chapter 42
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CHAPTER: 28
KASHI, REBORN AND REDISCOVERED
“Please do not go into the water. Let us bathe by dipping our buckets.”
I was addressing the young Ranchi students who were accompanying me on an eight-mile hike to a neighboring hill. The pond before us was inviting, but a distaste for it had arisen in my mind. The group around me followed my example of dipping buckets, but a few lads yielded to the temptation of the cool waters. No sooner had they dived than large water snakes wiggled around them. The boys came out of the pond with comical alacrity.
We enjoyed a picnic lunch after we reached our destination. I sat under a tree, surrounded by a group of students. Finding me in an inspirational mood, they plied me with questions.
“Please tell me, sir,” one youth inquired, “if I shall always stay with you in the path of renunciation.”
“Ah, no,” I replied, “you will be forcibly taken away to your home, and later you will marry.”
Incredulous, he made a vehement protest. “Only if I am dead can I be carried home.” But in a few months, his parents arrived to take him away, in spite of his tearful resistance; some years later, he did marry.
After answering many questions, I was addressed by a lad named Kashi. He was about twelve years old, a brilliant student, and beloved by all.
“Sir,” he said, “what will be my fate?”
“You shall soon be dead.” The reply came from my lips with an irresistible force.
This unexpected disclosure shocked and grieved me as well as everyone present. Silently rebuking myself as an ENFANT TERRIBLE, I refused to answer further questions.
On our return to the school, Kashi came to my room.
“If I die, will you find me when I am reborn, and bring me again to the spiritual path?” He sobbed.
I felt constrained to refuse this difficult occult responsibility. But for weeks afterward, Kashi pressed me doggedly. Seeing him unnerved to the breaking point, I finally consoled him.
“Yes,” I promised. “If the Heavenly Father lends His aid, I will try to find you.”
[Illustration: Kashi, lost and rediscovered—see kashi.jpg]
During the summer vacation, I started on a short trip. Regretting that I could not take Kashi with me, I called him to my room before leaving, and carefully instructed him to remain, against all persuasion, in the spiritual vibrations of the school. Somehow I felt that if he did not go home, he might avoid the impending calamity.
No sooner had I left than Kashi’s father arrived in Ranchi. For fifteen days he tried to break the will of his son, explaining that if Kashi would go to Calcutta for only four days to see his mother, he could then return. Kashi persistently refused. The father finally said he would take the boy away with the help of the police. The threat disturbed Kashi, who was unwilling to be the cause of any unfavorable publicity to the school. He saw no choice but to go.
I returned to Ranchi a few days later. When I heard how Kashi had been removed, I entrained at once for Calcutta. There I engaged a horse cab. Very strangely, as the vehicle passed beyond the Howrah bridge over the Ganges, I beheld Kashi’s father and other relatives in mourning clothes. Shouting to my driver to stop, I rushed out and glared at the unfortunate father.
“Mr. Murderer,” I cried somewhat unreasonably, “you have killed my boy!”
The father had already realized the wrong he had done in forcibly bringing Kashi to Calcutta. During the few days the boy had been there, he had eaten contaminated food, contracted cholera, and passed on.
My love for Kashi, and the pledge to find him after death, night and day haunted me. No matter where I went, his face loomed up before me. I began a memorable search for him, even as long ago I had searched for my lost mother.
I felt that inasmuch as God had given me the faculty of reason, I must utilize it and tax my powers to the utmost in order to discover the subtle laws by which I could know the boy’s astral whereabouts. He was a soul vibrating with unfulfilled desires, I realized-a mass of light floating somewhere amidst millions of luminous souls in the astral regions. How was I to tune in with him, among so many vibrating lights of other souls?
Using a secret yoga technique, I broadcasted my love to Kashi’s soul through the microphone of the spiritual eye, the inner point between the eyebrows. With the antenna of upraised hands and fingers, I often turned myself round and round, trying to locate the direction in which he had been reborn as an embryo. I hoped to receive response from him in the concentration-tuned radio of my heart. {FN28-1}
I intuitively felt that Kashi would soon return to the earth, and that if I kept unceasingly broadcasting my call to him, his soul would reply. I knew that the slightest impulse sent by Kashi would be felt in my fingers, hands, arms, spine, and nerves.
With undiminished zeal, I practiced the yoga method steadily for about six months after Kashi’s death. Walking with a few friends one morning in the crowded Bowbazar section of Calcutta, I lifted my hands in the usual manner. For the first time, there was response. I thrilled to detect electrical impulses trickling down my fingers and palms. These currents translated themselves into one overpowering thought from a deep recess of my consciousness: “I am Kashi; I am Kashi; come to me!”
The thought became almost audible as I concentrated on my heart radio. In the characteristic, slightly hoarse whisper of Kashi, {FN28-2} I heard his summons again and again. I seized the arm of one of my companions, Prokash Das, {FN28-3} and smiled at him joyfully.
“It looks as though I have located Kashi!”
I began to turn round and round, to the undisguised amusement of my friends and the passing throng. The electrical impulses tingled through my fingers only when I faced toward a near-by path, aptly named “Serpentine Lane.” The astral currents disappeared when I turned in other directions.
“Ah,” I exclaimed, “Kashi’s soul must be living in the womb of some mother whose home is in this lane.”
My companions and I approached closer to Serpentine Lane; the vibrations in my upraised hands grew stronger, more pronounced. As if by a magnet, I was pulled toward the right side of the road. Reaching the entrance of a certain house, I was astounded to find myself transfixed. I knocked at the door in a state of intense excitement, holding my very breath. I felt that the successful end had come for my long, arduous, and certainly unusual quest!
The door was opened by a servant, who told me her master was at home. He descended the stairway from the second floor and smiled at me inquiringly. I hardly knew how to frame my question, at once pertinent and impertinent.
“Please tell me, sir, if you and your wife have been expecting a child for about six months?”
“Yes, it is so.” Seeing that I was a swami, a renunciate attired in the traditional orange cloth, he added politely, “Pray inform me how you know my affairs.”
When he heard about Kashi and the promise I had given, the astonished man believed my story.
“A male child of fair complexion will be born to you,” I told him. “He will have a broad face, with a cowlick atop his forehead. His disposition will be notably spiritual.” I felt certain that the coming child would bear these resemblances to Kashi.
Later I visited the child, whose parents had given him his old name of Kashi. Even in infancy he was strikingly similar in appearance to my dear Ranchi student. The child showed me an instantaneous affection; the attraction of the past awoke with redoubled intensity.
Years later the teen-age boy wrote me, during my stay in America. He explained his deep longing to follow the path of a renunciate. I directed him to a Himalayan master who, to this day, guides the reborn Kashi.
{FN28-1} The will, projected from the point between the eyebrows, is known by yogis as the broadcasting apparatus of thought. When the feeling is calmly concentrated on the heart, it acts as a mental radio, and can receive the messages of others from far or near. In telepathy the fine vibrations of thoughts in one person’s mind are transmitted through the subtle vibrations of astral ether and then through the grosser earthly ether, creating electrical waves which, in turn, translate themselves into thought waves in the mind of the other person.
{FN28-2} Every soul in its pure state is omniscient. Kashi’s soul remembered all the characteristics of Kashi, the boy, and therefore mimicked his hoarse voice in order to stir my recognition.
{FN28-3} Prokash Das is the present director of our Yogoda Math (hermitage) at Dakshineswar in Bengal.
CHAPTER: 29
RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND I COMPARE SCHOOLS
“Rabindranath Tagore taught us to sing, as a natural form of self-expression, like the birds.”
Bhola Nath, a bright fourteen-year-old lad at my Ranchi school, gave me this explanation after I had complimented him one morning on his melodious outbursts. With or without provocation, the boy poured forth a tuneful stream. He had previously attended the famous Tagore school of “Santiniketan” (Haven of Peace) at Bolpur.
“The songs of Rabindranath have been on my lips since early youth,” I told my companion. “All Bengal, even the unlettered peasants, delights in his lofty verse.”
Bhola and I sang together a few refrains from Tagore, who has set to music thousands of Indian poems, some original and others of hoary antiquity.
“I met Rabindranath soon after he had received the Nobel Prize for literature,” I remarked after our vocalizing. “I was drawn to visit him because I admired his undiplomatic courage in disposing of his literary critics.” I chuckled.
Bhola curiously inquired the story.
“The scholars severely flayed Tagore for introducing a new style into Bengali poetry,” I began. “He mixed colloquial and classical expressions, ignoring all the prescribed limitations dear to the pundits’ hearts. His songs embody deep philosophic truth in emotionally appealing terms, with little regard for the accepted literary forms.
“One influential critic slightingly referred to Rabindranath as a ‘pigeon-poet who sold his cooings in print for a rupee.’ But Tagore’s revenge was at hand; the whole Western world paid homage at his feet soon after he had translated into English his GITANJALI (‘Song Offerings’). A trainload of pundits, including his one-time critics, went to Santiniketan to offer their congratulations.
“Rabindranath received his guests only after an intentionally long delay, and then heard their praise in stoic silence. Finally he turned against them their own habitual weapons of criticism.
“‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘the fragrant honors you here bestow are incongruously mingled with the putrid odors of your past contempt. Is there possibly any connection between my award of the Nobel Prize, and your suddenly acute powers of appreciation? I am still the same poet who displeased you when I first offered my humble flowers at the shrine of Bengal.’
“The newspapers published an account of the bold chastisement given by Tagore. I admired the outspoken words of a man unhypnotized by flattery,” I went on. “I was introduced to Rabindranath in Calcutta by his secretary, Mr. C. F. Andrews, {FN29-1} who was simply attired in a Bengali DHOTI. He referred lovingly to Tagore as his GURUDEVA.
“Rabindranath received me graciously. He emanated a soothing aura of charm, culture, and courtliness. Replying to my question about his literary background, Tagore told me that one ancient source of his inspiration, besides our religious epics, had been the classical poet, Bidyapati.”
Inspired by these memories, I began to sing Tagore’s version of an old Bengali song, “Light the Lamp of Thy Love.” Bhola and I chanted joyously as we strolled over the VIDYALAYA grounds.
About two years after founding the Ranchi school, I received an invitation from Rabindranath to visit him at Santiniketan in order to discuss our educational ideals. I went gladly. The poet was seated in his study when I entered; I thought then, as at our first meeting, that he was as striking a model of superb manhood as any painter could desire. His beautifully chiseled face, nobly patrician, was framed in long hair and flowing beard. Large, melting eyes; an angelic smile; and a voice of flutelike quality which was literally enchanting. Stalwart, tall, and grave, he combined an almost womanly tenderness with the delightful spontaneity of a child. No idealized conception of a poet could find more suitable embodiment than in this gentle singer.
[Illustration: Rabindranath Tagore, inspired poet of Bengal, and Nobel Prizeman in literature—see tagore.jpg]
Tagore and I were soon deep in a comparative study of our schools, both founded along unorthodox lines. We discovered many identical features-outdoor instruction, simplicity, ample scope for the child’s creative spirit. Rabindranath, however, laid considerable stress on the study of literature and poetry, and the self-expression through music and song which I had already noted in the case of Bhola. The Santiniketan children observed periods of silence, but were given no special yoga training.
The poet listened with flattering attention to my description of the energizing “Yogoda” exercises and the yoga concentration techniques which are taught to all students at Ranchi.
Tagore told me of his own early educational struggles. “I fled from school after the fifth grade,” he said, laughing. I could readily understand how his innate poetic delicacy had been affronted by the dreary, disciplinary atmosphere of a schoolroom.
“That is why I opened Santiniketan under the shady trees and the glories of the sky.” He motioned eloquently to a little group studying in the beautiful garden. “A child is in his natural setting amidst the flowers and songbirds. Only thus may he fully express the hidden wealth of his individual endowment. True education can never be crammed and pumped from without; rather it must aid in bringing spontaneously to the surface the infinite hoards of wisdom within.” {FN29-2}
I agreed. “The idealistic and hero-worshiping instincts of the young are starved on an exclusive diet of statistics and chronological eras.”
The poet spoke lovingly of his father, Devendranath, who had inspired the Santiniketan beginnings.
“Father presented me with this fertile land, where he had already built a guest house and temple,” Rabindranath told me. “I started my educational experiment here in 1901, with only ten boys. The eight thousand pounds which came with the Nobel Prize all went for the upkeep of the school.”
The elder Tagore, Devendranath, known far and wide as “Maharishi,” was a very remarkable man, as one may discover from his AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Two years of his manhood were spent in meditation in the Himalayas. In turn, his father, Dwarkanath Tagore, had been celebrated throughout Bengal for his munificent public benefactions. From this illustrious tree has sprung a family of geniuses. Not Rabindranath alone; all his relatives have distinguished themselves in creative expression. His brothers, Gogonendra and Abanindra, are among the foremost artists {FN29-3} of India; another brother, Dwijendra, is a deep-seeing philosopher, at whose gentle call the birds and woodland creatures respond.
Rabindranath invited me to stay overnight in the guest house. It was indeed a charming spectacle, in the evening, to see the poet seated with a group in the patio. Time unfolded backward: the scene before me was like that of an ancient hermitage-the joyous singer encircled by his devotees, all aureoled in divine love. Tagore knitted each tie with the cords of harmony. Never assertive, he drew and captured the heart by an irresistible magnetism. Rare blossom of poesy blooming in the garden of the Lord, attracting others by a natural fragrance!
In his melodious voice, Rabindranath read to us a few of his exquisite poems, newly created. Most of his songs and plays, written for the delectation of his students, have been composed at Santiniketan. The beauty of his lines, to me, lies in his art of referring to God in nearly every stanza, yet seldom mentioning the sacred Name. “Drunk with the bliss of singing,” he wrote, “I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.”
The following day, after lunch, I bade the poet a reluctant farewell. I rejoice that his little school has now grown to an international university, “Viswa-Bharati,” where scholars of all lands have found an ideal setting.
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action; Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!” {FN29-4} RABINDRANATH TAGORE
{FN29-1} The English writer and publicist, close friend of Mahatma Gandhi. Mr. Andrews is honored in India for his many services to his adopted land.
{FN29-2} “The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindus say, ‘traveling the path of existence through thousands of births’ . . . there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge; no wonder that she is able to recollect . . . what formerly she knew. . . . For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all.”-EMERSON.
{FN29-3} Rabindranath, too, in his sixties, engaged in a serious study of painting. Exhibitions of his “futuristic” work were given some years ago in European capitals and New York.
{FN29-4} GITANJALI (New York: Macmillan Co.). A thoughtful study of the poet will be found in THE PHILOSOPHY OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE, by the celebrated scholar, Sir S. Radhakrishnan (Macmillan, 1918). Another expository volume is B. K. Roy’s RABINDRANATH TAGORE: THE MAN AND HIS POETRY (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1915). BUDDHA AND THE GOSPEL OF BUDDHISM (New York: Putnam’s, 1916), by the eminent Oriental art authority, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, contains a number of illustrations in color by the poet’s brother, Abanindra Nath Tagore.
CHAPTER: 30
THE LAW OF MIRACLES
The great novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a delightful story, THE THREE HERMITS. His friend Nicholas Roerich {FN30-1} has summarized the tale, as follows:
“On an island there lived three old hermits. They were so simple that the only prayer they used was: ‘We are three; Thou art Three-have mercy on us!’ Great miracles were manifested during this naive prayer.
“The local bishop {FN30-2} came to hear about the three hermits and their inadmissible prayer, and decided to visit them in order to teach them the canonical invocations. He arrived on the island, told the hermits that their heavenly petition was undignified, and taught them many of the customary prayers. The bishop then left on a boat. He saw, following the ship, a radiant light. As it approached, he discerned the three hermits, who were holding hands and running upon the waves in an effort to overtake the vessel.
“‘We have forgotten the prayers you taught us,’ they cried as they reached the bishop, ‘and have hastened to ask you to repeat them.’ The awed bishop shook his head.
“‘Dear ones,’ he replied humbly, ‘continue to live with your old prayer!’”
How did the three saints walk on the water?
How did Christ resurrect his crucified body?
How did Lahiri Mahasaya and Sri Yukteswar perform their miracles?
Modern science has, as yet, no answer; though with the advent of the atomic bomb and the wonders of radar, the scope of the world-mind has been abruptly enlarged. The word “impossible” is becoming less prominent in the scientific vocabulary.
[Illustration: A GURU AND DISCIPLE, Forest hermitages were the ancient seats of learning, secular and divine, for the youth of India. Here a venerable guru, leaning on a wooden meditation elbow-prop, is initiating his disciple into the august mysteries of Spirit.—see guru.jpg]
The ancient Vedic scriptures declare that the physical world operates under one fundamental law of MAYA, the principle of relativity and duality. God, the Sole Life, is an Absolute Unity; He cannot appear as the separate and diverse manifestations of a creation except under a false or unreal veil. That cosmic illusion is MAYA. Every great scientific discovery of modern times has served as a confirmation of this simple pronouncement of the rishis.
Newton’s Law of Motion is a law of MAYA: “To every action there is always an equal and contrary reaction; the mutual actions of any two bodies are always equal and oppositely directed.” Action and reaction are thus exactly equal. “To have a single force is impossible. There must be, and always is, a pair of forces equal and opposite.”
Fundamental natural activities all betray their mayic origin. Electricity, for example, is a phenomenon of repulsion and attraction; its electrons and protons are electrical opposites. Another example: the atom or final particle of matter is, like the earth itself, a magnet with positive and negative poles. The entire phenomenal world is under the inexorable sway of polarity; no law of physics, chemistry, or any other science is ever found free from inherent opposite or contrasted principles.
Physical science, then, cannot formulate laws outside of MAYA, the very texture and structure of creation. Nature herself is MAYA; natural science must perforce deal with her ineluctable quiddity. In her own domain, she is eternal and inexhaustible; future scientists can do no more than probe one aspect after another of her varied infinitude. Science thus remains in a perpetual flux, unable to reach finality; fit indeed to formulate the laws of an already existing and functioning cosmos, but powerless to detect the Law Framer and Sole Operator. The majestic manifestations of gravitation and electricity have become known, but what gravitation and electricity are, no mortal knoweth. {FN30-3}
To surmount MAYA was the task assigned to the human race by the millennial prophets. To rise above the duality of creation and perceive the unity of the Creator was conceived of as man’s highest goal. Those who cling to the cosmic illusion must accept its essential law of polarity: flow and ebb, rise and fall, day and night, pleasure and pain, good and evil, birth and death. This cyclic pattern assumes a certain anguishing monotony, after man has gone through a few thousand human births; he begins to cast a hopeful eye beyond the compulsions of MAYA.
To tear the veil of MAYA is to pierce the secret of creation. The yogi who thus denudes the universe is the only true monotheist. All others are worshiping heathen images. So long as man remains subject to the dualistic delusions of nature, the Janus-faced MAYA is his goddess; he cannot know the one true God.
The world illusion, MAYA, is individually called AVIDYA, literally, “not-knowledge,” ignorance, delusion. MAYA or AVIDYA can never be destroyed through intellectual conviction or analysis, but solely through attaining the interior state of NIRBIKALPA SAMADHI. The Old Testament prophets, and seers of all lands and ages, spoke from that state of consciousness. Ezekiel says (43:1-2): “Afterwards he brought me to the gate, even the gate that looketh toward the east: and, behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east: and his voice was like a noise of many waters: and the earth shined with his glory.” Through the divine eye in the forehead (east), the yogi sails his consciousness into omnipresence, hearing the Word or Aum, divine sound of many waters or vibrations which is the sole reality of creation.
Among the trillion mysteries of the cosmos, the most phenomenal is light. Unlike sound-waves, whose transmission requires air or other material media, light-waves pass freely through the vacuum of interstellar space. Even the hypothetical ether, held as the interplanetary medium of light in the undulatory theory, can be discarded on the Einsteinian grounds that the geometrical properties of space render the theory of ether unnecessary. Under either hypothesis, light remains the most subtle, the freest from material dependence, of any natural manifestation.
In the gigantic conceptions of Einstein, the velocity of light-186,000 miles per second-dominates the whole Theory of Relativity. He proves mathematically that the velocity of light is, so far as man’s finite mind is concerned, the only CONSTANT in a universe of unstayable flux. On the sole absolute of light-velocity depend all human standards of time and space. Not abstractly eternal as hitherto considered, time and space are relative and finite factors, deriving their measurement validity only in reference to the yardstick of light-velocity. In joining space as a dimensional relativity, time has surrendered age-old claims to a changeless value. Time is now stripped to its rightful nature-a simple essence of ambiguity! With a few equational strokes of his pen, Einstein has banished from the cosmos every fixed reality except that of light.
In a later development, his Unified Field Theory, the great physicist embodies in one mathematical formula the laws of gravitation and of electromagnetism. Reducing the cosmical structure to variations on a single law, Einstein {FN30-4} reaches across the ages to the rishis who proclaimed a sole texture of creation-that of a protean MAYA.
On the epochal Theory of Relativity have arisen the mathematical possibilities of exploring the ultimate atom. Great scientists are now boldly asserting not only that the atom is energy rather than matter, but that atomic energy is essentially mind-stuff.
“The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant advances,” Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington writes in THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD. “In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. . . . To put the conclusion crudely, the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. . . . The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant except in so far as the mind-stuff has itself spun these imaginings. . . . The external world has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.”
With the recent discovery of the electron microscope came definite proof of the light-essence of atoms and of the inescapable duality of nature. THE NEW YORK TIMES gave the following report of a 1937 demonstration of the electron microscope before a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
“The crystalline structure of tungsten, hitherto known only indirectly by means of X-rays, stood outlined boldly on a fluorescent screen, showing nine atoms in their correct positions in the space lattice, a cube, with one atom in each corner and one in the center. The atoms in the crystal lattice of the tungsten appeared on the fluorescent screen as points of light, arranged in geometric pattern. Against this crystal cube of light the bombarding molecules of air could be observed as dancing points of light, similar to points of sunlight shimmering on moving waters. . . .
“The principle of the electron microscope was first discovered in 1927 by Drs. Clinton J. Davisson and Lester H. Germer of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, New York City, who found that the electron had a dual personality partaking of the characteristic of both a particle and a wave. The wave quality gave the electron the characteristic of light, and a search was begun to devise means for ‘focusing’ electrons in a manner similar to the focusing of light by means of a lens.
“For his discovery of the Jekyll-Hyde quality of the electron, which corroborated the prediction made in 1924 by De Broglie, French Nobel Prize winning physicist, and showed that the entire realm of physical nature had a dual personality, Dr. Davisson also received the Nobel Prize in physics.”
“The stream of knowledge,” Sir James Jeans writes in THE MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE, “is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” Twentieth-century science is thus sounding like a page from the hoary VEDAS.
From science, then, if it must be so, let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material universe; its warp and woof is MAYA, illusion. Its mirages of reality all break down under analysis. As one by one the reassuring props of a physical cosmos crash beneath him, man dimly perceives his idolatrous reliance, his past transgression of the divine command: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”
In his famous equation outlining the equivalence of mass and energy, Einstein proved that the energy in any particle of matter is equal to its mass or weight multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The release of the atomic energies is brought about through the annihilation of the material particles. The “death” of matter has been the “birth” of an Atomic Age.
Light-velocity is a mathematical standard or constant not because there is an absolute value in 186,000 miles a second, but because no material body, whose mass increases with its velocity, can ever attain the velocity of light. Stated another way: only a material body whose mass is infinite could equal the velocity of light.
THIS CONCEPTION BRINGS US TO THE LAW OF MIRACLES.
The masters who are able to materialize and dematerialize their bodies or any other object, and to move with the velocity of light, and to utilize the creative light-rays in bringing into instant visibility any physical manifestation, have fulfilled the necessary Einsteinian condition: their mass is infinite.
The consciousness of a perfected yogi is effortlessly identified, not with a narrow body, but with the universal structure. Gravitation, whether the “force” of Newton or the Einsteinian “manifestation of inertia,” is powerless to COMPEL a master to exhibit the property of “weight” which is the distinguishing gravitational condition of all material objects. He who knows himself as the omnipresent Spirit is subject no longer to the rigidities of a body in time and space. Their imprisoning “rings-pass-not” have yielded to the solvent: “I am He.”
“Fiat lux! And there was light.” God’s first command to His ordered creation (GENESIS 1:3) brought into being the only atomic reality: light. On the beams of this immaterial medium occur all divine manifestations. Devotees of every age testify to the appearance of God as flame and light. “The King of kings, and Lord of lords; who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto.” {FN30-5}
A yogi who through perfect meditation has merged his consciousness with the Creator perceives the cosmical essence as light; to him there is no difference between the light rays composing water and the light rays composing land. Free from matter-consciousness, free from the three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time, a master transfers his body of light with equal ease over the light rays of earth, water, fire, or air. Long concentration on the liberating spiritual eye has enabled the yogi to destroy all delusions concerning matter and its gravitational weight; thenceforth he sees the universe as an essentially undifferentiated mass of light.
“Optical images,” Dr. L. T. Troland of Harvard tells us, “are built up on the same principle as the ordinary ‘half-tone’ engravings; that is, they are made up of minute dottings or stripplings far too small to be detected by the eye. . . . The sensitiveness of the retina is so great that a visual sensation can be produced by relatively few Quanta of the right kind of light.” Through a master’s divine knowledge of light phenomena, he can instantly project into perceptible manifestation the ubiquitous light atoms. The actual form of the projection-whether it be a tree, a medicine, a human body-is in conformance with a yogi’s powers of will and of visualization.
In man’s dream-consciousness, where he has loosened in sleep his clutch on the egoistic limitations that daily hem him round, the omnipotence of his mind has a nightly demonstration. Lo! there in the dream stand the long-dead friends, the remotest continents, the resurrected scenes of his childhood. With that free and unconditioned consciousness, known to all men in the phenomena of dreams, the God-tuned master has forged a never-severed link. Innocent of all personal motives, and employing the creative will bestowed on him by the Creator, a yogi rearranges the light atoms of the universe to satisfy any sincere prayer of a devotee. For this purpose were man and creation made: that he should rise up as master of MAYA, knowing his dominion over the cosmos.
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” {FN30-6}
In 1915, shortly after I had entered the Swami Order, I witnessed a vision of violent contrasts. In it the relativity of human consciousness was vividly established; I clearly perceived the unity of the Eternal Light behind the painful dualities of MAYA. The vision descended on me as I sat one morning in my little attic room in Father’s Gurpar Road home. For months World War I had been raging in Europe; I reflected sadly on the vast toll of death.
As I closed my eyes in meditation, my consciousness was suddenly transferred to the body of a captain in command of a battleship. The thunder of guns split the air as shots were exchanged between shore batteries and the ship’s cannons. A huge shell hit the powder magazine and tore my ship asunder. I jumped into the water, together with the few sailors who had survived the explosion.
Heart pounding, I reached the shore safely. But alas! a stray bullet ended its furious flight in my chest. I fell groaning to the ground. My whole body was paralyzed, yet I was aware of possessing it as one is conscious of a leg gone to sleep.
“At last the mysterious footstep of Death has caught up with me,” I thought. With a final sigh, I was about to sink into unconsciousness when lo! I found myself seated in the lotus posture in my Gurpar Road room.
Hysterical tears poured forth as I joyfully stroked and pinched my regained possession-a body free from any bullet hole in the breast. I rocked to and fro, inhaling and exhaling to assure myself that I was alive. Amidst these self-congratulations, again I found my consciousness transferred to the captain’s dead body by the gory shore. Utter confusion of mind came upon me.
“Lord,” I prayed, “am I dead or alive?”
A dazzling play of light filled the whole horizon. A soft rumbling vibration formed itself into words:
“What has life or death to do with Light? In the image of My Light I have made you. The relativities of life and death belong to the cosmic dream. Behold your dreamless being! Awake, my child, awake!”
As steps in man’s awakening, the Lord inspires scientists to discover, at the right time and place, the secrets of His creation. Many modern discoveries help men to apprehend the cosmos as a varied expression of one power-light, guided by divine intelligence. The wonders of the motion picture, of radio, of television, of radar, of the photo-electric cell-the all-seeing “electric eye,” of atomic energies, are all based on the electromagnetic phenomenon of light.
The motion picture art can portray any miracle. From the impressive visual standpoint, no marvel is barred to trick photography. A man’s transparent astral body can be seen rising from his gross physical form, he can walk on the water, resurrect the dead, reverse the natural sequence of developments, and play havoc with time and space. Assembling the light images as he pleases, the photographer achieves optical wonders which a true master produces with actual light rays.
The lifelike images of the motion picture illustrate many truths concerning creation. The Cosmic Director has written His own plays, and assembled the tremendous casts for the pageant of the centuries. From the dark booth of eternity, He pours His creative beam through the films of successive ages, and the pictures are thrown on the screen of space. Just as the motion-picture images appear to be real, but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusive seeming. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture, temporarily true to five sense perceptions as the scenes are cast on the screen of man’s consciousness by the infinite creative beam.
A cinema audience can look up and see that all screen images are appearing through the instrumentality of one imageless beam of light. The colorful universal drama is similarly issuing from the single white light of a Cosmic Source. With inconceivable ingenuity God is staging an entertainment for His human children, making them actors as well as audience in His planetary theater.
One day I entered a motion picture house to view a newsreel of the European battlefields. World War I was still being waged in the West; the newsreel recorded the carnage with such realism that I left the theater with a troubled heart.
“Lord,” I prayed, “why dost Thou permit such suffering?”
To my intense surprise, an instant answer came in the form of a vision of the actual European battlefields. The horror of the struggle, filled with the dead and dying, far surpassed in ferocity any representation of the newsreel.
“Look intently!” A gentle voice spoke to my inner consciousness. “You will see that these scenes now being enacted in France are nothing but a play of chiaroscuro. They are the cosmic motion picture, as real and as unreal as the theater newsreel you have just seen-a play within a play.”
My heart was still not comforted. The divine voice went on: “Creation is light and shadow both, else no picture is possible. The good and evil of MAYA must ever alternate in supremacy. If joy were ceaseless here in this world, would man ever seek another? Without suffering he scarcely cares to recall that he has forsaken his eternal home. Pain is a prod to remembrance. The way of escape is through wisdom! The tragedy of death is unreal; those who shudder at it are like an ignorant actor who dies of fright on the stage when nothing more is fired at him than a blank cartridge. My sons are the children of light; they will not sleep forever in delusion.”
Although I had read scriptural accounts of MAYA, they had not given me the deep insight that came with the personal visions and their accompanying words of consolation. One’s values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture, and that not in it, but beyond it, lies his own reality.
As I finished writing this chapter, I sat on my bed in the lotus posture. My room was dimly lit by two shaded lamps. Lifting my gaze, I noticed that the ceiling was dotted with small mustard-colored lights, scintillating and quivering with a radiumlike luster. Myriads of pencilled rays, like sheets of rain, gathered into a transparent shaft and poured silently upon me.
At once my physical body lost its grossness and became metamorphosed into astral texture. I felt a floating sensation as, barely touching the bed, the weightless body shifted slightly and alternately to left and right. I looked around the room; the furniture and walls were as usual, but the little mass of light had so multiplied that the ceiling was invisible. I was wonder-struck.
“This is the cosmic motion picture mechanism.” A voice spoke as though from within the light. “Shedding its beam on the white screen of your bed sheets, it is producing the picture of your body. Behold, your form is nothing but light!”
I gazed at my arms and moved them back and forth, yet could not feel their weight. An ecstatic joy overwhelmed me. This cosmic stem of light, blossoming as my body, seemed a divine replica of the light beams streaming out of the projection booth in a cinema house and manifesting as pictures on the screen.
For a long time I experienced this motion picture of my body in the dimly lighted theater of my own bedroom. Despite the many visions I have had, none was ever more singular. As my illusion of a solid body was completely dissipated, and my realization deepened that the essence of all objects is light, I looked up to the throbbing stream of lifetrons and spoke entreatingly.
“Divine Light, please withdraw this, my humble bodily picture, into Thyself, even as Elijah was drawn up to heaven by a flame.”
This prayer was evidently startling; the beam disappeared. My body resumed its normal weight and sank on the bed; the swarm of dazzling ceiling lights flickered and vanished. My time to leave this earth had apparently not arrived.
“Besides,” I thought philosophically, “the prophet Elijah might well be displeased at my presumption!”
{FN30-1} This famous Russian artist and philosopher has been living for many years in India near the Himalayas. “From the peaks comes revelation,” he has written. “In caves and upon the summits lived the rishis. Over the snowy peaks of the Himalayas burns a bright glow, brighter than stars and the fantastic flashes of lightning.”
{FN30-2} The story may have a historical basis; an editorial note informs us that the bishop met the three monks while he was sailing from Archangel to the Slovetsky Monastery, at the mouth of the Dvina River.
{FN30-3} Marconi, the great inventor, made the following admission of scientific inadequacy before the finalities: “The inability of science to solve life is absolute. This fact would be truly frightening were it not for faith. The mystery of life is certainly the most persistent problem ever placed before the thought of man.”
{FN30-4} A clue to the direction taken by Einstein’s genius is given by the fact that he is a lifelong disciple of the great philosopher Spinoza, whose best-known work is ETHICS DEMONSTRATED IN GEOMETRICAL ORDER.
{FN30-5} I TIMOTHY 6:15-16.
{FN30-6} GENESIS 1:26.
CHAPTER: 31
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE SACRED MOTHER
“Reverend Mother, I was baptized in infancy by your prophet-husband. He was the guru of my parents and of my own guru Sri Yukteswarji. Will you therefore give me the privilege of hearing a few incidents in your sacred life?”
I was addressing Srimati Kashi Moni, the life-companion of Lahiri Mahasaya. Finding myself in Benares for a short period, I was fulfilling a long-felt desire to visit the venerable lady. She received me graciously at the old Lahiri homestead in the Garudeswar Mohulla section of Benares. Although aged, she was blooming like a lotus, silently emanating a spiritual fragrance. She was of medium build, with a slender neck and fair skin. Large, lustrous eyes softened her motherly face.
“Son, you are welcome here. Come upstairs.”
Kashi Moni led the way to a very small room where, for a time, she had lived with her husband. I felt honored to witness the shrine in which the peerless master had condescended to play the human drama of matrimony. The gentle lady motioned me to a pillow seat by her side.
“It was years before I came to realize the divine stature of my husband,” she began. “One night, in this very room, I had a vivid dream. Glorious angels floated in unimaginable grace above me. So realistic was the sight that I awoke at once; the room was strangely enveloped in dazzling light.
“My husband, in lotus posture, was levitated in the center of the room, surrounded by angels who were worshiping him with the supplicating dignity of palm-folded hands. Astonished beyond measure, I was convinced that I was still dreaming.
“‘Woman,’ Lahiri Mahasaya said, ‘you are not dreaming. Forsake your sleep forever and forever.’ As he slowly descended to the floor, I prostrated myself at his feet.
“‘Master,’ I cried, ‘again and again I bow before you! Will you pardon me for having considered you as my husband? I die with shame to realize that I have remained asleep in ignorance by the side of one who is divinely awakened. From this night, you are no longer my husband, but my guru. Will you accept my insignificant self as your disciple?’ {FN31-1}
“The master touched me gently. ‘Sacred soul, arise. You are accepted.’ He motioned toward the angels. ‘Please bow in turn to each of these holy saints.’
“When I had finished my humble genuflections, the angelic voices sounded together, like a chorus from an ancient scripture.
“‘Consort of the Divine One, thou art blessed. We salute thee.’ They bowed at my feet and lo! their refulgent forms vanished. The room darkened.
“My guru asked me to receive initiation into KRIYA YOGA.
“‘Of course,’ I responded. ‘I am sorry not to have had its blessing earlier in my life.’
“‘The time was not ripe.’ Lahiri Mahasaya smiled consolingly. ‘Much of your karma I have silently helped you to work out. Now you are willing and ready.’
“He touched my forehead. Masses of whirling light appeared; the radiance gradually formed itself into the opal-blue spiritual eye, ringed in gold and centered with a white pentagonal star.
“‘Penetrate your consciousness through the star into the kingdom of the Infinite.’ My guru’s voice had a new note, soft like distant music.
“Vision after vision broke as oceanic surf on the shores of my soul. The panoramic spheres finally melted in a sea of bliss. I lost myself in ever-surging blessedness. When I returned hours later to awareness of this world, the master gave me the technique of KRIYA YOGA.
“From that night on, Lahiri Mahasaya never slept in my room again. Nor, thereafter, did he ever sleep. He remained in the front room downstairs, in the company of his disciples both by day and by night.”
The illustrious lady fell into silence. Realizing the uniqueness of her relationship with the sublime yogi, I finally ventured to ask for further reminiscences.
“Son, you are greedy. Nevertheless you shall have one more story.” She smiled shyly. “I will confess a sin which I committed against my guru-husband. Some months after my initiation, I began to feel forlorn and neglected. One morning Lahiri Mahasaya entered this little room to fetch an article; I quickly followed him. Overcome by violent delusion, I addressed him scathingly.
“‘You spend all your time with the disciples. What about your responsibilities for your wife and children? I regret that you do not interest yourself in providing more money for the family.’
“The master glanced at me for a moment, then lo! he was gone. Awed and frightened, I heard a voice resounding from every part of the room:
“‘It is all nothing, don’t you see? How could a nothing like me produce riches for you?’
“‘Guruji,’ I cried, ‘I implore pardon a million times! My sinful eyes can see you no more; please appear in your sacred form.’
“‘I am here.’ This reply came from above me. I looked up and saw the master materialize in the air, his head touching the ceiling. His eyes were like blinding flames. Beside myself with fear, I lay sobbing at his feet after he had quietly descended to the floor.
“‘Woman,’ he said, ‘seek divine wealth, not the paltry tinsel of earth. After acquiring inward treasure, you will find that outward supply is always forthcoming.’ He added, ‘One of my spiritual sons will make provision for you.’
“My guru’s words naturally came true; a disciple did leave a considerable sum for our family.”
I thanked Kashi Moni for sharing with me her wondrous experiences. {FN31-2} On the following day I returned to her home and enjoyed several hours of philosophical discussion with Tincouri and Ducouri Lahiri. These two saintly sons of India’s great yogi followed closely in his ideal footsteps. Both men were fair, tall, stalwart, and heavily bearded, with soft voices and an old-fashioned charm of manner.
His wife was not the only woman disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya; there were hundreds of others, including my mother. A woman chela once asked the guru for his photograph. He handed her a print, remarking, “If you deem it a protection, then it is so; otherwise it is only a picture.”
A few days later this woman and Lahiri Mahasaya’s daughter-in-law happened to be studying the BHAGAVAD GITA at a table behind which hung the guru’s photograph. An electrical storm broke out with great fury.
“Lahiri Mahasaya, protect us!” The women bowed before the picture. Lightning struck the book which they had been reading, but the two devotees were unhurt.
“I felt as though a sheet of ice had been placed around me to ward off the scorching heat,” the chela explained.
Lahiri Mahasaya performed two miracles in connection with a woman disciple, Abhoya. She and her husband, a Calcutta lawyer, started one day for Benares to visit the guru. Their carriage was delayed by heavy traffic; they reached the Howrah main station only to hear the Benares train whistling for departure.
Abhoya, near the ticket office, stood quietly.
“Lahiri Mahasaya, I beseech thee to stop the train!” she silently prayed. “I cannot suffer the pangs of delay in waiting another day to see thee.”
The wheels of the snorting train continued to move round and round, but there was no onward progress. The engineer and passengers descended to the platform to view the phenomenon. An English railroad guard approached Abhoya and her husband. Contrary to all precedent, he volunteered his services.
“Babu,” he said, “give me the money. I will buy your tickets while you get aboard.”
As soon as the couple was seated and had received the tickets, the train slowly moved forward. In panic, the engineer and passengers clambered again to their places, knowing neither how the train started, nor why it had stopped in the first place.
Arriving at the home of Lahiri Mahasaya in Benares, Abhoya silently prostrated herself before the master, and tried to touch his feet.
“Compose yourself, Abhoya,” he remarked. “How you love to bother me! As if you could not have come here by the next train!”
Abhoya visited Lahiri Mahasaya on another memorable occasion. This time she wanted his intercession, not with a train, but with the stork.
“I pray you to bless me that my ninth child may live,” she said. “Eight babies have been born to me; all died soon after birth.”
The master smiled sympathetically. “Your coming child will live. Please follow my instructions carefully. The baby, a girl, will be born at night. See that the oil lamp is kept burning until dawn. Do not fall asleep and thus allow the light to become extinguished.”
Abhoya’s child was a daughter, born at night, exactly as foreseen by the omniscient guru. The mother instructed her nurse to keep the lamp filled with oil. Both women kept the urgent vigil far into the early morning hours, but finally fell asleep. The lamp oil was almost gone; the light flickered feebly.
The bedroom door unlatched and flew open with a violent sound. The startled women awoke. Their astonished eyes beheld the form of Lahiri Mahasaya.
“Abhoya, behold, the light is almost gone!” He pointed to the lamp, which the nurse hastened to refill. As soon as it burned again brightly, the master vanished. The door closed; the latch was affixed without visible agency.
Abhoya’s ninth child survived; in 1935, when I made inquiry, she was still living.
One of Lahiri Mahasaya’s disciples, the venerable Kali Kumar Roy, related to me many fascinating details of his life with the master.
“I was often a guest at his Benares home for weeks at a time,” Roy told me. “I observed that many saintly figures, DANDA {FN31-3} swamis, arrived in the quiet of night to sit at the guru’s feet. Sometimes they would engage in discussion of meditational and philosophical points. At dawn the exalted guests would depart. I found during my visits that Lahiri Mahasaya did not once lie down to sleep.
“During an early period of my association with the master, I had to contend with the opposition of my employer,” Roy went on. “He was steeped in materialism.
“‘I don’t want religious fanatics on my staff,’ he would sneer. ‘If I ever meet your charlatan guru, I shall give him some words to remember.’
“This alarming threat failed to interrupt my regular program; I spent nearly every evening in my guru’s presence. One night my employer followed me and rushed rudely into the parlor. He was doubtless fully bent on uttering the pulverizing remarks he had promised. No sooner had the man seated himself than Lahiri Mahasaya addressed the little group of about twelve disciples.
“‘Would you all like to see a picture?’
“When we nodded, he asked us to darken the room. ‘Sit behind one another in a circle,’ he said, ‘and place your hands over the eyes of the man in front of you.’
“I was not surprised to see that my employer also was following, albeit unwillingly, the master’s directions. In a few minutes Lahiri Mahasaya asked us what we were seeing.
“‘Sir,’ I replied, ‘a beautiful woman appears. She wears a red-bordered SARI, and stands near an elephant-ear plant.’ All the other disciples gave the same description. The master turned to my employer. ‘Do you recognize that woman?’
“‘Yes.’ The man was evidently struggling with emotions new to his nature. ‘I have been foolishly spending my money on her, though I have a good wife. I am ashamed of the motives which brought me here. Will you forgive me, and receive me as a disciple?’
“‘If you lead a good moral life for six months, I shall accept you.’ The master enigmatically added, ‘Otherwise I won’t have to initiate you.’
“For three months my employer refrained from temptation; then he resumed his former relationship with the woman. Two months later he died. Thus I came to understand my guru’s veiled prophecy about the improbability of the man’s initiation.”
Lahiri Mahasaya had a very famous friend, Swami Trailanga, who was reputed to be over three hundred years old. The two yogis often sat together in meditation. Trailanga’s fame is so widespread that few Hindus would deny the possibility of truth in any story of his astounding miracles. If Christ returned to earth and walked the streets of New York, displaying his divine powers, it would cause the same excitement that was created by Trailanga decades ago as he passed through the crowded lanes of Benares.
On many occasions the swami was seen to drink, with no ill effect, the most deadly poisons. Thousands of people, including a few who are still living, have seen Trailanga floating on the Ganges. For days together he would sit on top of the water, or remain hidden for very long periods under the waves. A common sight at the Benares bathing GHATS was the swami’s motionless body on the blistering stone slabs, wholly exposed to the merciless Indian sun. By these feats Trailanga sought to teach men that a yogi’s life does not depend upon oxygen or ordinary conditions and precautions. Whether he were above water or under it, and whether or not his body lay exposed to the fierce solar rays, the master proved that he lived by divine consciousness: death could not touch him.
The yogi was great not only spiritually, but physically. His weight exceeded three hundred pounds: a pound for each year of his life! As he ate very seldom, the mystery is increased. A master, however, easily ignores all usual rules of health, when he desires to do so for some special reason, often a subtle one known only to himself. Great saints who have awakened from the cosmic mayic dream and realized this world as an idea in the Divine Mind, can do as they wish with the body, knowing it to be only a manipulatable form of condensed or frozen energy. Though physical scientists now understand that matter is nothing but congealed energy, fully-illumined masters have long passed from theory to practice in the field of matter-control.
Trailanga always remained completely nude. The harassed police of Benares came to regard him as a baffling problem child. The natural swami, like the early Adam in the garden of Eden, was utterly unconscious of his nakedness. The police were quite conscious of it, however, and unceremoniously committed him to jail. General embarrassment ensued; the enormous body of Trailanga was soon seen, in its usual entirety, on the prison roof. His cell, still securely locked, offered no clue to his mode of escape.
The discouraged officers of the law once more performed their duty. This time a guard was posted before the swami’s cell. Might again retired before right. Trailanga was soon observed in his nonchalant stroll over the roof. Justice is blind; the outwitted police decided to follow her example.
The great yogi preserved a habitual silence. {FN31-4} In spite of his round face and huge, barrel-like stomach, Trailanga ate only occasionally. After weeks without food, he would break his fast with potfuls of clabbered milk offered to him by devotees. A skeptic once determined to expose Trailanga as a charlatan. A large bucket of calcium-lime mixture, used in whitewashing walls, was placed before the swami.
“Master,” the materialist said, in mock reverence, “I have brought you some clabbered milk. Please drink it.”
Trailanga unhesitatingly drained, to the last drop, the containerful of burning lime. In a few minutes the evildoer fell to the ground in agony.
“Help, swami, help!” he cried. “I am on fire! Forgive my wicked test!”
The great yogi broke his habitual silence. “Scoffer,” he said, “you did not realize when you offered me poison that my life is one with your own. Except for my knowledge that God is present in my stomach, as in every atom of creation, the lime would have killed me. Now that you know the divine meaning of boomerang, never again play tricks on anyone.”
The well-purged sinner, healed by Trailanga’s words, slunk feebly away.
The reversal of pain was not due to any volition of the master, but came about through unerring application of the law of justice which upholds creation’s farthest swinging orb. Men of God-realization like Trailanga allow the divine law to operate instantaneously; they have banished forever all thwarting crosscurrents of ego.
The automatic adjustments of righteousness, often paid in an unexpected coin as in the case of Trailanga and his would be murderer, assuage our hasty indignance at human injustice. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” {FN31-5} What need for man’s brief resources? the universe duly conspires for retribution. Dull minds discredit the possibility of divine justice, love, omniscience, immortality. “Airy scriptural conjectures!” This insensitive viewpoint, aweless before the cosmic spectacle, arouses a train of events which brings its own awakening.
The omnipotence of spiritual law was referred to by Christ on the occasion of his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. As the disciples and the multitude shouted for joy, and cried, “Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest,” certain Pharisees complained of the undignified spectacle. “Master,” they protested, “rebuke thy disciples.”
“I tell you,” Jesus replied, “that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” {FN31-6}
In this reprimand to the Pharisees, Christ was pointing out that divine justice is no figurative abstraction, and that a man of peace, though his tongue be torn from its roots, will yet find his speech and his defense in the bedrock of creation, the universal order itself.
“Think you,” Jesus was saying, “to silence men of peace? As well may you hope to throttle the voice of God, whose very stones sing His glory and His omnipresence. Will you demand that men not celebrate in honor of the peace in heaven, but should only gather together in multitudes to shout for war on earth? Then make your preparations, O Pharisees, to overtopple the foundations of the world; for it is not gentle men alone, but stones or earth, and water and fire and air that will rise up against you, to bear witness of His ordered harmony.”
The grace of the Christlike yogi, Trailanga, was once bestowed on my SAJO MAMA (maternal uncle). One morning Uncle saw the master surrounded by a crowd of devotees at a Benares ghat. He managed to edge his way close to Trailanga, whose feet he touched humbly. Uncle was astonished to find himself instantly freed from a painful chronic disease. {FN31-7}
The only known living disciple of the great yogi is a woman, Shankari Mai Jiew. Daughter of one of Trailanga’s disciples, she received the swami’s training from her early childhood. She lived for forty years in a series of lonely Himalayan caves near Badrinath, Kedarnath, Amarnath, and Pasupatinath. The BRAHMACHARINI (woman ascetic), born in 1826, is now well over the century mark. Not aged in appearance, however, she has retained her black hair, sparkling teeth, and amazing energy. She comes out of her seclusion every few years to attend the periodical MELAS or religious fairs.
This woman saint often visited Lahiri Mahasaya. She has related that one day, in the Barackpur section near Calcutta, while she was sitting by Lahiri Mahasaya’s side, his great guru Babaji quietly entered the room and held converse with them both.
On one occasion her master Trailanga, forsaking his usual silence, honored Lahiri Mahasaya very pointedly in public. A Benares disciple objected.
“Sir,” he said, “why do you, a swami and a renunciate, show such respect to a householder?”
“My son,” Trailanga replied, “Lahiri Mahasaya is like a divine kitten, remaining wherever the Cosmic Mother has placed him. While dutifully playing the part of a worldly man, he has received that perfect self-realization for which I have renounced even my loincloth!”
{FN31-1} One is reminded here of Milton’s line: “He for God only, she for God in him.”
{FN31-2} The venerable mother passed on at Benares in 1930.
{FN31-3} Staff, symbolizing the spinal cord, carried ritually by certain orders of monks.
{FN31-4} He was a MUNI, a monk who observes MAUNA, spiritual silence. The Sanskrit root MUNI is akin to Greek MONOS, “alone, single,” from which are derived the English words MONK, MONISM, etc.
{FN31-5} ROMANS 12:19.
{FN31-6} LUKE 19:37-40.
{FN31-7} The lives of Trailanga and other great masters remind us of Jesus’ words: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name (the Christ consciousness) they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”-MARK 16:17-18.
CHAPTER: 32
RAMA IS RAISED FROM THE DEAD
“Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus. . . . When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.’” {FN32-1}
Sri Yukteswar was expounding the Christian scriptures one sunny morning on the balcony of his Serampore hermitage. Besides a few of Master’s other disciples, I was present with a small group of my Ranchi students.
“In this passage Jesus calls himself the Son of God. Though he was truly united with God, his reference here has a deep impersonal significance,” my guru explained. “The Son of God is the Christ or Divine Consciousness in man. No MORTAL can glorify God. The only honor that man can pay his Creator is to seek Him; man cannot glorify an Abstraction that he does not know. The ‘glory’ or nimbus around the head of the saints is a symbolic witness of their CAPACITY to render divine homage.”
Sri Yukteswar went on to read the marvelous story of Lazarus’ resurrection. At its conclusion Master fell into a long silence, the sacred book open on his knee.
“I too was privileged to behold a similar miracle.” My guru finally spoke with solemn unction. “Lahiri Mahasaya resurrected one of my friends from the dead.”
The young lads at my side smiled with keen interest. There was enough of the boy in me, too, to enjoy not only the philosophy but, in particular, any story I could get Sri Yukteswar to relate about his wondrous experiences with his guru.
“My friend Rama and I were inseparable,” Master began. “Because he was shy and reclusive, he chose to visit our guru Lahiri Mahasaya only during the hours of midnight and dawn, when the crowd of daytime disciples was absent. As Rama’s closest friend, I served as a spiritual vent through which he let out the wealth of his spiritual perceptions. I found inspiration in his ideal companionship.” My guru’s face softened with memories.
“Rama was suddenly put to a severe test,” Sri Yukteswar continued. “He contracted the disease of Asiatic cholera. As our master never objected to the services of physicians at times of serious illness, two specialists were summoned. Amidst the frantic rush of ministering to the stricken man, I was deeply praying to Lahiri Mahasaya for help. I hurried to his home and sobbed out the story.
“‘The doctors are seeing Rama. He will be well.’ My guru smiled jovially.
“I returned with a light heart to my friend’s bedside, only to find him in a dying state.
“‘He cannot last more than one or two hours,’ one of the physicians told me with a gesture of despair. Once more I hastened to Lahiri Mahasaya.
“‘The doctors are conscientious men. I am sure Rama will be well.’ The master dismissed me blithely.
“At Rama’s place I found both doctors gone. One had left me a note: ‘We have done our best, but his case is hopeless.’
“My friend was indeed the picture of a dying man. I did not understand how Lahiri Mahasaya’s words could fail to come true, yet the sight of Rama’s rapidly ebbing life kept suggesting to my mind: ‘All is over now.’ Tossing thus on the seas of faith and apprehensive doubt, I ministered to my friend as best I could. He roused himself to cry out:
“‘Yukteswar, run to Master and tell him I am gone. Ask him to bless my body before its last rites.’ With these words Rama sighed heavily and gave up the ghost. {FN32-2}
“I wept for an hour by his beloved form. Always a lover of quiet, now he had attained the utter stillness of death. Another disciple came in; I asked him to remain in the house until I returned. Half-dazed, I trudged back to my guru.
“‘How is Rama now?’ Lahiri Mahasaya’s face was wreathed in smiles.
“‘Sir, you will soon see how he is,’ I blurted out emotionally. ‘In a few hours you will see his body, before it is carried to the crematory grounds.’ I broke down and moaned openly.
“‘Yukteswar, control yourself. Sit calmly and meditate.’ My guru retired into SAMADHI. The afternoon and night passed in unbroken silence; I struggled unsuccessfully to regain an inner composure.
“At dawn Lahiri Mahasaya glanced at me consolingly. ‘I see you are still disturbed. Why didn’t you explain yesterday that you expected me to give Rama tangible aid in the form of some medicine?’ The master pointed to a cup-shaped lamp containing crude castor oil. ‘Fill a little bottle from the lamp; put seven drops into Rama’s mouth.’
“‘Sir,’ I remonstrated, ‘he has been dead since yesterday noon. Of what use is the oil now?’
“‘Never mind; just do as I ask.’ Lahiri Mahasaya’s cheerful mood was incomprehensible; I was still in the unassuaged agony of bereavement. Pouring out a small amount of oil, I departed for Rama’s house.
“I found my friend’s body rigid in the death-clasp. Paying no attention to his ghastly condition, I opened his lips with my right finger and managed, with my left hand and the help of the cork, to put the oil drop by drop over his clenched teeth.
“As the seventh drop touched his cold lips, Rama shivered violently. His muscles vibrated from head to foot as he sat up wonderingly.
“‘I saw Lahiri Mahasaya in a blaze of light,’ he cried. He shone like the sun. ‘Arise; forsake your sleep,’ he commanded me. ‘Come with Yukteswar to see me.’”
“I could scarcely believe my eyes when Rama dressed himself and was strong enough after that fatal sickness to walk to the home of our guru. There he prostrated himself before Lahiri Mahasaya with tears of gratitude.
“The master was beside himself with mirth. His eyes twinkled at me mischievously.
“‘Yukteswar,’ he said, ‘surely henceforth you will not fail to carry with you a bottle of castor oil! Whenever you see a corpse, just administer the oil! Why, seven drops of lamp oil must surely foil the power of Yama!’ {FN32-3}
“‘Guruji, you are ridiculing me. I don’t understand; please point out the nature of my error.’
“‘I told you twice that Rama would be well; yet you could not fully believe me,’ Lahiri Mahasaya explained. ‘I did not mean the doctors would be able to cure him; I remarked only that they were in attendance. There was no causal connection between my two statements. I didn’t want to interfere with the physicians; they have to live, too.’ In a voice resounding with joy, my guru added, ‘Always know that the inexhaustible Paramatman {FN32-4} can heal anyone, doctor or no doctor.’
“‘I see my mistake,’ I acknowledged remorsefully. ‘I know now that your simple word is binding on the whole cosmos.’”
As Sri Yukteswar finished the awesome story, one of the spellbound listeners ventured a question that, from a child, was doubly understandable.
“Sir,” he said, “why did your guru use castor oil?”
“Child, giving the oil had no meaning except that I expected something material and Lahiri Mahasaya chose the near-by oil as an objective symbol for awakening my greater faith. The master allowed Rama to die, because I had partially doubted. But the divine guru knew that inasmuch as he had said the disciple would be well, the healing must take place, even though he had to cure Rama of death, a disease usually final!”
Sri Yukteswar dismissed the little group, and motioned me to a blanket seat at his feet.
“Yogananda,” he said with unusual gravity, “you have been surrounded from birth by direct disciples of Lahiri Mahasaya. The great master lived his sublime life in partial seclusion, and steadfastly refused to permit his followers to build any organization around his teachings. He made, nevertheless, a significant prediction.
“‘About fifty years after my passing,’ he said, ‘my life will be written because of a deep interest in yoga which the West will manifest. The yogic message will encircle the globe, and aid in establishing that brotherhood of man which results from direct perception of the One Father.’
“My son Yogananda,” Sri Yukteswar went on, “you must do your part in spreading that message, and in writing that sacred life.”
Fifty years after Lahiri Mahasaya’s passing in 1895 culminated in 1945, the year of completion of this present book. I cannot but be struck by the coincidence that the year 1945 has also ushered in a new age-the era of revolutionary atomic energies. All thoughtful minds turn as never before to the urgent problems of peace and brotherhood, lest the continued use of physical force banish all men along with the problems.
Though the human race and its works disappear tracelessly by time or bomb, the sun does not falter in its course; the stars keep their invariable vigil. Cosmic law cannot be stayed or changed, and man would do well to put himself in harmony with it. If the cosmos is against might, if the sun wars not with the planets but retires at dueful time to give the stars their little sway, what avails our mailed fist? Shall any peace indeed come out of it? Not cruelty but good will arms the universal sinews; a humanity at peace will know the endless fruits of victory, sweeter to the taste than any nurtured on the soil of blood.
The effective League of Nations will be a natural, nameless league of human hearts. The broad sympathies and discerning insight needed for the healing of earthly woes cannot flow from a mere intellectual consideration of man’s diversities, but from knowledge of man’s sole unity-his kinship with God. Toward realization of the world’s highest ideal-peace through brotherhood-may yoga, the science of personal contact with the Divine, spread in time to all men in all lands.
Though India’s civilization is ancient above any other, few historians have noted that her feat of national survival is by no means an accident, but a logical incident in the devotion to eternal verities which India has offered through her best men in every generation. By sheer continuity of being, by intransitivity before the ages-can dusty scholars truly tell us how many?-India has given the worthiest answer of any people to the challenge of time.
The Biblical story {FN32-5} of Abraham’s plea to the Lord that the city of Sodom be spared if ten righteous men could be found therein, and the divine reply: “I will not destroy it for ten’s sake,” gains new meaning in the light of India’s escape from the oblivion of Babylon, Egypt and other mighty nations who were once her contemporaries. The Lord’s answer clearly shows that a land lives, not by its material achievements, but in its masterpieces of man.
Let the divine words be heard again, in this twentieth century, twice dyed in blood ere half over: No nation that can produce ten men, great in the eyes of the Unbribable Judge, shall know extinction. Heeding such persuasions, India has proved herself not witless against the thousand cunnings of time. Self-realized masters in every century have hallowed her soil; modern Christlike sages, like Lahiri Mahasaya and his disciple Sri Yukteswar, rise up to proclaim that the science of yoga is more vital than any material advances to man’s happiness and to a nation’s longevity.
Very scanty information about the life of Lahiri Mahasaya and his universal doctrine has ever appeared in print. For three decades in India, America, and Europe, I have found a deep and sincere interest in his message of liberating yoga; a written account of the master’s life, even as he foretold, is now needed in the West, where lives of the great modern yogis are little known.
Nothing but one or two small pamphlets in English has been written on the guru’s life. One biography in Bengali, SRI SRI {FN32-6} SHYAMA CHARAN LAHIRI MAHASAYA, appeared in 1941. It was written by my disciple, Swami Satyananda, who for many years has been the ACHARYA (spiritual preceptor) at our VIDYALAYA in Ranchi. I have translated a few passages from his book and have incorporated them into this section devoted to Lahiri Mahasaya.
It was into a pious Brahmin family of ancient lineage that Lahiri Mahasaya was born September 30, 1828. His birthplace was the village of Ghurni in the Nadia district near Krishnagar, Bengal. He was the youngest son of Muktakashi, the second wife of the esteemed Gaur Mohan Lahiri. (His first wife, after the birth of three sons, had died during a pilgrimage.) The boy’s mother passed away during his childhood; little about her is known except the revealing fact that she was an ardent devotee of Lord Shiva, {FN32-7} scripturally designated as the “King of Yogis.”
The boy Lahiri, whose given name was Shyama Charan, spent his early years in the ancestral home at Nadia. At the age of three or four he was often observed sitting under the sands in the posture of a yogi, his body completely hidden except for the head.
The Lahiri estate was destroyed in the winter of 1833, when the nearby Jalangi River changed its course and disappeared into the depths of the Ganges. One of the Shiva temples founded by the Lahiris went into the river along with the family home. A devotee rescued the stone image of Lord Shiva from the swirling waters and placed it in a new temple, now well-known as the Ghurni Shiva Site.
Gaur Mohan Lahiri and his family left Nadia and became residents of Benares, where the father immediately erected a Shiva temple. He conducted his household along the lines of Vedic discipline, with regular observance of ceremonial worship, acts of charity, and scriptural study. Just and open-minded, however, he did not ignore the beneficial current of modern ideas.
The boy Lahiri took lessons in Hindi and Urdu in Benares study-groups. He attended a school conducted by Joy Narayan Ghosal, receiving instruction in Sanskrit, Bengali, French, and English. Applying himself to a close study of the VEDAS, the young yogi listened eagerly to scriptural discussions by learned Brahmins, including a Marhatta pundit named Nag-Bhatta.
Shyama Charan was a kind, gentle, and courageous youth, beloved by all his companions. With a well-proportioned, bright, and powerful body, he excelled in swimming and in many skillful activities.
In 1846 Shyama Charan Lahiri was married to Srimati Kashi Moni, daughter of Sri Debnarayan Sanyal. A model Indian housewife, Kashi Moni cheerfully carried on her home duties and the traditional householder’s obligation to serve guests and the poor. Two saintly sons, Tincouri and Ducouri, blessed the union.
At the age of 23, in 1851, Lahiri Mahasaya took the post of accountant in the Military Engineering Department of the English government. He received many promotions during the time of his service. Thus not only was he a master before God’s eyes, but also a success in the little human drama where he played his given role as an office worker in the world.
As the offices of the Army Department were shifted, Lahiri Mahasaya was transferred to Gazipur, Mirjapur, Danapur, Naini Tal, Benares, and other localities. After the death of his father, Lahiri had to assume the entire responsibility of his family, for whom he bought a quiet residence in the Garudeswar Mohulla neighborhood of Benares.
It was in his thirty-third year that Lahiri Mahasaya saw fulfillment of the purpose for which he had been reincarnated on earth. The ash-hidden flame, long smouldering, received its opportunity to burst into flame. A divine decree, resting beyond the gaze of human beings, works mysteriously to bring all things into outer manifestation at the proper time. He met his great guru, Babaji, near Ranikhet, and was initiated by him into KRIYA YOGA.
This auspicious event did not happen to him alone; it was a fortunate moment for all the human race, many of whom were later privileged to receive the soul-awakening gift of KRIYA. The lost, or long-vanished, highest art of yoga was again being brought to light. Many spiritually thirsty men and women eventually found their way to the cool waters of KRIYA YOGA. Just as in the Hindu legend, where Mother Ganges offers her divine draught to the parched devotee Bhagirath, so the celestial flood of KRIYA rolled from the secret fastnesses of the Himalayas into the dusty haunts of men.
{FN32-1} JOHN 11:1-4.
{FN32-2} A cholera victim is often rational and fully conscious right up to the moment of death.
{FN32-3} The god of death.
{FN32-4} Literally, “Supreme soul.”
{FN32-5} GENESIS 18:23-32.
{FN32-6} SRI, a prefix meaning “holy,” is attached (generally twice or thrice) to names of great Indian teachers.
{FN32-7} One of the trinity of Godhead-Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva-whose universal work is, respectively, that of creation, preservation, and dissolution-restoration. Shiva (sometimes spelled Siva), represented in mythology as the Lord of Renunciates, appears in visions to His devotees under various aspects, such as Mahadeva, the matted-haired Ascetic, and Nataraja, the Cosmic Dancer.
CHAPTER: 33
BABAJI, THE YOGI-CHRIST OF MODERN INDIA
The northern Himalayan crags near Badrinarayan are still blessed by the living presence of Babaji, guru of Lahiri Mahasaya. The secluded master has retained his physical form for centuries, perhaps for millenniums. The deathless Babaji is an AVATARA. This Sanskrit word means “descent”; its roots are AVA, “down,” and TRI, “to pass.” In the Hindu scriptures, AVATARA signifies the descent of Divinity into flesh.
“Babaji’s spiritual state is beyond human comprehension,” Sri Yukteswar explained to me. “The dwarfed vision of men cannot pierce to his transcendental star. One attempts in vain even to picture the avatar’s attainment. It is inconceivable.”
The UPANISHADS have minutely classified every stage of spiritual advancement. A SIDDHA (“perfected being”) has progressed from the state of a JIVANMUKTA (“freed while living”) to that of a PARAMUKTA (“supremely free”-full power over death); the latter has completely escaped from the mayic thralldom and its reincarnational round. The PARAMUKTA therefore seldom returns to a physical body; if he does, he is an avatar, a divinely appointed medium of supernal blessings on the world.
An avatar is unsubject to the universal economy; his pure body, visible as a light image, is free from any debt to nature. The casual gaze may see nothing extraordinary in an avatar’s form but it casts no shadow nor makes any footprint on the ground. These are outward symbolic proofs of an inward lack of darkness and material bondage. Such a God-man alone knows the Truth behind the relativities of life and death. Omar Khayyam, so grossly misunderstood, sang of this liberated man in his immortal scripture, the RUBAIYAT:
“Ah, Moon of my Delight who know’st no wane, The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again; How oft hereafter rising shall she look Through this same Garden after me-in vain!”
The “Moon of Delight” is God, eternal Polaris, anachronous never. The “Moon of Heav’n” is the outward cosmos, fettered to the law of periodic recurrence. Its chains had been dissolved forever by the Persian seer through his self-realization. “How oft hereafter rising shall she look . . . after me-in vain!” What frustration of search by a frantic universe for an absolute omission!
[Illustration: BABAJI, THE MAHAVATAR, Guru of Lahiri Mahasaya, I have helped an artist to draw a true likeness of the great Yogi-Christ of modern India.—see babaji.jpg]
[Illustration: One of the caves occupied by Babaji in the Drongiri Mountains near Ranikhet in the Himalayas. A grandson of Lahiri Mahasaya, Ananda Mohan Lahiri (second from right, in white), and three other devotees are visiting the sacred spot.—see cave.jpg]
Christ expressed his freedom in another way: “And a certain scribe came, and said unto him, Master, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” {FN33-1}
Spacious with omnipresence, could Christ indeed be followed except in the overarching Spirit?
Krishna, Rama, Buddha, and Patanjali were among the ancient Indian avatars. A considerable poetic literature in Tamil has grown up around Agastya, a South Indian avatar. He worked many miracles during the centuries preceding and following the Christian era, and is credited with retaining his physical form even to this day.
Babaji’s mission in India has been to assist prophets in carrying out their special dispensations. He thus qualifies for the scriptural classification of MAHAVATAR (Great Avatar). He has stated that he gave yoga initiation to Shankara, ancient founder of the Swami Order, and to Kabir, famous medieval saint. His chief nineteenth-century disciple was, as we know, Lahiri Mahasaya, revivalist of the lost KRIYA art.
The MAHAVATAR is in constant communion with Christ; together they send out vibrations of redemption, and have planned the spiritual technique of salvation for this age. The work of these two fully-illumined masters-one with the body, and one without it-is to inspire the nations to forsake suicidal wars, race hatreds, religious sectarianism, and the boomerang-evils of materialism. Babaji is well aware of the trend of modern times, especially of the influence and complexities of Western civilization, and realizes the necessity of spreading the self-liberations of yoga equally in the West and in the East.
That there is no historical reference to Babaji need not surprise us. The great guru has never openly appeared in any century; the misinterpreting glare of publicity has no place in his millennial plans. Like the Creator, the sole but silent Power, Babaji works in a humble obscurity.
Great prophets like Christ and Krishna come to earth for a specific and spectacular purpose; they depart as soon as it is accomplished. Other avatars, like Babaji, undertake work which is concerned more with the slow evolutionary progress of man during the centuries than with any one outstanding event of history. Such masters always veil themselves from the gross public gaze, and have the power to become invisible at will. For these reasons, and because they generally instruct their disciples to maintain silence about them, a number of towering spiritual figures remain world-unknown. I give in these pages on Babaji merely a hint of his life-only a few facts which he deems it fit and helpful to be publicly imparted.
No limiting facts about Babaji’s family or birthplace, dear to the annalist’s heart, have ever been discovered. His speech is generally in Hindi, but he converses easily in any language. He has adopted the simple name of Babaji (revered father); other titles of respect given him by Lahiri Mahasaya’s disciples are Mahamuni Babaji Maharaj (supreme ecstatic saint), Maha Yogi (greatest of yogis), Trambak Baba and Shiva Baba (titles of avatars of Shiva). Does it matter that we know not the patronymic of an earth-released master?
“Whenever anyone utters with reverence the name of Babaji,” Lahiri Mahasaya said, “that devotee attracts an instant spiritual blessing.”
The deathless guru bears no marks of age on his body; he appears to be no more than a youth of twenty-five. Fair-skinned, of medium build and height, Babaji’s beautiful, strong body radiates a perceptible glow. His eyes are dark, calm, and tender; his long, lustrous hair is copper-colored. A very strange fact is that Babaji bears an extraordinarily exact resemblance to his disciple Lahiri Mahasaya. The similarity is so striking that, in his later years, Lahiri Mahasaya might have passed as the father of the youthful-looking Babaji.
Swami Kebalananda, my saintly Sanskrit tutor, spent some time with Babaji in the Himalayas.
“The peerless master moves with his group from place to place in the mountains,” Kebalananda told me. “His small band contains two highly advanced American disciples. After Babaji has been in one locality for some time, he says: ‘DERA DANDA UTHAO.’ (‘Let us lift our camp and staff.’) He carries a symbolic DANDA (bamboo staff). His words are the signal for moving with his group instantaneously to another place. He does not always employ this method of astral travel; sometimes he goes on foot from peak to peak.
“Babaji can be seen or recognized by others only when he so desires. He is known to have appeared in many slightly different forms to various devotees-sometimes without beard and moustache, and sometimes with them. As his undecaying body requires no food, the master seldom eats. As a social courtesy to visiting disciples, he occasionally accepts fruits, or rice cooked in milk and clarified butter.
“Two amazing incidents of Babaji’s life are known to me,” Kebalananda went on. “His disciples were sitting one night around a huge fire which was blazing for a sacred Vedic ceremony. The master suddenly seized a burning log and lightly struck the bare shoulder of a chela who was close to the fire.
“‘Sir, how cruel!’ Lahiri Mahasaya, who was present, made this remonstrance.
“‘Would you rather have seen him burned to ashes before your eyes, according to the decree of his past karma?’
“With these words Babaji placed his healing hand on the chela’s disfigured shoulder. ‘I have freed you tonight from painful death. The karmic law has been satisfied through your slight suffering by fire.’
“On another occasion Babaji’s sacred circle was disturbed by the arrival of a stranger. He had climbed with astonishing skill to the nearly inaccessible ledge near the camp of the master.
“‘Sir, you must be the great Babaji.’ The man’s face was lit with inexpressible reverence. ‘For months I have pursued a ceaseless search for you among these forbidding crags. I implore you to accept me as a disciple.’
“When the great guru made no response, the man pointed to the rocky chasm at his feet.
“‘If you refuse me, I will jump from this mountain. Life has no further value if I cannot win your guidance to the Divine.’
“‘Jump then,’ Babaji said unemotionally. ‘I cannot accept you in your present state of development.’
“The man immediately hurled himself over the cliff. Babaji instructed the shocked disciples to fetch the stranger’s body. When they returned with the mangled form, the master placed his divine hand on the dead man. Lo! he opened his eyes and prostrated himself humbly before the omnipotent one.
“‘You are now ready for discipleship.’ Babaji beamed lovingly on his resurrected chela. ‘You have courageously passed a difficult test. Death shall not touch you again; now you are one of our immortal flock.’ Then he spoke his usual words of departure, ‘DERA DANDA UTHAO’; the whole group vanished from the mountain.”
An avatar lives in the omnipresent Spirit; for him there is no distance inverse to the square. Only one reason, therefore, can motivate Babaji in maintaining his physical form from century to century: the desire to furnish humanity with a concrete example of its own possibilities. Were man never vouchsafed a glimpse of Divinity in the flesh, he would remain oppressed by the heavy mayic delusion that he cannot transcend his mortality.
Jesus knew from the beginning the sequence of his life; he passed through each event not for himself, not from any karmic compulsion, but solely for the upliftment of reflective human beings. His four reporter-disciples-Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-recorded the ineffable drama for the benefit of later generations.
For Babaji, also, there is no relativity of past, present, future; from the beginning he has known all phases of his life. Yet, accommodating himself to the limited understanding of men, he has played many acts of his divine life in the presence of one or more witnesses. Thus it came about that a disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya was present when Babaji deemed the time to be ripe for him to proclaim the possibility of bodily immortality. He uttered this promise before Ram Gopal Muzumdar, that it might finally become known for the inspiration of other seeking hearts. The great ones speak their words and participate in the seemingly natural course of events, solely for the good of man, even as Christ said: “Father . . . I knew that thou hearest me always: but BECAUSE OF THE PEOPLE WHICH STAND BY I SAID IT, that they may believe that thou hast sent me.” {FN33-2} During my visit at Ranbajpur with Ram Gopal, “the sleepless saint,” {FN33-3} he related the wondrous story of his first meeting with Babaji.
“I sometimes left my isolated cave to sit at Lahiri Mahasaya’s feet in Benares,” Ram Gopal told me. “One midnight as I was silently meditating in a group of his disciples, the master made a surprising request.
“‘Ram Gopal,’ he said, ‘go at once to the Dasasamedh bathing GHAT.’
“I soon reached the secluded spot. The night was bright with moonlight and the glittering stars. After I had sat in patient silence for awhile, my attention was drawn to a huge stone slab near my feet. It rose gradually, revealing an underground cave. As the stone remained balanced in some unknown manner, the draped form of a young and surpassingly lovely woman was levitated from the cave high into the air. Surrounded by a soft halo, she slowly descended in front of me and stood motionless, steeped in an inner state of ecstasy. She finally stirred, and spoke gently.
“‘I am Mataji, {FN33-4} the sister of Babaji. I have asked him and also Lahiri Mahasaya to come to my cave tonight to discuss a matter of great importance.’
“A nebulous light was rapidly floating over the Ganges; the strange luminescence was reflected in the opaque waters. It approached nearer and nearer until, with a blinding flash, it appeared by the side of Mataji and condensed itself instantly into the human form of Lahiri Mahasaya. He bowed humbly at the feet of the woman saint.
“Before I had recovered from my bewilderment, I was further wonderstruck to behold a circling mass of mystical light traveling in the sky. Descending swiftly, the flaming whirlpool neared our group and materialized itself into the body of a beautiful youth who, I understood at once, was Babaji. He looked like Lahiri Mahasaya, the only difference being that Babaji appeared much younger, and had long, bright hair.
“Lahiri Mahasaya, Mataji, and myself knelt at the guru’s feet. An ethereal sensation of beatific glory thrilled every fiber of my being as I touched his divine flesh.
“‘Blessed sister,’ Babaji said, ‘I am intending to shed my form and plunge into the Infinite Current.’
“‘I have already glimpsed your plan, beloved master. I wanted to discuss it with you tonight. Why should you leave your body?’ The glorious woman looked at him beseechingly.
“‘What is the difference if I wear a visible or invisible wave on the ocean of my Spirit?’
“Mataji replied with a quaint flash of wit. ‘Deathless guru, if it makes no difference, then please do not ever relinquish your form.’ {FN33-5}
“‘Be it so,’ Babaji said solemnly. ‘I will never leave my physical body. It will always remain visible to at least a small number of people on this earth. The Lord has spoken His own wish through your lips.’
“As I listened in awe to the conversation between these exalted beings, the great guru turned to me with a benign gesture.
“‘Fear not, Ram Gopal,’ he said, ‘you are blessed to be a witness at the scene of this immortal promise.’
“As the sweet melody of Babaji’s voice faded away, his form and that of Lahiri Mahasaya slowly levitated and moved backward over the Ganges. An aureole of dazzling light templed their bodies as they vanished into the night sky. Mataji’s form floated to the cave and descended; the stone slab closed of itself, as if working on an invisible leverage.
“Infinitely inspired, I wended my way back to Lahiri Mahasaya’s place. As I bowed before him in the early dawn, my guru smiled at me understandingly.
“‘I am happy for you, Ram Gopal,’ he said. ‘The desire of meeting Babaji and Mataji, which you have often expressed to me, has found at last a sacred fulfillment.’
“My fellow disciples informed me that Lahiri Mahasaya had not moved from his dais since early the preceding evening.
“‘He gave a wonderful discourse on immortality after you had left for the Dasasamedh GHAT,’ one of the chelas told me. For the first time I fully realized the truth in the scriptural verses which state that a man of self-realization can appear at different places in two or more bodies at the same time.
“Lahiri Mahasaya later explained to me many metaphysical points concerning the hidden divine plan for this earth,” Ram Gopal concluded. “Babaji has been chosen by God to remain in his body for the duration of this particular world cycle. Ages shall come and go—still the deathless master, {FN33-6} beholding the drama of the centuries, shall be present on this stage terrestrial.”
{FN33-1} MATTHEW 8:19-20.
{FN33-2} JOHN 11:41-42.
{FN33-3} The omnipresent yogi who observed that I failed to bow before the Tarakeswar shrine (../