Beloved One. Baba

“Sorry for being late,” Baba opened the door with a big smile.

“But we had not agreed to meet.” My voice was hoarse and my throat hurt as I handed him a rose.

“Didn’t we?” there was that glint in his eye.

So I hadn’t been imagining things, when I suddenly felt the evening before that I had to get to Copenhagen to see him. It had made no sense, especially as I had a fever and I knew nothing about his schedule, except that he would only be in Copenhagen for a couple of days. And yes, it was all before fancy phones and texting. I lived in Århus at the time and the best way to get to Copenhagen at night was by a ferry. As I sat there looking at the water, feeling the sleet, feeling the fever shake my body, I seriously doubted my sanity.

I rang the bell to the apartment of a friend with whom he used to stay, but all I heard was stillness. I said aloud: “Now you are officially out of your fucking mind!”

I went to the lakes nearby and watched the swans dive in the icy water. It was cold; I was cold. I was convinced I was going to be really sick, all because of some stupid imagination. And here he was, some two hours later, smiling at me, offering me a cup of tea and telling me to join him for the meditation in the evening.

“Don’t worry, you will be okay,” he said. I realized that the pain in my throat was gone.

The meditation was held in someone’s apartment nearby. I don’t remember who it was. Two rooms were filled with people, the sliding doors in between were open. I stayed in the back, where I could hear Baba talking, but saw him only in brief glimpses. Suddenly there was a free space between us and the room with everybody in it disappeared. White fire burned itself through my body, from the bottom to the crown, widening, flames filling me as if I was nothing but an empty vessel. I was looking directly into Baba’s eyes. He was glowing. There was no time, there was no distance.

He looked at me, smiled, and started telling a story about swans who can filter milk out of water, however cold or dirty. “Be like a swan,” he chuckled, looking at me.

When I caught the ferry home, all my sickness was gone. No fever, no running nose, no aching throat. Only energy moving in my body. And joy, the feeling of being loved.

I have never been into gurus. Meeting Baba and getting initiated was a coincidence, if you believe in such things. I don’t have a word for it. Somebody had told me about an Indian monk, who had spent 12 years alone in the jungle and was now traveling through Europe, initiating people in Kriya Yoga. I became curious. I had trained Kriya Yoga for years, its ascetic form taught in the ashram. The long version could easily take four hours, the short one, half an hour. I was told that what Baba taught was easy to follow and didn’t took especially long time. We had to bring flowers and fruits as offerings. What I felt at the initiation was softness, mild like a mother’s love - so radically different from what I had been used to. We all got a flower to take back home to dry and keep. And we shared the fruits.

When asked about his 12 years of isolation and solitude, Baba only had one answer: “What a waste of time. I could have done something useful in the society in stead.”

He had opened a school for young children whose families were without means. Baba was collecting money to give them uniforms and food and teach them reading, writing, mathematics, and yoga.

Besides being a swami and managing the school, Baba was also an astrologer and I would say, a clairvoyant, although nobody used the word there. He looked at my chart: “Do you have a daughter you don’t see so much?” - Nobody around there knew about my daughter or my private life; nobody knew about the knife I had been feeling in my heart for years, nobody knew about the grief, longing and that nagging feeling of guilt. “It’s all as it should be,” he said. “You can love each-other at a distance, but you can’t live in the same house. You two are radically different from each-other. But she wanted to be born.” The pain dropped away, the grief and longing were still there, but not any longer as an unbearable daily hurt that had become a part of me.

“And you are going to write.” I was in my forties. “Isn’t it too late to start? I have been writing all my life, but I couldn’t find any support, so it came to nothing.” He smiled at me. “No, it’s still too early. You will do it, and you will write about spirituality.” Honestly, what on earth could I tell about that hadn’t been repeated thousands of times already? Spirituality? That, what really counted, had no words. Mostly when I had tried talking about my experiences, I was met with disbelief or even considered psychotic. All I had wished for most of my life was to fit in, but I never did. Writing about spirituality? But he had planted a seed.

I loved Baba’s traditional way of teaching, slowly, by initiations. It wasn’t about technique alone; it wasn’t about sitting completely motionless or hours. There was no angry shouting that had been a part of daily life in the ashram, where I lived. The swami there meant that people joining the ashram and wanting to be yoga teachers were to be broken down regularly. “They think they are Something… All these egos… I show them, they are nothing; and then we can build something better.” Yes, I was one of the chosen ones, one of the inner circle, as it was called. It didn’t last. All the teaching was about learning by heart. The swami had one guiding line in teaching yoga: “The body knows!” - It was forbidden to correct anybody, especially when it was about using knowledge gained somewhere else. I remember trying to say something about forward bends and herniated discs or that people can have some bad habits in their body and stretching in a wrong way could cause injury. I was not allowed to teach until I adjusted my attitude and understood the Right way. We were always holding our breath before swami showed up, and could first relax, when he was in a more or less friendly mood or had already had a couple of his angry fits. We were to do constant karma yoga, reading any books was not really accepted; it was forbidden to share, to talk about one’s experiences. The latter made kind of sense, as I believe that sharing too much can become a hindrance as we start wishing for some experiences, start making things up, or feel un-accomplished, not worthy. But it could also have clarified things, give some support at times of doubt and wonder. It’s a very delicate balance, as far as I can see. This constant shouting and anger, even when not aimed at oneself, was exhausting. I remember telling him at some point that his ways reminded me too much of the Soviet Union, where fear was the main way of keeping people under control and where learning meant learning by heart, never asking real questions, always aligning with some Party Truth. He was furious. “You are so wrong!” he shouted. “It’s nothing like that!” But his reaction proved my point. Listening wasn’t his strong side as far as I could see. It was always about some strategies, and it was often about money, having enough to manage, but never really enough. But what does enough mean? Is it ever enough when we focus at it?

One of the results of that kind of attitude was constant double-dealing and widespread double-standards: teachers preaching against smoking or drugs went out for a smoke in the forest, wearing gloves to keep the smell down; going out for a weekend and returning with hangovers hard to ignore; and so on and on. Swami pretended not to know about any of it. I also believe that if you put so much energy into fighting and breaking down anybody’s and everybody’s egos, you actually achieve the opposite - you make it grow, if not for other reason, then as a survival strategy. Anyway, understanding ego as something unambiguously negative, something you need to fight, was very common these days and in some circles, it still is. In my understanding, ego is a necessary tool to manage living in a society. Besides that, not everybody has to be constantly broken down, not everybody needs to be put down, ridiculed and shout at. There is all too much anger and fear without it, too much feeling unworthy, not lovable, not loved.

I remember seeing one of the older teachers fastening cords with hooks to some women under meditation, making them attached to him as he was taking their energy. When I confronted him with that, he went straight to swami, telling him I was mentally ill, imagining things or hallucinating. He mentioned I had to be taken to the nearest mental hospital. I saw things! Luckily, swami didn’t agree and later on I found books with drawings that looked exactly like my visions. They were made by clairvoyants. What I had seen was real enough, but clairvoyance was not a thing to be talked about or encouraged in the ashram. Yes, I still remembered how it was dealt with in the USSR: you were either put into a mental hospital or asked to join kgb and the institute of parapsychology. It’s all old news and my own direct experience. Double standards were the Normal there.

I left the ashram when swami meant I had bewitched the horses, as they always misbehaved, when he was angry with me. Well, maybe he was right; I genuinely loved taking care of them. I guess he didn’t know better; it had been the way he was brought up, and that had also been the way in the ashram in India, where he had spent a couple of years. With discipline and humiliation. We were told that we had to stay for at least ten years before we could start out on our own or teach meditation.

But despite everything, I am deeply grateful for that time, as it was also the time of deep silence for long periods and I learned to sit motionless like a rock for hours. And there is more: lately the question of belonging popped up in my life once again. Where do I belong? With whom? Where do I go for a reality check? - One of the deepest answers is that ashram, people I lived and worked together with there, the teachers and the teachings that stayed in my bones and heart. They are still my people and our differences of opinions don’t change a thing. They are my home.

And here I was, looking into the black eyes of a round Indian monk, who made me feel I was fine just the way I was. Instead of hardness and angry fits, there was softness, warmth, and caring. Baba brought healing into my life and nothing could ever change that. I loved the form of Kriya Yoga he taught. Practicing was no longer something I had to do; it was a pleasure, something I enjoyed and couldn’t be without. The latter never changed.

There were initiations and meditations, but also the rivalry that tends to be quite poisonous in relatively small groups around a spiritual leader. We knew very little about each-other; we had jobs, lived in different towns and the communication was mainly per e-mail. It wasn’t much of the community.

Some ten years later I traveled to Rishikesh to stay in Babas newly built ashram. There had been an invitation that also said that we shouldn’t bring chocolate, but rollerblades and iPads for children were most welcome. They didn’t have to be new.

The ashram was a beautiful vision, with a big meditation hall under the ground floor, where it was always cool and quiet. Baba and his closest teachers stayed there as well. As for the rest of the house, it was half finished in many places.

Baba seemed aged, burdened. I got to know that somebody had donated him a sizeable sum of money, but felt cheated and started a court case that had been going on for several years already. I wondered if I was to get better at listening to whispers and gossip.

One of the memorable moments was a lecture on the ground floor, where there was a small pool in the concrete with some fish swimming around in it. The problem was that the water was leaking out, and the fish were dying because of lack of oxygen. So Baba ordered some water pipes placed there to shift the water and a shower head, if I remember correctly. It took several days. The water was slowly leaking out into the floor around the pool. Then somebody said something about plants and some pots with soil and plants were put into the water, turning it all into a muddy mess with something invisible moving around in it. Nobody said a word. We were sitting on wet cold concrete looking at the pool, listening to Baba reading Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit and different guys reading the English version. - The same procedure was repeated many times. It was like a weird dream.

It got even stranger, when I saw women in long faded robes coming and going in Baba’s room, bringing food, clothes that they had ironed, washing his feet… Most of them were Russian and Russians also formed the biggest group of visitors. Except that there were always young boys sitting around in the room, drawing, reading.

I don’t know when the change had happened. I guess it was gradual, but the focus had gone from personal to prestige and numbers of foreign followers, having higher placement among other swamis in gatherings, being known…

I couldn’t stay there. It wasn’t anything for me. Was I disappointed? I am not sure. It wasn’t about the person. A simple man became a monk. The path was possibly chosen by his family. His mission was to help his society and his path brought him to Europe, where there were suddenly lots of women interested in him; there was chocolate, expensive watches, cars, computers and rollerblades and there was lots of money to be spent. Haven’t we heard this story again and again? He couldn’t resist. Then came accusations and court cases. He was not the first one to experience all that either. He had been innocent and then he wasn’t. Worlds collided, and he got caught in the machinery. I don’t think he saw it that way. Worshiping gurus was a part of the local culture. He seemed to mean he had deserved it all and that was an honor.

Many of his old European followers, who had been there from the founding days, left him because of the change, but new people flocked to him. The organization was growing, while the part that had drawn me to him corroded and fell apart. One of his closest students and a friend distanced himself and turned to Catholicism, he had grown up with. Still - love was there, flowing like Ganges underneath and through it all. He had given new life to my meditation practice. The essence of it all was and still is love, because awareness, as such, is love.