Meetings with Babajis and Sadhus : The inner and the outer world

Once I heard Osho say , wherever you taste an ocean it will have the same taste. And my experiences with people of the path to realization have given me the same impression. Reading Krishnamurti or Osho or Shivapuri baba I find the same explained it many different ways, they indicate the same through their own understanding…the containers differ according to them but the content they talk about is the same….

Recently , due to the immense devotion of my beloved, Swami Arun towards Shivapuri baba, I decided to know this man …..i had seen his pictures and the glow and bliss in his face even at the age of 130 yrs attracted me to pursue him….Following him, I went to the hill-top of the Shivapuri hill where it is said he lived for many years after his enlightenment and his travels around the world…..

It was on the day of Buddha Purnima, the birth-day of Gautama the Buddha that we, I and my  friend Ganga, chose to go to the place on the hill-top where the baba had lived…..we didn’t know the route but we had asked a few sannyasins who had been there before…After about two hours of uphill , already the serenity of the jungle, the sweet chirpings of the jungle-birds and the humming of insects hiding around the bushes filled us with a peace and tranquility we never imagined….we had still 2 hours up and we could imagine how amazing it would be there at the top….

For the last one hour of walk we met no one except birds , and this made me wonder if anyone was there on the top….we hadnt carried much food except some packets of raisins, a loaf of bread and some sweets made of lapsi , but Ganga was insistent that we should fast if there was no food and fasting would be nice for meditation as well….i was not ready for that intense meditation as her, but hoped somebody would be there at the top……There were roads bifurcating , and we had a hard time choosing which to take, but we were both following our instincts and we were talking about swamiji, about Osho, about life , about relationships and this made our journey very easy and comfortable…..

After about two hours in wilderness, we arrived to a place with a water reservior and a shiva statue in between the reservior….we were on the right path and after five minutes we reached an ashram….we were welcomed by a baba who was meditating in a dark room with wood-fire burning inside…he was Om baba….we were pleased by the reception…it was not yet dark , so we decided to climb up the hill to reach the top where Shivapuri baba had stayed……it was a half an hour walk up-hill …..as we reached the top and sat for meditation, white mists came dancing from the skies and covered us…for a minute or more, I felt I was floating in the clouds…and then they left , and I felt I was engulfed in their presence….i thanked the shivapuri baba..…..then we did a kirtan and then went down to ashram again…on the way we meditated for a while in a tree hole…the base of the two huge trees had fused and somehow made a huge cave inside them , where another baba, Todke baba had meditated for 40 yrs…we felt a very calm and soothing energy inside and were in silence for a long time inside the tree…..i indeed felt in close contact with the energy of the Shivapuri baba there inside.....let me quote some teachings of the remarkable god-realized man , the Shivapuri baba –

“Since we have our bodies to maintain, we have to perform duties –

i) Personal duty – To keep the body fit we have to use our external organs and we should use them wisely; that is we should use them as much as necessary. Seeing, hearing, speaking, touching, eating should be done only to the proportion required for the body and mind; no extra use should be made.

ii) Obligatory duty – Since we cannot live alone and need help of others, society is required. We have our duties to the family, to parents, children, to the society.

iii) Professional duty- Since we have to maintain ourselves, we must earn something and much take to some profession according to individual taste and capacityBut we should spend on owr own account only as much as necessary and use the balance for other purposes.

We must establish our life first by performing these three duties. Those who desire to realize the truth should make the moral and physical disciplines of three duties secondary and the spiritual discipline, namely Meditation, primary. Those who like to enjoy a happy life only should make the first three duties primary and meditation secondary.”

It is quite clear from my understanding of the words of Osho or Shivapuri baba or Krishnamurti that the human mind in itself has the quality of a mad horse and if we want the horse to guide to the stable , i.e. if we want to go beyond the mind , we need to tame the horse first, we need to work upon the horse first although the horse is not necessary at all for us…..and for this taming shivapuri baba talks of Right life, which constitutes sticking to fixed duties in life , performing them with reason instead of emotions and having no like or dislike for them, i.e. having discrimination in all actions and all emotions encountered by one. Osho also talked of purification of body, purification of thought, of speech, purification of the heart and of charities , of donating ones knowledge to help seekers on the path, donating 10% of the earnings  to the needful, and to the mystery schools….and we all know Buddha talked of samyak aahar ( right food ) , samyak byayaam ( right exercise) , samyak bichar ( right thought ) etc…they are not leading us to enlightenment or realisation but they are helpful to keep us in balance and harmony and tame the mind so that we can ask the mind to sit aside whenever we want.

We stayed in the ashram in the hill for 3 days. I lernt a lot from everybody and every thing there. I was inspired by Ganga’s one-pointed desire for enlightenment…I would joke that her very desire was the barrier but she couldn’t help otherwise. I also lernt a lot from Gaurishankar baba..he was 25 yrs but had left his home a few yrs back after some visions of deities start coming to him in his dreams. He had travelled to different places in India in search for answers and had come to the hill on guidance of some deity , as he said. I took a brief interview with him, and was quite skeptic about his experiences when he told he talks with the crows and the mouse and regarded them as messangers of God. But anyways, he loved the cows, crows and mice and used to feed them everyday..his love for the animals reflected on us too…he was very happy to get chance to feed the two of us , and I was inspired a lot by his overflowing love to everybody and everything in existence. The next day when me and Ganga were just wondering if the Om baba who lived in an another ashram nearby would ever come out of his meditation room, he appeared in our ashram. He sat in front of the fireplace where me, Ganga and Gaurishankar were sitting , feeling the warmth of the wood-fire in the cold and wet jungle. He looked at me with peircing eyes and looked at my mala. I could see a thought running inside him after he saw my mala. I then was prompted to trigger the baba, and I knew Ganga would also like to hear his views. We started our conversation in Nepali and I would translate in english to Ganga later.

I asked Om baba , what is your path ? He told me his path was that of a aeroplane. He asked me if I knew it. I honestly said ‘no’. He was more furious at my ignorance but it had no fire in it. Rather I felt nice when he was furiously looking at me, I was then and there, mind was still..i felt confronted by a Zen Master…..a subtle fear but trusting completely that no harm could come howsoever. He explained to me about the path of a pedestrian, about path of a car-driver and about the path of a aeroplane and that it is the fastest way to realisation of the self. He stressed on 24 hour continuous flow of meditation rather than 1 hr or two hr meditation per day. I then asked him, if he is in 24 hr meditation, he can stay in the city with his family , why he had to live a solitary life in the wilderness…he told me that the city gave him a lot of stress, the family gave him a lot of tensions and if he wouldn’t go down to put his hands on fire, he has known it once and abandoned it out of underrstanding…it convinced me…but still , it felt his spiritual life was not challenged , I asked him after 20-30 yrs of stay here , now he could easily go back and not get disturbed, but I saw a fear in him towards the usual social life…..he said about dropping everything, dropping every desire , then only coming to the wilderness and not coming to the wilderness to drop desires…when I looked into myself, I felt I had hundreds of desires still and I am not yet ready for the wilderness and aloneness that he was so much enjoying. He had a glow in his face and a presence around himself that could be felt from a distance. I finally asked him if he had become one with the divine . he honestly told me it hasn’t happened yet. He is waiting and watching. It was so beautiful. In the evening when I was translating it to Ganga, I went into contemplation myself, of the bondages I have in my life, of how fragile my will is , how I am influenced and disturbed for days when somebody I love doesn’t act the way I like…I felt faraway from the goal…..

I have been reading Shivapuri baba since my return from the shivapuri hill-jungle and he is penetrating me each day. I can clearly see where we Osho sannyasins diverted in the name of freedom , we almost tried to tame the mad horse with the electric shock, i.e. we are hoping to get a pure mind out of dynamic meditation alone but it is never going to happen. Discipline of the body ( by learning from the experiences of ones body, discriminating the need of the body from the need of the mind, giving a fixed schedule for sleeping eating, playing, disciplines the body) , discipline of the mind ( Shivapuri baba says- by dropping the negative i.e. doubt, fear, crookedness, greed, anger and adhering to positive – truthfulness, compassion, forgiveness, chastity, fearlessness and charitability according to the need of the time and situation and with the flexibility to change) and discipline of spiritual life through self-remembering or through meditation is needed to tame the wild horse called mind. Then only meditation begins.

As I am passing my days of waiting here before my work begins in an hospital in US , I travel everyday watching me and watching around. Everything in my life that has given me pain has come from my ego and further has strengthened my ego by my reaction to it. And every good times, be it of the ecstatic moments of holding hands with my lover or of the joy of being sucessful in any job I had taken , every pleasure , every joy had been of the ego and for the ego….every pleasure gave way for pain and every pain lasted for a while and then the desire for pleasure was there automatically….i can see it clearly and yet I know I can become a victim of the vicious cycle very unknowingly…and hence the need for awareness of everything in and out, of meditation, has become very important for me….to come out of duality of existence, of happiness and sorrow, of hate and love, of anger and compassion , of life and death will be the most difficult thing for me in days to come….and yet the me,  making effort to come out ,  is the ego itself…so the insistence of my Master Osho on let-go, as they say in Tao, wu wei.