ‘Thelma ... Thelma.’ Sour as a lemon, she’d ask, ‘What is it this time, George? And he’d answer back, ‘Aw, uhhh, never mind . . . ubhh.’ It was pathetic. Sometimes, they’d do this back and forth five or six times. If that’s what their religion does to them, it ain’t right. Who’d ever want to marry an old prune like that anyway?”

“Hell, I’d a kicked her out of the house years ago if I were him ... why stand for it? . . . he was just yeller. If she can’t even put out, what good is she? Certainly, there’s no earth-changing magic in their company. I’d prefer a dog, at least they’re cheerful.”

“Yup, I know what you mean. Boondocks consciousness. She wants it just as bad, but maneuvers the poor dude into playing the dirty man who initiates the thing again and again till she approves, does a noble deed, and then comes out wearing white robes. Your grandma’s whole concept of sin connected with marital sex is perverted. I don’t even think it’s Christian, to be honest. It’s a pride number, but she’ll get burned for such hypocrisy in the long run.”

“There’s probably a special astral hell for all those who engage in sexual blackmail.”

“Yeah, all that dammed-up horniness of a lifetime consumes them, while they get stuck with some wet noodle who reads the cosmic Wall Street Journal all day and night and doesn’t even want to talk.”

Surya Das concluded, “The thing about celibacy over here in India is that it isn’t vindictive. The Hindus do it more than we do, but they understand why they’re doing it. They’re abstaining out of a sense of higher love, that’s why. They’re transmuting that energy.”

Meanwhile, my energy was transmuting into sleep as I sank into one of the most untroubled and refreshing sleeps I had had in a long time. The bed itself, for a body now adjusted to straw mats and cement floors, reminded me of a cloud. I hated the idea of leaving it.

At 7:00 a.m. I reluctantly woke up, seeing the gentle dawn across the curtains. Then I became conscious of sounds emerging out of the living room. First low mumbling, then a motley of Indian and American voices singing hymns, then both of the Carrolls speaking in subdued tones. Then a flowing music soon to follow caught me up in a lazy reflection. I didn’t have that edgy sense of alienation from the world or confusion of thought that I so often did at the comparable hour on the ashram, when I would awake to a music that would also flow and echo in mysterious twists, the unfailing melodious voice of Vijaya contorting and whining through the beautiful but sad scales of the Suprabhattam.

Mrs. Carroll’s hand gently rapped on the door to alert us for breakfast. They would be off to perform church duties, and we would be going about our business of finding a place. The remnant of the Sunday school, Indians of all ages, gleamed when we appeared, only to suddenly look disappointed upon hearing of our discipleship under Baba. Some of them had been Baba devotees.

Within another hour or two, we foreclosed the possibility of other disciples beating us to the Blake cabin. It was almost picturesque as it sat under a cluster of trees on what had once been productive farmland. We had tea with Mrs. Blake, an old Anglo-Indian woman, and bantered about colonial days when the British knew how to run things, before the insufferable weight of the nation would buckle under political and economic pandemonium and corruption.

The main farmhouse was very much run down, indicating clearly the reason for Mrs. Blake’s acute interest in a spot payment on the rent. Yet, compared to the Blake Cabin a hundred feet away, the main farmhouse looked like a mansion. Over the entrance of the little cabin were words that Gill had scrawled crudely with chalk, “Shanti Kutir,” or abode of peace, which belied everything it became for Gill in tragic irony. We agreed to move in the next day.

By Sunday dinner that evening, Ivan had preached an evening sermon at the handsome stone church across the circle, and we were feeling a little more rooted now that we had our own place awaiting us.

Two blocks of belief

B

ut our after dinner conversation in the living room wasn’t light-key for long. Evidently, the Carrolls had some kind of burden for us. And I was no less zealous that the truth not be maligned by well-intentioned prejudice that might interfere in some deep way with the Carrolls’ acceptance of Baba, whose name equally with Christ meant truth, only in Sanskrit.

The living room oozed with power as the circle of faces looked at each successive speaker. Both blocks of belief could not be true at the same time: Either we could successively synthesize “A” with “Non-A,” or “A” would be right in its stubborn affirmation that it was intellectual schizophrenia to link it with “Non-A.” In other words, if it’s all one, we could engulf them, Christian or not; but if they could keep us from engulfing them, then it is not all one. The gospel was uncompromisingly unique and exclusive.

First, I had to deal with the formidable task of the Bible as I looked at the rock-hard determination behind their eyes. After all, I proposed, was not the “Logos” an eternal principle forever repeating itself in a multitude of contexts? And was not the entire written account of this Logos an allegory of truth too exalted to articulate by its overt examples? What about a yin-yang theme in the Garden of Eden? They disagreed to the very foundations of their personalities.

We had no trouble with either the supernatural or miracles; that was old hat to us, we saw them every day. We also knew that Christ was legitimate, so what were they getting at? We believed in him along with other avatars. Didn’t they know that the cosmic mind could easily work out so complex a scheme (accurate to the very final atom) as Christ’s advent? But they countered that it wasn’t an impersonal cosmic mind, it was a transcendent God. And Christ’s advent stood on hundreds of Old Testament prophecies, not the cosmic mind.

Then “was Scripture infallible?” they asked me. “Oh, sure, the God who can hold the North Star in the heavens can easily preserve all Scripture, be it the Bible or the Upanishads,” I responded.

Indeed, He could provide that Scripture not be adulterated through the ages; but let us make sure exactly what that Scripture is, they recommended, pointing to one Christ and one incident of incarnation.

Agreed, I said, that Christ was a person in history, as much in the flesh as Tiberius or Xerxes, and more historically substantiated than any single human being of antiquity by all legal-historical criteria. But he was also the cosmic Christ, having incarnated before as an absolute principle, and as such, he has touched all Scripture in all forms. I was pushing the Universal Logos theme.

Where does it say that? they asked.

Surya Das, smiling like the noble savage, interjected his wealth of Indian lore. Why, the Yacqui Indians, the Aztecs, and, at least one other tribe had all seen appearances of the “Great White Master.” Joseph Smith of the Mormons also said bluntly that Christ had appeared to the Indians in America. Besides, I now continued, Cayce in his readings from the Akashic records, the skein of the cosmic mind, unearthed a long genealogy of Christ’s past incarnations: for instance, his appearance as Melchizidek. Besides, Levi— who like Cayce went into the cosmic mind to write The Aquarian Gospel, a gospel more revealing for this age due to the higher evolution of souls—endorsed all of Cayce’s observations, agreeing especially on the unknown years of Christ, from age 12 to 30, where Christ sojourned to the East as part of his training as a master. And where could there be a greater theme of unification than to have Christ share in the spiritual wealth of the East?

The Carrolls observed that it was a dubious wealth, of which an army of saints could still spend forever picking up the pieces of wretched humanity, but go on.

Christ learned healing in Benares, transmutation under a master in the Himalayas, and in Tibet he went under the highest initiates only to transcend them.

The Carrolls observed that this was a myth equaling Von Daniken’s Chariot of the Gods. It had no backing in historiography.

Besides, if it’s all one, why didn’t Christ just remain in India? He could have just as easily taught from there. Why even return to Israel? A greater syncretistic statement would have been for him to have taught from India and remained there. And if he had been to India, why did none of his disciples breathe a word about it or go with him? Why, out of hundreds of documented patristic documents and letters going back to the first century, does not one of them breathe a single word about any trips to India? Rather, Christ is viewed in the exclusive historical context of Palestine and never out of that region. No eyewitness ever saw him go beyond upper Galilee.

Likewise, does it not seem possible that rather than the wise men of the East coming to train Christ, they actually indicated Christ’s uniqueness by bearing gifts to him? Indeed, did they not show that His redemptive plan was a sign of salvation to even the people on the far-distant ends of the earth, as well as the children of Israel? Was it not God who promised Abraham that all the earth would be blessed through his seed? Their “wise men” were not sufficient in the East; otherwise, these wise men would not have come to seek the promised One. And how interesting that not once throughout the New Testament does Christ make reference to any of the standard eastern concepts of pantheism. The Carrolls had a point. You had to look between the lines to find hints of all-is-one and navigate around verses that were clearly dualistic, not monistic.

“But,” one of the Carrolls continued, “if you’re going to pick and choose what is, and what is not Scripture in the Bible, you are making yourself the final authority for adjudicating truth. You are also viewing yourself as being on par with the ancient apostles and prophets of Scripture, and therefore qualified to write your own edition. And if each man can do that, there is nothing left. We may as well throw in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and every science fiction writer that ever lived and say that each has invented a valid cosmology. And if you do that, needless to say, there will be a spaghetti of contradictions. Under the authority of such a web of deception, you will become irretrievably lost to wander into deeper delusion. The Bible has to stand as its own standard, otherwise you are on shifting sand.” They also claimed the Bible was a grid to sift the false from the true in the objective outward world, as well as the spiritual world.

While the Carrolls pressed home this theme of a trustworthy standard, their argument amplified in my mind. Mrs. Carroll observed that if our ultimate basis for judgment was a private inner experience of intuition, well, experiences and feelings contradicted and betrayed us, in the same way the hallucinatory vision of the drunk talking to the purple elephant: To him, it’s real. We had enough examples of this in our own camp: the rooftop prophetess, Gill, and others. Besides, what standard could I, in turn, use to discern the false from the true, the counterfeit prophet from the genuine article? For did I not realize that the Bible repeatedly tells of coming counterfeit spokesmen of God, awesome in their subtle arguments? How could I, on my own, supporting myself by my own intellectual bootstraps, summon the relentless standard to judge between the true and the false prophet? Was there some magic about me, as though given an impunity above deception by divine favor, that made it such that practically all other men could be prone to deception but me, Tal Brooke? No, no, I was too democratic in belief to do other than rank myself in the general family of man when such questions emerged. “But it’s a fair universe, isn’t it?” I countered in my most humble, family-ofman voice.

Behind the question, the Zen Master of my intellect was detached from the arena of conflict, as it carefully watched the chessboard for openings. In a sense, each pawn was that precise persona within that would most persuasively manipulate things to edge them into the next square. Then at that acute unsuspecting moment, a potent mantra or Koan would be sprung to utterly disarm them. To bring this off, however, I needed more than ever to surrender to the Tao, the indwelling Baba, as a guide, always a step ahead of the rational thought.

I now answered why it was a fair universe. “We can adjudicate Scripture,” I proposed, “because we have the perfect light of God within, and that becomes our touchstone of truth to test everything. As we evolve spiritually, we gain in intuitive wisdom to enable us further to see beyond the mazes of life. Thus, perfect inner intuition-wisdom is the standard, because the highest scripture is written in the skein of the overself, deep within.”

Meanwhile, my question still hung potently in the air. “It’s a fair universe, isn’t it?”

“Insofar that God would that none should perish, but have everlasting life through His Son, Jesus Christ,” came the answer directly from the New Testament. “But this does not mean that we are free to adulterate God’s Truth to suit us, dictating reality just to suit our whims. That’s like the child who refuses to get out of bed one morning because the world does not conform to his wish of being made out of candy-cane houses and streets. He can lie in bed forever, yet neither change what is, nor blackmail the Creator into obediently dusting up creation to suit his fancies. As humbling as it sounds, we have no choice but to accept what is.”

The mighty weight of Truth, they went on, is that man in his unredeemed state not only stands in eternal judgment, far from the holy presence of God, separated by a gulf of sin as wide as the universe, but because of this, is at enmity with God. This problem of sin is so great that man is numbered among the adversary. It is anything but an illusion. It is a massive dilemma. The stupendous thing about God’s grace to fallen and imperfect man (merely a created creature and no more) is that it would yet be so broad and deep as to love man in his sins, to the extent of formulating the perfect riddle of bailing him out of an impossible predicament. Not only that, but at the same time, grace fully satisfies a perfect standard of justice and love. Fully a mystery so deep as to baffle all the hosts of the universe, cherubim and all. And what was that riddle of grace? It was the space-time incarnation of the Logos as the long-predicted Messiah, Jesus Christ, fully in the flesh, of whom even Thomas,

the doubter among the apostles, had to finally say, in empirically testing

the reality of the resurrection body, “My Lord and My God.” Not a

Gnostic, spiritualized resurrection abstracted into a principle of metaphysics, but the kind that left an empty tomb guarded by an alerted

Roman guard who would undergo death by Roman law, if they failed. This was the kind of resurrection that would change a small weakly

band of men who denied their Master once on the cross, and who were

once fearful of the drastic forces of the Sanhedrin and their nation, not

to speak of the power of Rome, into changed men who were instrumental in turning the world upside down for a man who was what...dead?

Men so sure of this fact that each apostle, barring John, died a martyr’s

death. And the apostles were not the only witnesses of Christ’s resurrection appearance. The Bible spoke of an assembly of 500 who saw it, and

yet lived to tell about it, even during the apostolic ministry of Saint Paul.

And even the lowbrows of the day knew that the easiest way for the

Jewish opposition power to dispel the spreading rumor of the resurrection was to produce the body and drag it openly through the streets.

That would immediately end the problem. But that was the problem; for

some reason they couldn’t. (Nor was “the body” seen wandering India!) Now the Carrolls made the proclamation of utter exclusiveness that

truly made Christianity unique. Part of the riddle was in Acts 4:12, as

Reverend Carroll opened his Bible reading, “There is salvation in no one

else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which

we must be saved, save that of Jesus Christ.” That narrow gate was to

accept Jesus Christ exclusively as Lord and Savior. Not bow down to any

other: Buddha, Krishna, Chaitanya, or yes, Sathya Sai Baba. Christ never

said he would keep on coming. He came once and for all, that one specific purpose, and his predicted one-and-only return will be for the specific purpose of consummating all of human history as we know it. I went deep into my mind to find the key in philology to deal with the

“no other name” category. The syncretic key that I had found in the past

was through the writings of Paul Tillich, in his books Dynamics of Faith

and Biblical Religion and The Search for Ultimate Reality, among the first

things exposed to me under the name of Christianity, following my huge

LSD trip. Looking for “God,” I took a course on religion at the

University of Virginia. We also read Bultmann and Buber, but for some

reason we never looked at the Bible. In these open-ended theologies lay

the groundwork for me to build a syncretistic matrix with the other world religions. But sitting in the Carrolls’ living room, all I found was a haze, void of the raw facts: no linguistic key of ethnic word origins which might connote “Universal Logos,” instead of that particular name, came to mind.

The Tao in me froze in a crosscurrent of static from an opposing force, jamming my dials, seemingly with more power than a million-kilowatt Russian jamming station. Going to the question of Baba, I had yet to deal with the incongruity of such good and wholesome people as the Carrolls, who surprisingly, would show such an unpremeditated, visceral repulsion toward Baba, that the very idea of linking him to Christ was anathema.

I had for a while described Baba’s great love and the raw virtue and sincerity of people surrounding him such as Raja Reddy and Kasturi, models of excellence and patience. For surely, I gambled, such credentials as goodness would break through to these missionaries. But this brought on a whole new line of thought.

“A man can appear good, and still be deceived. Our own seeming goodness is not sufficient to bring us into the full light of God. Scripture, in fact, tells us repeatedly, ‘None is righteous, no, not one.’ For there is no better salesman for counterfeit truth than a good man.” This thought hadn’t entered my universe.

We sought to quell the tide of “bigoted fanaticism,” lest the Bible be misunderstood in a context less than the most spiritual. “These are universal axioms that speak to all men on their own level of consciousness. But to derive the highest meaning, you have to go above duality and all pairs of opposites, and realize that this is a road map guiding toward highest unity. But such understanding only comes with considerable spiritual evolution.” Then, as a second thought, Surya Das observed, “I just can’t see someone running around with little horns and a tail.”

“I don’t believe the Bible asks you to do that, believe that Satan has little horns. I would not be a bit surprised, in fact, if that wasn’t his own idea in the first place, to camouflage his true picture by an act of demythologizing. To the contrary, I am not at all convinced that this popular imp in any way resembles what Saint Paul was talking about when he says in Ephesians 6, ‘Ye wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’” Satan indeed was cosmic. Even Lucas’ eventual Star Wars imagery did not approach this being.

In the same vein, the Carrolls opposed Surya Das’ idea that the Bible was most of all directed to a tiny fraction of high spiritual initiates. Rather, the plain statements of Scripture stated the opposite. Far from just communicating to Oxford Ph. D.’s, or at the time, Pharisaic scholars, Christ was reaching out to those poor, unsightly, and abandoned orphans of the earth whose only credentials were a humble sincere hunger for God’s love and forgiveness. Turning to Chapter One of First Corinthians, the Reverend emphasized this: “You don’t see among you many of the wise (according to this world’s standards) nor many of the ruling class, nor many from the noblest families. But God has chosen what the world calls foolish to shame the wise.”

Well we the disciples of Baba often prided ourselves on this identical clownish aspect, where our true exaltation appeared ridiculous to the world. Yes, there was a parallel.

As for an esoteric standard for interpreting the Bible, “Why is it also,” the Reverend pursued, “that Paul states emphatically,” (and here he went to the Phillips translation of the Bible), “‘Our letters to you have no double meaning, they mean just what you understand them to mean when you read them.’ That kind of provision allows your farmers and simple ordinary folk like us through the door, if you see what I mean,” Ivan emphasized. The gospel was not elitist.

The three of us sympathized with their plight, but we also knew that the Bible in its great, multilevel complexity spoke a different form of angelic language, beyond even symbol, to those who were ready. And the true quantum leap occurred for true initiates where the Bible speaks of an absolute division in the universe between good and evil. The “simple” reading portrayed a God of holiness who cannot look upon iniquity with his unadulterated eye without burning it to a cinder, forever apart from the fallen segment of his creation till some are reconciled and others consumed in the fire of judgment. After the old creation passed away with its elements disappearing in fervent heat, came a fully new perfect order of creation, even deeper in its goodness than the first (and only previous universe) and now immune, as it were, from further adulteration by the hypothetical entrance of sin, now no longer possible, no matter how subtle it might be.

But we knew there was something deeper than this simple reading: The leap here, upon transcending the realm of biblical literalness, came with the realization that this epic was a cyclical cosmic paradigm, a portrayal of the dual function of maya, beyond which was the oneness of all existence. It was the idea of this unity which was so difficult to drive home to the two missionaries. Especially since they knew the Bible almost verbatim, at least on the literal level, and we had to constantly stall for time to find verses to support what we knew intuitively to be true, finding verses that we could barely recite whose location was more obscure to us than a needle in a haystack. Therefore, we sought to find the overview, and again look at the general allegory of Genesis. We did know about that story. Paul, on the other hand, we were quite frankly rusty on. But we knew that our dogged zeal and faith would make the difference; the Tao would show us.

Perhaps by the resonations of the right utterance, the barrier in communication might be broken. Surya Das, a Cherokee half-blood, now appearing more Oriental than usual, his Mongolian features enhanced, awaited the right moment of silence and then uttered, “But it’s all one,” looking around calmly with an ethereal smile. His accent suggested the turbaned wonder boy, Mahendranath Gopal, riding an elephant through a curtain of Bengali foliage only to announce upon passing a tribe of monkeys, “Butt eet’zzz aul wan.” The Carrolls, contrary to our hopes, were not bowled over with this proclamation. They had been in India for over 30 years!

To put it in understatement, the Carrolls were somewhat familiar with pantheism, and were thus not vulnerable to a surprise attack. I called them to admit that they might not have complete and total understanding of all the truths of Scripture, to which they agreed with predictable humility. They had no problem accepting personal shortcomings with gracious honesty. Here, the argument of individual capacity and “gifts” did make some dent. A brilliant mind could glean more than a dull or ordinary mind. For example, Paul and Augustine were geniuses, and the Carrolls would consider them great saints. Christians seemed to take pride in the fact that the more mediocre their capacities were, ergo, the more spiritual they were. They trumpeted their natural deficiencies and inferiority almost as a sign of trustworthiness. My father used to caricature with disdain the prejudices of the Bible Belt rednecks of the Deep South. And the fact that usually the most ignorant and dull-minded were the most dishonest, like the tent evangelist hucksters. Of course, they were suspicious of him too; he was an intellectual (a Rhodes scholar finalist, etc.).

With a partial foot in the door, and speaking with rare glibness and force, I spent the next half-hour summing up the detailed highlights of my “mountaintop” LSD experience, the 3000-microgram “tree experience,” as I used to call it. They

stood their ground, and wouldn’t

budge as to its divine authority

and nirvanic revelation. Being

regarded as somewhat unsavory

was a little unsettling for me,

especially since the Carrolls were

reaching across to me through

this narrow door with the only

love they could faithfully show

without betraying their faith. Far

from casting me off, they invited

me in, yet with some fear and

trembling, as though being cautious about the garments I was wearing. This was a little more difficult.

I had to be as merciful and patient toward them as they were toward me. The more I pressed the account of my own mystical experience, the

more energy I tried to summon to validate not only my beliefs but also

my own identity, which was inextricably bound to them. It became more

and more evident to me that these two old Elms felt absolutely no need

to defend their stance in themselves. Rather, they seemed to obscure

their own meek prowess under the cloak of the mighty robe of another,

choosing instead to point to the inestimable power of Him. And this

“other” was another Logos, a different Christ, from the one that I had

formulated. I was the one who had to prove my transcendent consciousness. They were immovably secure in their Redeemer. They were like

granite. There was no doubt, fear, hesitation, or insecurity. Back and forth the controversy over truth went, neither side seeming

to win and neither party conceding any ground. There were times we

pushed hard into the hallowed territory of the Carrolls as they held their

ground with sober concern. At such times, I would begin to feel like the

wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. And other times, with a gentle calm

spirit yet speaking strongly, the Carrolls would counter us as always with

just the right Scripture on their lips as though written for the sole sake

of countering us. In turn, at such times, my fire was quelled down to the

marrow. During several Scripture responses the Carrolls gave, a shock

went through my system as though I had been slammed into a cinderblock wall at 100 miles an hour. I did not show it, but it was obliterating. By about 1:30 in the morning, it was finally time to call it a night and

turn in, but only after the most burdened and heartfelt prayer by the Reverend and Mrs. Carroll that Christ would be the one to speak directly to our hearts and convict us of the truth through the Holy Spirit. Little did they know the ramifications of their prayer, as we the visitors nodded among ourselves.

The following morning, March 1, the gentle forbearance by the two missionaries suggested that they were “loving the sinner but hating the sin.” After loading us up with a delicious breakfast, they graciously agreed to drive our belongings and us to the Blake cabin in their jeep where Surya Das and I would go on ahead and move in. Ed, now a little ill, would stay on a few days with Jerry, who had suddenly become quite ill, and join him in the guestroom. Mrs. Carroll, having also served for many years as a medical helper and midwife in the most primitive of south Indian villages, where they too had lived in the squalor of adobe village huts, applied her medical skills to Jerry, gasping when the thermometer registered 103.8. Off to the local physician he would go for some sort of cloudy booster shot.

Mrs. Carroll would record dutifully in her diary that Eddie, later that night, had quizzed her privately if God ever spoke directly to her. “Yes,” would come the sincere and inevitable answer. Finally, being pinned down directly as to what God had told her concerning who Baba was, she would respond to Eddie with Second Corinthians 11:13-15, “a false messenger of God.” In a profound sense, we wondered whether these two people transplanted here in South India were the greatest materialization of maya given by Baba to test our faith.

Even after the other two moved to the Blake cabin within two days, throughout the week the four of us would pay the Carrolls friendly visits, forever extending Baba’s grace into their home. We challenged them continually to go and see Baba themselves at darshan, always in exchange for a warm meal.

But soon, they would retreat from the picture but for occasional visits, as Baba’s domain would close in on us with more and more intensity. The yonder Blake cabin along the countryside between Whitefield and Baba’s Brindavan Academy was another world, and our main trek would be between that and Brindavan on bicycles, and occasionally on the local bus into the modern city of Bangalore.

Chapter 20

Telegrams from The Abyss

B

y March 4th, Baba had arrived at Brindavan from Ananthapur, exuding smiles of grace on everybody. He had just spent several days inspecting the multi-million-rupee school complex presently being constructed in his name, built on the same stretch of land that I walked with Baba when I first met him. The women’s college was to be completed by early summer. Nobody knew exactly how it was being funded, because according to Baba, there were no financial donors permitted.

For a while I received extraordinary attention from Baba, but something inside me was slowly crumbling. Despite this mounting flood of grace, for the first time in 14 months with Baba, I was being split at the very foundation of my faith. The cause remained a mystery.

Was it something that the Carrolls had said in their misguided sincerity? Was it some feature of Baba that I refused to acknowledge? Had I not surrendered sufficiently? From time to time I had heard various disturbing rumors regarding Baba. Though I had downplayed these, I had not forgotten them. Or could it be the oppressive filth, the wretchedness and poverty which extended itself like an ocean beyond Baba’s celebrated circle? I resolved to share these fears and doubts with no one, in case this was another test. Even if the rumors and wretchedness were factual, the facts were not to be taken with a mundane literalism. Baba was God, after all.

Meanwhile, the usual antidote of zeal and blind faith was becoming as ineffectual as holding Ping-Pong balls underwater, releasing them, and expecting them to stay underwater. My doubts remained faceless ghosts. A possible clue lay in the old adage that while the scorpion was embracing me, I was being stung from behind the head and across the back. To the others, I remained at the center of an enviable flood of Baba’s attention. Special access to his house, talks with him in the side garden and so on. No longer Rowdie, I had suddenly become “Tallie.”

“Tallie, stand up. Here is a special asana.” Baba would cheerfully announce to the sparkling faces sitting around him. The marionette would respond as the dilemma continued—silent gloom and probing coexisted with each precious second of supreme favor. In the back of my mind was the thought that in return for all this favor, a quota of rich faith was expected of me, and this only enhanced the problem. The rebellion of insecurity reared its head anticipating a possible fall from grace, saying to itself, Well, if it’s all that tenuous, who cares.

After one of the evening interview sessions, Wendell, who had arrived that day, came home with me to the Blake cabin. He moved in next to me in the main room, I assumed, to stay. But Baba had other plans, and reticently, Wendell allowed it to leak out that he was involved in a staggering project out in Ananthapur. In the main entrance hall of the multimillionrupee college, Wendell was to do two giant murals, perhaps in fresco, perhaps tempera, or perhaps in acrylic, he wasn’t sure. But each mural would be about ten feet by twenty feet, facing opposing stairways. Baba had shown him what needed to be done, showering him with grace constantly—private interviews, special favors, a long talk at the sandbox, and materializations.

In the late-night candlelight in the Blake cabin, hunched against the wall, Wendell sketched secretively, guarding the product as we talked catching up on events, Baba’s nature, and Aurobindo’s concept of creativity as a means of escaping maya. In the early hours of the morning, Wendell was still dissatisfied with his various attempts, still straining for something original and showing me some of the results. I was impressed. One night, Wendell needed full electrical lighting, so he moved to the Carroll’s house and stayed up all night to finish a critical painting. Baba asked Wendell to spend the night of March 10th at his Brindavan residence so Wendell could leave early the next morning in a special car. By then, Wendell had special rings and goodies that Baba had materialized and even spent the better part of a day alone in Baba’s house. He was being fueled with grace for the wilderness.

The morning of March 11, the morning Wendell left for Ananthapur from Baba’s, I woke up at the desolate Blake cabin after having had one of a series of terrible nightmares, now in my deepest throes of doubt and depression. I had shared none of these deeper inner trials with Wendell, in case they were passing tests. I decided that morning to go into Bangalore alone, missing darshan, in order to think and find some clue to patch my cracking monument of belief. Whatever secret momentum was at work within my mind, I could not locate its source.

Maybe a part of the oppression had been the Blake cabin itself. A damp, dark little mortar hut without a strip of furniture, and nothing but a crusty cement floor to sit on, its bare walls were fully like a jail. The latrine adjacent to Ed and Jerry’s room smelled, and rats scampered throughout the place at night. The huge blue-nosed rats that Mrs. Carroll had warned us about were carriers of bubonic plague and rabies.

One night, before Wendell’s arrival, we resorted to a 3 a.m. exorcism session, using every mantra we knew. As we encircled a flickering candle, the four of us joined hands and screamed, “Om, raksha, raksha, Hum, Hum, Hum, Phhhattt, Swahaaaa,” again and again to drive out whatever demonic presence had filled the place, our yells echoing out into the lonely black wilderness. The rats had been noisy that night, knocking over cutlery and tins in the kitchen area while scampering between there and the latrine. But that wasn’t unusual enough to bring on the Tibetan ritual of exorcism.

What had done it was a rather grim battle I had undergone, reminiscent of Gill’s discorporated battle with the Chinese familiar in this very same cabin and under the stars that January, over a year ago, when I had first met Baba and Gill. Such spiritual attack was not utterly foreign to me.

Earlier that night, I had been lying stretched out along my mat. Then at 2 a.m., I experienced the same semi-paralysis and borderline dream state that inevitably accompanied those rare times when I had apparently astralprojected in years past. Just the effort to get a single digit on the little finger to move would require huge will. In and out of this state any number of times, I let go and tried to drift into sleep. It would start up again: first the utter paralysis as though held down by 10 G-forces, then my mind would begin to hurtle, as a loud siren and jet-engine noise would start up in my head.

It was during this prone state that I felt a certain baleful presence in the room. I was momentarily pinned down and unable to move. As I drifted deeper into the “buzz region,” as I used to call it, a large rat tore through the room, scampering right up the length of my body. When it hit my head, seemingly carrying an explosive static force, I saw a configuration of blue energy crackle around me, first in an electrical pattern, then materializing into the hideous shape of some demonic aerial creature. I broke out of the paralysis and tried to chase it through the wall, slamming into a thick block of mortar and pelting back on the floor mat. The others awoke. I was angry and slightly shaken with fear, and so instigated the idea of an immediate exorcism, to which they concurred, having all awakened in the midst of nightmares.

But my inner struggle on the morning of March 11, though much less spectacular, was more far reaching in its ultimate philosophic pervasiveness. A root problem remained as to how I might dispose of the reality of supernatural evil: either as an illusory stratum within the godhead, merely a cloudy phantom within the region of dualism’s outward polarities, and therefore inconsequential in the face of ultimacy. Or, as a shuddering in my gut sometimes told me (and it was this unpleasant “primitive response” which I was really seeking to unburden myself of), evil was in fact a part of absolute reality that was at utter enmity with God, a God whose infinitely greater holiness, power, and just resolve, was such that this evil had no other final destination than what Saint John’s Revelation termed, “The Lake of Fire.” In terms of the total span of eternity, evil, by this view, was not a universal constant, but a time-bound phenomenon. By this view, one was neither to identify with it nor have any dealings with it if one wanted to know God. This was why the Bible warned ancient Israel not to “play the Harlot” with the idols and sorceries of Babylon. By this “narrow view,” the left-handed path of the Tantrics was not a way to God, but to perdition. Or put another way, the two views of evil were grounded in utterly different epistemologies and had contrasting definitions for who God is. As in the discussion in the Carroll’s living room, one view could seemingly engulf the other view, but not the other way around.

Deeply troubled and needing desperately to be alone, I wandered

Bangalore and thought.

With an ice-cream cone in one hand from Nilgiri Dairy, to relieve the angst, I ran into something that far from resolved my inner battle. At Higginbotham’s Bookstore on Mahatma Gandhi Road, I felt a crazy urge to play Russian Roulette with a long row of paperbacks and pull some random book out which might answer my questions. So I pulled one out, barely noticing the cover, flipped it open halfway, and facing me on the open page was a visionary account of “The Coming Anti-Christ.” What was unnerving were the standard biblical references of prophecy. Here was a concept, one of a false Messiah purposefully out to deceive the world, that had been far from my mind. One that I was not sure I had ever in my life really considered.

The portion of this vision which did not contradict Scripture showed an Antichrist with numerous counterfeit attributes of the real Christ, supernaturally energized. This non-human being had succeeded in seducing almost all the inhabitants of the world. The world followed. Along the way, the false messiah paused, looked back to assess its flock, then ever so slightly veered just noticeably to the left.

Then another blow hit my cracking monument of belief.

At another modern paperback store farther down Mahatma Gandhi Road, I repeated the same random selection routine, this time drawing a book that curiously amended the other book. Its basis was what it claimed to be that self-same, infallible, external standard of truth that I had just been puzzling about. I had wondered when you really knew that you had arrived at 100-percent-certain, reliable knowledge. The paperback made some claims about the Holy Bible: that it was God’s written word to mankind by direct revelation to men of God’s choosing, faithful servants of integrity who would rather die a martyr’s death and undergo persecution than alter or take back one written letter of that revelation. The book was entitled Twentieth Century Prophecy, by some biblical scholar named Bjornstad. What was interesting here is that the book sought to weigh individuals with regard to their self-claims of divine revelation, now using the Bible’s standards.

I scrambled through the pages of the book amazed that within ten minutes I should find another book that would at least endorse my caution regarding the “vision” of the first book. Yet, it retracted not a jot of the prophetic content of the Bible. Soon enough I began to dislike its tone, too narrow in its acceptance of belief and divisive with its sword of truth, rather than unitive and universal. Edgar Cayce, by strict biblical standards, failed the test as a legitimate prophet.

Then I discovered what the Bible’s standards were for anyone who speaks for God, as the author quoted from Deuteronomy 18:21 with the question brought to Moses, “How may we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?” The answer from the great prophet followed in the next verse: “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the Lord has not spoken” (18:22). Such false prophets, who spoke prophecy that was any less than 100 percent accurate, by Mosaic Law, in Deuteronomy 13:1-11, were subject to death. Edgar Cayce and many others failed this perfect standard repeatedly. They were false prophets.

Once I was back in the Blake cabin, I received a third shock that day as I was glancing through a stack of photographs that I had just picked up in Bangalore.

One picture was shot of me in the wilds of Puttaparthi as I approached the well for a swim, half a mile from the ashram near one of the rice paddies and a small cluster of woods. Ed had snapped it. I recalled the conscious effort of feeling then surrendering to some sort of spiritual umbrella surrounding me. There was no mistaking its identity; it was Baba. I was to surrender so that it would eclipse my own identity. Upon a hasty glance, my expression in the photograph looked fairly typical. But something bothered me.

So, with a magnifying glass, I saw that what had seemed shadowy in substance now took on a diabolical reality, similar to an enlarged micro-photograph of the harmless looking mole that turns out to be a raging carcinoma. It came out even more clearly a week later when I had the photograph enlarged. My face was grossly distorted—monstrous beyond normal limits. One eye, huge, globular, baleful, was four times the normal size. The other eye, a thin Mandarin slit, resembled the eye of death. The composite picture of both eyes resembled an ancient occult enemy staring up from the photograph. But for the horns missing, it was a powerful likeness to the Goat of Mendes, the Satanhead. I felt that this was no accident, whatever the cause of it. A deep chill went through me.

Indeed, the abomination that stared up at me was a supernatural enemy I had encountered in my early ventures into the occult. Memories of my childhood flashed through my mind: A tenyear-old Tal Brooke consumed with precocious curiosity about things strange—talking to our London house-maid who also worked for a medium . . . asking my parents for a Ouija board . . . subscribing to a spiritualist newsletter . . . reading books on hypnosis and trying it on people . . . late-night walks through the cemetery . . . blinding people from my roof with a mirror as they went to London’s Holy Trinity Brompton, off Brompton Road . . . endless pranks and misdeeds . . . feeling all the time like an outcast from God . . . making papier-mache masks of demons . . . attending horror movies . . . The

Trollenburg Terror, The Quatermass Experiment and dozens of others . . . my parents distant and remote, but always justifying the lack of deep-rooted and loving communication so convincingly that I felt I was wrong in constantly seeking what I obviously didn’t need . . . they, endlessly going from diplomatic function to social gathering, caught up in their own joy-ride . . . brushing my needs aside with the minimum of real contact and then quickly hurrying on . . . leaving me forever alienated, feeling brilliant and yet somehow backward . . . while I kept crying out for some bright side of life which was never there.

A deep feeling of uneasiness swept through my soul. I knew that I was caught in an inner war of faith. And what I longed for now more than ever was some kind of spiritual drama to turn my mind’s eye from the eye of the hurricane. I did not like what was happening to me and could not explain it..

Our house, #9 Cottage Place, Knightsbridge,

off Brompton Road

Chapter 21

The Cosmic Road Show

E

xactly 24 hours after my trip to Bangalore, “central casting” sent in the sort of “intermission” to my nightmare of cracking belief that a team of Hollywood screenwriters would be hard pressed to

beat. The most effective and zany movie script would not quite do justice to what actually happened.

A car engine purred down the drive of the Blake cabin as Eddie ran in with the announcement, “Tal, you’re not going to believe this.” It was Friday, March 12.

Hurrying barefooted to meet the envoy, I ran head-on into Ram Dass as he hopped out of a paisley Volkswagen bus. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime super cosmic deja vus. My inner battles suddenly vanished like a mist as I faced the famous New Age herald and author of the soaring bestseller, Be Here Now, which was rocking America. A recent copy lay open on the floor of our front room. I was reading it for inner validation to transcend my doubts. Now the cosmic mind had sent Ram Dass to my doorstep. As his book announced, “There are no accidents.”

Eddie announced, “Ram Dass, meet the chief. This is Tal, he’s probably closer to Baba than just about anyone except a few Indians.” Eddie often kept Ram Dass in New York at his apartment when the famous “UpaGuru” was passing through town on one of his lecture tours.

The six-foot-one, bare-crowned, long haired ex-Harvard professor who had so upturned the consciousness of America over the past decade (beginning with the psychedelic movement with Timothy Leary), smiled with a nod. His traveling band of admirers and fellow disciples emerged out of the van, forming a semicircle around him. As the film of history was being made, they stretched in the country air, marveling, while others smiled with a mellow knowingness. Their world tour, which had started in New York’s

East Village, was winding up in India. This meeting had been a long time coming.

Ram Dass’ luminous eyes, now taking it all in, searched me. It was the psychic connoisseur appreciating another very high soul, another beacon of the coming transformation that would rock the West. The surrounding onlookers were quiet. His hands rested on my shoulders as he remarked quietly while his eyes sparkled with recognition, “I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

“Yes, you have,” came the deliberate response.

“Remember the Millbrook Castalia Foundation years when you and Tim Leary and Ralph Metzner came through D. C. and then to Charlottesville?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that was one time we got together. Do you remember J. D. Kuch, Boo-Hoo of the Neo-American Church off MacArthur Boulevard?... Yeah , that’s right, she and her husband were also in Mensa. Okay, that’s it.”

“Wow. It’s all coming back. I remember you. As I said, you look very familiar, and it must go back very far.

“It does,” I responded again, thinking of Baba’s proclamation eight months back that my “brother is coming. Spiritual brother, not physical brother, of many lifetimes.” Baba nodded when I asked if it was Ram Dass.

Ram Dass gave me the embrace of the long-departed now in reunion. It could have been the Kiev railroad station at the end of the Russian Revolution. The only other master of the embrace I knew of from the West was Gill, the difference being, however, that with the latter, there was a narrow line where fierce zeal took on the attributes of a death struggle. At the perfect moment, the hug ended as the merry chuckles of the various extras on the set signaled that gold had been struck after all. We all went into the Blake cabin as Ram Dass and I pinpointed who had been where and when.

Ram Dass caught a knowing grin radiating from Surya Das. “It looks like you’re really finding yourself.”

“I am,” Surya Das smiled, “and when you meet the avatar, you’ll appreciate why.” Then Ed joined in.

Ram Dass spoke of Maharajji (Neem Korelli Baba), in Nainital, their recent stay in Bodhgaya near Benares under a Buddhist master, and the big tour with Muktananda, of which this current stopover was near the end. Ram Dass filled us in. It started in New York where Ram Dass met Muktananda through a disciple named Rudi and Hilda Charlton (who had studied under Nityananda, the guru of Muktananda). Overnight it blossomed into growing happenings featuring the two, Ram Dass and Muktananda. Large spreads appeared in the Village Voice and other underground papers. The caravan ended up in San Francisco and L. A. with darshans running well into the thousands in large well-known coliseums and halls, from New York’s Fillmore East to San Francisco’s Cow Palace. Then they left for Australia and India.

Ram Dass asked me about Baba. Specifics were what his well-trained academic mind was searching for out of the reams of data with so little time. I brought out photos of the recent Mahasivaratri festival, narrated, editorialized, and everybody seemed inspired.

We left the Blake cabin and headed for Baba’s with Ram Dass driving and me in the front seat. The Volkswagen bus resembled a mini-Benares, with every conceivable variety of amulet, incense, tanka, and Hindu deity strewn about. Maybe the VW would end up in a museum of consciousness evolution in some future era, the psychic equivalent of a Model-T.

In minutes, our bright VW bus came through the gate, and the western contingent sitting along the drive rippled with wonder. Ram Dass and his troop formed a line along the drive, most of them in the half-lotus yoga posture to tune into the flow of things. In Ram Dass’ jargon they were “getting centered.”

The girls on the other side covered their mouths, jumped around, changed places, squawked, waved at us, faces cherry red. The last time most of them had seen Ram Dass was at an East Village auditorium with people hanging from the rafters. Ram Dass, whom Hilda referred to as the “doorway of enlightenment for America,” incarnated for the age, having once been one of the Seven Sages on the order of Vishwamitra: a full master in the last phase of amnesia, until “Pow.” Would it be Baba’s loving touch that would finally send him soaring into samadhi, some wondered? Maybe this was the day. It was important enough for me to break routine to make sure things worked smoothly.

I quietly mounted the tiered steps to head toward Baba’s residence by an obscure garden path. My movement went about as unnoticed as the British Air Corps marching through Sumatra, as I detected that even Ram Dass’ luminous eyes had floated off center for a moment. Perhaps with good reason, as this was a liberty that he was not in the habit of taking with his own Himalayan guru, Maharajji, who by no means gave him any sort of preferential treatment above the local Nainital devotees.

For a moment I hesitated at Baba’s door, slightly ajar, then plunged through the icy waters of doubt by pushing it open. Raja Reddy stood alone quietly at attention in the hall. With an unfaltering cordiality, he welcomed me in with a polite handshake. I told him about the drama taking place: the surprise visit by the world-famous Ram Dass. He listened attentively, mirroring back my own sense of importance of the moment. He and I, in our earlier talks about what was taking place in America, had discussed Ram Dass’ influence.

The sound of Baba’s footsteps suddenly filled me with a reluctance to see him as Raja went to intercept him. Baba rounded the bend from the back darshan hall, and met me with an indifferent look, hued by slight irritation. By all appearances the effect of my visitation was what happens when a reporter drops in on a famous film star who is scintillating at prearranged press conferences but is morose at unannounced doorbell interviews.

The unlit reception room was stone quiet as Baba sat on the arm of a nearby chair. Raja gave him his after-dinner betel leaf box. Musingly, Baba rolled a leaf up after painting it with lime paste. He slowly chewed it. The irritation in his voice continued mounting as he discussed something with Raja in Telugu.

Baba rolled the betel leaf around in his mouth chewing loudly and grimacing in the manner of a tobacco-chewer ready to spit. Grudgingly, he looked up to me and slurred the question, “What is this Ram Dass, Haaa?”

I reminded Baba of his prediction of my coming brother and Ram Dass’ dynamic mission in firing up the spiritual revolution in America. Baba responded with a number of asides of which I knew it would be my test of fidelity not to pass on to Ram Dass or the others.

Scathingly Baba revealed, “Who is Ram Dass? Very impure. Now collecting devotees, and he himself does not know the way. Seeking fame before he is ready. Ram Dass is not as pure as my American devotees, that’s right. He should learn from you. Not as pure as you. Seeking fame is playacting, guru play-acting, ego.” After an ironic laugh, Baba asked, “Ram Dass is married?”

“No, Baba, strict Brahmacharya.”

I assumed this would be an endorsement. Baba made some sort of cryptic pun about Ram Dass’ past exploitations. I responded saying that in

America it is very difficult growing up, that most of us come from confused

backgrounds. I reminded Baba of his proclamation about me that my “mine

shaft of experience was the deepest of the American bhaktas.” Baba had told

the others that the mountain of displaced terrain from my mine shaft was

the highest of all. Baba conceded this. I appealed to Baba’s great compassion

to consider Ram Dass as misdirected as he might be.

“I am coming to darshan, don’t worry.”

In minutes I was again sitting right next to Ram Dass in darshan line as

though nothing

had happened.

Baba soon emerged

and quietly drifted

tangentially away

from us toward the

school offices. He

drifted back, oblivious of the new

envoy till he was

right over us. Then,

with impeccable

timing, Baba

beamed at Ram

Dass, “Ram Dass.”

And that would be

the extent of their communication. On the way up the drive, Baba informed

me that afternoon bhajans would be as usual and that he would be coming.

The others were invited.

After their brief encounter, Ram Dass searched for words to describe his

immediate impressions. “He’s so light... he’s almost not even here.” Wait till

you get into a confrontational cross beam, I said to myself, somewhat bothered by what seemed a demeaning description of Baba.

That afternoon, all of us surrounding Baba’s seat were suddenly treated

to a surprise interview. Baba’s chair suddenly turned away from the girls’

half and faced Ram Dass and me, who were sitting side by side. Baba materialized a very large pendant with a pentagram in the center and gave it to

a stunned Ram Dass. He taught for a while. Then, after Ram Dass asked

him, Baba agreed to meet the famed guru Muktananda the next day. For a

while it was a three-way talk between Baba, Ram Dass, and me. Ram Dass

left stunned. Minutes later we had our picture shot together with the materialized pentagram around Ram Dass’ neck.

The next day’s meeting between Sai Baba and Muktananda resembled a bizarre scorpion dance. Muktananda, first of all, tried ineffectually to force Baba into a hug as Baba talked to a devotee in the darshan line. Then Baba stalled for an hour as Ram Dass and I tried to get Baba to come out again. The final meeting was like a Mafia birthday party or “The Gunfight at OK Corral,” as Ram Dass and I were held out as beacons, and the two beings exchanged cryptic puns. It was a strange power-encounter going beyond the terrain of normal mortal interactions—that was the diplomatic way of treating it.

That evening, Ram Dass, several others, and I drove into Bangalore for a Chinese dinner. We found a great restaurant off Mahatma Gandhi road. We talked extensively during the long drive and meal. Ram Dass told me that he and Muktananda would head toward Bombay the next day, then end the tour in Delhi.

After Ram Dass and Muktananda left, weeks went by as I laboriously typed away in the Blake Cabin, writing up this and other events in my book about Baba. It was to be released in Calcutta in the fall. The high court magistrate of Bengal was financing its publication. Baba blessed it formally after Ram Dass left, sanctioning its public release in India. This was a huge weight off, because I had never cleared this hurdle. I simply took it for granted that Baba was behind it. I was getting nervous, afraid I might have to scrap the whole thing. When Baba blessed it, I felt so rich in faith that I wanted to share it with the Carrolls.

As it happened, I showed up just as they were sitting down for their big weekly meal. For the first time in a year and a half, I took the plunge. I felt

transcendent enough to have a huge plate of roast beef, baked potatoes, peas, gravy, hot muffins and apple pie. That‘s right, meat, and it tasted great.

I just gulped the food down, barely able to talk, I was so hungry. I noticed my hands trembling and shaking throughout the meal—which was becoming more frequent when I ate. My new-found justification for meat?—the Sufi custom of eating what is put before you in gratitude. Wendell and I had already resorted to omelets in town. Baba had even told Wendell to suck the innards out of raw eggs for strength. This hearty meal at the Carrolls was one of the most satisfying meals in a long time. Yes, I was rich in faith that day and wanted the Carrolls to see it. Unfortunately, as I chewed huge portions like a starved savage invited to a feast, I decided to show them my rich faith later. After the apple pie and ice cream, I was reduced to a mental midget, smiling with glazed eyes off into the distance.

The Malabar Coast

B

aba departed for Bombay midway through April. It was the break that all of us at the Blake cabin needed to take trips. The Carrolls agreed to guard our valuables in their house as the Blake cabin had no real lock. Surya Das, ever the Galloping Gourmet of spirituality, went to Pondicherry to see the famed Aurobindo Ashram. Eddie and others went to the Ramanah Maharshi ashram in Madras. I used the opportunity to go off to the coastal region of Malabar, where Gill had once stayed. I needed the deep balm of the ocean as an antidote to my frayed nerves. Jerry’s last minute resolve was to join me partway, then move on to the coastal city of Mangalore, where ancient Indian temples stretched like tombstones. But the trip soon became another micro-drama revealing my mental state.

When we emerged from the bus after the overnight ride, I was told that the “coastal town” of Udipi was situated an incredible two miles inland from the actual ocean. As this realization hit me, amidst blowing newspapers and packs of dogs and mounting cries of “Sab,” I could feel my teeth beginning to gnash in incredible railings and sub-audible blasphemies. Blown to smithereens was my dream of emerging out of a hotel on some beach every

morning or even seeing the ocean from a hotel balcony. “Sab?” Someone would call me and I would address him, “This junk heap is just like any other junk heap. I may as well be in bloody-Mysore-bloody-city,” and out would come a string of abuse. Yes, they had a madman on their hands. And this makes good street theater in India. I was now an item.

With a human caravan of followers, I led the way, raw-nerved and “mad as a frambert,” to what looked like a five-story modern hotel that just missed overlooking the beach by a few miles. But never mind. By now I was anticipating the hotel being closed or full, and having to sleep at the base of a tree with this rabble twittering and looking on. Rage and paranoia were now quickly growing within.

Imperiously, like the King of Bhutan, I rushed into the lobby, eyes blazing (a national tactic amongst the upper classes of India was to act with so much self-importance that the commoners would rather change the laws of the universe than oppose you). As the clerk stood up and brushed his hair, his silly smile started to quickly vanish, as I announced upon approaching him that if there were any bribes expected, or if he fabricated a full house to gain an even higher bribe in kicking out an imaginary occupant, or if he jacked up the prices especially for us - - my pupils started to open as my tone dropped from a near shout to a chilly proclamation, why I would . . . and my stare became unearthly as I suddenly became incoherent with thoughts of supreme punishment. Now the clerk looked at me in bewildered fear, as my blazing eyes hovered only inches from his face.

Jerry politely intervened, diplomatically moving between the clerk and this intense, inarticulate madman who just stood there and twitched as he tried to begin again. With great fear and caution, the clerk quietly escorted us up the stairs to two fine cubicles with ceiling fans, showers, dressers, and neat little cots for a measly four rupees a night. I was appeased, and tipped him generously as he graciously left us. The secret for getting things done in this plane of existence, I shared with Jerry in abstraction, was by sheer force of consciousness and spiritual will. But what I had actually done was to bludgeon my way through with a psychic meat axe. Perhaps rest was what I needed.

By noon it was too hot to sleep any more, so we dodged from one store awning to another, avoiding the deadening sun. Soon we met a contented looking fellow from California who had finally made medical school, “way the hell out here.” He needed chastening.

“What do they use for scalpels,” I asked, “broken shards of pottery?”

With even less tact, I announced, “With luck, you might even get to prac

tice in West Virginia.” His features sank as I asked whether they read medical texts in long scrolls of plantain leaf. I pictured something that looked like the Mahabharata, full of impossible lettering.

Then, after a brief comment on what we were up to, sensing what might be a moment of vulnerability in him—that right cosmic moment, if you will—I challenged him bluntly, “Do you think you’re ready to take a leap beyond all this garbage?” My tone intimated, “Are you brave enough to trade in a nice respectable white frock for the torn robes of a renunciant, or are you going to keep hot-doggin’ it?”

This might come with some shock to a fellow reveling in his self-conceived pilgrimage to India, where he could proudly stand in sandals on the Malabar coast. Here he was living out a part fully as daring as some little skit in the life of Gauguin. But to encounter two compatriots far more given over than he to India’s austere abandon must have nipped his vision in the bud. With us, he was not unique at all but a mere beginner.

By late afternoon my mood evened out, as Jerry and I took a taxi to the ocean. We saw a ragged empty beach, behind which were thatched huts at the jungle’s edge. One of these had been where Gill had lived. Then I noticed that the huts were along stenching black canals vomiting forth the sulfurous odor of rotting algae and sewage—another dark detail in the life of Gill. I could envision him wailing into the night. Soon we were in the ocean, a considerable distance from the smelly canals. I felt a cautionary sense of relief.

Jerry left as planned. I spent the rest of the week pondering my condition. During the heat of the day, I stayed near the hotel, often visiting second hand bookstores and newsstands. Otherwise I took the local bus to the beach to swim and write in my little spiritual diary. I often walked the long shore staring at the tall ragged wall of palms as I searched within. Yet I could not tell whether my “breakthroughs” were crevices or mountain peaks. As Wendell and I noted, enlightenment and madness sometimes are only a few degrees apart.

At week’s end, the prospect of leaving the desolate freedom of the primitive ocean pained me. But I packed, took an early morning swim, then calmly slipped into the mailbox an airogram written with decimating force to my parents. It bothered me that after spending a whole year without writing my parents, it had been of little effect. Memories of them, bitter ones and sad ones, lurked in the back of my mind to still pull me down. I had long felt the effects of their early neglect and blindness. Now I wanted to see them come clean and face their own defenses, feeling it would free me in some way. As I had written in my diary, “Get rid of your past. You are to have memories no longer.”

Chapter 22

The Return of a Bent Disciple

O

n Saturday night, April 24, after I stumbled through the dark rear approach path to the Blake cabin from the Carrolls’ house, balancing my typewriter on the handlebars,

I crashed through the front porch walking right into a pile of milk pails and bottles in the cabin entrance. A howl came out of the front room. I hit the light switch prepared to swing at someone’s head. I saw the one human form that was the least likely to be there sitting right next to my mat. The Lion-man Gill stared up intensely. He was sitting in a full yoga posture, his lion’s mane of hair now straggled and knotted. Typical of a sadhu, his body was thin and sinuous in contrast to his large head. Gill wore a loincloth. A new light was on his features. What now inhabited him seemed wholly other than the transitional personality I had known before. In a way it was as though I was meeting this person for the first time.

A peaceful power carried in his voice as he greeted me. Feeling raw-nerved from both the trip and having just come from the Carrolls, I could already feel my stomach tighten as

though to combat a great foe. I asked this now classical embodiment of the master yogi how he had been faring.

“Well, brother, well. And yourself? Let’s see. Step into the light and let’s have a good look,” the rugged voice proclaimed, ever resembling Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. Intoning he went on, “Ohhh, you’ve softened a little, you’re gentler not quite so hard and testy as before.” Cautiously, I let a most ambiguous smile faintly trace across my features, my eyes still looking firm but not hard.

The presence before me was the last one I wanted to deal with. I did not want to create any openings by letting my natural antipathy and distrust for him emerge. At stake was the very real possibility that what was before me was not the exalted image of “egoless love” in that unknowable fraction of realized supermen, but rather the unusual force of will of an unusually bent spirit. I could not decide whether Gill had been sent by God or Satan or both. His influence was so great that I had already come to realize that the others would open up to him, and lap up his words of power and perhaps cunning.

The others, who had been back from their respective trips for several days now, pulled up on their bikes, the gears quietly clicking in the darkness of the fields. Gill was in the process of telling me how Baba, just the other day, for no apparent motive, had him thrown out of Brindavan. Ed, Jerry, Phil, and Surya Das quietly concurred, now standing unobtrusively in the light of the front room. Gill had been sitting quietly in the Brindavan darshan line, his dhoti now soiled, his hair matted and hanging like frayed ropes. When Baba appeared, he turned on Gill shouting, “Go. You go. Get out and not coming back again.” Finally, “Psst. Unclean, what is this?” Baba looked around, drumming up local crowd support. Immediately, the weather-beaten American yogi, keeping even the tiniest self-doubt from escaping, lest it tear him apart upon surfacing, held down his private storms as hands seized him from all sides. The ushers quickly wrestled him up and forcefully walked him out of the front gate, permitting him less dignity than a common criminal or a madman. Baba’s orders were that Gill was never to come back again, declared persona non grata.

The others quickly assured Gill that the difficult incident was sheerly a most unfathomable test in the final lap of tapasya, a straightening by fire for a near perfect adept which none less in stature could withstand. Gill differed; not “advanced,” but having already attained perfection. A few eyebrows raised.

The deep reverberating voice seemed to flow at us from all sides announcing, “I am as sinless as Christ.” The others looked on stunned; I was not too taken aback. I decided to remain a detached observer till things really got out of hand. Then I would step in and throw Gill out.

The only thing I knew was that Gill now claimed to have finally attained “that state,” and I saw no festive announcement coming from Baba. I saw the opposite.

“Why do you think Baba did it, Gill?” I probed.

“I don’t know.”

I theorized a dangerous alternative: that perhaps the higher you get,

the more unshakable your self-confidence becomes, till even the mightiest sledgehammer blow from the guru will not break one’s surety. If one does break, how great the fall. Untested and unbreakable, there still remains the even more dreaded possibility that one has hardened, in utter and total confidence, without the normal turning back, into a state that is not “enlightenment” and will continue until some final infinite barrier sends him back to the elemental beginning of time. Here is where the feedback of the guru is essential as a preventive, that is, if the guru himself is right. He was sure of his state, was anybody else?

The others sat around him. I sat back on my mat and listened now noticing that the only other one with apparent reservation was Surya Das, squinting on from some far corner of the room.

For almost a week, Gill taught and shared what he had learned in the wilderness and on the mountaintop. Sometimes he could “even hear the trees growing” as he had in the California Redwoods. His eyes shone with an elfin light as he told us this. Such had been the beginnings of “total sensitivity” in him (except to others).

Now I sensed a new brokenness within Gill, a willingness to relate that reminded me of the monkey-on-a-string. In fact, at times it almost seemed as if he desperately needed our approval, especially mine, as though some invisible teacher stood behind him with a performance chart grading him at every moment he was with us. I knew that if this were true—that he was trying to make right, karmically, something between us—I would be his toughest obstacle, an adversary from way back as I imagined myself to be at times.

We asked him where he had gone for the last nine months. Gill had been all over India and Pakistan. For so touchy a crab, as I always envisioned him, it was a wonder he hadn’t gone berserk from the ravings and pandemonium of one train station after another, to the crowded streets, and every manner of hellish fruit stand and ramshackle tea stall where the natives just wait to swarm anything the least bit out of the ordinary. And Gill’s appearance—well, it was a most rare and remarkable thing, impressively commanding and intense, ever verging on volcanic unpredictability. The crowds following him must have been unbearable.

Gill agreed; the crowds were huge. But he assumed so for a different reason. The crowds followed him much as those rowdy and testy peasants in the Judean hills two millennia back must have, by their very contrasting worldliness and impurity, in a sense been pulled by the divine purity of Christ. Gill, too, by being in the world, suffered indignities. He traveled across India and went to Pakistan. Why?

“My brother is an aeronautical engineer living in Karachi.” It sounded so prosaic. “What sort of rapport have you all had?” “Never very much, we are as unlike as any two people can be.” For his brother, I surmised, it must have been traumatic when they

were small children. Like baby Snooks waking up to find an alien in the adjacent crib, you know, one of these weird things pulled out of the wreckage of a flying saucer, tentacles and psychic mind projections floating across the ceiling, bookcases passing through walls.All hell breaks loose as a microwave tube enters baby Snook’s ear, eyeballs cooked to a frazzle.... Somehow, I could never imagine Gill growing up in anything like a family of humans, but never mind.

“What happened in Karachi?” I asked.

“Well, when I arrived at my brother’s apartment,” he continued solemnly, “there was a party going on.” Gill was no fan of frivolity or small talk.

“I came in the door as I am dressed now, and what had been rather lighthearted, superficial, and perhaps frivolous chatter died as though someone pressed a button and switched them off. They felt immediately threatened by my presence. Some gawked in amazement, some made disparaging remarks, and those few men who had any guts at all mustered the courage to make outright attacks. But as I looked them directly in the eyes they would falter. Then the only way they could keep their little thing going was to gang up. But I still looked at them searchingly. That really frightened them because they had no ready response to that. This is what happens to people’s ego games when truth enters their presence. Everything they know begins to shake loose. Soon the energy level becomes too much for them to cope with, and they really become exposed.”

Resembling a great sphinx purring as he narrowed his eyes and gently rolled his head, as though to either absorb or fend off some botheration, he continued. “It is remarkable what some people will do to hold on to their egos. They look for some niche or weakness to try to control you with, or they try to be very articulate and abstract, and analyze the situation, not realizing that this is like prostitution. It keeps them from ever directly involving themselves in what’s happening by always holding it at arm’s length, and in their fear of looking uptight, they try to seize the conversation, playing one meaningless word game after another.” A trace of irony crept across Gill’s features. “I just stare back with love, searching into them. They lose the thought in mid-sentence, and what they pursue becomes even more ridiculous.”

One birdlike woman came up as he was sitting down. “Oh, you’re so savage. None of these others,” she looked around confidentially, “would venture out into this wild region in bare feet and a loincloth, hey?” The cool in-crowd of mockers looked on from their tiny circle on the side, joking, whistling, and shaking their drinks.

A deep resonant voice perhaps caught some people off guard as it cut through all the extraneous jabber in sober gravity, “I love you...you...more than you can ever possibly know. You see... I am you.” Gill’s eyes were stronger than the Rocky Mountains. There were some loud coughs at this point.

“Uhhh.” She was caught for a moment. Then she found a way to one-up him. She sat in Gill’s lap as some of the guests continued looking on in the awkward silence, while she felt his beard to see if it was real. She tugged it a little.

She got about as much of an emotional rise from Gill, as much passion—to further extend the analogy—as the Rocky Mountains. For a while, he let her questions peter out. First, about his tough, callused feet, his bony ribs, his vegetarian diet, his bare-chesting the icy winds of northern Punjab, Kashmir, and Simla, his eternities of meditation, and the long, ropy, matted locks that hung down his back in frayed cords, bound by mud and cow dung, no different in outward mortification than a well-seasoned Shaivite sadhu, or naga.

Her little world just couldn’t take it all in. She had her own ground rules for life: practical people kept things in nice safe boxes. It just wasn’t safe to stray from the popular mainstream of thought. For one thing, there was always the threat of losing social acceptance and being looked down upon as, well, different. And who could withstand ostracism? So everything out of the ordinary became a source of laughs. If some fanatic came along with strong convictions, then he might be humored but, really, now.

Issues that make life meaningful are things like cars, a fine home and steady income, and knowing fun people who are always there for a good time. Ultimate questions are off-limits.

And the unknown? Well, everyone knows they’ve proven the origin of the universe (Fred Hoyle’s “big bang theory”). Even grade school textbooks have pretty much thrown it all in, in explaining the origin of things (teleology). Modern man has triumphed by his own intelligence in answering “the question.” Mysterious and superstitious fears just come from an animal vestigial remnant of the cortex carried over from some Stone-Age brain; it’s all electrochemical.

Her inebriated party brain ticked away to find new ways to get a response out of this oddball (you know, all guys are alike and after the same thing). She poked her tongue in his ear. Not because she sincerely wanted to get things going, but to see if, just for laughs now, she might be able to get his defenses to break down.

Gill was what they called a “heavy.” It was just the reverse of the lights, like Ram Dass and Surya Das, who could just radiate a gentle love. That was the usual Western stereotype of “the evolved soul.” India, which had been in the mysticism business much longer, by millennia, gave the “heavies” much more stature. Gill could take your head off with a stare if he wanted to. People told me that I had the same effect, but I had to let go and surrender to another force outside myself, or perhaps within, to do it. Shiva, the destroyer, showed “divine love” by first annihilating the biographical ego, which is unable to stand the force. What remains has been transformed like silver in a crucible. Baba, when he exposed his wrath, was supreme in doing this with his Indian followers of long standing. I had seen them literally fall apart before his eyes and buckle at his feet, pleading, as though for another chance at life.

Back at the cocktail party, the gal sitting on Gill’s lap moved back to look at him after nibbling his ear.

What confronted her were two immense black pupils through which she could almost see another universe. Then the voice wired up to that other universe spoke in terrible power, prying open her innards like a hand scooping out the mush in an old pumpkin. The voice announced inner secrets and cherished vulnerabilities deep in her psyche. It put terror in her eyes. She was a microbe on a slide before a vast alien intelligence. In minutes a quiet frenzy swept the apartment, and people left with nervous excuses. She totally came apart. Frivolity among the yuppies had been totally dismembered. It was Shiva in the living room.

The Blake cabin crew was impressed. Now Surya Das had his own brave accounts: He had been present when Leary and Alpert (alias Ram Dass) had their marathon stone-in on STP in the bowling alley at Millbrook, not to speak of his similar closeness and access to Yogi Bhajan (whom he aided at the Colorado festival of light), Swami Satchidananda, Kirpal Singh, and Steve Gaskin, to name a few. He’d “been there” almost every time. But the encounter with Gill was unique.

Gill completed the details of his ventures. The rugged months alone in the thatched hut on the shores of Udipi Taluk: spiritual attacks, astral battles, monkeys raiding the hut, villagers peering in, and finally police raids. Repeatedly, the police hammered away on his door while he was meditating and barged in, wanting all the legal certificates of an alien. They continued to torment him heedless of his wish. He’d haggle, roar, and try to blow their minds. In the end, he vowed that he would just let go, no matter what happened, and stop trying to deal with it by aggression or cunning, the ego.

Then Gill went to a cave ashram in Gudjerat to sit for weeks on end, alone in the darkness as yogi-servants brought food and water, pushing it through a crack.

Gill told tales of the stormy seas of meditation in the cave, when hours stretched into eternities. The only way he knew day from night was by the food-tray slipped through a rock crevice. He added, “While you are in silence, if there is a voice within, with a pause before and a pause after, it is probably the teacher.” This had come as a trembling announcement. “Heed the voice of the teacher.”

Looking with sober gravity, Gill continued, now directing his statements to me, having already singled me out that day as “the strong one,” and one who was further along than he realized. “After the voice of the teacher, the tests will start coming soon after that. Watch out for them. And do not forget the love that you have seen. Stay up-front, expand the womb, keep on going through the cold region.” His voice trembled slightly, “Don’t cop out of the cold region. Keep the contract.”

A prophecy then followed as the others leaned forward to share in this nighttime revelation, one to come on Gill’s final night with us in our particular valley of existence. It concerned me.

His eyes opened with dark mountainous power, “Fairly soon, your heart-center will open completely, and you will come to know all the truths that you know but don’t know.” He had just spoken of the classic meditative phases of working through the chakras, where smells emerge that have never existed, then the region of bells, and then the yogi begins to see around corners at things that are happening from afar.

I wondered if this flattering prophecy was not a partial concession to reopen a door of trust that had closed the previous night after Gill and I had had a conflict concerning my writing the book on Baba. It was tense. I got up and sat right next to him staring an inch from his eyes. It scared everybody but Gill and me (who were loaded with energy but not really afraid) as they sensed that a fight might start from my controlled fury and the sheet of power I faced off. After Gill was satisfied that I was not playing a game by writing, he gave a light warning of the pitfalls of confusing outer activities with really important matters. Gill breathed like a gladiator who had become a pacifist (years ago he had been a sergeant in the Marines teaching martial arts). He let out a sigh of long-suffering patience; I should write but not become attached. “Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness.” I pretended I knew what he was referring to. I didn’t. Then he answered it.

“Do you know what it is?” Before I could answer him, he responded, “Your intellect.” Again I felt manipulated and let the moment pass.

Eddie asked if Gill had met Ram Dass. Yes, and Gill was not particularly impressed.

In Gill’s judgment Ram Dass had a long way to go. He was soft like the mayor’s pudgy son who thinks he’s clever enough to bluff his way into the local hoodlum gang, and thinks he has fooled them. Until a crunch reveals that he is a coward, and he goes plodding home to mama’s doorstep.

Gill also implied that Ram Dass was being “taken” for all he was worth by the chain of spiritual command who was giving him more leverage than his level of maturity deserved. His flamboyant joyride

and shoulder-rubbing would eventually end in the humiliating brunt of a cosmic joke (which did happen in New York some years later when Ram Dass followed a divorcee named Joya as the incarnation of the divine mother. It ended in a scandal lampooned by New Age Journal.) Ram Dass was not made of that tough fiber required to scale the slopes of Himavat, but was an opportunist, a loquacious, slightly theatrical dilettante in the tradition of the moaners in the Ouija board brigade who howl at the nuances of a full moon, read tea leaves, ever reminiscing over their Atlantian lives and kitchen cupboard visions. Though devastating Ram Dass, Gill was also violating his own rule about not judging.

He then told us about the time he reached full enlightenment which we then wondered about privately among ourselves.

Wendell told me later that he thought that Gill was not any illumined sage or vast soul on the edges of final perfection, but a disgruntled confused, perhaps foul-tempered, slightly paranoid gremlin consumed in messianic grandiosity, and this was a non-prejudicial first impression. All Wendell saw was Gill on the darshan line, before and during expulsion by Baba. “Not much light, maybe a lot of braggadocio and hang-ups.”

The following day, Friday, April 30, we took the bearded mystic to the Bangalore train terminus. Gill reached over and grabbed my shoulder, “Someday, brother, we will both be hitchhiking down a superhighway in Nebraska, each on the other side of the divider without a penny in our pockets. We won’t need to run across, we’ll just look at each other and continue hitchhiking.” Gill mounted the old steam train. Crouching like a beggar and holding a walking stick, Gill sat in the boxcar as it slowly moved out of the station. His eyes stared right into ours, never averting, never blinking.

When he was gone, I felt relief. It was another odd intermission. I also witnessed the emerging paradigm of a kind of group seduction that would eventually take hold in the West.

Little did I know then that within a few years, Gill would be the famous Central Park Guru of New York City and leader of the Yea God Ashram in upstate New York. (His group toured America on buses, an engaging story that the media wrote up. By then Gill wrote me an absolutely astounding letter from Hawaii. He had listened to a Christian radio program and given his life to Christ—for a time. The Yea God Commune converted en masse, burning all its guru pictures. But I sensed this would not last.)

Then, once again, this mercurial creature changed courses. Gill reclaimed his Jewish mystical roots, went to Israel, and since then has become a leader in the revival of Cabalism sweeping Israel. As always, he is on the front lines, this time as a key rabbi in Jerusalem. There are others who have also gone to India from Jewish backgrounds, who have similarly returned to their Jewish roots, and are now opening the way for this new mysticism coming from the Cabala. That too is part of the global pattern—a Babylonic one.

Chapter 23

Edging Upon the Eternal Choice

S

urya Das crouched in the entrance hall of the Blake cabin, resembling a prehistoric monster in a horror movie as he stalked forward. Gill had gone and we were still unwinding the next evening

from the heavy presence.

“

Ya ever see a pterodactyl about to take off? Like one of those museum models all perched up on a cliff, 15-foot wingspan and all. That’s what she looked like, I’m serious.” We laughed. Surya Das

had his arms out like a bat creature, head hunched forward, and back bent. He slowly stalked into the room. He was imitating the darshan of “The Mother” of the Aurobindo ashram at Pondicherry, near the tip of Southern India, where he had recently gone before Gill’s arrival.

Once or twice a year the 96-year-old “Mother” appeared on a third story rooftop balcony in her Franco-Indian mansion, the headquarters of Auroville International. She would look down silently on the crowd below, then, resembling the Pope, give her blessings with a signal or a wave. Silhouetted against the stark Madras sky, she indeed resembled that ancient reptilian bird, the pterodactyl. She claimed to be immortalizing her body, this French Jewess who was once the “shakti” of the great Indian sage and God-man, Sri Aurobindo. Aurobindo, the most cerebral of all the twentieth century “enlightened” visionaries had written thousands of pages of complex metaphysics and poetry before he died in the 1950s. He was the Sage who had looked up into the night sky November 23, 1926, and seen the great light descending at the moment Sai Baba was born in Southern India in the tiny village of Puttaparthi.

Surya Das had first stopped on his way home to tell the Carrolls of the wealth of modern India. Consequently, in her diary, Winona Carroll would record that Surya Das’ visit was “oppressive as he raved on about Auroville, Hindu and Catholic idols, Teresa Neumann, and other stigmatists.” Upon this tricky subject, the Carrolls would hold fast, stating only in the words of Martin Luther, that Scripture alone was all sufficient as God’s revelation to man in providing the guiding light. We did not need other human intercessors to get us to Christ, but the “God-breathed” Word alone was trustworthy. The Carrolls were not too receptive to Surya Das’ argument that the peaceful vibrations validated the various Catholic and Hindu altars and shrines.

Baba Lite

W

ithin a few days, on May 4, we had our first interview with Baba in weeks. It was the night that Barbara, a relative newcomer, was to have her baby at the Whitefield Missions Clinic. Her husband Dolf had been at a psychiatric facility in Madras waiting for Baba’s healing until his mother and aunt flew there to rescue him. Things had gone haywire for the couple when they had been under a tantric guru in the States who oversaw their coitus. Barbara had come with a most shapely and fair-faced prettiness, a Greek nymphish quality, that put her in another class from most of the other girls. She hung there through her last four months of pregancy.

Laughing, poised and assured, Baba celebrated the exact moment,

resembling a chunky midwife who has just aided the easiest delivery of all time. Baba shut his eyes and rolled back his head gently. A gleeful babyish smile greeted us a moment later, as Baba mopped his brow, “All is well. Now baby is born, and Barbara very very happy.” He named the sex as the entire group went giddy, feeling huge relief.

What followed was a finely timed moment of rapport, indeed, cosmic humor. I had always been able to play off the mirthful side of the avatar. It was a whole region of meta-psychology that I understood, a sort of divine sport. All the heavies did it, from Krishna to Ramakrishna. And they would only indulge in this kind of humor with their closest disciples.

Baba made a sunny declaration of pure child-like love. He twinkled down at me proudly as the others looked on—it was intentional overkill. On cue, I dropped my chin on his elbow and stared up, resembling (I thought to myself) a watersnake basking on some rock, head stationary, eyes moving around (meanwhile, “Don’t cop out of the cold region,” rang out in my bead.) This mime continued for a while.

Soon Baba’s giddiness pursued other matters. Baba’s asides resembled a nun telling a most mild joke, and flushing during the process. Though with a slight change in expression, the mode would have become sardonic. “Too much LSD, you go crazy.” The group knew well the story of Ram Dass consecrating a piece of hashish, and giving it to Muktananda to chew. A comment followed suit about Ram Dass. “Too much LSD had made his mind unstable like an old woman. Now he is out collecting devotees when he himself is only a devotee. He is a bhakta, that is all, not a guru. When he comes here, complete change. Not name and fame, but same. Like all my other devotees.”

Then Baba turned to the subject of Gill who had recently been there. “And Mr. Freedom, now complete finish. Also going around like a guru. Outer show, not inner love, delusion.” Baba smiled at me as he imitated Gill’s standard Hatha yoga tapasya, the grimly set jaw, breathing slowly. Some of the girls giggled nervously. I felt remorse for Gill.

Baba’s rasping voice chuckled the question at us. “Is this Divine?” And Baba tilted his head back like a drunk drinking liquor, thumb pointing to his mouth. “No, deep wine!” And he laughed.

The final brunt of his humor was Sri V. V. Giri, the President of India, whom Baba had seen within the last few days. Giri, like many renowned mortals, was obnoxiously arrogant and was pushing population control. Baba challenged the President as being an unworthy example of the philosophy he espoused by having “11 children himself.” Baba then laughed, pretending to be senile and half-deaf in portraying the seventy-year-old statesman who strained to hear Baba’s words with “Waaahhh?” Baba had his hand cupped up to his ear.

The Indian president was humbled by the superhuman powers of this most bold and omniscient creature in the red robe. Giri would soon be coming to see Baba. And on this awesome note, the interview ended.

Baba flew to Bombay on May 10 for a tour, and to our surprise, a whole squadron of the American bhaktas had tickets for the same plane. In saris and make-up, “the select sisters”—Margaret, Betty, and Barbara—were in the airport lounge chattering exuberantly about the plane ride with Baba and a certain growing drama. They actually believed that Baba was going to marry Tatu, the off-limits rooftop prophetess very soon. They were to stay at Tatu’s family home, a mansion, in Bombay. Raja Reddy and I were leaning on Baba’s Lincoln station wagon and waving. I grinned sadistically as the plane took off. That was one micro-drama I was waiting to hear about.

Meanwhile, huge issues were mounting up in me in this invisible war within. Something had to break. The stakes were enormous, even eternal.

And I could feel some ancient process unfolding within me....wanting me.....wanting to change me....wanting to replace me. And I needed to face “the cold region” and voluntarily give it all over.

Inner War in the Jungle

W

ith Baba gone I now had my chance to get away. I chose Sri Ranga Patnam, where I had been before, an ancient temple town surrounded by subtropical jungle and sitting on a river. I needed to both watch the process within and finish the book as a means of release. The Carrolls had gone to the hill country for the month of May and beyond. On the bus trip, I read Norman Mailer’s Fire on the Moon, serialized in Life magazine. This would give me access to the “global mind” and its most recent frontier. I also

read The Immense Journey by Loren Eisley, a pantheistic epiphany by a scientist seeing new paradigms of monistic reality.

By evening I arrived at the residence elegantly tucked away in the jungle. The mansion was off the main road away from the ancient

village of Sri Ranga Patnam. This time it was virtually empty but for the servants. On a prior trip, when I had passed down the richly foliated palatial drive with a well-cut median, it almost took my breath away to see this large white mansion with pillars and wide stairs—like one of those thirties movies of Edwardian India. And it had its own regal history. What was now a dak bungalow had been a summer guest house of the great Maharaja of Mysore, now taken over by the Indian government. It was a prize exhibit for foreigners and surprisingly cheap.

I chose the suite facing the wide Cauvery River with its own side entrance to one of India’s regal rivers. The suite was stupendous by my recent standards, with two huge rooms, high-ceiling fans, a rug, canopybed, British dining room table, chairs, a sitting area, and marble tiled bathroom and shower. I loved it.

Enhancing my writing would be the coming monsoon season, cool dense rains thundering on the guest house, reminiscent of some nineteenth century scene of British colonial Bengal in a Satyajit Ray film. I could swim in the wide Cauvery River whose banks, with vines, creepers, monkey tribes, and tall pink storks, looked something out of the life of Jim Corbett. The one sobering precaution was for the inevitable, wet, black cobras flooded out of their holes and left to squirm in the rain, foliage, and wet underbrush during the heaviest monsoons. One bite and you were dead—the dark side to earthly paradise, I noted.

Ironically, the setting was like a call to the past glory of aristocracy and nobility, the genealogy-conscious traditions of men: that very mentality from which I had once come, that in actual fact made me an heir of sorts. What had stuck in my mind were the trembling, bedside whispers of relatives and family about former greatness and nobility of heritage. Though the degree of trembling would usually vary according to my daytime acts, often construed perhaps as a spurning of my ancestry.

Mysore,... I breathed to myself, alas, so good to be tucked away in the private enchantments of your verdant jungle and tropical foliage, full of aromatic mists and enigmas of sound.

I was alone in Sri Ranga Patnam for a 17-day stretch of absolutely grueling concentration, reflection, and writing. But I was also in an escalating spiritual battle that became the center of the inner drama. Again, I got the suite on the river side.

I had over the past year written numerous chapters in the book introducing Baba to Indians through Western eyes. But now it seemed that I had yet to give birth to this internal process in order to write the final chapter of the book. I had to deal with a certain haunting doubt, the issue of good and evil and that constant quiet-room of sadness and mourning within me. There were also occasional pinpricks from passages of biblical Scripture, once uttered by the Carrolls, searching through my soul.

And this was the big issue: I had to face up to the full implications of the proposition that “I Am God.” Said falteringly, or without confidence, you could plummet. Said wrongly, like the voice of self-assertion of an impatient British lord, asked for his passport one too many times by the Malaysian customs office, you could drop off the slope of delusional megalomania—not a good outcome.

To be God, that was the ultimate quest. The very heirdom I now sought to conquer was no less than the very dominion and eternity of Deity Itself. This was the final slope that has made the greatest men in history stagger in blindness and stumble in the intoxicating headiness of the final proposition, “Do you prefer to be related to kings and princes, or would you rather it be God Himself?” would come the inner question.

What was this final leap into Godhood? It was a hero’s journey, infinitely more hazardous than all the epics of Indiana Jones put together! It was chronicled in the Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, The Ramayana, the story of the Buddha and the lives of countless Godmen from Shankaracharya to Chaitanya and Ramakrishna who had mounted the vast slope, nosing up the impossible. Some, like Baba, had been born avatars, fully enlightened at birth. This was the Vedantic and mystical mindset. I had been a mystic for years and years.

If things had been enthralling this far, I was now speeding towards a huge choice that had taken me an entire lifetime to reach. The stakes were colossal because one’s very soul was the gambling chip sitting on the table in the final ante, perhaps the only ante.

The final ante required nothing less than all I had and was. One literally jumped into the pot, clutching his soul as the final ante to await the verdict. If he has won, then truly he has been God all along, and he has inherited, rightly speaking, the entire universe as his due. He merges with the Ocean of light, the Static Eternal, and the great cycle of Brahman has come to an end.

If not, and it turns out to be a huge mistake, then what is to follow is now no more reversible than a tiny speck of a figure plunging off the World Trade Center, seconds away from impalement on a guardrail. The wind whistles as the body plummets, while the full thrust of one’s entire act causes the mind to race with feelings it never dreamed it could contain. Repentance during the descent into the void will gain no more than a sardonic chuckle from the dark hosts who egged on the jump, if you subscribe to the “opposition view.”

Once you have jumped, your fate and ultimate destiny are sealed. Either the loss is merely the transient ego sacrificed in exchange for Godhood and all that there is, or the soul itself has been lost in exchange for something worse than obliteration. Even in my “advanced state,” I could not escape the demonic implications of this risk from the Carrolls’ perspective. Yet, intellectually, I knew it as “the pull of dualism” which the mystic must in the end transcend or never ever become enlightened. I was on the razor’s edge.

I monitored the inward process as I read, looking for clues. Norman Mailer’s Fire on The Moon had a key insight: that amongst the light years of electronic circuitry at the space vehicular assembly plant at Cape Kennedy, the balance of human destiny hung precariously in a war between God and the Devil, of which the outcome much depended on how mankind tipped the balance (clearly a Manichean or Deist view). The behemoth of celestial mechanics ready for space, the very engines of hardware and computer software, were somehow the very entrails of God, whom, by the very nonchalance and humanist pride in our handling, we were blaspheming. America was setting itself up for destruction. Perhaps in some remote corner of his mind, Mailer feared damnation. I was catalyzed to write about the West’s coming changes. Change necessitated destroying the old.

And words started coming. I wrote eight to ten hours a day, thousands of words a day. I cooked one meal a day of rice and dal on a kerosene stove on the back porch. Two or three times a day I needed a break. Often I went down to the Cauvery River and swam, eyeing the foliated banks of palms, papaya, mango, and eucalyptus trees, pink storks, and roaming tribes of monkeys. If my head was really thick, I took a cold shower, then walked to the ancient temple on the outskirts of the village. My soul felt like it was in the balance no matter what I did. My ego was preparing to die.

The ancient temple of Sri Ranga Patnam was a strange teacher. It had been built in the far past, before Columbus discovered America. I often stood in the large empty temple courtyard at twilight, as dark thunderheads shifted across the firmament like chariots. And crimson streaks from the horizon gave an orange cast to the thousands of intertwined deities enjoined, dancing and beckoning from the rising stuka gate, tier after tier, 50 or 60 feet into the air. In the 1400s, people were brought to the inner chamber, offered to the gods, and sacrificed. I often reflected and soulsearched as I peered up.

Then I walked the temple lawn between the tremendous granite outer walls, dotted with black crows, and the immense granite center temple, a gray, plain-faced fortress in the tradition of those forbidding temples at Karnak and Thebes. After a bit, I often strolled within, past wizened old Brahmins in the gusty central corridor, musty with ancient smells, down into the subterranean acres of candlelit corridors. I passed 50 shrines of

shining metal gods, through wisps of sandalwood incense, to some central god, the temple deity of Sri Ranga Patnam, a reclining granite idol of Vishnu 50 feet long surrounded by robed priests chanting away.

As pilgrims bowed down, offering coconut and alms, I would unfocus my eyes and take it all in. Or I might lean on the railing and study the god. Either way, I was fully accepted by the priestcraft as a pilgrim and mystic. Someone told me that they had turned away hundreds of Westerners from the ancient holy of holies. But the Brahmin priests let me in “due to the look in my eyes and level of consciousness.” I had to play this drama out. So I might buy a coconut and break it at the feet of the god. Then I would stroll through the cavernous, cool corridors, stopping at each strange god to study it as one would at the Smithsonian.

To be sure, there was no denying that in this “outing process” of the force at work within me, I was sensing a dead dark spirit of India. These temple gods seemed so far from the real level of enlightenment, so dreamlike, so astral, so full of imaginations, and phantasmic planes.

Indeed, so sadly lost, I wondered why they ever built such forbidding shrines, as imprisoned celibates with shaved heads babbled away strange Sanskrit mantras to stone monsters, their lives a continual mechanical prayer, eyes ever more glazed, the spirit, by all appearances, frighteningly devoid of life, exuberance and spontaneity. More akin, I morbidly observed, to the product of a Russian underground brainwashing camp. Not ecstasy, certainly not that. And that’s why my writing was such an urgent breakthrough, not into these dead ceremonies and pujas of epochs past, but a new handwriting of God for this century. Something contemporary, yet timeless, vital, and routed in the never-ending principles of Vedanta. But God forbid that America fall into this, well . . .idolatry?

Now ancient India spoke to me through her gods about the sacred mission of my writing, and its age-shattering significance, along with other human channels of the age. The spontaneous formation of words, like a mantra, would flow out to the entire world due to the very potency of the words. But only that leap, I knew, and nothing else would make me the acceptable vehicle. Yet these very temple-gods themselves were a stumbling block, and I assumed that the “illusion” only became progressively more offensive to drive the aspirant more desperately to find the answer. And right now the chief stumbling block was the very gods of India themselves.

When I walked away from the main black monoliths, the voice of one of the Carrolls ran through my head with the ancient words, “You shall not make for yourselves idols, nor shall you set up for yourselves an image or a sacred pillar, nor shall you place a figured stone in your land to bow down to it; for I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 26:1).

The truth remained that modern India, to this very day, was still practicing what the Old Testament described as an abomination. It was the same idolatry of the Canaanites. This meant that I was now on the dividing line between fleeing it or reinterpreting it and finding the lost meanings behind the idolatry.

Then one morning, perhaps before dawn, several days later as I sat at a large oak dining room table covered with muslin, my typewriter before me, and stared out of the main window of my suite to the rain pitter-pattering on the freshly mowed mall where the jungle stopped, I had, in a flash, a direct inspiration from some stupendous source. The final chapter would be guided by a five-stage poem, which was the first factor out of the ordinary, since I never wrote poetry. Nor had I ever been into any goddesses. I was never a goddess groupie. Automatically, at the typewriter, I started the first poetic vision, “Chaos.”

The ancient goddess of destruction, Kali, appeared to me not in the frozen antiquities of a temple image, but in a new vision, popping out of her disguise like an optical illusion. She now appeared as the destructive force behind civilization. I was receiving the new metaphor of the ancient goddess. She had to destroy the old paradigms to bring in the new. The freestyle verse emerged.

——————— Kali Vision One: Chaos

Kali, come in a formidable guise, is a country, specifically America.

The parameters of her being progenerate and expel out from the formless and into the form, and then form is ingested, like Chronos devouring his children. These forms are wild and heretic. They are as audacious as the tinkertoy neons of Las Vegas and the bacteriophage housing plazas of polysterene wafers and concrete doughnuts.

Kali, bedecked in a galaxy of Chevrolet lights and chrome strips, perfumed with phenyl hydrazine and ionized smog, laced with threads of superhighways and excruciating boulevards, speeds up the high tension cables of her nerves with new isotopes. In the murky din and fanfare of jackhammers, bulldozers, sirens, and traffic cacophonies, she exudes from her million uteri the playthings of her children, in the maternity wards of Detroit, Chicago,

Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh. She peers back at her children through laser crystals, cathode ray tubes, sonar, and radar, and listens to them in the airwaves and through the circuits and wires, as they communicate in code.

Kali is burying her children in technology, devouring and beheading them in Vietnam, and resurrecting some of them through the sun disc of disillusionment. She is offering them a strange mystical vision and is uniting them in tribal communities on the precipice of rebirth. Many of these children might well see through the veil, as her costumes approach utter unbearability.

———————

Over the days, the rest surged forth as quickly as I could write. It was a mystic tome to the West, interpreting paradigm shifts in the language of the ancient gods.

My guiding thoughts as I wrote, were . . .that the postwar children of America were brought up in a sterile white world where society was determined to dominate the mysteries of nature and control all and everything. Pragmatism and logical positivism sought to anodize and vinyl spray-paint the grand eerie old cathedrals; it sought to put sodium vapor lights in every nook and cranny that contained hints of intrigue and signs of wonder.... And so the mystical in man quietly developed in the war and post-war youth of the television world, like some super-intuitive mantra used to invoke the reassuring memories of higher realities.

Soon I wrote vision two and three.

Kali: Vision Three: The Tantric Vision

Kali, with unforeseeable capriciousness, discloses to her children the revelation of a partial glimpse behind the mysteries of her topology. She presses out into the skies the entire panorama and paradoxical end-points of her most exquisite and appealing sensate delights, as they quiver in clever design concealing an abyss of misery.

Through the projection lenses on the other side of atoms, Kali displaces the movie film of externalized phenomena, before the eyes of her dearest children, and reveals dazzling unadulterated pure light. She silences her children in a moment of awe as the groaning celluloid beasts of the outer world finally lose their magical potency.

Such children of Kali sit perched on the eve of a final rebirth, through the causal nexus, to beyond the beyond.

There were five Kali Visions and some of them were quite long. I was writing off the chart.

The final section of the chapter, “The New Beginning,” was the most demanding, requiring greater shifts of allegiance within me to this creative source. In short, I was faced with what Gill had termed “the cold region.”

During all this, a requiem seemed to play quietly in my soul. It spoke of the very cessation of my life with such certainty that living memories were already being eulogized and stored away in some vault of the dead. The muffled drum, the passing bell approached, not to announce the death of my body, but rather an eternal slipping away of that mutable awareness that I had always taken to be who I was, the individuality and personality of Tal Brooke. What would come in its place, or be revealed, and how the me that was “in office” could benefit from this, was a mystery behind a closed door. For now, with a certain remorse, I would wave goodbye at the parting gate to all that had ever seemed to matter, the pith and core of sen

timental longings embodied in the remembrance of things past. To be killed on the altar were memories that had once been life and joy in my life: Me on my BMW motorcycle exulting through the Blue Ridge Mountains with a girlfriend riding on the back. Going to Sweetbriar, then off to a field to picnic with some beauty and other University of Virginia classmates and their dates. Older family memories. Memories of crossing the Atlantic on the SS United States to England. Traveling to Paris, Athens, Rome, Beirut, Cairo and countless other destinations—in some ways it had been a charmed life.

Nothing stopped the raging fire deep within me. I knew that I had to be able to finally say, “I am God.” And there was no avoiding this leap. It involved my saying something that most of my life I swore was unthinkable. There were deep barriers in my way, I assumed, of enculturation. Nondualist mysticism had helped me cross many of these natural barriers, as had my mystical LSD experience. And certainly Baba’s power and presence had taken me the farthest. But in the end, I had a solitary choice ahead of me. My impasse needed supernatural intervention, and I got it.

Intervention from beyond

D

uring the predawn hours of June 5, a Sunday morning, an occult visionary dream invaded my mind with a powerful message. Its clarity and intensity were of a magnitude similar to sitting in an IMAX theater, fully beyond ordinary dreams. The experience was so soul-rending, that I quietly shed tears through the duration of that gray rainy morning. This was no small thing, since I was never one to cry, and most of those few times had to do with private loves.

During the dream, my mind and soul were peeled back, and my eyes were held open as I stood on a high ledge and watched the events flow helplessly by. In some inner chamber, I could almost sense a gigantic spirit with a censer, for the first time, fully beaming down on me during these hours of decision, like some early hours rite in Brindavan just for “Tallie.”

But the paralyzing clincher was that the evidences within the dream fell down to the last atom on both sides of the balance of my terrible choice. And rather than the issue being resolved, it was heightened in its frightening magnitude. A part of me felt this love of Baba all the more and repented of its doubts, realizing that it was through the divine focus of Baba that I was taking this walk into the night. But the other part of me detected something going on beneath the machinery of the dream itself. I felt like an amnesiac seeing the source of his trauma and not identifying it beyond an “irrational fear.” I felt a warning signal, like smelling a thick pungence of cinnamon in the air, but again and again detecting a hint of chloroform or carbon monoxide or tanus leaves underneath. I was sure the dream had a supernatural source.

An initiation

I

t is in the future, at some multiple location: in London at the Savoy or Regency off the Thames, in Washington D. C. at some huge Sheraton or Hilton on the Potomac, and yet also on the Nile River in Cairo, all places that I have been to before. It is in the evening.

I pull off a ramp and drive into a large Holiday Inn-type parking lot filled with cars. I am late for something or other. Along with me are Kerry and Janet and a few other Baba devotees from the early days. As we rush through the crowded lot, the entire panoramic building complex is absolutely teeming with activity. In one wing, a huge buffet dinner, in another, several dining rooms are serving dinner for hundreds, all Baba devotees, at various levels of closeness to Baba. Through a huge plate-glass window, as I approach the electric doors, I am able to glimpse Baba’s form, hurriedly passing along a banquet table. People stop chewing and hold up their hands in prayerful salutation. Baba is in the impersonal mode, and apparently very busy. Only the most urgent matters will engage his attention. With him are Raja Reddy and a few others whom I don’t recognize. I have absolutely no idea what color badge I will be given, nor how long it has been since I have seen Baba, nor whether I even stand in the “inner circle” at all.

The size of the function brings to mind political conventions at the really big hotels in New York or Chicago. And these are Baba’s elect. Lesser devotees throughout the land are celebrating together variously.

I enter and am separated from Kerry and Janet, being ushered through lobbies, corridors, vast dining halls, through more plush, smaller, and more exclusive dining rooms, to the very elite area where a gold-black badge is pinned on me. It is obviously among the most precious and esteemed badges. Clearly, Baba has gone global.

Baba enters the dining room among swirling valets and messenger boys. Trembling American dignitaries, of all aspects of fame, are at bay just to get a word in with Baba. He passes them by. My boldness of approach is no different from that of the India days. I mask all uncertainty, pressing to the limits that I have a special exclusive relationship with him.

Baba busily acknowledges me, saying a few hasty words, but his manner is more remote. He quickly moves on. But something just happened, something huge.

Baba, in a fraction of time, transferred an impulse to me. It may have been a inward command. I am to go through something very important like the final chance to pass some sort of ultimate test.

Now I become almost fully taken over. I am no longer under my own control. I almost move like a robot or someone under mind control.

My body automatically begins moving hurriedly out to the parking lot. My soul and mind look helplessly on as some other force guides the machinery of my arms and legs. I get into the car and speed out into a temperate drizzle, through nighttime boulevards and a maze of ramps and flashing lights.

Now I move along the river’s edge. It becomes more like the Nile and less like the other rivers. In an industrial dockside area, down cobblestone alleys, there are a number of huge granite buildings that, though appear

ing to blend in with the rest, evidently have been camouflaged. In fact, they

are thousands of years old, remnants, as it were, of the monumental cryptic chambers of ancient Egypt, huge vaults of stone. I enter one dingy

doorway of a vast gray building composed of ten-ton seamless blocks that

without windows climbs five stories high. The only ornamentation is a

half-moon roof that looms against the brownish fog.

Inside the very warehouse walls themselves are hidden stairs to the

upper vaults. I enter upon the landing of ancient stone and am ushered by

a single guide to a doorway 20 feet high. It is directly from Thebes or

Karnak. A supernatural power swings open the huge stone door as I enter.

Then the power swings it almost shut behind me. This timeless chamber

seems to be the focus of every mystery initiation in history, right up to

modern Masonic rites in Paris and London. It is the room of ancient mysteries, spanning the earth, from ancient Babylon to the present. It holds the

mysteries of the ages.

I join a chanting line of initiates in the dark shadows. They appear stupefied. We are all facing a high priest. The flickering light is from two

black sulfur candles at the altar, revealing the chamber to be quite large.

The priest has a distinctly Eastern appearance. His companion priest is

now quite familiar. I recognize him as the principal of the Veda School in

Puttaparthi, the same little gnome-man with burning eyes. The butterflies

in my stomach are in a nauseous terror, sensing the anvil of choice.

Standing above us at least 20 feet high against the front walls are two stone colossi that are also at the British Museum, the Cairo Museum, or the tomb of Ramses the Second. These granite giants glued against the wall are Seth and Anubis, the Egyptian god of evil and the jackal god of the necropolis of death. The priest holds a burning censer as something tells me that it is tanus leaves burning. The hypnotic chanting becomes more intense.

I now see that to our left, behind thick curtains, are circular stairs that lead to an upper chamber. A priest has pulled them back to beckon us on with a lit candle. The initiates before me in line slowly turn around and face the stairway. The anvil of choice is nearer.

With helpless terror I am close to losing my mind. For suddenly, both granite giants, perhaps 50 tons each, have unglued themselves from the wall, and have now started to slowly edge forward with hideous strength. The gigantic feet sound like hydraulic hammers each time they hit the rock floor. A wind has entered the room from nowhere. These stone giants are now scanning the room with eyes of fire.

Then, as the others move beyond me, I try to stall in such a way as to escape detection while I desperately calculate an escape. I know my soul is on the anvil of choice. The priests move up the stairs as the two living statues slowly follow. One stops and searches through the crowd with burning red eyes.

My spirit fights with my body not to proceed. My choice rests on a particle of time. I must escape in the vanishing seconds of dim hope, in much the same way as a field mouse instinctively dodges the beak and talons of a hawk.

A question is ringing out in my guts, “Why is it that every time I reach this same gate, this narrow choice of initiation, that no matter how light, airy, loving, and innocent the pathway has been up until that point, the doorway, the rite, cannot be made in any other fashion than that which feels unbelievably sinister to my deepest being? Why does it bear a total resemblance to the very horrors that I most instinctively feared as a small child, the deepest things of Satan? Why does the final doorway always have the feel of evil rather than good? Or can’t it be somewhere in between? Why never the bells of bliss? For, at the final moment, the carpet is pulled from under you, and you still have to pass through the fire and kiss the feet of some demon god. And only then can you pass through some dark tunnel— a tunnel through which you can never see the other side.”

In the final possible moment, I gained back the full control of my arms and legs. To do this I had to follow my most heartfelt leading, something that I knew deeper than anything. I called out the name of Jesus, of all things. Then the door opened and my legs sped through the front door. Instinctively, I ran down the inner stairs with such nimble quickness that the somnambulistic procession could not stop me. Perhaps miles or hours later, I stopped running. I knew I had escaped with my life. I also sensed this deep well of hope. I want to hang on to this hope.

But it’s not over yet.

Before I can wake up or collect myself, a second dream immediately follows like a new videocassette punched in to replace the old one. This dream is a direct sequel to the last one. In it, I now realize that I have blown that final test by letting instinctive fears keep me from the gate of Godhood. I am not advanced enough.

In this dream, the dial of my emotions shifts, and I am lost in a lost world, back in the West without roots, estranged from Baba. Then in a grand act of cosmic forgiveness, Baba descends from his float in a grand parade in Washington, D. C., as the World Avatar, to reclaim his lost disciple. In a blur of heavy emotion the dream ends, leaving me overwhelmed as I wake up.

The next day I packed and took the bus back to Bangalore. My spiritual crisis was mounting to a vast inner war, as though a contest between God and Satan. My own checkmate on the board of eternity felt to be only moves away. The inescapable choice remained on the horizon, a final initiatory rite. And like the occult dream, my response was crucial.

Would I or would I not bow before this force and enter the unknown tunnel? And was the end of the tunnel blissful Godhood or some demonic abyss, a twisted, eternal descent into outer darkness? I could not deny the sense of warning that the dream had carried—that was the dominant final impression.

Chapter 24

The Terrible Revelation

I

f the trip to Sri Ranga Patnam had left me feeling that edgy, less godlike sense of mortal vulnerability—so definitive of a mere creature, that God-breathed speck of dust in Genesis—a clue appeared

just in time to give me another quick boost. It was the next move on the chess board by some force on the other side.

As I have said, amongst us there was a pool of many talents. On June 7, just a day after I returned to the Blake cabin, we encountered a new roommate, Mark, who ingratiatingly asked me permission to stay on as he was beginning to feel a little ill of late, and needed people who could tend him. This was the same Mark who had arrived with Margaret and Barbara before the November birthday festival some months back, the one I had turned away from our suite at Puttaparthi around the time so many of the American outcasts were living on the roof. Mark was by now a most familiar face, and certainly more sensitive and intelligent than most of the others. His straw mat lay near mine in the front room.

Caution urged me to proclaim him in sick bay, in case he was coming down with what Michelle and others had recently succumbed to, that most contagious and debilitating nemesis of the Peace Corps, yellow jaundice or hepatitis. It could eat up two-thirds of a human liver in weeks, killing a portion of those who had it. But unlike the Peace Corps, we did not have the funds to charter a whole plane back to the States, should one of our people be among that percentage who die from it.

Wendell and Phil had been amazed at the position of my stars, and a consequent tarot reading that was almost identical. The result was a growing fame among the Westerners that, fitting the pattern of Baba’s election of me, I was a “triple Aquarius” with three “exalted” signs. Mark, whose peculiar talent involved going into some kind of mediumistic trance, shook and sweated as the readings came through the “Masters.” As he stared at my planet signs and worked through the “houses,” he was in awe between his seizures of rapid speech. Some of his natural awe, in the form of Brooklynese exclamations, with a bit of Yiddish, I censored as I typed what he said word for word. I really hoped this would help settle my crisis.

As the astrological voice spoke through Mark, now clearly beginning to channel from some higher source, the other Blake members sat silently listening nearby. The entire cabin was still very struck by the “Kali Visions.” What was now coming from Mark inspired me as I recorded it, full of innumerable insights, major recurrent patterns and themes true to my personality, stirring proclamations and truths. The edicts of fortune seemed to renew me. The added warnings and revelations of my weaknesses and shortcomings challenged my imagination, and aroused an admiring curiosity. Once again, if a team of Hollywood screenwriters were to get together and think up the ultimate horoscope to prepare me for enlightenment, this was it:

“Personality throughout life, there is a general trend towards expansion . . . started up as (messed up) kid, but ... there were occult forces that you could not contend with, no one understood them. You were superopen and super-sensitive to them.” (This was true, since in Haiti when I was a very small child, some odd things happened, including the possibility that I had been taken to a Voodoo ceremony.). “Your view of the world is to take cosmic wholes and analyze them. Digest the whole show. You do it by intuition. In the future you will enlighten science, perhaps change history of science through channeling higher forces. Fascination with death for the explosion all over the universe. Ego death in this life.

“Super-strong ego power in you. The Jovian intellectual king on the throne ... the guy who likes the good life . . . intellectual arbiter of the whole world who is going to die. He is scared. The split is between hobnobbing with the good life and the destruction of the personality that is seen as a sham. Knowing the oneness of it all, and wanting to blow it out.

“Uranus in Gemini—intuition of writing channeled right from the hierarchies: right from the masters. Mind is exploding with higher mind. Forty-watt bulb over-loading with millions of watts.... very powerful, coming through public, immensely popular books. May quickly fade from public recognition ... watch that. Will catch public imagination, novelty though ... stumbling blocks will be powerful older friends, may make me wait at the gates. Main obstacles, mother: also women in general, beware of female deception and those who want to mother. Keep brahmachari. Hang up with women in past lives.

“In talking with people, you have to be on the upper hand, the sun, top dog. Love of dangers and motorcycles . . . be careful of daredevil risks . . . could get (messed) up with daredevil transportation. Possible leg injuries . . . Too serious, can’t have any fun in life.

“Capricorn in the fifth house . . . relate to kids as an old man. The child in you is suppressed and buried very deep. As a kid you had to fight with belligerency. The child had to disguise by being the tough guy. It is as though your energy is directed at recapturing that lost childhood ... childhood innocence is top of mountain.

“You fall in love with hauntingly beautiful women, follow that as through they were the key to the other world. Venus in Pisces, falling in love with the dream, the illusion.”

“Sixth house: thank God your life is devoted to service to others. Hard exterior, soft interior. Yet incredibly sensitive ... respond to forces other people barely feel ... aware of other planes that others can barely feel. Quite possible that you will start some new kind of occult thing going. A new cycle in the occult.

“Ninth House: Taurus; legalistic, emotional legalism. Higher principles, what is fair, what is just ... justice is high sense’ righteous indignation. Would prove my point by putting people through lawsuits. Interests all over the world. Past life kingship. You had something to do with seership. Visionary keys in the past. Power to look into the future. Problems with father, he was an obstacle. Heavy karma with family, chose to come to get rid of crap.”

“Will be beacon of future change in the world. John the Baptist of America, voice in the wilderness. My planet is Jupiter ... key of chart with Uranus coming in second. You will not be visionary on the mountain but will bring it down into the world .... Masters are giving him so much power that he is not functioning .... The other person is very important in your life. Funnel coming from cosmos and infinity ... through you to the man on the street. Ego and destruction coming through you to him. Siva comes through you and dances upon the head of

the average man. You are Siva. People will try to step on you ... problems with your father, perhaps discrediting you. Must not try to tear his heart out, rivalry power-game from the year one. He was your enemy.”

“Mars-Saturn opposition. You can blow it by reckless streak. Could run some cat over at a hundred miles an hour, also reckless with words. Say things you do not mean. You could get some of the greatest words in history if you are good. But speak more sweetly, words are your weapon, also. Could use this power for destruction or for good. A lot of violence, very deep that explodes out. You are a volcano, a pranic one. The force that propels you to heights, the guy running the gauntlet, tremendous power and tremendous obstacles that come in the form of older man. You have a hell of a time with authority. You want to cut the balls off the establishment. Heavy stuff in the past. Had your fingers in many pies, some from much higher planes. Epic stuff like Tolkein. Not an earthly love, a love like an incredible inner plane thing. Good chart but a rough life, fascinating rough life; you will triumph over all the forces. Tremendous intellect, power, energy, intuition. Against you are temper and incredible vindictiveness.”

“If you get married, the person would not have to be human. I would expect her to be Venus coming out of the shell. Standards of another world.”

The channeling ended like the ultimate fortune cookie. Sweating profusely, Mark turned to me and said, “Heroic life, heroic proportions. If you could control your temper, you could have the whole world. Then you will have so many siddhis (powers) you won’t know what to do with them. I look at you and have to say that you are not a human being, you are a great being, and must have come here out of great compassion.”

Mark’s concluding comments as he came out of the spell were so full of reverence that I was deeply touched. He really meant it. But as far as clues for the final chapter went, I had heard it all before, and the temporary boost went away as readily as any transient mood. Besides, this sort of grandiosity always felt dry in the end, like past-life seminars where participants reminisce about their lives as Plato and Mahavira.

The drum beat, the passing bell continued as my inner war returned.

By mid-June all the others but Surya Das began moving back to Puttaparthi by Baba’s orders. Surya Das wanted solitude to get his head together, and I wanted solitude to finish that last chapter. Baba himself would be well nigh unreachable throughout the month, traveling inter

Tal Brooke approaching the point of no return

mittently between Whitefield, Puttaparthi, but spending most of his time at the women’s college in Ananthapur, which was now rapidly being completed. There was no reason for me to suffer the heat and hardship in Puttaparthi when I had the cooler cabin with Surya Das with its greater sense of freedom and privacy.

By this time Mark’s illness showed its true jaundiced colors, and he moved to Saint Philomenas Hospital in Bangalore. Surya Das and I visited him hooked up to bottles of glucose. He tried to smile and brave it. He had a Charan Singh follower for a roommate, an American, and they spent tired hours on their backs comparing their masters. Mark defended Baba as the avatar; his roommate defended Singh as the highest of masters. Fulfilling my expected leadership position, I informed the lad that one invalidating thing about Charan Singh and his fellow disciple Kirpal Singh under their master Sawan Singh, was that they had started rival orders, continually backstabbed one another, each claiming sole succession to the guru. Besides, he was a guru, Baba was an avatar, and so on. Mark disappointed me in not being better able to defend Baba.

But by June 20, I, too, was no longer able to effectively defend Baba in the face of this challenge. I made enigmatic statements to the hospital roommates and used everything I had to keep from breaking down before their very eyes.

“The Clue” appeared two days earlier and it utterly changed my life. I would never be the same. You can forgive and forget at times, but you cannot go back and undo what has taken place in history.

The Clue

A

cloak of darkness was beginning to cover the desolate wilderness around the empty Blake cabin. It was the evening of June 18, and I could hear Surya Das’ steps near the front porch. I had spent a fruitless day sitting alone in the cabin struggling for inspiration for the last chapter, while Surya Das had spent the afternoon out wandering and shopping. I was hungry and I figured we would try to get supper together on the little kerosene stove. But when his form slowly lumbered through the dark porch into the living-room light, I knew instantly upon seeing his face, as he flung back his shawl headdress, that something had just happened. The awesome burden he was carrying darkened his normally carefree face, and I knew it might be unbearable.

Surya Das stood in the doorway, hand on hip, sighing, slightly shaking his head, the anxious depth in his black eyes carrying a look of silent tormented abandon,

the kind of look I expect he had when he was a 12-year-old living near Chattanooga and heard that his parents had decided to divorce. The only word that he could get out of his mouth was a ponderou, “Well...,” and I secondguessed the rest with a tone of total certainty, “... I’m not going to believe what you’re about to tell me.”

“Right.”

“It’s going to totally blow my mind.” “Yup.”

“It’s about Sai Baba.”

“You guessed it.”

My heart was beating furiously as my mind raced to arm itself for something fully as obliterating as my mountaintop LSD experience. I got into the most optimal physical position to receive the shocking news, in the center of the room in familiar conference fashion. Then I told him, “Okay, let’s hear the whole thing from beginning to end, every detail, don’t rush to the crux of the thing without leading up to it.”

“You know the tea house in Whitefield, the one where a lot of the Anglo-Indian guys hang out?”

“Never been in there, but go ahead.”

“Well, I went in there for some tea and ran into some of the guys whom I’ve talked to a number of times. I joined them, and we soon got on the subject of spiritual things. Well, they were sort of half-interested. Then I got on the subject of Baba. They wouldn’t say anything. I kept pressing it and they kept quiet. Finally a guy named Raymond and I went for a walk near the Carrolls’ house. I kept pressing him. He was very quiet. I knew he had something to say, so I got his complete confidence. He asked me to tell nobody, to swear to keep this a secret, that what he was about to tell me only two other guys knew, that not even his friends in the tea house knew it. Furthermore, he was under an oath to his best friend, Patrick, not to tell a soul. He said he had a sudden feeling of responsibility for my soul, and that was why he was taking the chance, despite his legitimate fear of Baba’s supernatural powers. That unprotected, he or his family might get destroyed, that there have been instances before of local people really being under a curse.”

“Right, I know what you mean. Phil once dug up some unpleasant stuff among the local villagers of Puttaparthi regarding the original source of Baba’s occult power. Something about an ancient lingam on a hill. But I didn’t want to hear about it because there was no way to substantiate it.”

“Anyway, Raymond described to me how about two years ago, a few months before you met Baba, Patrick... you know the one, the real goodlooking Anglo-Indian with long hair and the sensual look. Yeah, the really good-looking, well-built guy who hangs around Whitefield.... Okay, well Patrick went to Brindavan one day, and sat among a whole crew of Americans who were just passing through town for a few weeks. Well, Baba thought that Patrick was one of the freaks from the States you know, because of his long hair and light skin. So he invited Patrick in with all the others for the interviews he gave to the Americans.”

“Uh-huh,” I responded with a slow, deliberate sigh.

“Well, one day after one of those interviews, Baba kept him over for a private interview.”

I was going to keep silent for now, for the only two people who knew about my own private interviews with Baba were Wendell and Phil, Prema’s husband, because they had confided their similar experiences to me.

“Well...,” Surya Das said, slowly shaking his head. “... Aw man you’re not going to believe this. But I’m gonna have to tell you anyway. At any rate, Baba treated him like he does you, you know, all the special attention beside the chair, addressing things only to him, smiling a lot. When all the others left and Baba got him alone, he did his usual number of materializing things and telling him his inner secrets, though I don’t know why the devil he didn’t know that Patrick just lived down the road. Well, the next thing that happened was that in one smooth motion, Baba reached down and unzipped Patrick’s fly, and pulled his tool out.” Surya Das stopped for a long pause to let this one fully drop on me. Then he looked up as though to say, “Okay, are you ready for this next one?”

“Well, when he worked Patrick up ... Man, I don’t know why the guy just stood there and put up with this crap. In fact, when I asked Raymond, all he said was that Patrick was only about seventeen, horny, perhaps a little naive, and I guess didn’t give a blue jay what the other partner was. Maybe he was curious or just wanted to see the whole weird thing through, or maybe the kid’s a bisexual. Though Raymond told me that Patrick is only interested in girls, and just may have some what-yacall liberal curiosity. How the hell should I know? But at any rate he worked up a bone all right, and the next thing that happened is really gonna blow your mind. Baba lifted his robe and inserted the thing. That’s right. Maybe he’s got a woman’s organ and a man’s organ down there. Yeah, a hermaphrodite. But he honestly inserted it. Patrick said it felt just like a woman.”

I was chilled to the marrow, and really did not want to believe what I was hearing. The problem was that till then, I knew at least some of this stuff from firsthand experience. Now finally it had gone too far. “Listen, if Baba had been a hermaphrodite, it would have gotten out all over the neighborhood. All Indian kids run around naked till they’re five.”

“I know, but maybe Baba’s mom protected him or hid him, or hell, ‘it,’ yeah, that’s right, ‘it.’ Maybe she was really careful with it. Or some of those people, what ya call neuters, can be latent for years, and only develop a labia after puberty. I don’t know all the physiology. Besides, with all his supernatural powers, he’s got a sort of weird body anyway. Maybe the guy just transmutes, you know, shifts his protoplasm around at will. At any rate, Raymond told me that just at the moment before Patrick was through, Baba pulled him out and collected his semen in a little white handkerchief.”

“This is really too much,” I remarked grimly, “Do you think it’s some kind of a lie or hoax?”

“I wish to hell it was, but I get a total feeling that it’s true. The guy just was not lying. It was not a come-on. He was dead serious and scared. He was sticking his neck out. I know people and this guy was telling the truth. At any rate, let me continue. Baba collected the stuff, and then told him that the whole world lay in the palm of his hand, and that anything Patrick wanted, he could have. That Baba was planning a special position for him, like Raja Reddy. That Patrick could move in, live there, and be with Baba to spread his mission throughout the world. Suddenly Patrick didn’t give a hoot. He may have even laughed and told Baba that he was from just down the road, and that he wasn’t even an American. At any rate he stopped going and that was it.”

“Okay,” I announced despondently. “Are you ready for this one?” “I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. After this I could hear just about anything and it couldn’t be any more shocking.”

“By the way, before I go into this, I should tell you that among the guys whom Baba has already ‘purified,’ by pulling out the lingam, are: Wendell, Phil ... Yeah, I know he’s married, but one day Phil confided this to me. And that’s not all. There was the disciple of Yogi Bhajan, there was also ‘Alpine Schwartz,’ the tall dude with the blue ski cap. Yeah, he told Wendell one day at the Whitefield ice-cream stand how Baba materialized a japa-mala for him in a private interview, and how it had a white bug crawling around on it. Then Baba pulled his drawers down, handled it for a minute presumably to cleanse it of ‘heat.’ That’s not all. There was also a guy who only passed through for a few days, and by the way, that’s why. One day Wendell and I were at the Chinese restaurant off Brigade Road, and right at the table next to us, were Gordon, the jewelcutter from L. A., and this guy from UCLA who I thought was blaspheming Baba. He was talking at full pitch describing to them how Baba was a ‘homo,’ how Baba got him in for one of those private interviews, pulled his fly down, and started to go to town. He said it scared the hell out of him, and he practically ran out from the place with his fly down. Baba chased him to the door calling him, panic-stricken as the kid just left. Wendell and I just thought the guy wasn’t mature enough to handle or transcend his own negative projections and cultural hang-ups.

“But then you’ve got to ask yourself, if Baba’s omniscient, why does he pick people who’re going to misinterpret it and blow the whistle on him?” I let this data sink in on him and continued, “But that’s not all, there’s one little card that I’ve been holding back on you till now. I, myself, am the main one of all of them. That’s right, Surya Das, Baba has done it to me, and up till now I have pretty much sworn the whole thing to secrecy, believing fully that it was a form of tantric purification, or if nothing else, a test, of allegiance.”

I described my final gruesome encounter with Baba during that fateful private interview in Whitefield which has been alluded to but which the reader does not know about in detail. We will let the matter rest here, with my only statement being that unlike Patrick, I did not respond. In fact, I tried to keep my mind on the “clear light,” assuming that I was being schooled in the unimportance and ephemeral irrelevance of the physical aspect. Baba never again approached me after that.

Surya Das, like me, was in shock. He got up and started making tea while wandering around in a daze.

“But there’s another extra side of this,” I added, “There is also an occult aspect about the semen. Check this out. One day I heard Phil’s confession as we were returning to Whitefield on a bus. How Baba did to him what he had done to me. Thank God none of us even thought about getting it up. But what Phil told me, and you know he used to teach astrology at the Six Day School in Frisco, having been into it for over ten years, is the fact that semen is one of the most potent things used in really heavy occult stuff. The vital essence of life or whatever. Perhaps even Alistair Crowley used it. No doubt that’s why there’s such a heavy emphasis on sex in covens.

“But one thing Phil mentioned was that when he and Prema were going to have their second child, they both vowed to stay celibate for a year and store up their seeds for what they call a ‘solar year.’ It is said that if you do this, you will pull into this world the highest soul imaginable to incarnate into the body of your child, something on the level of a rishi or a master. You can also control their astrological chart somewhat by timing the conception. I think Phil’s kid might be a solar year one, maybe that’s why Baba has always taken him in. Well, I’m not sure we can even think that way anymore. But if semen is invaluable, sperm stored up for a solar year must be about the most precious thing that someone who is into sorcery can use.”

A chilly silence filled the air. “Think what kind of unsuspecting gold mine Baba might have in the Veda School lads. Several hundred kids disciplined severely into celibacy whom Baba uses as a kind of sperm-bank. Even then, Phil told me that he quite frankly suspected that such was the source of Baba’s powers, sperm from the Veda School kids stored for a solar year.” I went on to mention a dream I had a year before in Puttaparthi in which Baba went on an inspection tour of the Veda School urinals.

We sipped our tea numbly, while I felt my soul disintegrating. I would be under a dark cloud of unknowing for weeks, the constant pressure of despair pressing me to the outer limits of my endurance. If it cracked this time, I knew the battle would be fully lost, for there would not be the slightest chance of navigating out of the abyss that I had gone so deeply into, particularly now that the invisible domain that I had allied myself to for so long was turning against me. I just did not want to believe the facts if I didn’t absolutely have to. Within a day we would try to get Patrick himself to agree to come by and tell us his account. The issues were too important not to. Many lives might eventually be involved, even millions of them.

I also knew I could not make a patchwork of lies and truths self-servingly and call it reality. If I intentionally unknew or ignored what I now knew, verily, I would be like the Laotian monk immolating himself in the fiery corona of red, who, at the irredeemable moment past the point of no return, begins to twitch a little before the newsreel ends and before the public eye vanishes. And it tells us that the emaciated figure twitching in flames is paralyzed into an agony that might just last forever. The willful monk just keeps a poker face till the body drops away, then when all the onlookers are out of view, he can scream forever. What a scream that’s gonna be. Just himself and the void, endlessly black, forever and forever. The monk just has to look enlightened and keep composure while aflame. He can’t embarrass his religion with bad theater! It is a covenant of the will. How terrible to learn that your trance is not enlightenment after all as 1,000-degree flames bubble and fry your skin in escalating agony that no force on earth can stop!

Almost as an afterthought I said, as the “Good Book” says, “And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God: And the books were opened; and another book was opened; which is the book of life. And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.... And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:12-15).

We sat stunned, talking into the early hours of the morning. Sleep would not come before certain points were settled in our minds. We gaped at one another in shock, when we weren’t reminding ourselves of such things as: “The bottom just dropped out of my entire life. Can you believe it, would you ever have believed it, Baba is a queer? Twenty-five years of being guided to this incredible peak, backed up by all kinds of complex life patterns, intuitions, omens and signs, an absolutely astounding philosophy, and so convincing is it, so positive are you that it is the truth, all culminating in Baba, that you invest all that you have and are into it. Then one day, just in a second, it is all ripped away! Where do you go next, Las Palmas, the Caribbean? Do you just pack your bags and forget it ever happened? Stop thinking, like most people, and live the thoughtless hedonistic life waiting for the next floor to cave in? Never.”

The others would soon feel the consequences of our act, and we knew that we had to deal with this immediately. The main obstacle in reaching the others was the impermeable, blind-faith, closed system of belief fundamental to the whole path. Even those dearest to us would predictably launch a counterattack on our own validity. It had always worked this way before. I should know, I had done the same with others who fell away.

“We will have failed like so many other bright stars of promise who gave in to ‘sensuality, ego, doubts, and weakness.’ If it’s our word against Baba’s, you know whose word they’re going to believe, and it won’t be ours.”

But even if the group invalidated us, there was still a sore spot that they had yet to explain. And that was Baba’s blunder in bestowing so much “grace” upon those who would turn away, disillusioned, from him and embarrass him by broadcasting their grievances, real or imaginary, to the entire world. Tal, known for his zeal and faith, never known for an outward show of doubt, who would suddenly turn on Baba as an enemy. Tal who had written pamphlets circulating through Assam and northern India about Baba, and who now had a huge project coming out of the presses of Calcutta in the form of a book. The problem the American contingent had to deal with was explaining how the avatar, who sees perfectly above time, who knows everything that is going to happen (for he says so adamantly) could allow for so adverse an outcome. Why, even my book would have to be scrapped as a bitter memory, as it came out and those reading it learned that the once great Tal Brooke, who spoke to crowds of thousands and sang to them, was suddenly persona non grata.

Doubtless, the Americans would take the situation as a divine test upon their own faith, translating me into a convenient fragment of maya.

The next afternoon Patrick and Raymond did come. Very sobered, less flippant than usual, Patrick’s account followed virtually word-forword what Surya Das had told me the fateful night before. Then, when I told them my entire story, they weren’t surprised. I aired my thoughts. “Your account can’t be contrived because if there’s nothing else I know, one thing I do know, and that is that I have personally stood alone before Sai Baba with my pants down to my knees.” All of us would depart, sworn to mutual secrecy till more data came in. Patrick would urge me to remain quiet, perhaps to protect his family at least from disgrace, at the same time understanding my relentless quest for the truth.

The gloomy days of June would stretch on, desolation wherever I was. This state of occult desolation really cannot be communicated. The difficulty in trying to portray this terrible state is total. It is not like a death in the family or seeing friends die in an auto wreck where grief enfolds. The terrible power of my occult desolation, let me suggest, had come through a spiritual doorway, and most people have no idea where it is and how far back there it is.

Should Surya Das and I, virtually oblivious of our surroundings, make our way along the same road, slowly lumbering to deep sighs of indignation, a circular prison of thought would go on. “I feel like I’m dying inside. I just can’t believe I’ve been with this guy for so long, trusting him completely, a guy who is worshiped by millions who don’t even know that he’s a...”—and there would be a brief pathetic laugh—“closet queen. He’s up there on stage working miracles before their very eyes, claiming to be God Almighty, and behind closed doors he’s toyed with any number of guys.” My head would be hanging low, and Surya Das would ask, “Well, what are ya thinking of?” And I would look up and say, “That foul copulation, I just can’t get it out of my mind.” To him, this would occasionally be funny. Not to me.

Another gruesome tidbit would roll in from Surya Das, “In fact, on Mahasivaratri, all he’s really doing is upchucking a stone phallus, that’s all a Siva lingam is, what a joke. It’s his big stunt of the year.” Then we would remember the Jean Harlow effect on the swinging silver couch, the Jhula, adored by all the people at festivals. All things that smacked of some grandiose narcissism.

In my gut-wrenching depression, I had to remind myself why I should not give up on finding ultimate Truth in disillusioned bitterness. After all, my covenant had been “the Truth, no matter what.”

Just because I had believed in some false light did not repudiate the existence of the true light. For counterfeits, whatever they are, were parasitically dependent on the existence of the real thing. Perhaps the victory of hell over me was the possibility that after such a bitter aftertaste from this last experience I would give up on all truth. I would turn away prematurely when the very light of God’s compassion waited at the door. One might see why an adversary to the true God might have such a lethal weapon in deception. Others and I could ask, “If I can be so totally blinded and deceived, then when can I ever really know the truth and not wonder whether it, too, isn’t another lie? Will I ever be able to tell the true man of God from the false?” I could not answer that question. Though the issue of a reliable and trustworthy standard of truth that was objective had come up before.

Meanwhile, Surya Das and I were soon divided in our reaction to the terrible revelation. I was sobered and cautious. He was more unguarded, cavalier and using it as an excuse to do his thing.

Surya Das soon found excuses to experiment with some of his old ways of “centering” himself. In the puja-room, next to the kitchen, I could hear him reciting a sing-songy mantra to Siva, a ganja-mantra for smoking hashish. Incense would be burning, as Surya Das would make mudric gestures in the candlelight before all manner of deities on the shrine, perhaps to make the act sacred. After a few puffs he would emerge with a slightly sheepish grin, as though waiting for me to dump him. A trace of defiant satisfaction would remain underneath, yet not without that pitiful look of weakness so typical of self-indulgent alcoholics. I told him, “You’ve already wandered over your head in one maze, don’t be a classic fool, lest you wander beyond reach into another maze. You’re still staggering around from the last shocking deception.”

If a self-revelation had come out of all this, it was the humbling fact that I could be deceived so extensively and so completely. And in grim loneliness, constantly throughout the days, I would struggle with the question, “If I can be so totally blinded and deceived, then when can I ever really know the truth and not question whether it, too, is not just another lie? Will I ever, after this, be able to tell the true man of God from the false?” I could not answer the question.

By June 27, a week before the huge college opening festival in Ananthapur, Surya Das and I knew we still had some scores to settle. For one thing, much of my luggage was at the main ashram.

We locked the Blake cabin and, like refugees in flight, hastened with our terrible revelation into Bangalore. At the Regent snackbar we were most secretive with the friends of the “rooftop prophetess.” Like a disagreeable older brother, I leaned on their table, masking my despair with that same armor of lonely control I used in Sri Ranga Patnam, and in so many ways intimated, “Oh, yeah. Is that all?” in a kind of belch, and walked away. Their faith was sky high. Baba had psychically been preparing them for the drama of the age, tee-hee. They were so sure of this that they were now staying in the fanciest hotel in town and buying silk saris, jewelry, and otherwise preparing themselves for the great event, the wedding that was to never happen. Maybe if they hit bottom, I could talk to them, but now was not the time.

The Painful Journey

W

ith a guarded dignity, Surya Das and I left them and were soon on the train to Ananthapur where Wendell was working on the mural at the almost completed college.

The school was stupendous. We found Wendell resembling Michelangelo, standing atop a jerrybuilt platform and working on one of his 20-foot murals. With a pang of brotherly love, I gave him due appreciation as he had given me so often with my writings, “You genius.” He smiled back, and in my heart I would ask, “Why is it all for naught? This much talent, and he’s being squeezed for all he is worth. True beauty being grafted to an abomination.” Immediately Wendell caught something upon our faces and faltered. Then he heard something in the tone of my voice, “Wendell, we’ve got to talk.”

We went up to the windy, bleak four-story rooftop of the huge circular monolith overlooking miles of barren wilderness. It was a structure that was more giant and bizarre than anything either Antonioni or Fellini had incorporated in their grotesque surrealistic cinematic obsessions with architecture. Wendell, thinner than ever, moving about like Joe Cocker on stage and wearing these ragged white pajama bottoms, painstakingly drew patterns in the cement dust as he listened. It was getting to him. This was the first time I had ever seen anything get to him quite like this. I could see his faith beginning to stretch and falter, stress lines of doubt briefly surfacing on his face. After five intermittent months of titanic effort out here in this wasteland, he has to hear this horror story, I thought. What a sense of loss, what a misappropriation of brilliance. The potent wave of thought we brought now threatened to extinguish his great effort.

Wendell sensed a most terrible compelling potency about Patrick’s story. For a second he reviewed what happened to him with Baba. He was sure there was nothing erotic about it. No, of course not, it was purely to purify him. “But how do you explain what happened to Patrick? What if you had gone all the way?” He squirmed. Now it was just too unreal. And if it happened, well, let truth win out in the end.

A sobering element in this for Wendell, who wrote me a very encouraging letter about my own mission when I was writing alone in Sri Ranga Patnam, was the very real fact that I was suddenly leaving. Doubtless, this reinforced his sense of loneliness inherent in the path.

After a while he returned to the mural. Wendell would continue working 18 hours a day in the hot wind, as perpetual crowds of helpers and visitors stood around gaping in silence when he didn’t direct them to either clear off or bring him some supply.

We finally left the central building that day as a limousine pulled up, its occupants gibbering away self-importantly. Surya Das and I took the afternoon bus to Puttaparthi. By evening we arrived in near the ashram gate unnoticed. Baba had headed to Ananthapur by another route, missing us by hours. This was exactly as I had hoped. I was feeling an overwhelming aversion to him and could not stomach seeing Baba at the moment. I was also beginning to wonder what he was.

On a hilltop that evening, Surya Das and I told Ed and Phil the news. They received it with cautious alarm. Ed especially became disheartened, knowing that his choice would be to cut us off and remain with Baba or end up in the same hell of uncertainty. This sudden spanner in the works would end for them a perfect little story out here in India. If I had been a faith-building example before, now the spiritual ticker tape announced that I might have fallen through the bottom of the market of credibility. Even Tal might become a part of maya for the faithful remnant that persevered.

With Baba’s unnerving presence out of the way, I now had several final days to spend on the ashram alone, much of the time to reflect in the hills. I felt acute loss.

Some of us huddled together in the foothills to decide what to do next. Eddie just listened, at times helping us grope for alternatives as though part of the schisming group. Other times Surya Das and I were alone. Oddly enough, I was not obliterated from the earth, but still very much alive and kicking. If Kasturi and I “walked down memory lane” together within the ashram, smiling and talking like old times, it took everything I had to keep him from knowing that the bottom had fallen out of my life. For one thing, there was the possibility that I was under testing still—that this was my greatest test. Two, there was that lifelong caution of mine that said that he didn’t need to hear the whole story. The less Kasturi knew, the better for my livelihood. I was a fugitive, a hidden agent in the nest, a fallen chief disciple, and quite possibly, in the long run, the most internecine enemy of Baba’s, if there were a true God that existed apart from Sai Baba. I felt utterly alone among friends whom I had virtually adopted as family. I had a grieving sense of loss about all of them. Deep bonds had been forged in the desert.

In the late afternoon of my final day in Puttaparthi, I chose to go off alone to the hillside overlooking the entire ashram. I settled among the huge smooth boulders in the warm breeze, where the din of village and ashram sounds blended faintly in the distance. I brought my wrinkled Bible, retrieved from the belongings I had come to get. As perplexed as I was, I still dared to search for truth, this time in the Scriptures. I was utterly desperate.

I looked defiantly at the sky and challenged God, whoever or whatever He was—if He was even real at all. “Okay, God, you’d better prove yourself if you are real. This is your last chance, because I’ve been looking for truth all my life.” I was almost testy. “Because if you don’t, and life is just a joke, I am going to live like someone driving a Ferrari with his foot flattened to the floor. I will go for the good life ruthlessly, taking

people with me. My innocence and idealism will be long dead. I will curse You and die.”

Then I looked down at Baba’s domain and challenged God with the question, “And how do you explain the apparent love of this self-proclaimed incarnation of God and his miracles...tell me that? Let’s see you answer that one.”

At that point, I just threw the Bible wide open on a boulder, playing Russian roulette with its pages.

It opened up to Matthew Chapter 24, and I immediately looked at verse 24 randomly.

“And there shall come false prophets and false Christs working great signs and wonders to deceive, if it were possible, even God’s very elect.”

This passage hit my eyes merely seconds after I had looked away from Baba’s prayer hall and asked how a creature like Sai Baba could be explained. And of all that is in the Bible, the answer that fell open could not have been any more direct or specific. The answer from the Bible was that Sai Baba was a false miracle worker out to deceive. The Bible had contained this message all along, down these long centuries. The words were those of Christ himself, warning his followers across time about what was to pass before His return.

I pondered the words, “False Christs working great signs and wonders to deceive, if it were possible, even God’s very elect.”

I then read the words surrounding this passage. It was all radically new to me. I felt I was reading an epic overview of human history.

And as he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when these things will be, and what will be the sign of Your coming and of the end of the age?”

And Jesus answered and said to them, “See to it that no one misleads you. For many will come in My name, saying, `I am the Christ,’ and will mislead many. And you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes. But all these things are merely the beginning of birthpangs. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations on account of My name. And at that time many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and will mislead many. And because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end, it is he who shall be saved.

And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a witness to all the nations, and then the end shall come.”

After looking up from my Bible to take it all in, I felt a fiery conviction as I read the following verse further down the page, “Then if any one says to you, ‘Behold, here is the Christ,’ or ‘There He is,’ do not believe him. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible even the elect.”

“Behold, I have told you in advance. If therefore they say to you, ‘Behold, he is in the wilderness, do not go forth, or, ‘Behold, He is in the inner rooms, do not believe them.’ “

“For just as the lightning comes from the east, and flashes even to the west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Matt. 24 : 3-27.)

There was so much in this passage that I had to close the book for a

long time before I opened it again. For now, still confused and with so much invested in Eastern spirituality, I just filed it away as an alternate explanation of who and what Baba really was.

Then as red veins stretched across the sunset sky, another fact began to sink in: that Christ would return like “lightning.” I believed all these years that He would reincarnate, assuming that He was the same part of Brahman we all were. But no such thing was even vaguely implied. Rather, the long-promised Messiah had entered the world by birth only upon one occasion, through direct supernatural intervention. The Old Testament had predicted this long before the time of Christ.

“Therefore, the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a child, and shall call his name Emmanuel (God with us).” (Isaiah 7: 14). To an unprepared generation, such a miracle could appear scandalous indeed. But God had warned of it in the prophets. The provision being that the only choice people would have was that either the Messiah was “God among us,”—or that most unholy of stigmas—he would be explained away as a bastard.

The Carrolls had once made a point that I was only now considering. There would be one and only one birth of the Messiah. Never again would he come through the human vehicle of a mother. Never would it be the Divine purpose for the Messiah to repeat the process of growing up from childhood. The sacrifice of a perfect man to atone for the fall of a once-perfect man (and his seed) had been satisfied once and for all. This fact nullified the claims of every guru in the world who claimed to be Christ come again. Christ would be born into the world only once.

And what about Christ’s return? The Carrolls had once discussed that as well, saying that when the ascended Son of God returns from deep heaven in power, in the very manner in which he departed, history as we know it will stop forever. Perhaps it will be as sudden and as total as this Logos, through whom the warp and woof of the universe was made (as the Gospel of John declares), suddenly stopping everything in creation in mid-electron orbit to celebrate the precise instant of the advent.

Every creature in the earth and beneath the earth will know simultaneously: “Every eye shall see.” But that “Alpha and Omega,” far from being a helpless infant born to yet again toddle and grow up, can only be that once-crucified Messiah now appearing in blinding and exalted glory, even so that those who are not His shall tremble in deepest terror. And only then will every knee bow and every tongue confess Jesus Christ as Lord, God the Son, whom Isaiah described with the words, “And his name shall be called Pele (Wonderful), Yoetz (Counselor), El Gibbor (The Mighty God), Avi Ad (The Everlasting Father), Sar Shalom (The Prince of Peace)” (Isaiah 6:1). (El Gibbor may be translated literally from the Hebrew as God-man, whom Isaiah identifies with the prophecy; “Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given.”)

The long green and white prayer hall in the valley below me looked far too diminutive and gaudy to harbor the returning Christ of the Bible. I could close the book before me, having at least settled that forever. Later that night I returned to the hilltop. Under the starlight I was still very much broken and confused, as I brought my despair before God, whoever and whatever He was. I uttered the Lord’s Prayer, then peti

tioned with heavy heart that I be shown by God Himself His true nature without the need to fear deception.

After two long years of frightful bondage to a god I was beginning to learn was not God, it was a most relieving thing to board the bus in the dark early morning hours and rumble away through the wilderness shadows. Much weight upon my soul was yet to be resolved. I was not sure how yet, but an emboldened rage was slowly mounting within me about Baba, gathering in my soul, as armies before battle, for the needed confrontation to get at the truth.

As the bus rumbled off I knew that a community of now-distant spiritual relatives was shrinking behind me. Ironically, they were caught in a growing epidemic of infectious hepatitis. Strained to the limits, these American and European brethren would wilt in the sun and answer their bodies’ acute hunger for protein with overspiced starch, all the while thinking to themselves that they were becoming purified and spiritually exalted—they were Baba’s fruit on the desert, his languishing children.

Chapter 25

Escaping the Crucible

W

ithin a few days, Surya Das and I began clearing up the cabin and packing our belongings. The future remained a blank. All we knew was that if we had to move, we were

ready. My feeling of balancing on a high wire had intensified along with a crushing despair of the soul. We continued to bravely mask “the terrible revelation” from the others, should we encounter them. Mark was hurt that we were being secretive. I had warned Surya Das before that Mark might spill the beans just out of a need to blurt out the story to one of the girls.

Surya Das continued to anticipate the new challenge of a spiritual pilgrimage across India, from ashram to ashram, master to guru, so that his inner evolution would continue. I responded with a note of disgust, “Uh yeah. Maybe the next one will wear a green robe and have a flattop and lots of moxie. Yogi forty-second-street-ananda with a pet anaconda named Grumba.” He thought it was funny, but I was making the old point about the closed loop of blind faith.

There was a rumor spreading that Hilda was due to arrive at the Bangalore airport in a few days to attend the massive event in Ananthapur. In my state of mind, I was hardly in the mood to go through the token effort. But Surya Das wanted to greet her and ask some probing questions.

Our waiting at the airport was little more than a formality. It was July 5, and the big school opening festival in Ananthapur was only days away. The minute the old gal got off the plane, Surya Das would probably hit her with the whole thing. In the meantime, I was in anything but a receptive mood for hearing her predictable conciliatory pearls of wisdom in response to this recent scandalous “test.” Indeed I had never held her in awe as the others had. I had never met her, for one thing, and had my own personal barriers and suspicions about women gurus. It just wasn’t my style. As far as telling her the story, we would try to feel how receptive she was on the spot; Surya Das, who knew her, trusted her. I didn’t.

To me, entrusting her with the information might be the most naive thing we could do, similar to the old movie formula of informing the friendly confidante who happens to be the enemy’s number one undercover agent. Doubtless she would sympathize with us, but it would be a stalling tactic as the news got to the commander. Secrecy, again, I felt was the safest insurance in case there was more behind this whole thing than met the eye. The true nature of Baba was still a mystery.

Baba’s powers themselves expelled the possibility that he was merely an innocent bystander, an ordinary mortal deluded by grandiosity. His metaphysics was too complex and knowing, his ability to manipulate people far too devastating. And his powers topped it off.

My mood at the airport was not good, quickly veering into black humor, a natural escape valve starting in early youth from pain, anger and despair. This sardonic abandon was ready to lash out at Hilda the moment she descended the ramp to greet one of Baba’s prime disciples. I waited for the plane, and my imagination went rampant with defiant mind-shockers to greet this saccharine “guru” from Manhattan.

Fantasies: defiant blue-denim mock outs. Surya Das and I chewing tobacco. He has his lemur on his shoulder, a little monkey-like being with saucer-shaped eyes that looks as if it’s from outer space (he had been carrying it around for weeks now). Our mouths are hanging dumbly open as the old hag with the silver hair floats down the ramp. She walks up to the two big lugs chewing tobacco, mouths still hanging open in mock obscene shock, when not chewing, eyebrows knit together in hostility.

“Sai Ram seekers, oh dear, where is our master in this turbulent plane of existence...that dear sweet....”

A long pause, double takes at the sky, obnoxious chewing movements, hand on hips still looking around. She’s definitely uncool. “Uh... I dunno,” I look at the lemur, “Ya see where he went? He was here a minute ago....” The animal looks positively weird. “Aw yeah... some dude dressed up like Jiggoletto in chiffon, weird, walks in the French court manner with the ruffled silk...uh, I think he was walking by, let’s say mincing toward the men’s room. Seems to me that Baba took off right after him, looking really excited about something. Followed him right in there, Lady. See the men’s room over there. Yeah, that’s right. Ought’a be through in a sec.”

Surya Das twangs in. “Yeah, fiddle, he’s only wha-cha-call anointing the old Siva lingam. Does it all the time. But yeah, he’s groovy. We’ve learned a lot. Here show her how ya do shakti-pat.” The lemur reaches out and yanks her nose.

In my next abusive fantasy, we are wearing Stetson hats, cowboy boots, leather jackets, and smoking hand-rolled weeds, looking really mean. Instantly my fantasy dies in disgust.

I had just been reading William Burroughs’ Nova Express near the runway. It was a treatise on transgalactic mobsterism, bleeping with paranoia and insights into the nature of the demonic and grand-scale con games. It had sickened my heart and soul. And I could not help but apply the tenor of the message to the entire Baba revelation. It also brought up the issue of the reality of supernatural evil as a force divorced from God. Burroughs’ disjointed, heavy-powered phrases still ripped through my mind, as I recalled that he had written the novel in Cairo, ankle-deep in morphine ampule boxes. The inspiration seemed to be demons blowing the whistle on one another’s stratagems. Yet the setting was without hope, a godless universe.

On some agonizing line about the hell-world Minraud, I looked up from the book and saw the silver needle circle overhead.

Fifteen minutes later the plane unloaded, and each head that came out that wasn’t Hilda’s further confirmed our suspicions that it was just a rumor. I felt relieved. Instead, like the messenger boy that gets the brunt of criticism for bringing the bad news, every face that wasn’t the one received a sneer of disgust from us. By the last passenger, my fantasy about the hostile reception party was beginning to look true of Surya Das and me. We were starting to really sneer. We didn’t even notice that the plump girl coming down the ramp was wildly waving at us until Surya Das said, “Oh no! It’s Lila, she must have come in Hilda’s place. Looks like she finally got her visa.”

I looked over unable to mask my feelings of extreme disgust. “Aw, crap, she’s not even pretty. You mean we’ve gotta go through this ordeal. Why, it’ll blow her mind....” Now I started to consider the factual ramifications of our less-than-perfect zeal for Baba. “She’ll see right away that we’re ready to float a lemon on the dude.” Truly it would take a superhuman effort of will to chaperone her to the Regent Guest House and contain the inner hell we were going through. The last thing we needed was a bubbly, turned-on Baba bhakta, especially an old standby like Lila. Surya Das reminded me that Hilda had almost made me a legend among her group in New York. She was in for a real surprise; I was all primed for the yoga of degradation.

There was another surprise. Herman’s daughter from San Diego was on the plane -- indeed, Herman, the Russian who had shared the luxury suite with Gill and me in the early days. After we got to Regent Guest House, Lila was in tears as I stood at the head of the table making the very cautious statement, “Again, I would urge you not to overly adore the physical manifestation of Baba....” Behind my black eyes was an ocean of unspeakable anguish and occult desolation. She’d break again, practically bawling. I hated even having them near me.

We left the next morning of July 7, in a rented taxi, deciding if nothing else, to make our final ride to Baba one of physical comfort with the girls sharing in our expenses. I hated going through what I knew lay ahead. At least the road to Ananthapur was paved.

Bearing My Heart to Wendell

By early afternoon, our dust-covered taxi went by the wire fence of the college compound to the gate. The building, four stories high and donut-shaped, looked like a modern Bauhaus imitation of the great Coliseum of Rome. The sort of bleached-white architectural anomaly that Fellini used in his movies. Around the central building were other large buildings that sat in a huge compound closed in by a high wire fence. A policeman in a sentry box signaled us through. “Well, there it is,” I announced mockingly, not exactly trying to disguise my lack of enthusiasm. The three girls in the back missed my tone, jumping up and down in their seats with glee. Soon we entered the large rotund monolith as crowds of devotees moved like excited ants.

The girls were mere grains of sand in the avatar’s world mission. What had once been Lila’s vaunted personal intimacy with Baba, when fewer foreigners flocked Brindavan, had vanished. Baba’s eyes fell upon Lila with no more recognition than if she were a stranger in the crowd just arriving from some meaningless American city. I observed her try to press up to Baba with a theatrical, self-fueled joy on the landing of the second floor as Baba passed. Baba hissed at the crowd to stand back, not showing the least trace of recognition for Lila, whom he ordered the others to restrain. She froze as he walked on, buckling at the knees with tears in her eyes. Herman’s daughter was also crying, though probably for a different reason. It was all the price of faith in this stub

by frog-king walking around chewing betel leaves as people moved around him in magnetic storms, obeisant to his beck and call. Where was the love that her tender little soul was starving for? Herman’s daughter and Lila were quickly consoled by some of the longer-term American girls who bore a knowing, obedient and chastened look. The tired creases under their eyes told of many rough initiations, all a part of breaking down their wills and intellects as a part of surrender to the guru.

The sight was painful to watch. Clearly, other Westerners with more talent and “spirituality” had replaced Lila. And like an older wife in a large harem, her role was now to just hang on and hope for that rare nod from Baba, that piece of bread thrown to the dogs in the outer court. Lila’s dream of returning glory had officially died on the spot.

Two gigantic murals bordered the grand entrance-hall, each by wide elegant stairs. They were crystal reproductions in the Andrew Wyeth tradition. One painting was of Puttaparthi with miles of mountains, rice paddies, bullocks, arid fields and the main ashram. The other huge mural portrayed a verdant pristine forest in the wilds of North America, a bird hovering in frozen flight in the gap of a narrow canyon between two luscious banks. Dewdrops glistened on leaves, every twig, every leaf stood out in miraculous focus as a sublime rainbow hung overhead. And up on a platform, from Lila’s perspective, was this very high spiritual being in white, not even aware of the shifting swarms of awed admirers. He was completely casual about Baba’s frequent stops to survey his work, invariably to chat with and encourage him, most humbling for Lila.

It was now late afternoon. Wendell caught my eye and hopped down from the platform immediately, while onlookers puzzled like hungry groupies, pressing to get the inside word. Guards perpetually kept Wendell’s working area clear, standing back respectfully as I joined him in the clearing. “Like old times,” I told myself ironically. Wendell rested his hand on my shoulder, saying in a confidential voice, “We’ve got to talk. Haven’t got much time. This thing has to be done by the inauguration tomorrow. I’ll have to pull an all-nighter.” The President of India was arriving with a constellation of VIPs. Wendell and I went up the stairs toward the roof as arm-banded volunteers in the Seva Dal stepped aside. Though I had changed within, I still commanded the supreme VIP privilege of one of Baba’s inner circle. And for now, I played it for all it was worth.

In the gray light on the roof, Wendell asked if I had resolved anything with Baba. Not yet, I said, still having found no occasions to confront Baba. I told Wendell that it would take a supreme miracle for Baba to convince me that he was who he claimed to be. Wendell then shared a great confidence with me, perhaps in doing so, hunting for clues.

Wendell confided, “You know a few hours after you and Surya Das left, Baba arrived, and the first thing he did was come up to me and bring me into his quarters down there.” Wendell was bothered, his tone conveying bewilderment over the cloak and dagger mysteries surrounding Baba when things should be out in the open. Perhaps Baba had let his guard down with Wendell. And for that reason Wendell had to answer with richer faith as fully deserving of the confidence that his master bestowed upon him.

In the privacy of his suite, Baba looked into Wendell’s eyes questioningly. “What is wrong? Have you seen Tal? What does he say? Doubts? Bad faith?” Baba even sounded hurt and jealous. Wendell had told Baba nothing about his knowledge of the terrible incident and our visit to see him, evidently quite stunned by Baba’s question. No human being could have told Baba a thing. Yet Wendell asked himself why Baba needed to question him when he was God and all-knowing. Wendell, attempting to protect me, then gave Baba a vague answer. Tal was going through something, a test of doubt, but would come through.

Then out of the blue, Baba mentioned to Wendell a certain person, a rather pretty lad from Whitefield whom Wendell might have seen a few times.

Baba’s words came out in rapid, urgent, and even panicky whispers, informing and warning Wendell. Sequences jumped around like a fragmented dream. “Some two years ago, one coming, a Whitefield hippie. Long hair, muscles, American shirt saying ‘love.’ Not love, lust. Only interest is girls, not God. Sitting in darshan line, pretending to be an American. Swami knows.” The rest was garbled until the teenager, and yes, it was Patrick, was accused by Baba of spreading damaging rumors. “False lies. Blind jealous reaction after I tell him to go. Now others believing lies. His word over Swami’s!” Perhaps Baba gave Wendell a hug as a reminder of the purity of his love, and then Wendell was dismissed to paint.

After Wendell’s account, a kind of horror filled me. Then I felt infuriated and decided with a steely-minded resolve to combat Baba now that he had supernaturally broken through my protective camouflage. He was smelling things out through some kind of spiritual surveillance system. The “gasoline crack in history” of his blunders was growing wider and evidence was beginning to collect like beads of oil on water.

Exactly what Baba really knew and what he planned do remained a mystery. One thing was sure; Baba had already partially blown his defense by giving Patrick’s story enough dignity to talk about it with Wendell in a tone far from detached, as though he was afraid of being found out. This only further implicated Baba. I could also detect the beginning of a widening gulf between Wendell and me. I wondered if he had not already made his choice in his heart to go ahead and override this impediment to his faith. The scandal would be maya. Wendell would take the leap. I had leapt too many times already.

The masses of elite visitors from around the country turned in around 9:00 p.m. in the immense building. Women’s dorms and men’s dorms of the elect were in giant classrooms carpeted with sleeping bags and mats. Late-night chatter was relegated to verandahs, the circular overlook into the center compound on each floor, the rooftop and the acres of open compound between the various school buildings. Haunted, I tried to sleep in an overcrowded dorm while Wendell pulled his all-nighter.

Six a.m. reveille involved devotees outdoing each other in zeal and energy—whistling loudly while shaving, doing calisthenics, looking self-important, slapping their chests like hard-core campers. Wendell was on the 11th plane of consciousness, oblivious to the frenetic insect movements around him, just a Neil Young sneer at all the obvious games and come-ons. As he smiled at me, for a second it was like old times, but something had already started to change in me forever, and the twinge of sentimentality was almost a part of the past.

Confronting an Ancient Spirit

July 8 was the big day. Thousands upon thousands were coming to see the massive opening of the multimillion-rupee complex as little sideshows went on. The kings and queens of this state and that were coming to see Baba and demanding special audience. So were political and industrial VIPs. All of them would have to wait in a long line. Baba might even be chastising them. Once great diadems of devotion, such as the overly loquacious Dr. Gokkak, now had to walk a little more carefully. Indra Devi, in all of this, was hardly noticed. Perhaps that was why she felt the need to march around as though a part of some great secret mission. Baba barely gave her a glance.

Early that morning, I resolved in my heart that I would break through to Baba. My time was running out. And the crowds grew by the hour as the afternoon’s inauguration ceremony with the President of India approached.

I was feeling for the first time a radically new reaction to Baba growing in my spirit. I had noticed it the night before as Baba passed me on the staircase leading to his suite. Others looking on might have assumed that I was the old Tal Brooke. But I was quickly becoming an alien in the nest. Baba had floated right by me, neither looking at me nor acknowledging my presence. I felt nausea, revulsion, and a deep indignation of spirit. It felt as though the spirit that inhabited the bright-robed body was so putrid, so foul, so horrifying that if the crowds could just see it for a second denuded, they would scream in terror. Indeed, when Baba brushed by me, I shuddered in my soul, as a deeper eye of conscience in me detected a presence dwelling within the body. I wondered if its closest earthly parallel was a scorpion. I sensed that this tame-looking magnetic being, able to go in and out of people’s force fields, would quickly change once all its disguises were removed. It would suddenly pursue the screaming crowd like some giant mansized scorpion with blazing red eyes and a thousand stinging tails.

This brought up the deeper issue of “outing” the spirit within Baba, if such a notion were possible. Certainly that would help resolved my inner war.

The appointed hour of deep contact was drawing close. My body and mind were hardly my own. The energy, intensity and desperate urgency from so much at stake made me an inevitable pawn of the moment—expendable and explosive. I was determined, in a mixture of despair and rage, that no tactic of Baba’s would turn me back no matter how enormous the price. I needed to find a way to test his soul in an all-or-nothing encounter. My revulsion to Baba had become so great that I knew that one of my plans of action—Plan B—was now out of the question. And what was “Plan B?”

Plan B involved the deep indignation of soul of my remaining in the nest as a camouflaged enemy, falling back into grace through perfect obedience. Using flattery to blind Baba, I would appear to be the even stronger disciple, repentant of my brief apostasy. Only he and a few would know (I was satisfied that Baba did not have full access to anybody’s thoughts; he had a patched access, the rest he bluffed) of the Patrick episode. Then during some festival speech, as I would dedicate my book to Baba, in one horrifying public gesture, I would grab the bottom of his robe, and tear it off his entire body. It would probably lead to my death, but what it would reveal would be either two neuter genitals, or the undeniable fact that this self-proclaiming God come in flesh had been utterly deceived about his closest American disciple. His omniscience, telepathy, control of history, would be revealed as lies, as Sai Baba was fully caught off guard. There would be no conceivable good that could come from this public outing. Before a vast audience, the web of energized control surrounding his spirit would be broken, letting out its ferocious scorpion nature before it could be held in check. Perhaps Baba would suddenly go berserk in demonic blasphemies and rage in the heat of blind passion, now oblivious to the pinheads looking on. It would be a public display of a spiritual abomination.

I felt an urgent overpowering need to bring this thing to a head immediately. My revulsion was just too great to consider any kind of extended delay considering the inner contortions that this would demand.

By 10:00 a.m., the entire college complex was teeming with activity for the big afternoon event: Barnum and Bailey-sized awnings and

A future festival in Puttaparthi with a crowd of one million--as predicted

tents were being pitched outside with a Styrofoam and plywood stage in the front. The school bands were practicing as acres of ground were roped off into sections, streamers and flags going up, loudspeakers mounted everywhere.

But the activities of the morning were in the large main four-story circular building with the impressively sized inner courtyard. The four entrance ways into the building, suggestive of the Coliseum in Rome, were packed. The main entrance with stately approach stairs was guarded by ten guards and Seva Dal members who reluctantly slid open the giant mesh gates to admit VIPs and members of the inner circle from the surging mass outside.

Raja Reddy emerged from a limousine like Rudolph Valentino in white, and briskly approached Baba in the inner courtyard, at first bowing down to touch his forehead to Baba’s feet.

Things started up with a token feeding of the poor, as a few hundred wretched and maimed, a meager fraction of those in the ocean of bodies outside the compound, were squeezed through the mesh gates by several guards and directed toward the circular park. They sat in neat, reverent rows within the monolith of the elect as the privileged castes of India looked on in a spirit of noble generosity. Baba dutifully ladled out food on banana leaves. When the peasants were finished, with an almost bored wave of the hand, Baba motioned them to leave, turning a deaf ear to their quiet pleas and raised hands as they hobbled back out of the gate. Most likely they would all be shooed away before the president’s motorcade arrived. Because of who I was, I was able to stand just about nearer to Baba than anyone there.

The unreadable expression on my features belied the ferocity of emotions within me. Baba was on a routine inspection of the rooms and offices, as a small train of attendants and dignitaries followed him ten feet behind. People appeared more awed and afraid of him than usual. The Western girls were kept at bay, 100 feet away from the front area. Most of the males were scattered about. Many devotees filled the courtyard, standing frozen. Others assembled at different points of the circular ground-floor veranda, while still others looked down quietly from various landings above.

Wendell stood part way up the wide marble staircase beside his mural of Puttaparthi. On the mezzanine above and behind him was the polished black door to Baba’s suite, carpeted and elegant within and looking out to the entire front compound from a wide balcony; it was most suggestive of the Papal apartments from where the Pontiff emerged seasonally to bless Vatican Square.

I was planted near a wide pillar where the circular ground-level veranda crossed the front lobby. Briskly, Baba led a train of people toward me, heading for one of the main reception-rooms on the other side of the front lobby.

Calculatingly yet unobtrusively, I stood fairly far out, counting on the fact that Baba rarely veered course, but usually swept by the closer disciples. To onlookers, this graceful act gave his disciples a special sense of privileged intimacy. I was gambling. Indeed it would be hard to describe my mental state.

I felt like a high-level assassin on a mission of doom, hidden in the ranks, yet quietly on the verge of oblivion, seconds away from some act that would result in overwhelming deathly retribution. What made the risk even more electrifying was that I did not know exactly what I would do until the last moment, then there would be no turning back. Part of my cloaking—so as to elude Baba’s radar—was total spontaneity without premeditation. I sensed that deep within I already knew what to do. This could be a virtual suicide mission.

Several of Baba’s closer new Indian disciples, being brave, edged up slightly behind me.

In seconds the bushy red figure with a radiant face and burning eyes was upon us, quickly brushing by with great command. As his robe swept by my hand, which was hanging harmlessly by my side, it suddenly jolted with life and became tense and strong. My hand grasped a sizable fold of Baba’s robe at waist level and held it as he continued walking on till the tension caught him. Then I yanked it back, causing him to skip back as though bumping into something. It happened so fast and my own movements were so disguised that the alarmed onlookers had not figured out yet what had happened.

Baba went three steps beyond me to fully realize what had happened, then he whirled around rapidly in a state of fury, spewing out words. He had pinpointed who it was. His black eyes boiled fury as he tried to contain the curses leveled at me. This was the predictable highly fissionable scorpion nature, the dreaded source of power, usually held in check. With an unexpected boldness and calm, again ready to pay the price, I looked right down his black orbs with a total conviction of knowledge regarding who he really was. I saw a despicable blotch, a mere cinder compared to the true Living God.

Suddenly Baba resembled a wrangling bitch who had lost all authority and now had to bluff. “Rowdie, complete spoil. Go, get out here....” I had seen this sort of thing crush people, denunciations far milder. Perhaps he thought it would crush me, but I began to smile sneeringly just enough for him to know.

Some kind of spiritual muse in the background was trying to tell my soul that it had just forfeited an undreamed-of chance. Yet already there was a golden trumpet of triumph blaring heavenward. I looked Baba in the eyes and nothing earthshaking happened, I had not perished. My cool indifference and poised reaction persuaded the onlookers that this was merely a rather esoteric test between Baba and a highest disciple, thus rendering his authority even more impotent, for I knew he wanted a train of ushers to pitch me out. My aloof contempt was not exactly that lever point of reverence that Baba could use over me. I held my dignity and looked at this imposter with an implacable conviction that he had been found out, that any influence over me was gone. I also knew that what resided within the shell of Baba’s body was neither divine nor entirely human.

I looked at Baba a moment longer as he sputtered. Then I blanked him out, turned my head upward over him, and looked through the giant gateway to the clear blue sky. The act itself was freeing, a bond

A future festival in Puttaparthi with a crowd of one million

breaking statement showing my aloofness from his realm. The creature would boil. But I would be looking off, as a feeling of hope, for the first time in an eternity of anguish, broke in upon my soul like a heavenly choral work by Purcell or Handel.

And what splendor I saw in the vast blue firmament compared to the shadows of this coliseum. The still, quiet voice of some inner Comforter had appeared. A sovereign hand and a restraining power seemed to gently cloak me from Baba’s venomous crossfire. I got a very real feeling that an ancient battle was going on around me of which I was only dimly aware. Maybe it was a controversy between the creature in red who had been posturing as God incarnate and an infinitely vaster might.

Then I sensed a towering presence of almost limitless power standing like a column of light outside. Through the huge door I sensed a being, perhaps 200 feet high and made of light, towering in the distance, invisible but present. I am not being metaphorical but quite literal. All I could think of later to explain this were those mighty biblical beings, the archangels, forever present in invisible strength at crisis points in history. They seemed to appear when the honor of God’s name and His transcendent glory demanded to be acknowledged before men, dominions and principalities of the cosmos.

Perhaps this was part of some ongoing spiritual war that spanned back to the foundations of the world. It was both a sign of judgment to this usurper of God’s name in the red robe, as well as a harbinger of hope to me in the jaws of great danger, even annihilation. This I did not articulate. It all happened too fast. But I sensed that I had been rescued in the face of overwhelming odds. The beast in the red robe usurping the name and glory of God would now be held at bay, like the lions from Daniel in the lion’s den.

It’s not that I was that important in some grandiose drama. I was merely a causative agent, a kind of trigger of contingency. I was merely a pawn on a far larger chess board. When I had acted, it opened up a cascade, an overshadowing event, which took place on a greater level. It was as real to me as the noonday sun.

Impotently, Baba spun around and marched off in a huff. I was still looking up at the sky. Several bewildered onlookers came to the area, curiously studying me. Then Wendell hastened over to question me about the incident. Beaming radiantly, I was hard put to explain my great sense of release and freedom. Some of the other Westerners overheard my comments and saw me smiling in relieved joy. Yet soon I would be removed from among them.

During the afternoon’s festival, I used the remaining hours to study the enemy in red. He knew that I knew, but nobody else did. The band was playing, limousines were arriving, the great arena bubbling with tens of thousands, while hundreds of ministers of state, governors, politicians from Delhi, and men from all walks of renown, filled the reserved seating under an awning beside the stage.

Baba—the creature who had persuaded millions that he was God— led a dramatic procession to the stage among the wailing of Karnatic horns and band tunes. An honor guard followed. I walked over the front ropes past the men’s front bhajan area with a line of empty microphones. Quietly Baba hissed at me. “Pahh. Stay away from singing. Go out.” I ignored it, knowing that for now I could still exhibit the special freedom of an inner-ring disciple that a large chunk of the assembly still assumed that I had.

Holding my revulsion, I watched the event in the burning sun, deep within the recesses of the crowd under the main awning. I had a new perspective. Baba’s eyes occasionally sought me out. A procession of notables spoke before the lumbering pedantic address by the President of India, Baba’s most impressive pawn who would become his own fool, not even needing to be mimicked or ridiculed by Baba. Baba would roll back his head and laugh again and again. This putrid spectacle appeared several weeks later in India’s largest national magazine. The tedious event stretched for hours. I pitied anyone sitting in the direct sun’s rays all this time.

Then toward the end, a noteworthy thing happened. An outside crowd of thousands started to riot at the compound fence. They tried to break through the outer fence and into the festival. The crowd started to ripple. It began to look like things might get out of control, something that according to Baba was impossible in his “august” presence. Apparently, President Giri’s arrival had not persuaded the mob of locals in Baba’s favor, this rumor-worn and incidentfilled stock which for two decades might have learned something about Baba to goad them into this. It seemed to suggest local scandals and unsettled scores, feuds, and grievances. They yelled and chanted against Baba. Then police with long sticks broke into the area staving back the threat. But the blotch was already there. Things were by no means going smoothly for this self-proclaimed God of the universe.

Nor had things gone any better for the American friends of Tatu, after hours of baking in the 110 degree heat and now looking like they were near heatstroke. Their arrival had been most theatrical, arriving in a cab to the very border of the crowd from which the three elect girls disembarked like Bombay film stars. They waved at everybody and spread a blanket in the front row of the privileged women’s area. They had looked on knowingly for hours, slowly wilting, but determined not to show it. Their heads must still be held high in greater expectation and faith of Baba’s coming marriage proposal to Tatu. By the end of the entire gaudy event, when their silk saris were drenched and their makeup was running, they didn’t even try to smile. That is, until Baba walked by, and they perked up for the last hope of a final sign. What would issue forth from the avatar was a vindictive rasping tone, chiding and demeaning them. It also flattened them.

Soon the crowds scattered in the crimson light of the late afternoon. I strolled up to the three dumbfounded girls, still gaping and standing in shock by the side of the stage. Near tears, they blurted out to me that they had been “taken.” Margaret laughed bitterly, perhaps in self-deprecation, stunned, disillusioned, now rambling her way out of a slowly ending trance about some kind of deep-level hoax. And somehow Baba had known about it and taken pleasure in the sheer game of it. They had expected Baba to reveal a great mystery at the height of the event, his wedding plans with Tatu. I laughed back pitifully at them, agreeing that they weren’t even near the ballpark. They did not fully see the irony as I could see it. Yet still being cautious with them, I intimated my plans to move on with Surya Das for a “tour.” My camouflage remained in full effect.

Later that night, I took the chance to say a cautious, final goodbye to a number of people I was close to. India was visibly heartbroken, this dear girl. She noted in the deep remorse from my tone that I knew something that I could not share. She detected that I was quickly becoming more a fugitive on the run than the robust disciple she had once known. I told her little more than that I was being pressed to go “beyond form.” Cautiously I warned her not to put her heart in the hands of Baba, the Baba that she understood him to be. I wanted her merely to accept the possibility of one day no longer having to be dependent upon Baba. It frightened her. She could not imagine how she would get along in the world without him. This was the case with many of them.

India wept as I affectionately grabbed her shoulder and left, heading out of the compound toward the ramshackle commercial stalls and jerrybuilt stands. I wanted to drown my intoxicating despair, back to haunt me yet again, by disappearing into the public pandemonium, the Coke stalls and floating circus atmosphere, because that was the hard answer about my two wasted years. I had been duped in a floating carnival. And now I could examine my due reward— dogs, beggars, parched dry earth, fruit-vendors, fleas, photographers and every manner of hawker and hustler and con artist, all mere amateurs compared to the really big con artist in the giant coliseum. My due reward was a broken heart, a nearly wrecked soul, a penniless pocket, and a grossly undernourished body. Yet I had been spared my life. I could move on. I wasn’t sure that the others would get away so lightly. And I knew that I had to warn them the most powerful way I could at the most receptive time for them.

As I vacantly sipped a Coke outside the compound, I looked out to the glowing lights of the festival. Searchlights lit up the giant central building as it burned up into the night sky like a giant monolith of Satan. A huge Walt Disney play land clock, 10 to 15 feet in diameter, stood directly above Baba’s apartment on a raised tower, its luminescent dial, numerals, and hands glowing in bright multicolored plastic. Figures walked on the rooftop high up, encircling the donut shape. Desolation, I would tell myself, noting how the scene resembled an inferno from a painting by Heironymus Bosch.

Soon Phil’s wife Prema, the super hip black girl who had gone to Oberlin, sidled up to me like Tina Turner ready to lay down a Motown heavy, swaying just slightly. I primed the pump. “Well, was it impressive?”

“Honey, it ain’t impressive; it’s depressive.”

“You said it. The whole thing was a horror show.” I then got to hear her growing doubts, noting her grievances and agreeing. This was the night that Jeanne, a girl who had come in our cab, disappeared and nobody knew where she was.

Later I hastened warily back to the men’s dorm room, dodging the nocturnal shufflings of the enemy in red. My spirit was bursting with urgency to leave. I was getting a high-order alert within that I was in very real danger and that it would only be held back for so long. The next conveyance to Bangalore was an early train and that meant a final night, hidden among the masses.

At 5:00 a.m. the next morning, as pandemonium started up, I quietly nodded towards Surya Das. It was time to unobtrusively head out the side gate of the donut-shaped monolith. I carefully resisted my urge to run once beyond the gate, my bags close to my body. Neither of us could endure the place a moment longer. Painstakingly, I determined to evade the searching black eyes of Baba, almost thrilled at the challenge of keeping his knowledge of my whereabouts in the dark. In an hour, we were on the early morning train back to Bangalore.

In Bangalore we took an auto rickshaw to Brigade Road. I decided to join Surya Das in the men’s dorm at the Regent Guest House. One of our group who had stayed in Bangalore queried me. I remained absolutely silent. And so I remained till some of the others arrived the next day in a cab.

Little did I realize that what was going to happen would pale anything that had ever happened to me in my life.

Chapter 26

Entering the Kingdom of God

A

ll it took was a look into each other’s eyes for us to know that the spell, the enchantment under Baba, was gone forever. It could never be resuscitated. This was the reckoning we faced.

Who was he really? What was the answer? Where do we shunt our wrecked lives from here, at least for those of us who had wholeheartedly invested mind, body, and soul into Baba? This secret conference among the five of us had to be more than just licking one another’s wounds in a crisis.

Margaret, Barbara (of select sisters fame), and Mark sat in a circle with Surya Das and me in a closed room at the Regent Guest House. I made sure the other “select sister,” Jerry’s ex-girlfriend Betty, was cleverly decoyed by the others, who also now distrusted her. I had previously warned them not to trust her.

I began to share with them why Surya Das and I had left Baba, Surya Das often picking up where I left off. This amazed them, yet they had each had their own inklings about this, that there was an unwholesome sensuality beneath Baba’s holy veneer.

Yet how did this revelation about Baba fit into the cosmology of Eastern thought—those millions of complex pieces of the mystical puzzle about man becoming God, the sys

tem of reincarnation, finding the God-realized

guru? My heart, mind, soul, and body shook

within from the sepsis of this lie. For it was a lie.

From the original Genesis lie, across the cen

turies, it filtered down from civilization to civi

lization, as this adversary genius selected one

human vehicle after another to carry it this “high

er enlightening,” this “transcendent truth.”

Its kernel has always been that man is God, divine in his essence. But according to the ancient Genesis account, this seductive thought was the cause of the Fall of Man, the reason for his present alienation from God. It was not God who told Eve, “You shall be as God” It was a certain fallen one, a bent creature known as Satan, who started history’s oldest lie. (It had been the very thing that had undone him.).

And it was attractive. As Proverbs warned, like most sin, it was as sweet as honey in the first taste, but underneath it was bitter as wormwood. This great lie was the basis of the mystery religion of Babylon: Mystery Babylon, as Revelation called it, “the spiritual harlot” whom God opposed from the foundations of the world and who opposed the true God from time’s beginning. This subtle mystical body of belief had shimmered across Egypt’s mystery cults, to the Vedantist Brahmins, the Neo-Platonic and Eleusinian cults of Greece, to the Druids, the Sufis, Mayans, and Cabalist Jews, crisscrossing a hundred cultures throughout time, with this enchanting dervish, this dance of death. But this mystery dance was not allowed in the Bible. The scribes of Judah had to wash their hands of it, and across the centuries, Israel was again and again purged of it. Repeatedly Israel had to confess its sins of this enchantment with Babylonian occultism whenever it came in contact with it. It was like a spiritual virus wafting across the borders from Canaan, smelling like perfume but bringing a plague.

Those of us sitting in a circle were maimed war victims of this lie, now sitting shaken in a locked little room in a South Indian Hotel. Yet, we never would have known this had we just sat back in America as weekend astrologers and armchair mystics, sipping intriguing concepts like fine wine but never taking the risk, never entering the heat of the battle, never putting our very souls on the line.

Most of the turned-on seekers and weekend meditators back home were in exactly this predicament. They put their toes into the water just enough to be titillated but they never took the leap. They would, therefore, never believe those of us who had taken the leap. We would be scoffed at as aborted pioneers who somehow didn’t have it to press on the whole way. Yet they possessed that magical infallibility of intuition to know. Perhaps this was the blind pride about which the Bible warned.

I narrated a story I once read and how it paralleled our situation. It was about a fugitive running from an all powerful spell. Thomas Mann’s, “Mario and the Magician,” was about a magician of such amazing power that he could totally captivate everyone’s will in an audience. Those who escaped could only do it by an utter and thorough breach with him, a gut-level revulsion that held on to nothing of the prior influence. Only one man left the theater, and he never looked back. “Remember, if we can’t give our lives to Baba now, then we cannot speak kindly of Baba from a distance, or we will float back into his realm like straying asteroids into a sun. There can be no compromise.”

“So who is Baba?” they asked me.

I recited something I had read on the hill overlooking Puttaparthi, an ancient verse written almost 2,000 years back in Matthew 24:24: ”And there shall come false Christs and false prophets, and they shall work great signs and wonders, so as to deceive .... Deceive ... if it were possible, even God’s very elect.”

“It’s been in the Bible all along. That is what Baba is— an anti-christ who works miracles to deceive.” The verse completely caught them off guard as it did me when I read it the first time.

“Then who is the real Christ?” the predominantly Jewish remnant asked.

“Christ,” I replied. “Jesus Christ.” My answer had come so fast and the room became so still that I wondered whether it was entirely my own. “So simple, so incredibly simple,” I amended.

It was not so much that I was guiding the course of the inquiry, this desperate search for an answer, as I was beginning to walk by faith into a greater light as this active confession was opening up my eyes to see on a completely new level. We had been deceived. We were wrong. Our understanding, what we had thought were our infallible intuitions, fell short of the mark. If you will, we had sinned in our very consciousness. Now, for the first time in my life, I was beginning to see things in this new light, and it put me in the core of a process that nothing could stop—nothing but my own choice to turn away from what I knew to be true.

It was dawning upon me in full power that I was not God. I was not even a god. I was a bleary-eyed creature lost in the spiritual night. “This is all the Bible has ever said that any of us are anyway, creatures made by God. Little mortal men, vulnerable little flesh and blood people, made from the common elements and God-breathed with a soul.” Yes, we were made for a purpose, but that purpose does not include our usurping the infinite and holy creator of the universe. The painting and the painter are separate and different. I was feeling a brokenness that had me on the verge of tears, especially as I remembered an event.

I told the rapt listeners about something that happened to me on my very last day in London before I flew to India two years back.

I was walking down Brompton Road alone, past Harrods. I was approaching my neighborhood of childhood days in Knightsbridge, heading towards the museums. Then, as now, I was still alone. I had planned to go to India for years, but I had been stretched by a recent, unplanned personal anguish. I was also feeling the full weight of my decision to go to India alone. This pilgrimage to India had been costly in more ways than one, and one of those costs was having to leave a girl I was very close to—but it was a searingly close relationship that had its own problems. My soul was vulnerable as I headed towards my old house.

A most complex, almost nostalgic forlornness was upon me. Down Brompton Road I went, turning right at Cottage Place, where stood my old childhood home, #9 Cottage Place, a four-story affair owned by some earl. I was heading for that very same sanctuary where I used to blind people on Sunday mornings with a giant mirror from my roof, Holy Trinity Brompton Church (We never went to church).

That afternoon I entered the rear chapel in this old English church. In the main sanctuary an organ rehearsal quietly filled the air with the gentle power of J. S. Bach. Alone at the altar, I knelt down and started praying to God beseechingly —be this God cosmic or Personal, monistic or transcendent— I prayed to Him never to let me go, never to forget me, or allow me to be ensnared, to bless me with His love, to have pity on me, to take the reins of my life, guarantee me in this search for the ultimate truth and that I attain the real answer no matter what.

T

hen I looked up and saw those immortal words of Christ carved into the marble altar, “Greater Love Hath No Man Than He Who Would Give His Life For His Friend.” It was about Christ’s sacrificial death in our stead. As I left the side chapel I fell against the wall, sobbing. Then I felt a still small voice of assurance reaching down within me, saying, “You are about to go through a dark night of the soul, a great storm, and it will appear to you as though you will even perish. But My hand is on you, and I will provide you

a way out. You will be saved in the end and know the truth.”

A seal had been made, an invisible covenant. I felt I could now go to India without the fear of being engulfed by oblivion. But the truth that I would find in India was not the ancient mystery religions after all. It was not yoga, or any Far Eastern path. I had been alienated from the Christian church all my life and looked down on it with disdain and contempt. I came from a family of virtual atheists who had long since departed from their deep roots in the Church of England. We were the WASP counterparts of so many secular Jews I knew. I especially hated organized religion. But now I was facing something else. It took this grand cycle to bring me to the Christ of the Bible, the one and only God-man in the history of the world.

The salvation of Christ was far greater and deeper, a boundless mystery vast enough in its holy perfection and design to dwarf Baba’s counterfeit tugboat through the ocean of samsara, this vain effete peacock, this dark demon god of South India. What a gaudy, papier-mâché imitation. The others now agreed that they had never been able to look at the New Testament and interpose Baba in the place of Christ.

In front of the others, I knelt on trembling knees and started tearfully praying for myself and any who would bow their heads with me. I had come full circle back to that moment in the small English chapel. Was it not true that my dark night of the soul in India had come to an end? Had I not passed by the veil of death?

Before God and those witnessing my act, I faced the wall and utterly denounced Baba. I admitted the depth of my wrongdoing and sin. I confessed that Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life. And that His name is the only name under heaven and earth given among men by which we may be saved. I confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and asked Him to enter my heart, to take over the reins of my life, forever, forever, and forever without end. Amen.

A quiet miracle took place within. Joy flooded my soul instantly. The terrible insecurities melted away. A million-pound weight that I had carried on my back disappeared. I had hope, real hope, bonemarrowdeep, for the first time ever in my life.

There was another feeling that accompanied my moment of release as the great inner weight was removed. Somewhere on the other end of a long time connection, there had been a scream as the tentacles of some spiritual enemy, those deep inroads of the empire of Satan on my soul, were torn away and cast off by God Himself. It was as though in some dark chamber, the Baba spirit wailed in rage. Mine was a supreme defection.

Some people tell me that when they “came to Christ,” nothing dramatic happened. Not so with me. For when I was transported from the realm of darkness to the heavenlies of the co-eternal Christ, it really was as lightning in its soul-shaking power and immediacy. In an instant I went from Tal Brooke, dead in his sins, to Tal Brooke, forever redeemed. I crossed that gulf of separation from God to communion and full acceptance with God.

I was transported from one kingdom to another, from one eternal destiny to another, not by my own merit, but by an act of unfathomable grace. It would happen in less than a second. At one time, the most obvious answer in the world, and at the other, perhaps the most difficult gateway to enter. For no other path requires you to face up to the fact that you are a hopeless sinner. No other path defines sin as the very words of Christ do, and herein is a difference as wide as the universe itself. You and God agree about your blackened condition, your wretched and pitiable unredeemed state. That as you feel God’s holy eye upon you, you are a speck, most powerless, most small. No merit system of action can redeem you. Yet He loves you. And this is when I began to slowly weep.

When I returned to my chair I was a different creature of whom the Scripture says, “Behold, all things are made new.” I could share with them two things that I had just been “told.” The unretractable assurance to those faithful in Christ, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 8:38,39). The other factor pressed into my heart was that I now had a mission to write another book—the one you are now reading—instead of the pro-Baba book, The Amazing Advent. I could also sense another promise, “I shall bring all things unto thy remembrance.”

Immediately, several hundred things sealed in the storehouse of my mind about Baba emerged in an unending stream of release. Clear memories of where he fell short of deity. I went on to share some of those discernments about Baba that came railroading out, and they all agreed. Mark went on to write his own list, including the observation of the appalling state of so many devotees who follow Baba, their lack of peace, and everything but love and joy. I was amazed to find that he included the fact that Indra Devi had given Baba a private donation of several hundred thousand rupees.

Perhaps this long trip to India into the center of Baba’s realm, after a life of mystical leanings, was the only way I would ever be satisfied, I told the others, to finally concede that Christ is the only way, without need for any man, guru, or celestial being. I had been in love with the mystical view and would have never just let it go. It took a rupture in the cosmos, a civil war of the soul to get me to consider the other side.

I had relished the subtle and the complex. But the true path to God was the most honest and simple salvation imaginable, perfect, and available to any who would come.

“Don’t you see, it has to be that open, that honest, that straight, for any man. Not a few chosen initiates who carve their own gateway, but for all. And if I have crossed it in my life before, then you can bet that for at least one occasion, others in their own way cross by the same gate. Later I was reminded of this moment of triumph in a great epic of J.R. Tolkein, when Frodo defeated the powers of evil:

“In the heart of the realm of Sauron ...at the very crack of Doom, stood Frodo, black against the glare, tense, erect, but still as if he had been turned to stone . . . And as Frodo put on the ring and claimed it his own, even in Sammath Naur the very heart of the realm, the Power in Baraddur was shaken, and the tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown. The dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his eye piercing all shadows looked, across the plain ... and the magnitude of his folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash, and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him. For he knew his deadly peril and the thread upon which his doom now hung.

. . .throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired. For they were forgotten. The whole mind and purpose of the power that wielded them was now bent with overwhelming force upon the mountain.”

Perhaps in some way, as I cried out for Christ, the terrible hold of Baba’s power too would fall into the chasm of fire, and his siege upon my soul would end as a new dawn came at the hour of peril, when I seemed surrounded and besieged at the very gates of Mordor. Out of nowhere, a vast golden sun would lift up and fill the sky.

We discussed those on the earth who really have managed to lead lives closest to true grace, perfection, love, joy, hope, and contentment. Lives that speak of a goodness, that only comes from God. Foremost in my mind were the Carrolls, for they had lived by a standard I had never really seen, and they had done it by living under the lordship of Christ as faithful servants, humbly carrying the lamp of love and service with qualities of character that no psychoanalytic couch or LSD trip could create in a million years. These were God-touched lives that came from deep purity that no devil could counterfeit, that only God could do.

Sure, every religious camp in the world emphasized selfless love, but the only people able to live it out were the real Christians. Not necessarily those who called themselves Christian, but those whose lives were defined as Christian by Christ and the apostles.

Indeed, one of the decoys used by the deceiver was the ploy that nominal Christians were the “real” Christians. And others could say, “Look at their fruits, and you can see what sort of Savior they have.” But the tragic fact would remain that the lives of these people were only further proof that God had never changed them within in the first place, they had never known Christ as Lord and Savior. When Emperor Constantine nationalized the Christian faith in 450 A.D., in one fell swoop, the doorway had been thrust open and a haze of confusion resulted when the flock was greatly adulterated. It suddenly became hard for the outsider to tell the one from another, “the wheat from the chaff.”

It was no accident that Christ warned of a large crowd of “goats” to span across the centuries, purportedly in His name, but whom He had never approved of or gathered, even great church names, television stars, self-proclaimed prophets, and founders of cults. Indeed, the goats would include those who had even called Christ “Lord,” and worked miracles in His name. It was in the seventh chapter of Matthew:

“Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophecy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’

“And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me you who practice lawlessness.’” (Matthew 7:22)

The criterion for being a Christian would neither be found in man’s reason alone nor the declarations of an ecclesiastical body, the church. It could be found solely in the Bible, and Scripture stated clearly that it was a direct person-to-person encounter with the Living Lord through His agency, the Holy Spirit, given as a seal of salvation. Then one’s life had to reflect this change. No, it would never be perfect on earth, sin would be a constant battle, but that life would change.

The Church Universal, the true Church, could be divided by nothing. It was a living kingdom spanning the centuries composed of true Christians. It was, “One body of which there is one Spirit, just as all of you experienced one calling, one hope. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, one Father of us all who is the one over all...” (Ephesians 4:4).

This kind of knocked out the problem of denominations, and put the worldwide and history-wide body of believers more in the dominion of individuals linked together through the invisible and supernatural headship of Christ. Naturally, there were true Christians in every denomination who faithfully tried to serve their Lord as best as possible according to their knowledge, even in many of the most dead, liberal, and apostate churches conceivable; but this fact never sanctified the entire congregation, it never put God’s seal of approval on every edifice across the land using the name of Christ.

This surely disqualified “Western Culture” from being that band of true believers. That there had once been a Christian base, with at least that worldview reigning for a time, and a state church (never the living church), yes. But modern enlightenment philosophy had abolished and replaced almost all that remained of the Christian faith 300 years ago as the motive force behind the West. The philosophy of science, Naturalism, became the god of the West, not Christianity. There had been true Christians, yes; but these were individuals.

In our hotel room, God managed to break through this caricature of Christianity that had plagued me and shackled me down my entire life. I had inherited the seeds of doubt from my atheistic father. My peer groups of friends growing up disposed of this evidently dead faith mockingly in the most creative ways. Now I had encountered the living God. It was the most sober and holy moment imaginable.

No wonder half the world was so disillusioned with the so-called church. No wonder I had been a critic of the church all my life. I had been looking down the wrong barrel. I had been tricked. I assumed the generalizations, labels, and pigeonholes about all these things under the name of Christ as being truly representative of what Christians were. It went right by me, and I never paused to think about it any fur

374 LORD OF THE AIR

ther. I just blindly assumed that this army of incompetents were all Christians.

Indeed it was another thing altogether to really meet Christ who “stands at the door and knocks” upon the very door of our souls. I encountered the One who has miraculously changed lives like mine across the centuries. It was absolutely real. It banished the occult desolation that I had been carrying for so long. This was real grace. As in the Visionary Dream in Sri Ranga Patna, I called on the name of Christ and was rescued in the real world from an occult realm out to pillage and destroy my soul.

But I knew there was another problem in reaching those before me—the majority were Jewish. Indeed, the majority of all the foreign Baba devotees who had been under me were Jewish, at least threequarters of them. They had wandered the nations since Titus brought destruction on Israel and its temple. Again, scattered as in the days of Babylon, when they had been found unfaithful to the Living God and sent captive to foreign nations. Then, as now, their ears had become dull to the voice of their true God. Now they cherished an ethnic identity, seasoned with Yiddish humor, bitterness, and cynicism, with perhaps a touch of tolerant sensuality to give life a flavor. Their noblest cause had become humanitarianism and preserving “tradition.” But what of pleasing their God, that foremost precedent of their most godly ancestors before Christ? I knew they had deep inbred caricatures that almost inoculated them against Christ. Nevertheless, some were encountering Christ through a new doorway, New Age ecumenism. Through that, many had their first look at the New Testament....but with a spin on it. This would take time.

Yet in the midst of these dear hard core seekers, my life had changed forever, radically and profoundly. I was feeling a radiant lightness of spirit from some hidden spring that I had never felt before ever in my millions of transitions of consciousness, from LSD elevators to mountaintop epiphanies. This was real.

Chapter 27

Escaping the Land Of Shadows

M

argaret, who had melted in the heat just days back during the Ananthapur festival next to the “rooftop prophetess,” claimed Christ as Lord and Savior very shortly after I did.

Her conversion appeared long-range and genuine, as she and I became very close very quickly in a kind of survival mode. Barbara and Mark, also Jewish like Margaret, conceded to the purity of Christ and to the demonic nature of Baba. Surya Das quietly bore through all of this, anxious to go on his spiritual pilgrimage across India.

For days after the powerful life-changing event, Margaret and I talked intensely for hours at a time. We wandered Bangalore through parks, cafes, bookstores and newsstands as we went over how deeply we had been deceived. We explored the wider implications of our shift in cosmology and belief. There was also the lesson of having a good healthy mistrust of relying solely on some inner guidance system. It was not infallible by any means. Now and then we clowned. As a visible expression of my break with the past, I got a haircut from Margaret. We laughed through stages of the haircut including one I called “the man of the future.” In the end it looked quite good, one more bond with the past broken.

The Western contingent was now moving back to Whitefield and a few of them were showing up in Bangalore. The main mood of all of us was one of cloaked silence, should we come in contact with any of the Baba followers. My feeling was “no exceptions,” and that to reveal what had happened could jeopardize all of us. We could tell them later.

At one point Margaret and I were afraid that we had blundered. We decided to go on a sort of private celebration, yes, call it a date, to the newly opened Blue Fox, a modern, plush, westernized restaurant not far from the Regent Guest House. For the first time in 21 months, I relished the idea of eating a gourmet non-vegetarian meal in a top restaurant. We saw steak on the menu from one of the local English farms— the most tabooed food of all—and ordered it as a wild celebration of our new-found freedom from all the debilitating legalism. Margaret and I sat in a snug corner of the restaurant, waiting with expectation, glad that we could lead normal lives again.

After all, Christ fed the fish—an obvious non-vegetarian food—to the five thousand in one of his greatest miracles. He also ate meat, saying, “It is not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, it is what issues from your heart” (Mark 7:15). In fact, I had been amazed to discover that rather than supporting vegetarianism, the Bible opposed the idea of diet as a means of sanctification. It included the forbidding of the eating of meat as a “doctrine of demons” to emerge in the later times, alongside the enforced prohibition against marriage (I Tim. 4: 3). As we sat in the Blue Fox, we realized that if we were caught eating meat, it would be used as evidence against us as “falling away,” presented as the real reason we left Baba. But such a public reckoning was inevitable as our lives normalized. And we had to be willing to pay the price of ostracism. Lessons often came quickly.

Just as a large sizzling 20-oz. chateaubriand arrived, Margaret and I looked at the door and our hearts fell. Two recent New York arrivals who were Baba devotees, Steve and Leslie, were ushered to a distant table. It was like seeing a sniper. Margaret turned when she saw my eyes

light up, and I grabbed her hard so she would not jump out of her seat. Our eyes met saying, “Oh, well, there goes a good meal but let’s eat it anyway.” I was so hungry I almost didn’t care. We pretended not to see them as they ate some exotic gourmet vegetarian platter almost out of view. Later, I coolly went over to their table and greeted them. They seemed hurt that Margaret and I had been secretive with them. They had always been especially friendly with me, and now I wondered if there was ever a way to spring them out of this infernal trap. The problem was that they had not hit bottom and had enough money and options to forestall such an eventuality almost indefinitely.

As Margaret and I left the Blue Fox heading arm-in-arm toward Brigade Road, yet another unpleasant jolt hit us, as we spotted Wendell sitting on a railing nearby talking with some of the Baba crowd. We smiled at him and said a hasty guarded hello as we walked on quickly. His greeting carried a musing wonder, perhaps even some jealousy. Yet I did not want him to use this as ammunition against us, for I could guess what he was imagining (it felt like my first date in two years). I planned to send him the full story later and did not want any suspicions to get in the way.

It so happened that Margaret, a vibrant full-blooded Jewess, was the prettiest of all the girls, loaded with personality and charisma, as well as imagination, intelligence, and wit. From the day she arrived, what stuck out was that she was sort of the queen of the girls, sharper, brighter, more attractive and always beaming. Months back, when we started to bump into each other, we used to joke at the ice-cream stand across from Brindavan. I would ride by on my bike, and Margaret would then come over blushing with laughter telling me that she just realized that her divine mission under Baba was to be the “Miss Fab of Long Island.” She would be the enlightened housewife walking the catwalk with the other beauty queens. She could tell audiences on television how Baba had done it all, as she rode off on a flower-decked float smiling at the viewers. She could smile into the camera, talking about cosmic consciousness, pranayama, and Hatha yoga. Margaret would soon break into fits of giggles in front of me. This was the same girl who came over to me another time from the girls’ table to tell me that they finally figured out who I was in a former lifetime: King Arthur. That was in the old days. Now I was just Tal Brooke the mortal crea

ture, not quite as grandiose these days, but full of

more hope than ever.

Margaret and I quickly rounded the corner

out of Wendell’s view as I was whispering to her

about a certain morbid parallel between our pre

sent situation and Rosemary’s Baby. The

book/movie was a chilling, diabolical thriller about a

naive newlywed in a hornet’s nest of demonic power, surrounded by people manipulating and seducing her and siphoning the life out of her so that she would be the eventual vehicle to carry the devil’s baby. It was filmed in Manhattan at the Dakota House. Hilda, that sweet old gal, reminded us of the old woman next door, and it went on from there. Sometimes we quickly dodged behind newsstands and into alleys to avoid being seen. This would often bring on wild laughter, as I became more paranoid. Yes, we were walking a virtual minefield of potential accusations.

Betty was kept in the dark when she appeared later. She sensed that a tornado had come amongst us. Mark and Barbara, by my urging, packed their bags for North India. Margaret and I waved goodbye to them as they left the Regent Guest House for the railroad station in a rickshaw. What Betty later discovered in their trail were heaps of torn Baba photos, incense, and what not. Her reaction was predictable. To gain greater intimacy with Baba, she played his double agent and informer while she repented of her errors in associating with us. Margaret and I completely cut her off.

I had prayed to God about finances. When we collected our mail I discovered, by God’s timing, yet another $100 check wired to me. This time from Lennie, a Vassar graduate working in Washington, and the sister of my best friend Miles Copeland (who later became the famed rock manager of the Police, Sting, the Bangles, and 20 other rock groups). Lennie had just sold the remainder of my stereo system. The check was fully unexpected and the timing was incredible. Now I could get to Delhi.

Right after Mark and Barbara left for North India, July 13th, I knew it was time to leave the Regent Guest House and visit the Carrolls. Surya Das wanted to join me in case they invited us to stay. Margaret wanted to stay on at the Regent Guest House for a few more days. Her plan was to join me at the Carrolls once Surya Das vacated his room and left for his journey. I felt the pressing need to be incognito and gain my strength before the spiritual battle intensified. I was also bursting inside to tell them the incredible news of my conversion.

A Way Station Over an Abyss

I

stood on the Carrolls’ porch with Surya Das behind me and knocked on the door that evening, my heart racing with expectation. I had some big news. But I was never able to surprise them with my announcement. Something happened when my eyes met theirs, even before I could get a word out. Something that indicated the astounding power of an event 2,000 years ago when Christ walked the earth and that continues to this day. I saw tears quickly forming in the eyes of Winona Carroll as she stood holding open the screen door. Ivan appeared and he was hit with the same thing. We were “one in Christ.” They knew it instantly before I could open my mouth. Not a word had been said. The three of us clutched in an embrace, as time seemed to stand still. Surya Das respectfully looked on.

The Carrolls were having a peak moment. The hard years in India, 35 long years, had produced at least one solitary grateful soul standing before them at the door. He had entered the kingdom of God, and all the odds were against this ever happening. They saw him as a brilliant rebel, driven, tough-minded yet sensitive, willful, and even ruthless at times, but there he stood, this fellow named Tal, broken and thankful.

My joy would be difficult to describe. Here was this love put into my heart by an act of grace that I could not drum up in a million years of sadhana. It reached out to them in utter gratitude, forming a personal bond of fellowship that I had never quite known before. Of course I was broken and wretched, carrying many of the scars of two years of hell’s discipleship in India, and much longer than that searching alone. But if the Carrolls had previously noticed a bottomless void in my heart before the Ananthapur festival, now they saw a growing torrent of hope in my eyes. A hope filled with faith and joy. I might not be able to articulate the dynamics of this at the time to a hardened skeptic. Mine was that same irritating reply given to the ancient Pharisees by the congenitally blind man now healed by Christ, “All I can tell you is that wherefore I was once blind, now I see.” (John 9: 25).

We were to have a feast that night. Something earlier that day told Winona to buy extra food. We just appeared unannounced as always. And what a rich dinner we ate that night. I felt home at last—heart, mind and soul. All of us quietly hoped that Surya Das would cross the gulf, but it was up to him. Meanwhile, over dinner and after, Surya Das and I narrated details surrounding the Ananthapur festival. The Carrolls were amazed that I had pulled Baba’s robe, also sensing that God was at the crossroads of that and other events. His grace had protected me, they were certain of it. They also told me that they had set up prayer chains praying for me at least weekly for the last eight months. There were upwards of a hundred different groups praying for me in living rooms and churches. That too hit me, and I felt enormous gratitude, gratitude that continues up until this day.

I knew then that these missionaries of the gospel, these deep and genuine saints, had been considerable agents in my salvation. To them, they were only faithfully serving their Lord, the simple duty expected of a servant. To me, this was a cause for eternal gratitude. I knew that in the height of heaven, I would at some point look into their radiant faces and wash their feet with my tears. If they had not poured out their lives for people such as me, had they balked at the much harder road of obedience that living in India for over 35 years entailed, my destiny might have been different. Their rescue station across the Whitefield circle from the Major’s House would not have been there for me, not the fellowship, not the meals. Instead, had this house been desolate, I might have remained eternally divorced from the face of God, hurtling towards a different eternity. I was rescued out of an abyss. They were like a medical rescue team standing at the gates of our own hell’s kitchen in South India right by an abyss. And had they not been there....well, I don’t really know where Tal would be today. Their selfdenial had entered history, in my life. They were there at the perfect time in my life.

I soon realized that I too was a disciple of the Lord. My faith carried a responsibility. You don’t respond to infinite love by looking for a free ride on a carpet of grace. I could not live a self-indulgent life at the expense of truth, at the expense of my own generation who were just like me, seeking but trapped. I knew there was a mandate on my life God had given me, a purpose.

After dinner, Surya Das and I had already been invited to move in, each with separate rooms. I had my favorite room with the adjoining private shower.

During the next four days, Surya Das sat in darshan line to confront Baba about Patrick’s story. He was ignored totally. I spent the time learning about my newfound faith. When I wasn’t reading, I talked with the Carrolls in spare moments away from their usual busy schedule. They were a constant stream of grace into the community, helping people in all sorts of ways. The local Indians knew exactly where to come for help. I constantly saw God’s grace in action through them.

Accelerated Growth

F

or days I read the New Testament and immersed myself in their most recommended books. I was constantly amazed.

C. S. Lewis, one of the great literary saints at Oxford, put it very succinctly when I read Mere Christianity at the Carrolls. It added to my sense of purpose.

The...weight...of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible heavenly creatures, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with awe and circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their lives are to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit, immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

Things don’t just end when we die. Our lives determine what happens to us at everlasting judgment. It is either far from the face of God where men would be eternally consigned. Or we enter the bliss of heaven itself, in the very fellowship of God. Our lives and actions counted one way or another. But the great divider was our response to Christ.

God was not a slot machine. Life was not solely for our entertainment. Rather, discipleship was costly, including, on rare occasions, one’s very life. This was a fuller picture of the Faith than the dull portrayal given by so many lifeless churches. I already knew of the incredible conflict of the spiritual powers; I had seen the dark side. So the words of Christ came to me in immediacy and power. Neutrality was not an option. I was seeing a faith that had nothing to do with the empty and indifferent modern churches that filled the landscape of 20th century America. Today’s churches couldn’t turn a McDonald’s upside down, much less an ancient Roman world that stood in fiery opposition to Christianity. Foxes Book of Martyr’s showed Christians giving it their all. It was real to them.

Christ announced plainly, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” (John 15:18) There was spiritual opposition awaiting any Christian who was really alive. The boldness and passion of the early church was the thing that turned the world upside down and why so many Christians were martyred. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul. Rather be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matt 10:28)

The power of God transformed a band of frightened disciples in hiding after the crucifixion into emboldened apostles who could face off any crowd. They would not have risked their lives and become martyred for a dead body to sustain a lie they created about the resurrection. They had seen the risen Lord and much more. And the early church exploded because others had as well.

If history was cyclical in Hinduism, it was linear in the biblical view. God dealt with history raising and judging nations and people. Civilizations rose and fell. Ones that became depraved reaped the whirlwind of judgment. Proud cultures collapsed in desolation. This too unnerved me. If the West was becoming more depraved, there could be a ticking clock in motion for our generation. The signs were not good. Even in the ancient world, Paul outlined some of the signs of moral cancer. It was like a cross-section at a Rolling Stones concert.

Paul wrote to Timothy and said:

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall

come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents,

unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, truce breakers, false accusers,

incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,

Traitors, heady, high minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;

Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. (Second Timothy 3:1-5).

Paul in the first chapter of Romans offered an insight into the nature of human rebellion against God. In his letter to Rome, Paul talked of the dynamics of willful atheism:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their

imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four footed beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies

between themselves:” (Romans Chapter 1:18-24)

Meanwhile, God would not contend with the world for all eternity. There was a timeline. There would be a time when history was brought to a stop, concluding the whole drama. By then, men will have virtually polluted the world morally, even despoiling the earth that God had created (an ecological nightmare was portrayed in Revelation). The remedy would be the Second Coming of Christ as King and Judge visiting in judgment “as in the days of Noah” when almost the entire world was destroyed as a sign of future judgment. At the end of history, “all the elements will melt in fervent heat when God creates a New Heaven and a New Earth.” We were supposed to be vigilant about times and seasons, but we were also told it was fruitless to set the date of the return. History was full of false predictions, causing harm and skepticism.

But the general outline was that a time would come when evil was on the increase as the “restraining power” of God was removed. It would really be Satan’s world for a while. This lay ahead still in the uncertain future. Sai Baba was like a preview of the eventual apocalyptic beast and Antichrist. If Christ came as a man in the flesh, then why not Antichrist? The Bible seemed specific about this coming false messiah. I still had the taste of one of these false christs in my mouth. Baba was not a figurative symbol; he was a forewarning of greater deception.

The defiant and mocking generation at the end would welcome the system and the person of the Antichrist—Sodom and Gomorrah magnified globally like one huge Marilyn Manson concert. At some point, God steps in because the decay has reached full strength and the gathering process of history has ended. The full number of all who would turn to God has been reached. The mockers soon face the universe of their own creation—Clive Barker’s Hellraiser to the tenth power. They will have trashed all of God’s various rescue stations like the Carrolls. Saints like the Carrolls would be hanging upside down, their eyes gouged out in this future world of evil.

But no one knew the final time of this cultural conflagration. I had to reach my own generation, knowing things could go on for 50, 500, 1000 years if God decided to delay.

I had most definitely rediscovered the reality of good and evil again. Evil was mangling people’s souls in the hands of the adversary, this fallen Spirit who used to watch over entire galaxies, whose IQ was probably over a half a million. He didn’t need any think tanks. He was one, a super think-tank, having himself once been described as king of the domain of subtlety. This was the “Prince of the Power of the Air” whom Paul spoke of in his Letter to the Ephesians, the one who made war on God’s people throughout the long centuries, starting with the initial deception in the Garden of Eden. My hatred for this creature, due to my own scars, far outweighed any fear I had of him. One thing I could do was “out him,” expose him and his deceptions to those that would listen.

No sooner had I come to Christ, I quickly entered the crossroads of spiritual adversity. To quote one author, I was “marked for total disposal,” since I was not the type to stay silent about my knowledge. But I also felt as Paul when he was on the run for his life. To escape Damascus, he was lowered in a straw basket down a long drop from the high wall of the city. I planned to leave India as Paul had left Damascus, under a cloak of secrecy that was almost total. I would gain my strength back, healing in the shadows. First in London with my parents, working to heal the relationship, then in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Now in God’s kingdom, could I now assume that I was immune from ever being deceived? No. And the Carrolls well knew the danger. “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (First Corinthians 10:12). Just as Christ had warned his apostles, I would be warned of the leaven of false doctrine. Paul had written to Timothy, his disciple of long acquaintance, to “guard the gospel,” even with his life. The Bible was filled with repeated warnings of holding fast to the true faith and avoiding all false teachings. A critical point of attack of the ancient adversary was to change the revelation of God, altering truths so they became lies.

Paul warned the early churches that they must avoid being misled, telling one of them:

For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God. Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock,

over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock.

Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse

things, to draw away disciples after them (Acts 20: 27-30.)

No savoir faire walk here, ever compromised by expediency. Paul knew better than that. It was a dynamic conflict and would continue until Christ’s return.

The apostle John was not “tolerant” of false teachers either. He knew enough to despise the damage they could do. John cautioned, “The man who is so ‘advanced’ that he is not content with what Christ taught, has, in fact, no God.... If any teacher comes to you who is disloyal to what Christ taught, don’t have him inside your house. Don’t even wish him ‘God-speed,’ unless you want to share in the evil that he is doing” (2 John 9-11).

Were these apostles just paranoid, or was there something called heresy that appeared in place of truth? It killed churches like the black plague.

With fear and trembling, the Carrolls stressed to me that they had seen too many new converts snipped away at the bud by following some false teaching, some self-appointed teacher who introduced deviations of the truth. To guarantee against this was Scripture itself. It was that perfect standard, inerrant and infallible, “delivered once for all the saints” to weigh any and all claims of the truth. The true Christians stood on this immovable rock, and it would guide them and help them discern truth from falsehood. Aside from the Scripture, to help our path in this world, we had the Comforter, the Holy Spirit.

Indeed, there was a special function of the Holy Spirit and Paul reveals it after he warns a certain church about men leading them astray: “I know that the touch of his Spirit never leaves you, and you don’t really need a human teacher. You know that Spirit teaches you about all things, always telling you the truth and never telling you a lie. So as He has taught you, live continually in Him.” (I John 2: 27-28.) I knew that I could even be teleported to a lonely mountaintop in Ghana for the rest of my life and never be thrust out of His presence. This was a great foundation for hope, for rock-solid confidence not in myself, but Him.

And I certainly needed this rock if I was going to return to the West alone, at a time the church was under siege from so many sides. In the months before my conversion, I had almost tormented the Carrolls with hard questions about the disarray of the modern church. At the time, I was trying to invalidate all Christianity, showing the superiority of the eastern path.

The Carrolls had responded that, yes, the church was swarming with problems of all sorts. But then again, the Bible had warned of exactly this happening all along, hadn’t it? We should know to expect it. The adversary, predictably, had attacked from within.

First of all, he tried to undermine the word of God at the turn of the century through a massive academic endeavor which purported to be seeking the truth, using high-sounding words and academic piety to foist itself upon society as the final voice of authority concerning the reliability of Scripture. Since then, most of the divinity schools and seminaries had embraced this leaven of doubt, an ultimately man-centered philosophy, delighting in their new freedom to tolerate sin. I was well warned. The arrogant pontification of the self-proclaimed “open-minded Christian” might begin by espousing Bultmann or Tillich, chattering about the weighty things of God as though it were a hobby, oblivious to the Holy One before whom they were discussing. But it would not end until they had the earth goddess in the sanctuary and lesbian-bi-gay marriages in the church. Down the slope these apostates would stagger, using God’s terminology to deconstruct the truth, enemies of God. But they would not find this out until the end of history. For now, they could glory in their cleverness, making the laws of God to none effect.

The Carrolls also surmised that beyond this wide ranging apostasy in the church, there would also be cults galore back in the States, blurring boundaries, confusing believers and grabbing new converts. Each cult would attack some fundamental doctrine of the faith in an attempt to undermine Biblical teaching and then replace it with some “higher revelation” from its leader. There were hundreds of such cults, and they all worked on the principle of leaven or the virus. They were parasitic on the truth, the real Gospel, which they took and changed. If the genuine believer used scripture to test their claims, the cults would lose very time. And if their arguments seemed too clever and compelling, the believer was promised the Holy Spirit to help guide him. I learned very early to live on this principle, cutting through manipulative cults like they were weeds. Yes, the cults were just one arm of this perennial spiritual warfare.

I was beginning to feel a new dimension of this spiritual warfare even under the covering of the Carrolls’ house. Baba started to lurk in my dreams. I would face Baba in my dreams constantly. He would argue, persuade, hold out great possibilities for me, then, when I didn’t succumb, I would be threatened with annihilation. Using the name of Christ, I would blow him out of my presence like a bomb. Every night these dreams went on, even while I was traveling across India. In one dream Baba was on stage, imitating the so-called Saint Sophia miracle. I would see exact clones of Baba coming out of a side stage door, one after another laughing and running into some central auditorium. Baba would detect my presence in the auditorium, and there would be a showdown. In another dream, as Baba argued with me, his face began to peel off and swim with maggots.

But what really drove shivers down my back was a literal near-miss with Baba on one of my last days at Whitefield. It was getting dark. I had just gotten off the bus half a mile from the Carrolls, and I was walking cautiously down the road near a wide bank where the trees thickened. A chill filled the air. Then I noticed directly in front of me, quietly floating down the empty road, Baba’s sleek, long station wagon with the tinted windows rolled up and headlights on. Without making any quick moves, I edged over into the obscure shadows of the side bushes. The limousine glided by, not more than thirty feet away as the side window blackly reflected at me in full view. Now I could really feel the diabolical power of Baba as the headlights swept by. He was most likely going to a dinner engagement in Bangalore, this soul eater. Then, quietly like a hearse, the vehicle moved on into the growing darkness.

By July 17, Surya Das took the train to Pondicherry, where he and I were supposed to meet in a matter of days, having spent the last four days at the Carrolls with me. After he left, Margaret moved into his room from the Regent Guest House. She and I continued talking to each other and the Carrolls. They, too, were hoping her conversion would stick.

Within a day, Margaret and I went to the Bangalore Mission’s Church, meeting Joe and Edith Mullins, two missionary friends of the Carrolls, who were old friends and fellow students at Oxford with John Stott. They looked into my eyes and smiled at me with a long, satisfied joy. “So, you are Tal Brooke, the former Baba zealot. Do you know that the Carrolls and our entire congregation have, over the last six months, been praying for you specifically? That the Lord would deliver you out of the hands of Baba and reveal to you some hidden aspect of Baba’s evil. We even prayed that you would one day write a book exposing him.” Margaret and I warmly shook hands with these two dear souls, and walked on. I began to get an inkling of the power of prayer, how it had exposed Baba, how it had helped release me.

On the afternoon of July 20, the Carrolls and I had a final embrace on their front porch, tears welling up in our eyes. I was a son and a brother now going out into the wilderness again, but forever with the guiding light of God. I was saved; but my new life, they knew, was only just beginning. The breadth and depth of the Faith was wider than the universe, and now there was the burden on my life to be fruitful and deserving of the Lord. They knew of the importance of the book that I was called to write and would pray for it incessantly.

We hated to part, but all of us realized that I needed to quickly move out of the region and towards Delhi. Margaret joined me in the ride into Bangalore for a parting dinner. Margaret and I hugged goodbye on Mahatma Gandhi Road. I ordered the rickshaw-driver to take care of her as he drove her twelve miles to Whitefield where she would spend her last days with the Carrolls. She was due to fly from Bangalore to Bombay and then from Bombay back to New York. Meanwhile, I sped off to the train terminus to take an all-night train to Pondicherry, where I was to meet Surya Das en route to leaving India.

On The Road

O

n the train to Pondicherry, I felt like Frodo in Mordor, on a mission of great importance. Obscurity was critical in my escape from India. I would write to almost no one, being ambiguous even to my parents as to why I was leaving India. As the train clickety-clacked, I celebrated every mile of separation between Brindavan and me. And I contemplated my newfound faith.

At Pondicherry I was with Surya Das for ten days, getting sea and sun and witnessing to the ashram residents about Christ’s salvation. The well-known writer Sat Prem turned a cold shoulder, and Diana, a bareskulled woman renunciant, attendant of the “Mother,” smiled at me noncommittally. Indeed, I got darshan with the ninety-six-year-old “Mother,” that most occult creature overlooking the domain, again like a pterodactyl. As my eyes fused into her dark orbs, I looked right down them boldly, saying the Lord’s Prayer within my heart. She was undergoing a tremor underneath, her thick neck bending forward like a giant mesh of cables, eyes fully imbecilic from the side. Yet head-on they were laser-like. As I stared at her, having known the fire, in the confidence of the Holy Spirit, she soon seemed shaken after one of her longest known eye-to-eye darshans. She said something conciliatory in French to the attendant, but I knew that the spirit inside her, this foreign entity, knew well its eventual destiny and that its days of deception were numbered. Would this “shakti” of Aurobindo’s immortalize her body as she claimed? Hardly, for within three years her obituary would appear in Time magazine.

Once I reached Madras, by August 3, I discovered another $100 wired to me, this time for a car I had left with a friend to sell. It had come with a strange kind of timeliness. As I stood on a street corner on Mount Road reading Newsweek about some 13-year-old avatar boy wonder known as Maharajji, and thinking that indeed this is an age of antichrists and false prophets, I vomited. By nightfall I had a temperature of 104 degrees. I remembered a dream I had had a few nights before about contracting yellow jaundice. In the dream my urine turned the color of Coca-Cola. Then sure enough that very thing happened. And for three days I lay in a dark, seedy Madras YMCA dorm room, vomiting anything I ate or drank, knowing full well that my liver was disintegrating. My urine was the color of a cola drink. This was something that killed some Westerners.

When my temperature subsided, Surya Das and I went hospital hunting before I told him to go on to North India. Madras Central Hospital was a nightmare of rusty needles, crammed rooms of hundreds of thin brown bodies resembling toothpicks. The red tape to get in was incredible. It was a scene out of Franz Kafka. I exploded at a hospital bureaucrat who told me it would be three weeks before I got in. But I was relieved; the place probably would have killed me. I knew I had to trust God, my back already against the wall.

In a leap of faith, I suddenly got into a cab, and headed for a private hospital I had heard about. Saint Isabell’s, a small, clean, private mission hospital was beautiful. For two weeks I ate eat fish and vegetables, three good meals a day, in a clean private room off a cool verandah. I read the Bible and pondered the Lord, the great hope within. This was a natural purging of two debilitating years in India. I was recovering from a peasant’s diet, bad water, and heat, and as I discovered once in London, a colon swimming with large parasitic round-worms which would continue to sap my strength for another six months, but not enough to stop my rapid recuperation from jaundice.

While in the hospital, I had received a clear command from the Lord to utterly scrap the pro-Baba book, The Amazing Advent, about to be released in Calcutta. I sent them a telegraph after seeing the galley proofs and considering how many Indians this book would deceive. Once I obeyed God’s directive about not being party to further deception, my conscience and soul jumped for joy. I immediately felt a greater conviction about God’s plan for the book that you are now reading.

Two weeks later, and feeling much stronger, I left Saint Isabell’s hospital and almost immediately boarded a Grand Trunk Express to Delhi on August 25. The excitement of the drama burned in the pit of my stomach. Even the wear and tear of the two-day train ride through one cauldron of heat to another would not ripple my purposive sense of release and joy. I had God in my life, and how different this was from the other forms of cosmic guidance. When the train finally pulled into the New Delhi station, I felt a long inner sigh of relief. I had managed to cross all of India without incident. My constant image was Paul lowered from Damascus in that basket.

In a happy-sad nostalgia, I took an auto rickshaw from the New Delhi station and soon passed by Connaught Circus and Parliament en route to the Diplomatic Enclave surrounding the international youth hostel, the modern Vishwa Yuvak Kendra. My heart was dead set on staying there till I flew out of India. I had relished this for well over a month. I knew I could recover in hiding in this familiar upscale place in the best part of New Delhi. I also planned to eat at the restaurant in the compound of the American Embassy nearby or at the relatively close Ashoka Hotel.

But my heart sank utterly as I walked into the lobby of the upscale hostel. I found out that the entire complex had been rented by the Peace Corps for a training program that would last three weeks. All Western travelers had been turned away at the desk. I almost wept I was so tired and disappointed.

I was desperate. I quietly lowered my head and started praying, talking to God like a needy son. Then I approached the American director of the Peace Corps who was renting the Kendra. I proposed doing a seminar training Americans about living in India in the worst climes, surviving, and handling Eastern philosophy. I was happy to do it for free just so I could rent a dorm bed. He admitted that India had the highest attrition rate in the Peace Corps, and that they could rarely hang on to people for the full term. I could see him think. Then he looked up. “Why don’t you stay here as a short term instructor? We will cover your room and board.” I was stunned and grateful beyond belief.

I got a private executive room with a private bath and all the food I wanted. By the end of two weeks, I had a dedicated group of guys who hung on my every word, big strapping guys as I had once been, ex-football stars from Nebraska and baseball players from Auburn. And when I finally told them the end of my story and told them the gospel, some of them turned to Christ. By the time they saw me writing the Westerners at Puttaparthi, the Peace Corps guys were pulling for me. This letter was to be my final bombshell, but it would not be dropped in the mail until I was at the airport and flying out of India. I knew Baba’s web too well. A premature note could sabotage my attempt to leave.

Final Escape

I

knew that I faced a bureaucratic nightmare in order to escape India. It was an obstacle course of traps that had caught many. And each stage required exact timing.

First, I had to be financially cleared before I could even apply for an exit visa. In the first week of September, I took a rickshaw across Delhi to a huge office building. If I did not have every receipt for each traveler’s check cashed at a bank, then they could legally begin an investigation while detaining me in Delhi indefinitely. I had no receipts at all but the ones just recently cashed in Delhi and Madras. This was quite an obstacle.

In a large office, I looked the inspector right in the eye. My receipts had been lost somewhere along the line, possibly on a train. “So you don’t have any of them, eh?”

This went back and forth for a while. I remained cool. I suggested to him that after riding in so many trains that it was a miracle that I even had my passport much less any receipts. He paused, smiled, opened my passport and stamped it with a seal of approval from his office. We cordially shook hands and I calmly walked out. Part of my modus operandi was that I was dressed in good clean Western clothes, in no way resembling that bane of India, the Western hippie.

My next obstacle was considerable. To be granted an exit visa I needed to be cleared by Mysore State since I had been a resident there for two years. This meant the Delhi authorities had to wire Mysore State to get a police release on my standing, for I had to be cleared. What the enemy might do, I had long ago anticipated, was trump up a civil offense charge against me that would be enough to incarcerate me in a Delhi prison for years.

Let us remember that in a state of panic, my Calcutta publisher had probably already contacted Kasturi about my shocking cable ordering Nabajiban Press to scrap the book. This would create a quiet panic in Puttaparthi. Possibly a cable from Delhi to the Superintendent of Police of Bangalore, a Baba follower, would be felt across Baba’s web immediately. The bureaucratic spinning wheel would roll, false accusations would be drummed up, the more influential the source the better. A resounding: “Permission to leave India not granted. Detain suspect for legal action” would leap across the Mysore Teletype to central headquarters in Delhi by early afternoon. Thus Baba might still trap me yet, should God not intervene.

When I arrived at the police headquarters in the government enclave, the room was filled with weary foreigners, tormented and bored mys

tics, all prisoners of red tape, all in the clutches of bureaucratic powergames. I heard an official say to someone, “But, sir, your passport has expired, it is no good.” There would be a yell of consummate despondence from some wasted, shaved-skulled renunciant trapped in India, broke and destitute.

I sat down at the inspector’s desk the fourth day in a row, finally with a ticket within the necessary forty-eight hours of the plane’s departure. I had all my papers in order, now wondering what they would find next. All they needed to do was send that fateful Teletype to the policeinspector in Mysore. My flight was leaving that weekend. Then I heard the horrible news.

“But sir, we cannot do anything until Monday. There is a government holiday.” I would be in really bad shape if I did not make that flight, perhaps even trapped in India.

I was in overdrive almost roaring at him. “By then my plane will have left. It is not my fault that there is a government holiday. I did exactly what your office told me to do. I came here with a ticket within fortyeight hours of the plane’s departure as well as all the other papers. It is a charter flight and you know that it cannot be transferred. Now, you must fulfill your word to me.” By then I was sweating, while holding out my now-expired diplomatic passport that I replaced in Madras (when my father retired) to remind him of my diplomatic entry into India as well as my privileged background.

“Okay, sir. You will please remain here for one minute if you don’t mind.” I was to see the top brass. I always went to the top. And now I felt a great forceful insistence on behalf of my case.

In a larger office I argued, leaning forward on the desk and watching the official through clouds of acrid smoke. “Listen to me, I came here on a diplomatic passport. Do you think I came here to do anything other than my intended mission of inquiry? (I showed him my hardbound Calcutta Baba book) ... No, I am a Christian, praise God, I am a Christian.”

“Oh then, you are not a follower of our spiritual yoga and gurus then?”

“No, not anymore,” I responded with grave finality. If I had to sell out on Christ to get out of India, then I would wait for eternity in this God-forsaken office rather than earn an expedient exit visa. I knew that I might be put to the test right here.

“Well, it seems only you Westerners desire to follow our gurus. Few of our people have genuine interest in these matters any more.”

“You know what your office has told me. Now wire Mysore and they will clear me. My record is spotless with that office. The superintendent of police is even a friend of mine.” I had given him an autographed copy of my shorter book published in Assam.

“But sir, it is a holiday, the office there is closed today. It will not open until Monday.”

“It is not my fault that you have a holiday on this crucial day.” I was ready to go over his head.

Finally I heard, “Okay, sir. I will wire them in any case. They may have someone there. You come back this afternoon and, if they have replied, it will be okay. And if not, I will stamp your passport in any case.”

I shook his hand and left with dignity, careful not to celebrate prematurely. I returned to learn that the Mysore Teletype had not answered. Time for the trump card. I looked into his eyes and handed him my open passport. Reluctantly, he took out his stamp, looked at it, and pressed the stamp upon the open page. I pressed back the surge of relief within me, extending my hands again for a gentleman’s handshake. I soon walked out down the street, a zest of energy driving me on and on, and then I held up my hands and yelled in triumph. Then I remembered to bow my head and pray.

But it was not all over yet. Mysore might still cable in urgency, I might get detained at the final gate to the plane’s ramp. Or the charter people might have miscalculated and booked too many passengers.

I refused to believe it was over until I was in the plane, as the jets were whining and I was fastened into my seat. Meanwhile the clock ticked away the hours of that final day before the plane’s departure. Yes, Baba’s hierarchy of devout followers in South India could still stir up trouble.

I composed an absolutely devastating seven-page letter to the

American community now back again at the main ashram. Copies were sent to the Carrolls and other people. This was the final bomb to be mailed my last day. With wrong timing, the gates of hell might still pour forth, should my exit from India be aborted. The letter normally would reach them a week after my plane left Delhi. If I were detained, the battle would reach new dimensions. But still, a feeling of faith urged me on to mail it.

After I mailed the letter registered from the central New Delhi post office, I learned that there was a last-minute shift in the departure time of my flight. It was delayed to the next day. This could be a technical problem, as the Delhi authorities would have assumed that my plane left the day before. Exit visas expired within hours.

The final night at the Kendra, I masked this incredible drama going on from the others and gave a forceful seminar. During my concluding moments with them, I gave an overview of the battle between the true God and the Adversary and his system of religious mysticism, so subtle in its wonderful travesty of the Truth that myriads had fallen in love with the illusion as one might fall in love with physical beauty.

In Isaiah 14, God explains what caused this cosmic transformation of a covering Cherub named Lucifer into Satan.

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations. For thou hast said in thine heart, ‘I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of congregation, in the sides of the North.

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds: I will be like the

Most High.’

Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

(Isaiah 14:12-15)

The single thought, “I will be like the most high” caused this titanic fall in the comos. Later Adam and Eve bought the same lie. After the fall, the creature changed even more terribly.

I read the seminar group several interesting slokas from one of India’s highest scriptures, The Bhagavad Gita, about Arjuna seeing Krishna in his “Universal Form,” the most sacred part of the Gita. The Bible reveals the true identity of Krishna as he reveals himself to Arjuna in his “Universal Form.”

Chapter 11, Verse 24. When I see you touching the sky,

blazing with many colors with mouths wide open, with large fiery eyes, my heart trembles in fear and I find neither courage nor peace, 0 Vishnu.

Verse 29. As moths rush headlong into a blazing fire for

destruction, so do these creatures hurriedly speed into your mouths for their destruction.

Verse 30. Devouring all the worlds on every side with. your flaming mouths, you lick your lips. Your fiery rays filling the whole world with radiance, are burning, 0 Vishnu.

Verse 32. The blessed Lord said: I am the mighty world

destroying Time now engaged in wiping out the world. Even without you, the warriors arrayed in hostile armies shall not live.

I closed the Gita. Who was Vishnu? Could he be this same fallen Cherub, once Lucifer, that Isaiah described? Vishnu’s land, Bharata, wailed in disease, starvation and idolatry. The greatest spiritual treasure of India was the conviction that she carried the world’s monopoly on spiritual wisdom and could not possibly be wrong. Whether she knew it or not, like the ancient Babylonians, the source of her occult inspiration was the ancient adversary, the devil.

I briefly described Sai Baba claiming to be God. Then I read the seminar group a passage in the Book of Revelation. They were all ears, leaning forward rapt in concentration:

And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.Revelation (19:20):

I continued several verses on: whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. Revelation (20:10-12):

And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from

But there was a splendor unimaginable to those faithful in God. Revelation Chapter 21:1 proclaimed this: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.” The Lord Himself would wipe the tears from our eyes, and we would reign with him forever and ever.

I left them early the next morning before light.

At 6 a.m. I stood with a nervous crowd in the airport waiting room. A previous charter plane the day before had been cancelled. But our plane was waiting outside. The others had to wait for another plane. Ours had only been delayed a day.

By 7 a.m. we started to board. I got to the gate. The guard looked at my passport. “Excuse me, sir, but your exit visa was for a plane yesterday evening. It is seven hours expired, sir. You will have to get another.” Fury mounted within me.

I looked him in the eyes. His superior and other officials sat at a desk behind him. I went right to them with him. Eyes met. “Is it my fault that the plane was delayed? What in heaven’s name can I do now with the plane about to leave? Your office in Delhi is closed right now. This plane is my only chance. Now I want to get on.”

The official gave the guard a slow nod, and with a red stamp, the guard marked my passport, “Delhi airport, Palam, 14 September, 1971.”

I walked through the gate giving them a courteous wave. Yes, I even feared being hauled out of the plane before the door closed.

I had made it this far, finally strapped in at a window seat and waiting. Twenty minutes later the engines started up. The plane started to roll forward. Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Then we sped down

the runway, nosing up skyward. I was still feeling tense as long as we were over India. I did not underestimate the machinations of India to radio back the plane. Remember, even the president of India was a Baba devotee.

I held my breath tensely while we rose in the air. Soon we passed beyond the land mass of India. Once the clear Arabian Sea sparkled up a radiant emerald green from below, I exalted. I looked out the window hiding from the other passengers the volcano of joy and release within. No one could guess what I had been through. A cheerful stewardess handed me an ice-cold Coke. I exhaled audibly with incredible relief thanking her. Two years in this land had become an eternity. What looked like the doorways to paradise became a deepening trap into the abyss. Now I was really getting out.

My heart sang a quiet hymn to God as the land of Bharata retreated in the distance behind me. The dry ancient face of sand with its endless temples and mystical texts had guarded the world’s most ancient lie. Now it had lost all claim on my soul, for God had rescued me—body, mind and soul—for another destiny.

THE END

Glossary

Advaita Vendanta : non-dualistic Vendanta, perhaps the most influential interpretation of the Hindu scriptures, systematized by Sankara. It is non-dualistic because it asserts that there is only one Reality and because there is no dualism between the atman and Brahman.

ananda: bliss.

ashram: an abode or residence, commonly of a saint, sadhu, ascetic, or guru who is usually engaged in some form of religious instruction.

atman : the Self or soul, the eternal aspect of a living being. In Sankara’s system the Self is identified with Brahman, the one Reality, and so there is truly only one Self. Other Hindu theologians differ from Sankara and, in varying ways, postulate a plurality of souls.

avatar: Sanskrit word for the descent or incarnation of a god upon earth. bhajan: a song of devotional love, sung to the accompaniment of musical instruments and chanted in temples or public gatherings.

bhakti: Sanskrit word for “love’’ or “devotion,’’ often used for human devotion to God.

Brahman : the supreme Reality, conceived of as one and undifferentiated, static and dynamic, yet above all definitions; the ultimate principle underlying the world, ultimate reality.

darshan : literally “sight.’’ One speaks of having darshan of a saint, sage, or a deity, which means being in his or her presence and receiving a blessing by the mere fact. It is of crucial importance to the disciples in an ashram that the guru, in darshan, look directly at the devotee, for his glance, no matter how impersonal and disinterested, correctly forms an important psychic and spiritual link to the master, and through him, to the Absolute.

dharm a: right, morality, duty, truth, religion.

dhoti: loincloth worn by a male Hindu.

dhyana: reflection, meditation.

Kalki : the final avatar of the god Vishnu. The Kalki Purana speaks of him as one whose body is blue, who with sword in hand will ride a white horse swift as the wind, to destroy the race of the Kali yuga, to inaugurate true religion again.

Kali: consort of Shiva. She is his female counterpart, a goddess, and symbolizes the projected energy of the Divine Being.

karma : the sum total of a Hindu’s actions in one lifetime, which determines his fate in the next. Release from karma, whether good or bad, is obtained by “knowledge’’ and abstinence.

GLOSSARY 401

Kundalini : The Supreme Power, otherwise Kundalini-Shakti, in the human body. Kundalini is aroused by the practice of tantric yoga. Kundalini is also called the “Serpent Power.’’

kurta: a loose-fitting, collarless shirt.

leela : literally “play,’’ but in the religious and mystical sense, the divine sport, the movements and activities of the Supreme Being, which are not subject to the laws of nature or man. The god Krishna, divine incarnation, playing as a child, is the example of leela.

lingam: a phallic symbol of the Hindu god Shiva.

mandala : a symbolic diagram, usually surrounded by a circle, representing a pattern of psychic energy. Incantations are made while inscribing the mandala, and spiritual forces are believed to descent or appear.

mantra : a verse, word (Om, Srim, Aum, etc.) or incantation, used to assist in meditation, or to acquire supernatural powers. Each deity is represented by its own mantra; it is only by the correct enunciation of the correct mantra that the deity will descend to enter the body of its image, or will respond to a devotee.

maya : a key philosophical, mystical, and practical concept that dominates much of Indian thought. Maya is “God’s creative energy,’’ energy that may be described for convenience as “the creative illusion of the Brahman.’’ But maya is also cosmic illusion, becoming magic, art, phenomenal existence. Maya is thus not illusion in the sense of unreality but cosmic play, the divine leela or sport.

moksha: liberation, release_usually conceived, in Indian religion, as liberation from samsara.

nirvana : a word for liberation in Indian religion and in Buddhism in particular. Literally, it means “the going out,’’ as of a flame_the point being that it is the flame of desire or craving which causes rebirth, and therefore the extinction of craving will bring about liberation from samsara.

Om: the chief of all mantras, the universal sound (see mantra).

puja : worship of gods, usually ceremonial worship, either the daily offerings of flowers, water, and incense to images, or more complex rites in a temple or on an anniversary.

rishi: a sage. Any wise or holy man (hence Maharishi_great rishi).

sadhana: fulfillment. A course of spiritual teaching leading to a realization of life. A method of training the faculties to realize their potential.

sadhu : a Hindu ascetic. The sadhu eschews caste, social position, rank, and authority in order, by gradual stages of purification, to withdraw toward the ultimate reality.

samadhi: concentration of thought, intense contemplation.

samsara : the passing of the soul through a series of earthly lives. This chain, which invokes so much suffering, is the result of karma, the accumulated debts arising from ignorance, sin, and bad acts and actions.

sanyasan : one who has retired from active life to devote himself to spiritual concerns. This possibility is controlled in Hinduism by the doctrine of four stages of life_that of being a student, that of the householder (i.e., family man), that of one who withdraws from the householder’s duties, and finally that of the homeless wanderer or religious mendicant.

Shakti : the eternal and Supreme Power, variously described as manifest energy, the substance of everything, the all-pervading. Today, Shakti has been connected to, is identical with, the power of the gods Shiva, Vishnu, or Brahma, the great Hindu triad. From the most ancient scriptural time Shakti, under a variety of names, is intimately linked to Shiva, the Lord of Sleep. Shiva is helpless without the fecundating divine energy, Shakti.

siddhi : literally “perfection,’’ siddhi is an occult power gained through the mastery of the higher stages of yoga. The siddha, the person who has the power of siddhi, possesses magical powers according to classical yoga. The yogi is not only able to control his bodily functions (even the nonvoluntary ones, like pulse, digestion, and breath), but also can read minds, engage in astral travel, walk on water, bilocate, predict the future, make objects move without touching them, and so on. These immense powers are not used by the more responsible class of yogis, who state that siddhis are distractions, not aids, in the upward ascent of the self to the Self.

Shiva (or Siva): One of the two great gods of devotional Hinduism (see Vishnu). Shiva is often portrayed as rather terrible, and symbolizes the destructive as well as the creative powers of God. As well as being an object of devotion, Shiva is associated with austerity and contemplation.

swami: a member of a Hindu religious order and general title for a holy man. tapas: the austerity of an ascetic holy man.

Upanishads: (see Veda)

Veda : literally “knowledge,’’ i.e., sacred knowledge: a word used for the early scriptures of Hinduism, consisting in the first instance of collections of hymns, the Vedas, to which were added accounts of the rituals, etc., to which in turn were added expositions of the inner meaning of religious acts, the Upanishads.

Vendanta: the systematic exposition of the Veda.

Vishnu : one of the two great gods of devotional Hinduism (see Shiva). Though an unimportant figure in Vedic religion, Vishnu acquired, with Shiva, a dominant position in the period following that of the early Upanishads. Associated with Vishnu is the conception of “avatara,’’ Vishnu appearing on earth in various animal and human forms, the most famous being Krishna.

yajna : the Vedic ritual of sacrifice. Vedic religion was mainly one of sacrifices, carefully observed down to the most minute gesture and intonation of phrase. The purpose of the sacrifices was in part the increase of cattle and food and a prosperous life for the people, as well as propitiation of the gods.

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End Run Publishing

“To provide an end run around the publishing monopolies”

The publishing giants keep producing books that fit within certain narrowly prescribed politically correct & secularist views, thus keeping from publication books that challenge their views, regardless of how well written. Free speech is thus effectively defeated at the editorial & marketing gateways of these 70-story monoliths. Today’s high-tech revolution—digital short run printing, powerful computers, & the Internet—may eventually level the playing field (How many publishing giants started as humble two room bookbinders in Brooklyn at the turn of the century?). Stay tuned for more titles.

Tal Brooke has written numerous books on diverse subjects. His most popular book in the West, When The World Will Be As One, was a 100,000-copy bestseller marketed to a very limited audience. It is now back in an updated edition and entitled One World. He has written seven other books, including Riders of The Cosmic Circuit, which came out in Europe. Keep your eyes out for these and other titles.

Tal Brooke, President of SCP, is on the Web at the SCP Web Site: www.scp-inc.org

Check out the in-depth Journals and Newsletters that SCP (Spiritual Counterfeits Project) has published over the years. Or phone the SCP offices at: 510-540-0300

One World, The Millennial Edition

by Tal Brooke

The 100,000 copy bestseller is back more powerful than ever with 40% new material.

We are in a time of worldwide transformation, and unless a miracle intervenes, we could experience a quantum leap more radical than when the Renaissance appeared, driving the Dark Ages out of history.

A New World Order could arrive almost overnight and be unlike anything the world has ever seen, affecting every life on the planet. Yet it may not be the utopian future of universal brotherhood we are all

being primed to expect by today’s power players

and experts.

ONE WORLD uncovers the deep and often

hidden forces behind the sweeping changes taking

place right now. It suggests that certain critical

turns in the road of history have remained

unknown by the public—intentionally. In today’s

monopolized information gateway there are,

indeed, patterns being kept from public view for

the simple reason that this radical transition

requires a docile and trusting public—a public

that is willing to accept the popular reasons

America and other nations have been pushed

into a national debt equal to their net worth;

why the family continues to disintegrate; why

male and female roles blur; and why

Christianity and traditional values disappear

to be replaced by another system. The financial, mili

tary, political, and spiritual arms of this powerful agenda have an interlocking purpose that gives the plan almost irresistible power.

Yet it is also true that the growing Leviathan of world government cannot break through as long as America and the free world stand in its way, mindful of their former prowess and virtue. America and the Western world is fighting for its soul. Be assured that it will take your breath away when you suddenly recognize the pattern laid out in this book.

One World: ISBN: 1-930045-07-7

The Mystery of Death, The Millennial Edition by Tal Brooke

The mystery of death—which to most is the greatest mystery of the ages—has now been solved allegedly through certain "scientific breakthroughs" revealed in Life After Life, the 1970s bestseller. In it and subsequent books, Near death experiences are described by those who have "come back" in images as wild and baffling as anything in the movies.

Predictably, as powerful digital special effects have rapidly advanced, movies such as the academy award winning film The Sixth Sense and What Dreams May Come have been able to convincingly portray the latest paradigms of the afterlife. These and other films show digitally enhanced scenes of the deathplane, beings-of-light, disembodied spirits, souls in an intermediate plane awaiting rebirth, astral planes, psychic contacts to and from the other side, non-human entities, astral travel, mediums, channeling, earthbound spirits, as well as a host of other things—all previously described in an array of bestselling books and now a cornerstone of New Age thought. Those with the most celebrated near death experiences have gone on to become media superstars, selling millions of books while appearing on primetime television.

But is this new paradigm of the afterlife what really happens at death? Or are such experiences—and that’s the key—a spiritual cocktail for a modern age that has been adrift and perplexed?Is it a symptom of a culture that has lost its spiritual roots and is desperate to embrace what turns out to be one of the oldest occult terrain in history?

The Mystery of Death contends that there are realities that need to be considered in order to get the full picture. At stake is what happens to the human soul whose worth is beyond measure.

The Mystery of Death: ISBN: 1-930045-05-0