Shaktipat

Shaktipat:

In our dormitory was a manuscript of a book that Baba had written about his relationship with his  Guru and his subsequent fulfillment of his meditation practice.  I started taking pages of the manuscript  and reading it.  It was narrated in a devotional voice as Baba had dictated it to one of his students.

  

This was so personal and it was a genuine manual to the relationship with a teacher, how Baba had practiced and what kind of extraordinary experiences unfolded in this mysterious process.

One day I read about how Baba used to sit in the temple of his Guru Nityananda in Ganeshpuri and practice Guru bhav , identifying his body and mind with his teacher.  He described how he touched each part of his body and imagined that Nityananda existed within him. It seemed like he was effacing himself and replacing his sense of self with his Guru’s consciousness.  That seemed to be his main meditation technique.

So I decided to try it.  I walked down the stairs and entered into the marble meditation veranda that was outside of Baba’s rooms, and surrounded the tiny little original hut that Nityananda had given him, and in which he had done much meditation practice.  I sat down close to the door of his room.  I sat up in a firm  lotus posture, and began to say to myself, “Muktananda is in my calves, my thighs, my arms are no different from him, my life force itself is none other than his consciousness.” It seemed a strange thing to do at first, but clearly this was a secret method he had revealed. The book had not even been  published yet, we had a copy of the English translation  and I was fortunate enough to receive this secret teaching...,”Muktananda is in my heart, my brain, “ I was getting into it.

Then I heard the door to Baba’s room open, he came striding  out.  He often had this habit of walking around the verandah and observing people’s meditation.  He came and stood close to me , I felt very nervous and excited at the same time.  I opened my eyes, and Baba took my chin and tipped my head back, looking into my eyes.  Suddenly there was a stream of light flowing from his eyes into mine.   That light dissolved any sense of individuality I could have held on to, my awareness expanded out into a vast universe.  It seemed like there were vast endless worlds, containing all the elements and creatures of the world, all composed of light.  Baba chuckled a bit and continued walking around the verandah.

 Some kind of strange sound  seemed to come from deep within me, like the sound of creation itself, a universal howl.  As it moved through me it took on the form of intense energy, every solid cell in my body became electrified and radiant.  I sat there for some time, then got up and walked out of the meditation room, and up the stairs to the roof of our dormitory.  Nothing looked familiar, everything had taken on the form of light and energy, and there seemed to be no boundaries of form, everything seemed translucent.  I went back to the  little space that defined my world, my  3 x 6 bed and lay there for a long time, with no trace of individual  identification. I seemed to have become the universe itself.  Slowly over the next couple of days, my consciousness began to shrink back into some kind of individuality. 

I continued reading Baba’s spiritual autobiography and began to understand this experience I had had was termed shaktipat, a kind of spiritual awakening that activated my own Kundalini energy which is undifferentiated from universal energy. 

And now  to complicate life in the ashram  even more, for the next  three  years  I had ongoing  bizarre  inner meditation experiences  that at times felt like hallucinations.  Reality was constantly blurring for me.  I wept continuously for a year.  At first the tears seemed to be connected to my own life disappointments around love;  then it seemed to be my mother’s suffering that I had witnessed and felt so much empathy for;  then it seemed to be for the suffering condition of all of humanity. Not only the poverty I was acutely aware of in India, but also the shallow lives of the people I had socialized and worked with in New York and Los Angeles, blindly searching for happiness in sex, drugs and rock and roll, which were the opiates of my generation.

  

Had this occurred to me in the west I am sure I would have been hospitalized for a  psychotic break, and given some mind-numbing medications to pacify me.  Fortunately I was in an ashram with a wise and kind guru who even though I had arrived a stranger on his doorstep looked after me with absolute kindness and generosity  for the l2 years that I was his student.  The Indian devotional philosophy encourages one to relate to a teacher as a divine father, utilizing ones basic  natural emotions.  Baba responded with tremendous kindness mixed with strict discipline.   His therapy  was one part absolute  unconditional love with two parts strict discipline and he set the bar  high. The result of reaching up to his standards, ultimately established valuable habits and ethics that replaced many  of my  previous neuroses.

   

Ultimately I didn’t know why I was weeping except  rather than sadness I began to be aware of a growing sense of  joy.   It just seemed like my heart was opening profoundly.  I no longer could define myself by any familiar boundaries, but the kind of tender and poignant emotions and feelings that were moving through me as a result of this life in the ashram seemed to be oddly familiar.  They were evoked at the sight of a beautiful monsoon sunset with extraordinary cloud formations; at the fragrance of the delicate  monsoon flowers, at the sounds of  beautiful classical Indian music  or devotional songs sung by one of the ashramites that often resounded from the temple during our morning work periods.  I began to appreciate that Indian culture evokes a rich variety of subtle feelings, in fact the various ragas of  classical  Indian music are specifically written to evoke those subtle  spiritual states . 

Throughout this time,  Baba was  like a warm  solicitous father. He watched and responded to my travails with kind, unconditional loving.   When I struggled with a low self esteem he reinforced a positive self identity within me. When I was terribly spaced out,   he guided  me to stop meditating, to do some garden work to ground me, and then gave me a job of writing down his words in the weekly question and answer sessions. That work  required concentration and attentiveness which was helpful  as I often felt overwhelmed by the energy  around him. 

Baba  assured me that the  experiences  I was having were due to the arising of previous karmas stored in  the unconscious  after the activation of the Kundalini the inner spiritual energy that is the result of yogic practices and contact with Gurus of his tradition.  He advised that I I should not pay too much attention to the content, just allow whatever feelings arose to just pass out.   That  process process of purification  had begun from  several  occasions  when he spontaneously gave me shaktipat, looking into my eyes, or touching me for a long time on the forehead  as I was meditating  in the meditation  verandah. 

That writing work kept me in touch with reality I think, as I wrote a report for the ashram newsletter published in English, and  transcribed  the question and answer sessions that he gave. My mother had insisted that I take shorthand and typing classes so I would always be able to get a good job.  Here in the ashram the shorthand came in very handy.  For years around Baba   I painstakingly wrote  everything down in  shorthand, typed  them out on an ancient  typewriter, and  went over the translations with Professor Jain.

These  transcribed teachings   ultimately were published as  the series of books “Satsang with Baba” volumes  1 thru 5 chronicling life in the ashram during  the period of l97l- l974.   We hardly edited Baba’s words,  and  also  retained the names of the questioners.   Those volumes with the particular questions the residents and guests asked, along with Baba’s answers really gave a good picture of   life in the ashram  for the residents during that period, prior to the arrival of huge numbers of western students which greatly changed the ashram environment.