On the day following the conference, Baba invited all 700 participants to his ashram in Ganeshpuri for a bandara, a traditional Indian feast. As it turned out, Baba’s presentation at the Bombay ITA conference was his last public appearance. When the meeting ended, he retreated into his quarters in the Ganeshpuri ashram, where he spent most of his time in silence, making gradual preparations for the transmission of the Siddha lineage and his own demise. Christina and I spent two weeks on a pilgrimage to various sacred sites in India and then returned to Ganeshpuri for our final two weeks with Baba. He appeared in the marble-covered courtyard twice a day and sat there in silence, while the ashram residents and visitors paid homage to him and offered various gifts.
Everything seemed to indicate that we would not have another chance to talk to him or see him privately. That unexpectedly changed two days before our departure. Noni, Baba’s personal valet, delivered to us a message that Baba wanted to see us. He wanted us to come at five o’clock to the meditation hall, where he would “tune up our meditation.” The meditation Hall was the spiritual heart of the ashram. It was built around the place where Muktananda’s own guru and powerful Siddha yogi Nityananda lived in a cottage. This place was marked by a large hide of a tiger, the animal consecrated to Shiva. One of its doors opened into Baba’s bedroom, another one to the staircase descending underground to the Tiger Cave, another favorite place for meditation.
Christina and I arrived in the dark meditation hall at the appointed hour and sat down on a large hide. We might have meditated for about five minutes, when the door of Baba’s private quarters quietly opened up and he walked in. Without saying a word, he approached Christina and pressed on her eyeballs, maintaining the pressure for about fifteen or twenty seconds. Then he moved on to me and did the same. I felt his thumbs delving so deep into my eyes that they seemed to be touching my retinas. I experienced an indescribable pain and pressure in my head and had to control my impulse to interrupt this procedure. I felt that nobody, not even a Siddha guru, should be allowed to do with my eyes what Muktananda was doing. But my curiosity took over, and I said to myself: “This is very interesting; stay with it!” And I did.
The pressure grew to intolerable intensity and then my head exploded into a brilliant light that gradually turned into a vision of star-filled sky. I experienced an ecstatic rapture of truly cosmic proportions, which ended in a state of blissful emptiness, similar to the one I had experienced after I had first received shaktipat from Muktananda. This experience matched those in my high-dose psychedelic sessions in terms of its intensity, but it was of shorter duration. Christina’s experiences were equally powerful, but they continued throughout the night. They brought a chain of memories of abuse that she had suffered from various male figures in her life. She felt that it was a major emotional clearing and healing of old traumas.
The next day, Noni brought us a message that Baba wanted to see us in the meditation hall at the same hour for “round two,” as he called it. This time, he repeated the same procedure of compressing our eyeballs, but added another element. He pressed his forehead, decorated with several ashen horizontal stripes—the sign of Shiva—against ours and forcefully blew air into our nostrils. This time, the resulting experience was very positive for both of us. In the morning of our last day in the ashram, shortly before our departure, Baba unexpectedly invited us into his private quarters for a darshan. In retrospect, it became clear that this was meant to be the final good-bye.
At the beginning of this meeting, he gave us each a meditation shawl and a beautiful dark amethyst. Then he broke his silence and told us that we should have the amethysts set in gold and made into rings. He emphasized that it was very important that we wear these rings all the time. As we were parting, Baba surprised us with an enigmatic sentence: “Go back and continue to work with people! I will help you. You are doing my work!” And he motioned us to leave. This was the last time we saw Baba, and all that remained were memories of this remarkable human being and of the play of consciousness that he represented.
Devotees often try to explain scandalous events that happen around their gurus by saying that large light casts a big shadow and that such problems are caused by dark forces fighting enlightenment. Swami Muktananda’s light must have been very bright because its shadow was large and dark. The final months of his life were tainted with ugly rumors about his sexual abuse of young girls. Some of his devotees were appalled by what they considered hypocrisy and an inexcusable flaw of their guru and left the movement. Others decided not to believe these rumors or tried to excuse this behavior by seeing it as some advanced Tantric practice, culturally acceptable in India but misunderstood in the West.
After Muktananda’s death, the situation was further confounded by a pro found dissent between Chitvilasananda and Nityananda, the two siblings to whom he passed the Siddha Yoga lineage. The ugly intrigues that were involved were widely publicized by Indian and American press and further deepened the already existing rift in the inner circles of Siddha Yoga, as well as in the larger group of followers all over the world that, according to some estimates, exceeded one hundred thousand.
Christina and I visited the Ganeshpuri ashram twice more, but the magic of the old days was gone. We have dissociated ourselves from the movement and its politics, but remain connected to the Siddha movement on another level. Baba continued to appear in our dreams and various non-ordinary states of consciousness. We also have repeatedly had experiences of participation in powerful Siddha rituals in which we felt a strong connection with what we call “Shiva energy.”
THE GURU IN THE LIFE OF HIS DEVOTEES: Is the Siddha Yogi a Cosmic Puppeteer?
One of the most extraordinary aspects of our experience with Swami Muktananda and Siddha Yoga was the astonishing incidence of synchronicities in the lives of Muktananda’s followers. We heard about them on a regular basis from our friends and acquaintances who were associated with the Siddha Yoga movement. The weekend intensives offered by the various ashrams regularly featured speakers who told their remarkable stories about meeting Baba. These stories contained without any exception descriptions of fantastic coincidences similar to those that introduced me to the world of Siddha Yoga.
One example came from a man who spent some time in an Australian ghost town looking for leftover gems in abandoned mines. At the time, he lived alone in a ramshackle cabin. During the long evenings, he tried to read using the light of a candle. One of the previous dwellers had left on the wall of the cabin a picture of a strange dark-skinned man in a red ski cap holding a wand of peacock feathers. It happened to be a portrait of Swami Muktananda, although there was no inscription on the photograph identifying him as such.
In one of his lone evenings, the gem hunter lifted his eyes from the book he was reading and became captivated by the face of the man on the picture. As he was focusing on the eyes, he experienced a radiant thunderbolt that seem to emanate from the portrayed man’s pupils and hit him between the eyes. It triggered powerful waves of emotions and a strong physical response. These experiences continued on the following days, and in the next two weeks a series of events led this man to Baba’s Melbourne ashram. He decided to take a weekend intensive, where he learned about shaktipat and the many different forms it can take. He remained Baba’s ardent follower in the years to come.
One of Muktananda’s senior swamis, a friend of ours, shared with us the following story from her early devotee years. One of the things that Muktananda liked to do was to give Westerners Indian spiritual names—Yamuna, Sadashiva, Durghananda, Shivananda, Lakshmi, and so on. His students and followers usually received their new names in the darshan line, which involved brief contact with the guru, a few words, and an offering, or prasad. Our friend, at the time an eager student and aspiring novice, stood in the darshan line with a friend of hers, both of them waiting to receive a spiritual name from Swami Muktananda. She felt slightly nervous and channeled her anxious anticipation into jovial conversation. “I think I know wh
at name Baba will give us,” she said grinning. “He’ll call us Creepa and Creepie.” To her astonishment, the name she received just minutes later was Kripananda, or the bliss of grace, and has been known as such ever since.
Among the hundreds of stories told in weekend intensives, one deserves special notice. It involved a Malibu veterinarian who was summoned to take care of one of Baba’s dogs. As Swami Muktananda journeyed all over the world, an envoy of people from his inner circle traveled ahead of him to find temporary quarters for his visit. They often chose for this purpose poorly maintained buildings in bad neighborhoods and renovated them, creating temporary ashrams; it was seen as karma yoga to leave the premises in much better shape than they had been initially.
Baba liked to go for regular walks wherever he was and did it fearlessly, without any regard to the reputation of the place. While he himself was not worried, this caused deep concern in his followers. One of them gave Baba two large dogs to protect him during his strolls. During Baba’s stay in Malibu, one of the dogs became very sick. A woman from Baba’s inner circle looked up the phone number of a local veterinarian.
The veterinarian arrived at the ashram and examined the dog, without meeting Baba or having any contact with him. On the way home, he started having kriyas—intense welling-up of emotions and body tremors. Within a few days, as a result of a few coincidences, he was sitting in the meditation hall chanting “Om Namah Shivaya.” Eventually, he too became one of Baba’s dedicated followers. Swami Muktananda often jokingly likened Shakti, the energy involved in the shaktipat and in kriyas, to the common cold, something that is eminently contagious, something that one can “catch.”
Instead of describing more experiences of Baba’s followers that we heard about, I would like to give some examples from our own life. The first story involves an entire series of synchronicities that occurred in the early 1980s.
It began when Christina and I received in our house in Big Sur, California, a phone call from Gabriel, a medical doctor who was a member of Swami Muktananda’s inner circle. He told us he was passing through Big Sur and asked if he could stop by to discuss something important.
The reason for his visit was that the media people from the ashram were not satisfied with an interview that Baba had given on the subject of death. The reporter had not been sufficiently familiar with the topic and did not ask very interesting questions. Gabriel knew that I had done psychedelic therapy with terminal cancer patients and that I was very interested in psychological, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of death and dying. He sat down with a notebook and asked me to tell him what might be the most interesting questions about death that a Western psychiatrist and consciousness researcher would like to ask a yogi.
After about three hours of our discussion, Gabriel realized that what we were doing did not make much sense. It became obvious that, instead of formulating the questions for somebody else, I should be the one actually asking the questions. He suggested that we visit the Miami ashram, where Baba was at the time, and that I conduct the interview with him. However, there was a problem: the ashram would not cover our expenses, and we did not have, at the time, a lot of money to spare. In addition, we were about to travel in the opposite direction, to conduct some workshops in Australia and to continue to India to prepare ground for the 1982 International Transpersonal Conference.
After a long discussion, we decided to go to Miami after all. It was al ways interesting to see Baba, and the opportunity to hear his ideas about death was particularly tempting. Just before leaving for Miami, we had a workshop scheduled at Esalen. The Esalen program typically had four parallel events, and there was a limit for the number of participants in each of them. Shortly after our decision to go to Miami, the enrollments for our workshop started rushing in. One of the other workshops had to be canceled for lack of interest, and two others were not filling. As a result, Esalen extended the quota for our workshop. It filled to such an extent that we ran out of floor space for the breathwork; we had a long waiting list and had to turn people down.
The sudden interest in our workshop was unprecedented. As a legacy of Fritz Perls, Esalen offered complimentary Gestalt sessions for all residents and seminarians who needed it. The week before our workshop started, several people actually did emotional work on the Gestalt “hot seat,” working on their disappointment and anger that they were not able to participate in our workshop. When we got the check for the workshop, we discovered that the difference between our fee and what we would have made had the other workshops filled amounted exactly to two roundtrip tickets from Monterey to Miami. It was difficult not to see it as “the grace of the guru,” or guru kripa, as Muktananda followers used to call similar events.
When we arrived at the Miami ashram on Thursday, we found out that the interview with Baba scheduled for Friday was canceled. He was not feeling well and needed some rest before the weekend intensive. Instead of interviewing Baba, I did an interview with one of the ashram media people on transpersonal psychology. Because we already were in Miami, we wanted to participate in the weekend program, but our flight to Melbourne was leaving on Saturday late in the evening. We asked Baba for permission to take only half of the intensive, which was a highly unusual and irregular request. To our pleasant surprise, the permission was granted, but then the question arose whether we had to pay for the entire intensive or just half of it. Baba made another exception and allowed us to pay just half of the usual cost, one hundred and fifty dollars.
Another big surprise came when we were just about to enter the meditation hall. The young woman at the door gave us a big smile and handed us three pristine fifty dollar bills that looked as if they just had come from the printer’s press. “Here’s your money back,” she said. “Baba does not want you to pay; you are coming as his guests.” Everything seemed to indicate that the guru was giving us special treatment. However, this feeling rapidly dissipated at the end of the first day of the intensive, when we approached him in the darshan line with an offering and wanted to thank him. He kept talking with the man who was ahead of us in the line and brushed us off with a dismissive gesture of his hand without exchanging a single word with us.
This “Swedish shower” approach, combining outpouring of love and favors with complete disinterest, outwardly cold behavior, or even ego-deflating comments, seemed to be Baba’s strategy of reducing his followers’ sense of self-importance and exclusivity. We got into a taxi and drove to the airport, facing a long flight to Melbourne. The plane was full and the seats in the economy class seemed exceptionally narrow, particularly for people with long legs, like ourselves. Tired after a long day and jammed into our uncomfortable seats, we felt defeated and surrendered with a sense of resignation to our grim predicament.
“Staaan, Christiiina!” the loud voice of one of the stewards aroused us from our melancholic mood. “What a surprise! Had I known you were on this flight, I would have put you in the first class. But I have two seats for you in the business class.” It turned out that a couple of years earlier this steward had been in one of our Esalen workshops and had very positive life-transforming experiences in Holotropic Breathwork sessions. Seated comfortably in the business class, we wondered if this was just an incredibly improbable coincidence or another crest in the sea of guru’s grace.
When we finally reached Melbourne, we were met at the airport by our dear friends and hosts, Muriel and Al Foote. As we were driving to the city, they told us that they arranged for us to spend the first day and night in the house of their close friends, the famous Australian opera singer Greg Dempsey and his wife, Annie. When we arrived at the Dempsey residence, we discovered to our surprise that Greg and Annie were both dedicated followers of Swami Muktananda. The house was full of Baba’s photographs, and there was one even in the bathroom.
As we were sitting down for breakfast, Muriel suddenly started looking very sheepish and told us that she had invited a young woman to join us for breakfast and spend some time with us. “I’m re
ally sorry. I know you guys must be dead tired,” she apologized. “Many people called me and wanted some private time with you while you’re in Melbourne. I managed to turn down all of them, except this one. There was something special about her. She has done work with dying people, like yourselves, and she sounded so nice!”
When the woman arrived, it turned out that, unbeknownst to Muriel, she was from the Melbourne Siddha Yoga ashram. She told us that just as she was walking out of the door, the phone rang and she happened to pick up the phone. It was Baba notifying the ashram people that we were coming to Melbourne and that they should help us because we were “doing his work.” During breakfast, we heard many Baba stories and learned about the growing Siddha Yoga movement in Australia, getting used to the Australian accent.
We spent the night at Greg and Annie’s, and the next day the Footes drove us to nearby Blackwood, where they had their house and seminar center. In the evening that day, we started our Holotropic Breathwork workshop. The Siddha magic seemed to continue. Out of twenty-five people in the group, eight had experiences of Blue Light, Blue Pearl, and Blue Person, which in Siddha Yoga are considered very auspicious and important steps on the spiritual journey. One participant started spontaneously chanting “Om Namah Shivaya,” without having any idea what that was. None of the participants knew about our connection with Swami Muktananda.
When the Impossible Happens Page 8
