THE BEGINNING OF A PERSONAL SPIRITUAL PATH---BY GANASHYAM DAS
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PART TWO-WRITTEN IN JAN 97-NOT FINISHED YET-PART ONE NOT STARTED YET-
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I lived in a 4 person intentional community/extended family for
about 5 1/2 years. 4 1/2 years of that time, we lived on and owned a paid
for 160 acre farm near the canadian border in northern Minnesota. We grew
about 80 percent of our own food, including our own meat.
We ate a lot of meat.

In 1974 I had left the farm and went to California to work for a while and
make money to build a "private cabin" on the farm. In the winter of 1975 I
returned to the farm for a week and ended my involvement with the group and
returned to California to live and to my job as an electronics engineer
working for a small high tech company in  Sunnyvale California.

I was a lone wolf type seeker of truth and wisdom. I had no interest in
being part of any spiritual group or the follower of any teacher.
I had just gone through about a year of intense working on myself with
dreams, self-hypnosis, a type of meditation I had read in a book, and
the study of a lot of psychology research, dream research, and various
scriptures.
I was attempting to understand myself better and understand some of the
experiences I had gone through. It was a year of much continual internal
change and growth for me. 

Then I experienced a period of about 3 plus months of nothing seeming to 
change inside. I was doing the same practices I had been doing but with no
results.
I got really bummed out about this and one night in my small apartment,
I kind of threw myself on the floor in the dark and yelled out "help".
I meant that cry for help with all my being. I felt much better after
doing this and kind of forgot about it for the next 3 weeks. But in those
three weeks a number of strange situations happened....I will not go into
those situation now.

Then a "faerie tale" happened to me, a thing so strange that if you read
such a tale in a book story in a book, you would likely say to yourself,
"Yah what bull shit."
The fairy tale resulted in me picking up a woman who was hitchhiking on that
sunday afternoon. She said she need to go to Berkeley California, over 2
hours drive from where I picked her up. She asked me to please take her
there. She was not very talkative at first, but as we continued on,
she began to open up to me. She said she had been in the desert on kind
of a pilgrimage. That she had has a vision while in the desert, that told
her she was to go to a certain a city in Oregon and that there she would
meet a specific man there who she would marry and be with the
rest of her life. She said she had to go to Berkeley to some things she
had left there with a friend. While she were were talking, I kept looking
at her eyes, they were strange-she had shining eyes. I had never seen eyes
like hers-shiny. I though to myself, maybe she is stoned out of her mind.
But she did not act stoned at all. She seemed very centered and at peace.

We finally we got to berkeley and arrived at her friend's house.
We went in and I kind of hung out while they talked about stuff.
THe couple who lived there also had shiny eyes. It was weird.
Then we all shared some food. After we had eaten the 3 of them were
across the room talking for a while and occasionally looking over at me.
I heard the woman I had picked up say, do you really think we should ask him?

Then woman came over to me and said, we want to go see our teacher for a
little while. His place is close to here. Would you like to come with us.
I thought, what the hell, my plans for the day are already toast, so I
said sure. She said it is customary to the teacher a little gift one 
visits him. Would you taking an orange and giving it to him ? 
I said sure, why not. So we got in my car and dove to a place in Oakland 
just across the Berkeley/Oakland city border.

We parked the car and entered a up huge building. I noticed how clean the
street and sidewalks were near the building. Unusual for Oakland.

The place was called an ashram. It was a residence for about 300 plus
people and their teacher, one Swami Muktananda. 

The place was really weird to me. You had to take off your shoes and
check them when you walked in. There were many pictures hanging on the walls
of strange looking men. Many people were coming in and checking their shoes
and heading down a wide hallway. Some of the men were wearing eastern
style clothing and some of the women were wearing saris.
The people were very quiet, not normal for so large a group of people.
I felt uncomfortable there. Many were carrying a flower, fruit, and other
small things in their hands.

The place was very crowded, I lost sight of the woman who had brought me
there as all of us walked down the hallway and into a open area as
big as a very large dance hall. Many people were already sitting down on
the carpeted floor cross legged. There was a woman's and a men's side to
this huge room.I tried to see where the woman who brought me was, but was
unable to locate her, so I went and sat down on the men's side.

It was very quiet in the room, almost no one at all was talking. There was
a small raised area in the front of the room with hugh padded chair and a
couple of small tables next to it. The tables had a number of objects on
them. One was a blue glass thing with a live flame in it.
Eventually everyone was sitting down. The room smelled of a strongly of a
strange incense.

A man with a shaved head, dressed in orange robes walked into the front
of the room, up onto the raised area and did a kind of little hop and
landed sitting in the padded chair in full lotus position.

What little noise in the room had stopped immediately when the man in
the robes walked in. There was a space between the two sides of the room
left as a wide center walkway for people to walk from back to front of
the room.
Suddenly a lot of loud noises started happening. People clapping in
unison, a couple people were blowing horns of made of some kind of big shells,
some were ringing bells, some using hand cymbals being struck, and 2 were
beating drums. The amount of noise all this caused was awesome.
This continued  for a few minutes and then stopped.

When the noises stopped, all the people in the hall all chanting together
loudly in a strange language. It was a long chant, about 20 minutes.
When this chant ended, A woman walked from the rear of the room carrying a
tray with a burning flame of some sort on it and strong incense billowing
up from an another object on the tray. She stopped in front of the man in
orange robes and started waving the tray in some sort of a circle pattern
as everyone in the room starting chanting a different chat of some sort.
a constantly repeated part of the chant was,

"JYOTA SE JOYTA JAGAVO, SATAGURU JOYTA SE JYOTA JAGAVO"

This chanting was very passionate. I did not understand a word but the
sounds were very beautiful, and it all was very very strange to me !

When the chant was done, the woman returned to the back of the room.
The people started chanting again. A woman in the front of the room was
playing some kind of a air powered keyed musical instrument with the chanting.
They did several different fast chants.

Then the main lights dimmed and they did a long slow chant for about 5 minutes
in the semi dark.

"OM NAMA SHIVIA" they chanted, over and over. The words were reverberating off the ceiling as was the sound of some stringed instrument.

The only light then came from some small blue bulbs on the walls.
When this chant ended, everyone closed their eyes and a meditation period was
started. The meditation period was about about 15 minutes.
There was sufficient light so i could see fairly well in the room.
I was looking around at everything and everybody, taking it all in.

Then I looked at the man in the robes, at his face and my mouth fell
open ! For as I looked at his face, it changed...it be came the face of
a beautiful woman, then of a young boy, then an old woman,  then an old
bearded man, then a man with glasses....face after face. I was blown
away....this lasted about 5 minutes or more and then it stopped.

I figured I was hallucinating. The meditation time ended and the lights came
full up.

People were getting up and making two lines in the center aisle, a woman's
line and and a man's line, down to the front of the room.
The front two people in the line would walk up to the man in the oranges
robes, kneel and present something to him. A flower, piece of fruit, a piece
of paper, and other small things. He would speak to some of them and they
would answer, leave the line and go back to where they had been sitting
and sat down. I was watching everything intently.

Then I felt something, an unknown something from my left. I turned and now
sitting next to me was a woman in a sari. This is strange I thought.
I had already seen that the women and men appeared to always stayed on their
own sides of the room.

She was looking directly at me intensely and said,"how did you get here?".
My mind went quickly through the events-the fairy tale-that brought me to
this weird place, I did not know what to say, that would not have her think
I was some crazy nut case. Then I looked directly into hers eyes, her eyes
were shiny like the eyes of the woman who had brought me, but about ten
times shinier. So I said what popped into my mind. "A woman with shiny eyes 
brought me here." A big smile appeared on her face and she laughed loudly.
It appeared she seemed to fully understand what had happened, from my
spontaneous short statement. 

She said,"would you like to meet BABA"?. Being somewhat disturbed by the
situation, the people and the previous events of the day, I said,
"who the hell is baba"?

She pointed at the man in the orange robes and said, "we call him BABA,
it means father in sanskrit." He is our teacher". "He is a very special 
being and knows everything!" " You can ask him anything you want to know
and he will know the answer to your question.

I thought why not and said,"o.k."

We walked to the lines and joined them. The woman kept changing places
in her line, jockeying to stay next to me, as some men or woman stayed
longer in front of the teacher than the the person they were next to.
As I was slowly moving up in the line many thoughts rolled quickly through
my mind, many questions I had about many things came up in my mind.
Shortly before I came in directly in front of him, I thought If he knows
everything, then I do not have to ask him anything, he will know
what I need.

This was the thought in my mind as I came forward and stood before him.

I kneeled in front of him, as I had seen the others in front on me do,
and layed down the piece of fruit I had been given to give to him,
by the woman who had brought me to the place, in one of the baskets that
I had seen the others in front of put what they were carrying in.
The baskets were full of such things.

He asked me where I was from. I answered. He made kind of a grunting noise.
He asked me who had brought me to him.
I answered. He made the grunting noise again.

Then he leaned forward and looked deeply, looked very intently into my eyes
for a few moments.

Then he pointed at me with the index finger of his right hand and said to me
in a very strong commanding voice,

"YOU COME HERE FRIDAY AND SPEND THE WEEKEND HERE."

He kind waved me off, like dismissing me. I headed back to were i had been
sitting and sat down. I was very angry.

I was thinking, Who the hell did this guy think he was, ordering me like
I was some little kid. Then I noticed that the woman who had gone up with me,
had come back with me and had again sat down beside me.

She was animated, all excited. She said to me, "you must come here for the
weekend, like he told you too. This is very important, there is an
intensive this weekend. I was angry, I said what the hell is an intensive ?

She said, "an intensive is an initiation.
I have been living here for 8 months serving MY BABA and I have never ever
heard him order anyone to come to an intensive before."

I told her I did not understand all this. she said, "you do not have to
understand, just come here and experience it and wait to think about it
and to try to understand it later.
If in the intensive he touches you, something unbelievable may happen.
Please, just come and let it happen, this is very important.
Just come and after its all over you will understand."

So I asked her what I had to do. She told me to go to the business desk
up near where the shoes were kept and sign up for the weekend intensive.
Then she left me.

The man in the robes had left the room by this time and the people were
milling around and leaving.

I did not see the woman I had come with. I found the business desk.
I was told if I wanted to take part in the intensive I had to join
the siddha yoga foundation...25 dollars please and the cost to attend
the intensive on the coming weekend was 75 dollars please. 
I was still a little angry. I said I will think about it. I looked for the
woman I had come with and again could not find her. The place was emptying
out by then, so I went and retrieved my shoes, put them on and left the place
found my car and drove the several hours back to Los Altos Hills where my
apartment was. I never saw the woman who brought me again.

In the next few days, I went round and round in my head, should I go or not?
Should I spend a whole hundred dollars to go spend a weekend there?
Finally I decided to go, drove to the place in Oakland, paid my money and 
drove back home.

Well in retrospect....I almost missed the most important event in my whole
life, so far, because I did not want spend one hundred dollars to be at
that strange place for a weekend !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!