When the Impossible Happens (10 page)

Our friendship with Swami Muktananda continued until his death seven years later and formed an important part of our life. Christina and I had many additional personal darshans with him and attended a number of Siddha Yoga meditations and weekend intensives in different parts of the world. During these years, I also had ample opportunity to compare spontaneous experiences of people who had received shaktipat with those that were induced by psychedelics, and could confirm their remarkable similarity.

Shortly after my first meeting with Baba, Christina and I developed Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful nonpharmacological method of self-exploration and therapy. With this approach, non-ordinary states of consciousness are induced by very simple and natural means—faster breathing, evocative music, and release of blocked energies by a certain form of bodywork. The experiences triggered by this approach can be very powerful, and they resemble both the states induced by psychedelics and those de scribed in Kashmir Shaivism. They thus represent an additional proof that the phenomena induced by LSD and other similar substances are not chemical artifacts, but genuine expressions of the human psyche.

Our relationship with Swami Muktananda deepened and intensified in the last years of his life. During a darshan following the conference of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) in Danvers, Massachusetts, he suggested that we hold one of the future ITA meetings in India, and he offered us his personal support, as well as the help of his staff and of the Ganeshpuri ashram. The conference was held in the Oberoi Hotel in Bombay in February 1982, several months before Baba’s death. It was called Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science and provided a forum for exchange between new paradigm scientists and spiritual teachers.

The program had a stellar cast; it featured brain researcher Karl Pribram, physicist Fritjof Capra, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, family therapist Virginia Satir, neurophysiologists Elmer and Alyce Green, child development expert Joseph Chilton Pearce, and many other scientists. The spiritual world was represented by Swami Muktananda, Mother Teresa, Parsee high priest Dastoor Minocheer Homji, Turkish Sufi Sheik Muzafer Ozak Al-Jerrahi, Taoist Master Chungliang Al Huang, Aurobindo scholar Karan Singh, Benedictine monk Father Bede Griffith, and rabbis Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Shlomo Carlebach. Among the highlights of the cultural program was an evening of Hassidic dances, sufi zikr of the Halveti Jerrahi dervishes, musician Paul Horn, and Alarmel Valli, the rising star of Indian classical dance. The meeting was a thundering success in spite of the absence of the Dalai Lama, who could not deliver his opening address because he fell ill on his way from Dharamsala to Bombay, and of the Karmapa, who had died a few months before the conference and was not able to close the conference with the promised Black Crown ceremony.

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 what 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.