When the Impossible Happens (11 page)

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 really 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.

Another interesting event I would like to describe happened two years later. I have already mentioned earlier, describing our last meeting with Baba, that he had given us each a beautiful dark amethyst and suggested that we have them made into rings and wear them all the time. We later found out that the choice of the stones might have had a deeper meaning. Since antiquity, amethysts have had the reputation to protect the owner against intoxication, as indicated by their Greek name.
“Methystos”
means intoxicated and
a-
is
alpha privativum,
expressing negation. This seemed to make sense in view of my work with psychedelics and Christina’s problems with alcohol.

Shortly after our return from India, a series of natural disasters devastated the Big Sur coast. A catastrophic fire that had destroyed 160,000 acres of the Ventana wilderness stripped the coastal mountain range of all vegetation for about twenty miles, from the Hermitage of the Immaculate Heart almost to Ventana Inn. The following onslaught of torrential rainstorms on the unprotected mountain slopes resulted in massive landslides. Highway 1, the stunning scenic road connecting the Esalen Institute with Monterey and its airport, was blocked for a number of weeks. All the Esalen workshops, including ours, had to be canceled.

This had serious financial repercussions for Esalen, but particularly for us. We lived at that time on a very limited budget, and loss of income from several workshops was very painful. It was not a very good time to follow Baba’s suggestion and have our amethysts set in gold and made into rings. I, being the more rational member of our marital dyad, would have postponed the project, but Christina felt strongly that we should go ahead. During our next shopping trip to Carmel, which with the detour caused by the landslides now took seven hours instead of the usual two, we stopped at the jeweler’s shop and ordered our rings.

Two weeks later, when we were leaving for France, our first stop on a European workshop tour, we picked up our rings on the way to the airport. Our first workshop in Paris was a Holotropic Breathwork weekend with about thirty participants. As we were going around the circle introducing ourselves, one of the group members, Simone, presented as her main complaint severe chronic pain in her belly, which seriously interfered with her everyday life. She described that repeated examinations had failed to detect any medical reason for this difficulty. Since the problem seemed to be psychosomatic, she hoped to use the breathwork to get some insight into its causes.

Eager to begin her explorations, she asked her breathing partner if she could go first. Her process was very intense, with much crying and physical struggle. About an hour into the session, she started to make loud sounds and asked for me. She shared with me that her belly pain was greatly intensified and asked me if I could do something about it. Our usual approach to such situations was to intensify the pain by external pressure and encourage the person to find a way to express his or her feelings. I asked Simone to tense up her belly and applied pressure on the center of the painful area, using my right hand on which I had the amethyst ring. I then encouraged her to express fully with sounds and physical movements her emotional reaction to this intervention.

Simone pushed against me with her tensed-up belly, and her face was showing more and more strain. She was holding her breath, and her face was turning purple. Suddenly, there was a bloodcurdling scream like I had never heard before in my life. Simone started to breathe normally, went into a deep relaxation, and a blissful smile appeared on her face. A little later, she told me that she felt completely pain free for the first time in years. In the evening, when the group got together for sharing, she described what had happened during her session.

At the beginning of her experience, she relived several memories from her postnatal life that involved pain in the belly, including repeated sexual abuse by a relative. Then the experience deepened and took her to the memory of her biological birth. As she was reliving her difficult passage through the birth canal, she discovered that part of her abdominal pain was related to the agonizing discomfort she had experienced as a fetus struggling to be born. As her session continued, Simone started envisioning scenes from human history that involved violence and sexual abuse. This was the time when she decided to call me, because her pain kept increasing and was rapidly reaching the limit of her tolerance.

“It was incredible when you put pressure on my belly,” she recounted later in the sharing group. “The pain was increasing every moment and became absolutely unbearable. But I wouldn’t let go and was determined to stay with it. At one point, the pain was not just mine; it was all of humanity that was suffering! And then everything exploded into deep-blue light, which was indescribably beautiful. And in that light appeared the image of that Indian guru, whose posters are all over Paris. He had dark glasses and a red woolen cap and was holding a bunch of peacock feathers.”

A couple of weeks before our arrival in Paris, Swami Muktananda’s successor, the young Nityananda, had visited the city and held a weekend intensive. The posters, which one could still see on many walls and pillars all over the city, featured him with his teacher. Christina reached into her wallet, took out a picture of Swami Muktananda she happened to have, and showed it to Simone with a questioning look. “Yeah, that’s the one; a funny guy!” she con firmed and then she added: “But my experience also had something to do with your amethyst ring. The blue light seemed to come right out of that ring!”

It was interesting that Simone associated her healing experience not only with the amethyst ring and with Swami Muktananda, from whom it came, but also with blue color. As I mentioned earlier, visions of Blue Light and Blue Person play an important role in Siddha Yoga and are considered to be very auspicious. Simone connected with me several years later in another French workshop and gave me a follow-up; she told me that since our Paris workshop her pain had not returned.

The number of synchronicities we have experienced ourselves and observed in Baba’s followers was truly astonishing. He appeared in his followers’ dreams, meditations, and psychedelic sessions, and these visionary visitations seemed to be closely linked to events in these people’s everyday lives. Many of his followers concluded from these astonishing coincidences that Baba was aware of everything that was happening in their lives and was actually actively arranging all these situations for their spiritual benefit. This gave him a superhuman stature of a cosmic puppeteer, supervising the lives of tens of thousands of his followers and students and pulling the strings behind the scenes of material reality.

I was fascinated by this phenomenon and, at one point, I asked Swami Ama, who had been with Baba for more than twenty-five years, to find out from Baba how he himself saw this situation. She agreed and subsequently told me that Baba laughed at this grandiose fantasy of his followers. He explained to her that during the forty-some years of his pilgrimage in India and rigorous spiritual search, he had had many experiences in higher, normally hidden dimensions of existence. Because of that, he had become part of these domains and of the mechanisms through which they influence everyday reality.

He also told Ama that if he needed, he was able to focus his mind in meditation to different areas and get the necessary information, which is something that many good psychics can do. But, more than anything else, his arduous spiritual quest brought him to a sharper focus on the here and now and appreciation of simple things in everyday life. For example, he told Ama, he loved to cook. And while he was focusing with single-pointed consciousness on all the colors, textures, smells, and tastes of the food he was preparing, thousands of his followers were experiencing him as the conscious and active architect of their lives. He was very amused by the idea that he would monitor the lives of thousands of his devotees and orchestrate for them custom-made astonishing synchronicities and spiritually meaningful events. “That would be too much work; I like my life simple,” he said with a mischievous smile.