AS YOU MEET BEINGS along the path, you’ll come to sense who are your teachers and who are teachings for you. Some teachers are obviously still working on themselves, and they feed you by sharing their experiences. Others serve as living examples of the detours and pitfalls along the way, which may help you reflect on how to get on with your own path. They become teachings for you, whatever the intention when you started out.
In Indian folklore there is a classic story of a guru and disciple. This guru is proud of his attainments, while the humble disciple takes the teachings to heart and deepens his practice. One day the guru is riding through the bazaar on a palanquin, and they meet. Knowing purity when he sees it, the guru bows at his disciple’s feet, recognizing that the disciple achieved liberation, while all he himself achieved were recognition and material desires.
A pure-hearted devotee takes what he or she needs and leaves the rest. Even a great teacher’s spiritual attainments ring hollow while the ego holds sway. If both teacher and disciple aren’t getting free, they are just creating more karma.
When I was with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Oxford-educated Tibetan tulku who founded Naropa Institute, he was drinking, gambling, and playing sexual games with his students, and it made me very uncomfortable. I saw that he was helping them run through their Western karma. My discomfort was that he was encouraging them to do things that trapped them further in worldly stuff, but I think from his standpoint (and, I hope, theirs) he was just taking them through it. He could see with the spiritual eye that they were ready for that teaching.
That is tantra in the classical sense, using desire to get free of desire. The trouble is it’s hard to tell from the outside whether someone is getting more attached to a pattern of desire or whether that one experience will push someone over the edge into vairagya, the world-weariness that is the precursor to true detachment. If it is not an act of volition, what Gurdjieff used to call intentional suffering, but a teaching imposed from without, it’s hard to see how it works.
Siddhi-fied
I met Swami Muktananda for the first time at Big Indian, the ashram of Rudi (Rudrananda, aka Albert Rudolph) in upstate New York. Rudi was also a devotee of Muktananda’s guru, Nityananda. I was one of the musicians in the chanting circle on the stage with Muktananda. Muktananda’s staff were encouraging me to travel with him and introduce him around the world. I had a vision of Maharaj-ji dancing in the middle of the circle, and he looked at me and said, “Help the man.” When the music ended, I told Muktananda I would help him. I went on tour with him in the United States, and then on to Australia and Singapore, and finally back to India. Looking back, I wonder if that vision actually came from Maharaj-ji.
When I went back to India with Muktananda at the end of his world tour in 1970, he had me give a speech alongside him and a Supreme Court justice at a football stadium in Bombay. The next day we drove up to his ashram in Ganeshpuri, a few hours north of Bombay. When we got to the ashram, there were fireworks and hundreds of people lining up to greet Muktananda. As is the custom they all brought offerings.
Swami Muktananda. Photo by Rameshwar Das.
He had me sit on a lower throne next to his taller throne, and when they’d bring flowers he’d pass them on to me. When they gave him money, he’d put it under his cloth. I was inundated with about forty pounds of flowers. In the heat, the smell of marigolds was suffocating. That went on for two days. I sat under a lot of flowers, and he took in a lot of money.
Papa Trivedi, the president of Muktananda’s ashram board of trustees, invited me to his home. I was a visiting yogi. He told me, “The doctor said that for my heart I have to take a little scotch every night.” I said that I understood.
I went into his room expecting him to bring out a medicine glass, but he brought out an ice bucket and two glasses. I started remembering the days when I really loved scotch and soda. So he poured one and said, “Would you like some plain soda?”
I said, “No, I’ll join you.” I figured, “Tantra is for me!”
We staggered through dinner, and I could barely find the table. That was on one drink. Next evening we started a little earlier. He kept telling me to stay on and become part of the scene, because Muktananda was taking such an unusual interest in me.
While I was staying at the ashram in Ganeshpuri, Muktananda invited me to meditate in a “cave” in the basement where he had done his own meditation. He told me to stop meditating in the satsang hall where everybody sat together. At 3 A.M. I went down there. A sadhu with a large key opened the gate of the cave. The cave room was very dark and hot. I proceeded to take my clothes off and meditate. I immediately experienced shakti (energy) or kundalini (the “serpent power” latent in the spine) and entered a visionary state in which I was flying. In this vision I was kneeling in the air before Muktananda. Then I proceeded to shoot over his head, still flying.
When I finished the vision or whatever it was, I was so energized I wanted to leave the cave. I rattled the gate until the man with the key came. It was about 4 A.M. I raced for the outside courtyard, wanting to get some air. In the distance I saw Swami Muktananda and one of his devotees walking in the courtyard. I went running over to Muktananda, and he said, “Ram Dass, did you like flying?”
Later, as part of a yatra, or pilgrimage, that Muktananda led in his blue-pearl Mercedes, we traveled in a VW bus to a series of Shaivite temples in South India called siddha peeths. They were all power spots where great saints and yogis had lived. One night in a temple town called Gokarn, Muktananda came and woke me about 3 A.M. He didn’t speak any English, and I didn’t speak Marathi, but he motioned me to follow him. We walked down a quiet street to a small temple on the top of a building. In this temple he gave me a mantra in an initiation. Right after that I fell asleep.
About 9 A.M. somebody came and woke me up and said, “Baba wants you.”
When I got to the place he was staying at, I asked him, “What was that about?”
He said, “That mantra will give you vast wealth and power.”
Being a self-righteous do-gooder, I said, “I will only accept it if you give me love and compassion too.”
He looked at me with disgust. That was the Vaishnavite (me) meeting the Shaivite (Muktananda), the way of love meeting the way of power.
That experience of flying over Muktananda’s head and all this special treatment from him were consistent with the effort of Muktananda’s people to get me to become his lineage holder or heir apparent, whatever you call it. They kept saying things like, “Maharaj-ji was your first guru. Now you’re ready for your real guru.” But it meant nothing to me. That’s how it is with your guru. My heart was so tuned to Maharaj-ji, it didn’t even register.
Besides this manifestation of Muktananda’s powers, or siddhis, there were several aspects of this experience that linked back to Maharaj-ji. First, when I met Maharaj-ji in 1966, he had said to me, “You really want to fly.” I replied that I flew a plane—I had a pilot’s license and I flew a Cessna.
After leaving Ganeshpuri I went back to the north to Vrindavan, where Maharaj-ji met us with cosmic precision. Afterward when we were sitting with him, he said to me out of the clear blue, “You know, it’s good to meditate naked.” He didn’t say anything else about it.
One day later Maharaj-ji called me in and started talking about Hari Dass Baba. By this time Hari Dass was in America, surrounded by students who had heard about him through me. He was being taken care of by several very devoted women. The only thing is yogi renunciates are not supposed to hang out with women.
Maharaj-ji said, “He’s with women!”
“Yes, I know, Maharaj-ji.”
“What does he call them?”
“He calls them his mothers.”
“Oh. How old are they?”
“One is twenty years old.”
“Mothers?!”
He had taken me through this routine a dozen times before. Then he said, “You know what his mothers give him?”
“No, what?” I asked.
“They give him milk.”
“That’s wonderful. Mothers, milk, that’s beautiful.”
“Every night they give him milk.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Maharaj-ji.”
Then Maharaj-ji leaned down really close to me and said, “You know what they put in the milk?”
“No, Maharaj-ji. What do they put in the milk?”
“Whiskey!” he said in a shocked tone.
“No!” I said.
He came even closer and he said, “Yes!”
He shook his finger at me, and we both knew whose drinking he was referring to.
It’s tricky to tell these stories, because I was very much attracted to power, and Muktananda used his powers. My impression was that although these were truly siddhis, or yogic powers, his whole scene was power-oriented, third chakra, and although the power was spiritual, it was also being used to gain worldly stuff. I felt there was an element of personal desire and a misuse of power.
When I told Maharaj-ji, “Muktananda has a dining room table and chairs made of gold,” Maharaj-ji said, “He holds on to too much.” Of course, Maharaj-ji had also set me up to be with Muktananda. I believe he sent me to Muktananda to understand the distinction between love and power. Muktananda was a mirror in which I could see my own desire.
You may have many teachers and teachings along the way. A teaching may be a situation that reflects your desire back to you like a mirror and shows you where you’re at, or where you’re not, the way in Muktananda I could see mirrored my desire for power. An upu-guru, a kind of temporary guru, can be a teacher who points you to the path.
Those who themselves have seen the Truth can be thy teachers of wisdom; ask from them, bow unto them, be thou a servant unto them.
—Bhagavad Gita 4:34
Over the years as I’ve reflected on these experiences I realized that although Muktananda wasn’t my guru, he was a guru for others, and he was a great teacher for me. The same person who is a guru for one person may be a teacher or a teaching for somebody else. Your true guru, or sat guru, on the other hand, is the true “remover of darkness” for you, beckoning to you from farther up the path and capable of taking you through to enlightenment.
Teachers may have much to offer, even though they may not be able to bring you to the final stage. Teachers who point the way as they work on themselves with an open heart may be very pure, or sattvic. They may have had that initial glimpse of divinity that turned their mind toward truth, and they are working toward realization. Pure teachers can give you the basic training in yoga and meditation to clear the mind, purification that gets you on your way.
Changing Planes
Every person has a guru, but only some have a guru on this plane. Some people contact Maharaj-ji by reading Miracle of Love, chanting with Krishna Das, or attending my talks, developing a heart connection to Maharaj-ji that many of us who were with him in the body do not have. We got distracted by his form. Those who meet Maharaj-ji in books, talks, or meditation have him as fully in their lives as those who saw him in the flesh.
Not all conscious beings have physical bodies. Some liberated beings exist primarily in other lokas, nonmaterial worlds or planes, in subtle or astral bodies. They work across planes, not only with beings on those planes, but also with us on the physical plane. You may have read about or experienced having a guardian angel, hearing an inner voice, or having an inner guide. Such astral presences are relatively real. They are real within that plane, the way a tiger is real in a dream until we awaken.
I was on the road lecturing in the United States, and I was scheduled to stay at a house of Buddhist practitioners. When I arrived, they said to me, “Before you go rest, there’s a woman here who has been hospitalized several times. We’ve talked to her, but we can’t do much with her. Would you see her?”
I went in and found a highly agitated woman sprawled on a bed. “What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Well, I guess I’m crazy.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Well, all this stuff happens to me. My mother thinks I’m crazy and put me in a hospital.”
“What do the people in this house think?”
“Well, they say it’s all in my mind.”
That’s what a Buddhist might say. “Well, what is it in your mind?” I asked.
“How does a pyramid with three stars grab you?”
“That’s pretty nice. Do you see that?” I replied.
“How would you like to be driving down the street in your car, and suddenly there’s an American Indian sitting next to you?”
Because I had worked with Hilda Charlton, a devotee of Swami Nityananda who used to call on Native American spirits in her classes at St. John the Divine in New York, I asked, “Does the Indian have a name?”
“Yeah, Blue Moon.”
“Well, next time you see Blue Moon, tell him there’s a tribe of Indians gathering on the astral plane to create a universal tribe of peace. If he would like to join that tribe, he should call into the ethers the name of Cochise, who will guide him to that group.”
It blew her mind. I was obviously in control of my scene, and I thought her Indian was real. Then she told me about other beings and other experiences, and as far as I was concerned, it was all real. Now, she was at the beginning of her path, her third eye was opening, and that was part of her route. She was just frightened, and she had nobody to talk to. It didn’t mean that this was the last thing she’d do before she got fully enlightened.
You can play with all this stuff, these different beings on all these different planes, and they’re all incredible teachings. But it’s not necessary to consciously pass through all the subtle planes, with the gods, or devas, and astral beings, to get to the One.
It’s very paradoxical. There is nothing that you have to go through consciously, and yet there’s nothing you don’t go through. You might pass through incredible transformations that other people would experience as momentous personal turning points and never notice. You could go through tremendous changes in energy levels and never notice, because your path is the path of devotion, so energy experiences aren’t relevant. You may be into Zen, for example, and never deal with them. The astral beings may be there, helping you, guiding you, but you don’t deal with them. Your karma determines your path.
I was visiting with Dr. Venkataswamy, the founder of the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, South India, which is named for his guru, the great Indian saint Sri Aurobindo. We went on pilgrimage with some friends to Aurobindo’s ashram in Pondicherry. Dr. V., as he was affectionately known, wanted me to meditate in Sri Aurobindo’s room. I started to meditate there, and as I began to go into a deep state of meditation, I heard somebody behind me. I opened my eyes, looked around, and saw a sadhu covered with ash sitting cross-legged on the floor. I watched him blessing me in some way or other. Then he disappeared. He dissolved like a cloud of water vapor in the sky.
The sadhu I had seen was an old, old baba. When I finished meditating, I went out and related this experience to Dr. V. and his friends. None of them seemed at all surprised.
The contemporary Brazilian healer Joao prefers to be known as Medium Joao, but is often called John of God in English. He came from humble origins and never received an education. When he was fifteen years old, St. Rita appeared to him and told him to go to a church where a crowd of people was waiting for him. He lost consciousness at the door. Only when he came out of the church did they tell him he was responsible for about a thousand people being healed. That was the beginning of his healing career. Later he came to understand that an astral being had taken him over.
Through Joao a “phalange” of incorporeal doctors provides amazing holistic healing and a taste of unconditional love to thousands of people every year from Brazil and abroad. Certainly the entities of John of God’s astral medical college are real to him and to those who receive treatment at his center, the Casa. His consciousness can shift onto the plane where they exist and bring healing to those of us who cannot otherwise experience those other levels.
These astral beings can be loving and helpful guides. Their energy and wisdom can bring us to new levels in our sadhana and open us to higher vibratory planes. They can be a focus for developing our devotion, much as the Tibetans use visualizations and mantras to develop relations with celestial beings, gurus, and dakinis (tantric deities).
By acknowledging such immaterial beings and planes as equally real—but not more real—than this immediate reality, you start to free yourself of attachment to any one plane or level of reality. Thinking of them as more real than this physical reality, however, can create more attachment. The attraction to the energies and mysteries of other planes can be a tremendous distraction or side trip from one’s path. Attachment is attachment on any plane. Recognizing the relative nature of reality allows you to go beyond the form to where Reality lies.
Astral planes and after-death states are connected; an example is near-death experiences in which people meet all their relatives and forebears. They’re all there to help them to get through what the Tibetans call the bardos, which are disembodied astral states between births. The ego is frightened of death, because ego is part of the incarnation and ends with it. That’s why we learn to identify with our soul, because that will reduce the fear of death, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment.
When we talk about these planes, we differentiate them as physical, astral, causal, and so forth. But the entire creation and every plane in it are one gestalt existing right here in the present moment. For pure beings who traverse these planes, what manifests is a function of the needs of the moment rather than their desires. In such cosmic existential moments Moses brought forth the Ten Commandments, Einstein a theory of relativity, and Mozart the Requiem. They each manifested an aspect of the infinite One in synch with their karma and their cultural milieu.
These are all just methods. Ultimately all methods are illusions, so in the end it doesn’t really make a lot of difference. There are more illusions than you’ll ever need to get enlightened. You just use the illusions you karmically need to get there. When you are fully realized, you will recognize the illusions for what they are—relative reality, symbolic reality. You recognize them and are part of them. And when it’s happening to you, you see that it’s universal, and the truth is the truth is the truth. This is what the Buddha discovered when he confronted the illusion of maya under the bodhi tree.
RE: Incarnations
Full realization is very, very rare. As they see it in the East, the perfection of consciousness does not come in one birth, but through thousands and thousands of incarnations. Sometimes we may see the culminating birth, the finishing touch, as in the case of Buddha. Otherwise most of the beings who are called “saints” in India or by the Catholic church are not perfected beings. We may be seeing them in very advanced births, where, as my teacher Hari Dass Baba used to say, there’s only “a transparency left of the veil of illusion.” For example, when Ramana Maharshi was seventeen years old, he lay down on the floor of his uncle’s study and imagined his own death, finding in that experience the core of his true Self.
Imagine a mountain of solid rock six miles long, six miles wide, and six miles high. Once every hundred years a crow flies by with a silk scarf in its beak, just barely caressing the top of the mountain with it. The length of time it would take to wear away that mountain is how Buddha described the journey to enlightenment. That’s the game of incarnations. In the vastness of time any one incarnation is like the blink of an eye in relation to a seventy-year life span. Every time you blink, that’s like another incarnation. Every thought form is like a lifetime. A realized being is so completely in the present moment that every time a thought appears, there is creation, preservation, and destruction of the entire universe.
Of course, that’s only a description from within our limited view of relative time. It goes from the smallest unit of thought, perhaps a billionth of a second in duration (called an asta kalapa), to a human life (perhaps seventy years), to an astral life of perhaps five hundred or a thousand years, to an entire cycle of the universe of form, four yugas, called a Day of Brahma, millions upon millions of years.
How you see this chain of incarnations is a function of where you are standing in relation to time. Its illusory nature (now you see it, now you don’t) becomes more apparent when you reconsider your concept of time. Realization is beyond time and space, so at another level nothing is happening anyway. When there is no attachment to the past and no expectation of the future, there is only this moment—the eternal present, here and now.
Both Hindus and Buddhists say human birth is highly auspicious, because it has the elements for liberation. You have everything you need to work with in a human birth to become realized: consciousness or awareness, conceptual understanding, the emotional heart, joy and sorrow. When Buddhists talk about the preciousness of a human birth, it’s the awareness associated with human birth that’s the opportunity. We become aware to bring ourselves to higher consciousness. Suffering is part of it too; it’s all grist for the mill of developing awareness. What’s here in front of you is what you can be aware of; it’s food for enlightenment. It’s your part in the passing show of life.
All of this requires energy, effort, willpower. One way of looking at the possibility of our human birth is that it is the intersection of physical and spiritual energy, or shakti. Tibetan yogis up in the Himalayas generate body heat through yogic practices called tumo. They have contests in the snow where they wrap wet sheets around themselves to see who can dry them the fastest. In the Hindu tradition, shakti is described as kundalini, the “serpent power” that rises in the spine and progresses through the spiritual nerve centers, or chakras, until it reaches the crown chakra, opening the yogi to cosmic consciousness.
We can also see how our human feelings and emotions can be stepping-stones to enter into divine emotion, the deep longing and love for God. The gopis, the milkmaids and cowherd girls, of Vrindavan cry for their playful lover Krishna, the cosmic cowherd. Responding to their intense pangs of separation, Krishna comes, and they are intoxicated by his presence, lost in divine love. For true devotees, or bhaktas, that unsurpassed love shines out through every pore as they dissolve themselves into it.
We can use our intellect, too, in its capacity to conceive what is beyond perception. Rationality, the power of deductive reasoning, gives us a matrix, so we can act in time and space; it takes us beyond simple survival. The power of thought leads us to wonder about the ultimate and to search for it in both our perceptual universe and our inner being. This is called jnana yoga, the yoga of intellect. Bhakti, devotion, combines with jnana in the heart-mind, the core of individual identity or individual soul, the jivatman, which merges back into the One, the 
tman, where it originated.
From the cosmic perspective an incarnation is like the blink of an eye. For us in our human condition, it’s like a full dress rehearsal with an audience. That’s the witness perspective that you get if your jivatman, or heart-mind, is your reality. The jivatman is the same as the individual soul, and jivatmans know each other across incarnations.
On this plane you identify with who you think you are, your ego, which is the “I” thought in the thinking mind. On the soul plane you can have an individual soul, but no ego. That shift of your identification from ego to soul moves between two distinct perceptual vantage points. When you identify with the individual soul, the jivatman, with some help from the guru, you go deep within and begin to merge with the collective soul, the tman. The jivatman takes you to the tman. The jivatman is the individual soul. The tman is the One . . . nobody home.
Maharaj-ji.
To us Maharaj-ji often repeated, “Sub ek!” “It’s all One!” He had a gesture in which he would hold up his index finger, almost in admonition, as if to say, “Can’t you see, it’s all One?” Buddha, Christ, Moses, and Krishna are all just different aspects of the same being.
I think when I die I will go to where Maharaj-ji is. That’s one of the guru’s jobs, to show up when you travel between incarnations. I guess it’s an astral plane or a bardo. Then he will guide me to the One.
Once Maharaj-ji put one of his close devotees, Guru Datt Sharma, into samadhi with a pat on the head. Guru Datt went rigid and stopped breathing. While he was in samadhi, Maharaj-ji explained, “We have been together for many incarnations.” That’s why Maharaj-ji could affect him so quickly.
Entering the Stream
Beings who have understood how it all is, who have realized their identity with the tman, are stream-enterers; they have tasted the flow of the nectar of liberation. They are a breed apart from other people in the world. They know something others do not know. Every part of their life is colored by that merging. They touch us not only through what they can share, but also through what they cannot share, what they themselves have become. We can only begin to imagine or intuitively absorb those states from our limited vantage point.
These individuals have embraced higher awareness in this life and, though realized, they are still finishing off their karma accrued from past lives. Perhaps their awakening is sufficient so that no new karma is being created and their acts are free from personal attachment. Yet they must still complete the karma of the body and the personality originated in previous lives or former acts in this life. The soul, the jivatman, carries the accumulated sanskaras, or tendencies, from birth to birth until the full realization of the greater tman. When the soul merges in the One, there is no more separation.
I have stilled my restless mind, and my heart is radiant: for in Thatness I have seen beyond Thatness, in company I have seen the Comrade Himself.
Living in bondage, I have set myself free: I have broken away from the clutch of all narrowness.
Kabir says: “I have attained the unattainable, and my heart is colored with the color of love.”
—Kabir1
A free being no longer identifies with the body or personality, with a personal past or future. The body, the packaging, still has its karma running off and the skandhas, the mental aggregates, continue, but with nobody in them. A saint’s body may be growing old, getting sick, and so forth—that’s the karma of the body. These beings may have the power to change their bodies or personalities, but the only reason they would do so would be for the benefit of other beings. There is no personal desire to stay on this earth. They’re not going to make their bodies healthy, because it’s no big deal. They might do so if it were useful to somebody else.
As the body karma runs off, so too does the karma of the personality, because no one is identified with it. Saints all have distinct personalities and qualities, their own unique karma. But the reason a being who no longer identifies with the body, personality, or thinking mind stays incarnated is not out of personal desire, but for the collective karma, the needs of other beings.
There are many beings who have attained different degrees of perfection, who have entered into different states of samadhi, or absorption, whose devotion and love have brought them to merging, but not quite all the way. Beings may become enamored of many subtle planes along the way. There are states, like nirvikalpa samadhi (samadhi without form), that are so deep there is no body consciousness. But even these states pass. Finally form and formless are a continuum, interpenetrating and all-pervasive, a constant tension of being and nothingness held together by the supreme attractive force of unconditional love.
Swami Vivekananda describes cosmic consciousness and nirvikalpa samadhi:
“Can it be,” he said, “that the water pot is God, that the drinking vessel is God, that everything we see and all of us are God?”. . .
At the marvelous touch of the Master, my mind underwent a complete revolution. I was aghast to realize that there really was nothing whatever in the entire universe but God. I remained silent, wondering how long this state of mind would continue. It didn’t pass off all day. I got back home, and I felt just the same there; everything I saw was God. I sat down to eat, and I saw that everything—the plate, the food, my mother who was serving it, and I myself—everything was God and nothing else but God. I swallowed a couple of mouthfuls and then sat still without speaking.2
One day in the Cossipore Garden, I expressed my prayer [for nirvikalpa samadhi] to Sri Ramakrishna with great earnestness. Then in the evening, at the hour of meditation, I lost consciousness of the body and felt that it was absolutely nonexistent. I felt that the sun, moon, space, time, ether, and all had been reduced to a homogeneous mass and then melted far away into the unknown. Body-consciousness almost vanished and I nearly merged in the Supreme. But I had just a trace of feeling of ego, so I could again return to the world of relativity from samadhi. In this state of samadhi all differences between “I” and “Brahman” go away, everything is reduced to unity, like the water of the Infinite Ocean—water everywhere, nothing else exists. Language and thought, all fail there. Then only is the state “beyond mind and speech” realized in its actuality. Otherwise, as long as the religious aspirant thinks or says, “I am Brahman”—“I” and “Brahman,” these two entities persist—there is the involved semblance of duality. After that experience, even after trying repeatedly, I failed to bring back the state of samadhi. On informing Sri Ramakrishna about it, he said, “If you remain day and night in that state, the work of the Divine Mother will not be accomplished. Therefore you won’t be able to induce that state again. When your work is finished it will come again.” 3
Perfection: The Siddha
Beyond all distinctions is a class of saints who have finished their spiritual work in every sense, who have completed their sadhana and are fully realized. There is no identification with a personal self, no attachment to personal karma. Everything they do in form is empty of personal need. The fullness of the One permeates their every moment.
When in the role of a guide such a being is a sat guru, a true guru who beckons from the destination farther up the mountain. The living presence of such gurus, the example of their being, shines like a light on the path. They are a statement of the spiritually possible. Their unconditional love is the color of the One. They are pure mirrors on which there is no dust. As saints, they may be referred to as siddhas, perfected beings. They call from the realm of the supreme state, enlightenment, which in terms of samadhi, or the state of absorption, is sometimes called sahaja stithya (easy or relaxed, fixed on God) samadhi. I remember Maharaj-ji’s state being called that. He acts on this plane and is in samadhi at the same time; in that state there’s no difference.
A perfected being lives in harmony with the universe with no clinging whatsoever. In Buddhism that state may be called “nothing special,” “crazy wisdom,” or the arahat. Taoists call it wei wu wei. Hindus may refer to such beings as avadhoot, without body consciousness, or siddha purusha, merged in the cosmos, or, again, as sat guru, gurus who bestow ultimate truth.
Perfected beings rest in emptiness, in presence, in nonconceptual, nondifferentiated awareness of every moment. Out of them comes the optimum response to any life situation. They may not think about saying it or doing it, or even know they have. It’s not on that level. There’s no ego.
When we were with my guru, Maharaj-ji, at times he seemed like an avadhoot, beyond form, like Shiva lost in meditation on a mountain peak above the clouds. On the other hand, much of the time with him was spent in seemingly trivial conversation, though that often felt like a cover for the deeper work occurring within. The talk was often laden with meaning, though we might not catch the meaning unless it was meant individually for us. Maharaj-ji’s fingers were often moving as he constantly mouthed Rm Rm Rm, the name of God. In and out, form and no-form, past, present, and future—it was all there in every moment. There was no discontinuity between form and formless, no boundaries, no edge to his being.
It is true that at the moment of entering beyond all planes into the void, brahman, a being seems to have an option of merging completely or of entering the One and returning, which was mentioned in the previous chapter. Such a being is liberated in the sense of being free from all forms. At that point there is a kind of choiceless choice, a bounding condition that Buddhists call the bodhisattva vow, a voluntary postponement of ultimate merging to stay in form and continue to reincarnate to relieve the suffering of all beings, the ultimate act of compassion. From where we stand, the bodhisattva vow sounds like a heavy load, but it’s actually light, because there’s no self to take seriously.
In the bhakti, or devotional, version, it isn’t even a choice. It’s a surrender; it’s God staying in form to extend the lila, the divine play. The bhakta, the devotee, is God’s dance partner in the divine lila. Hanuman, the monkey god, the supreme devotee, chooses to stay separate from R
m in order to serve, to remain immersed in love for Rm and to play in the lila. When Rm says, “Come up here and sit with me,” Hanuman refuses. He stays separate to serve Rm. He won’t come up no matter how Rm attempts to persuade him. Going against God is hard! It’s turning away from Grace to stay in the love.
Hanuman knows just how far he can push, because Rm understands perfectly. It’s all part of the lila. Otherwise there would be no Rm and no Hanuman. And Hanuman is the one who stays incarnate for us. That’s the boon that Rm gave Hanuman, that he will always be present on earth as long as the Ramayana story is told.
As we pass through these seemingly endless incarnations, our predicament is that a veil of unknowing surrounds us so that we don’t know who we are. Enveloped in this subjective illusion (maya), we think we are who we think we are. We forget we are one with God or that we’ve had other incarnations. As we evolve spiritually the veil of maya gets thinner and thinner. Perfected beings, siddhas, have ultimate knowledge of who they are on every plane—all their incarnations, this incarnation, and their identity with the Absolute.
You are the guardian of Rm’s door, none may enter without your leave.
—Hanuman Chalisa, v. 21
That kind of knowing is not knowledge of a mental sort; it’s wisdom or being. Perfected beings have merged with God, have become One, have gone beyond all form, beyond all polarities, merged into truth, into love, into wisdom. Perfected beings don’t know those qualities—they are those qualities incarnate.
Every act that comes from such beings is optimum in all dimensions. It can’t be anything else. The only reason they’re in form is to alleviate suffering. Their acts, no matter how heartless or immoral they may seem from the outside, cannot deviate an iota from God’s will, God’s love. It’s the nature of their being. That’s who they are, a statement of that perfection. If there’s no clinging, there’s no way they can go against the will of God. They are the will of God.
To think of a siddha as experiencing you as other is a projection. For the siddha there is only One, though there may be many in that One. Your impurities are part of the terrain of existence, the texture of the One. Because perfected beings are pure awareness, their perception of the world is in no way colored by individuality or by any desire or clinging, so they see with perfect discrimination. They see it all just as it is, the unfolding of karma, the interplay of darkness and light, good and evil, life and death.
The only thing a man must renounce if he wishes to attain the Supreme Truth is the notion of individuality. Nothing else.
—Swami Ramdas4
I said to Maharaj-ji, “I can’t go back to the West and teach. I’m too impure.”
He had me stand up and turn around, and then he said, “I don’t see any imperfection.”
That complete clarity of being, is-ness, is the origin of true compassion. It’s not exactly seeing another’s suffering; it is being it. Realized beings don’t have sympathy or empathy for someone else’s pain; they experience it as their own within that pure awareness. Within that greater identity there’s no difference between self and other.
Maharaj-ji. Photo by Rameshwar Das.
The Form of the Formless
All planes exist within the One. Paradoxically, the One is also a plane of consciousness. But from within the One there’s no subjective experiencer, because the One can only experience itSelf. And so it creates all the other planes to experience itSelf. That’s the paradox, the mystery of existence that creates the play of forms, the dance, or lila. A perfected being is no longer an actor in the play moving in and out of planes, going up or coming down. The subjective self has disappeared in the merging of subject and object, the One.
Once a salt doll went to measure the depth of the ocean. . . . It wanted to tell others how deep the water was. But this it could never do, for no sooner did it get into the water than it melted. Now who was there to report the ocean’s depth?
—Sri Ramakrishna5
Realized beings are so vast in every dimension you can only get a glimpse of their full being, you can only approach that vastness in terms of something finite. Our limited view falls so short, it’s like seeing only a mountaintop above the clouds and not the immensity of its slopes spreading beneath. As you approach the vast being-ness of this mountain, your individuality pales in comparison with that immensity, until finally you begin to dissolve into that infinite God-being. Then you, too, become one.
The guru’s form is a door leading to the formless guru, to God. You love the guru’s form and slowly that love transforms itself into an oceanic love. It’s the lover dissolving into the Beloved.
Hanuman
In the Ramayana, Hanuman takes incarnation as a monkey to serve God in the form of Rm. By the grace of the Divine Mother, Sita, and his love for Rm, Hanuman possesses all powers, or siddhis, and he soars through the universe doing Rm’s work, now merging into oneness, now coming back into separateness to embody service and devotion. He dances playfully on the edge of form. He blesses Rm’s devotees and acts as a powerful model for totally devoted service to God.
Maharaj-ji’s temples are Hanuman temples. In one sense Maharaj-ji is an incarnation of Hanuman. In another, Hanuman is his ishta deva, his personal deity, the form through which he gets to God. In that way Maharaj-ji worshiped Hanuman-ji. In another way they’re the same.
Hanuman murti at Kainchi. Photo by Rameshwar Das.
A story is told about Maharaj-ji’s earlier days when he used to meditate and do tapasya, austerities, in an underground cave. An old woman brought milk every day for Maharaj-ji to offer to Hanuman. Then Maharaj-ji would drink what was left of Hanuman’s prasad. In this way Hanuman became his ishta deva, his form for the deity. One day the milk didn’t come. Maharaj-ji threatened Hanuman with a stick, berating him for the lack of sustenance, because Hanuman was supposed to be taking care of Maharaj-ji.
One of our elder guru brothers in the satsang family, Dada Mukerjee, told numerous stories about Maharaj-ji turning into Hanuman. One night monkey paw prints appeared on the wall in Maharaj-ji’s locked room at Dada’s house. Another time Maharaj-ji’s feet became red and hairy like Hanuman’s.
Sometimes when Maharaj-ji would talk, we would realize we were talking to the Shiva or Hanuman aspect. Because from within, these are all facets of Maharaj-ji’s identity, and he floats in and out of these planes like a balloon floating through various layers of the atmosphere. To speak from those planes, to form words from those spaces, to carry on a conversation when your consciousness is shifting planes, is an incredible feat. I can only compare it to being on LSD and carrying on a conversation while my consciousness was completely changing.
At a reading of the Ramayana, when the reader asked what section he should recite, Maharaj-ji said, “Recite the part where I am talking with Vibhishan.” (It was, of course, Hanuman who spoke with Vibhishan.)6
With Maharaj-ji the result was sometimes a hilarious juxtaposition of the childlike and the cosmic. Sometimes Maharaj-ji would complain about the way the temple was being run or be irascible and temperamental. Sometimes he would be just a cosmic giggle rolling on the bed, and sometimes he’d become like Shiva, the perfect yogi, seated on his tukhat as if it were Mount Kailash. Sometimes he would just be shimmering light, and sometimes, though the body was there, he would be gone, merged, absorbed into Rm.
One time I hid on the second floor overlooking the front of the temple and saw Maharaj-ji, who had just been telling us never to get angry at anyone, apparently blow up at one of the temple workers who had let some potatoes rot in the storeroom. I thought I was well hidden.
Later in the day, Dada came up to me and asked me whether I saw Maharaj-ji get angry, and I said, “Yes,” though I was feeling completely bewildered.
Then Dada said, “You will understand.”
The next afternoon a Western couple in our satsang, Radha and Mohan, complained to Maharaj-ji that they were having an argument and couldn’t get advice from Ram Dass, because there was a sign on his door that said he was meditating. At that point, Maharaj-ji said, “You can get angry at someone as long as you don’t throw them out of your heart.” And then he pointed at me.
It’s impossible to fully comprehend beings like Maharaj-ji. In their highest manifestation they aren’t really in the incarnation; they are the universal One. Then they come down to experience the play within God’s will, of which an incarnation is the dense form. Spiritually, this is where the rubber meets the road. They may enter still more deeply into other forms and experience separateness, though they never forget for a moment the Oneness. At the same time they are fully human, warts and all, and the lila, the divine play of forms, continues moment to moment. For a fully conscious being there’s no discontinuity, never a flicker of forgetfulness of God. Maharaj-ji would be carrying on a conversation while at the same time doing japa, touching the joints of his fingers, doing Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm Rm.