Dancing the Path of Love

 

MAHARAJI

Of all the chapters in this presentation, this one is the least integral, most easily skipped. Yet I feel it presents a very important background on where I’m coming from.

A totally different kind of Guidance needs to be mentioned. It is what you get when you devote yourself to a guru. Gurus generally put out suggestions or rules on how to behave, but because they are so focused on that stream of Divine energy that is keeping them alive, they often can do much more than this. For example, Ram Dass discusses instances where his guru could clearly read his mind or knew what was going to happen or could be completely unaffected by a large quantity of LSD. My devotion to Guru Maharaji also contained several instances of magic, guiding me to that ineffable experience that is beyond understanding.

I first heard Maharaji speak in 1972, when he was only 14, the boy guru. What he said made absolutely no sense to me. About a month later I was contacted by one of my former students, Doug Bernard. He said he had seen me at the Maharaji meeting and he had gone ahead and received the knowledge that Maharaji was offering. “This isn’t just in your head,” he said, “This is physical experience.” So what? It didn’t mean a thing to me. Maharaji may have been offering a physical experience of God, but at that point in my life I couldn’t imagine this was anything real.

The following April Doug was scheduled to speak at the West Hills Unitarian Fellowship, which I had been attending occasionally for a number of years. I made a point of going, curious as to how Doug’s strange trip was progressing. It turned out he didn’t speak, but sent four other devotees to speak for him. They were all glowing, obviously incredibly happy. I still didn’t understand exactly what they were offering, but I decided I wanted what they had; I wanted the happiness. I began to attend satsang. I had lots of questions, but I was told just to listen, and eventually all my questions would be answered. When the opportunity presented, I asked for knowledge.

When I received knowledge from one of Maharaji’s initiators on June 2, 1973, I was tremendously disappointed. The initiator, Swami Parlokanand, presented four meditation techniques, and for each technique he moved to each one of us individually and psychically transmitted a taste of what we would experience meditating.  I expected to experience some burst of white light as I had experienced with acid, but instead I received just a tiny glimmer. I picked up a six-pack of beer and some chocolate on the way home. But that tiny glimmer caught me. I started to meditate, and after a few weeks the experience began to come through. I attended satsang a couple nights a week, and I found I was becoming a little more stable, a little more centered.

In 1974 I decided to attend my first festival where there would be darshan, over the fourth of July in Amherst, Massachusetts. Darshan is a ceremony in which devotees receive the blessing of the master. I bought my ticket and was ready to go when my father was struck down by an undiagnosed intestinal illness. The doctors decided to pump out his stomach. My father hated doctors because of what they had previously incompetently done to him, and he objected. He couldn’t see how pumping out his stomach would lead to a diagnosis. The doctors proceeded anyway. My father fought it and vomited into his lungs, causing chemical pneumonia. He was in Intensive Care at death’s door.

I didn’t know what to do. I took some acid and meditated at his bedside for a couple hours, crying most of the time. At the end I received a very clear message from Maharaji that it was ok for me to go to the festival: my father would recover. I told my mother, who gave me her permission to go. I left on Thursday morning. On Friday the doctor told my mother that he was going away for the weekend, and could he have her permission to do an autopsy when he returned, since he still didn’t know what my father’s original problem was. Nevertheless, my father gradually recovered, and it eventually turned out that he had a perforated ulcer. He spent 45 days in Intensive Care before he was released, in part because he had extreme diarrhea. My father finally got himself together enough to read all the information about the medicines the doctors were giving him, and discovered the diarrhea was being caused by one of the medicines, confirming his opinion of doctors. But just as the Guidance I received predicted, he did get well.

Different gurus do darshan in different ways. For example, Rajneesh simply touched devotees’ third eyes, in the middle of their foreheads. Maharaji had devotees kiss his feet. I thought this was a pretty weird custom, but I knew I had learned and grown in the past year, and if this was how I was supposed to express my gratitude, I was whole heartedly into it. It takes a long time for 12,000 devotees to file past Maharaji and kiss his feet, so he was experimenting with how to speed up the process. He arranged for the devotees to line up on either side of some of the streets on the University of Massachusetts campus at Amherst. He then sat on a throne on a trailer drawn by a fancy tractor, with one foot on either side so that devotees on either side of the street would have a foot to kiss, and he could thus handle two at once. My friend Jim Galbraith and I waited for four and a half hours in 105 degree sun for Maharaji’s procession to pass by. To ward off the sun we made paper hats out of a newspaper, and were determined that we would let nothing freak us out.

Eventually the procession rounded the curve and came toward us. When it got about 30 feet away I was hit by a wave of energy as powerful as an ocean wave. It was all I could manage to bend down and kiss his feet. Then I collapsed on the pavement and cried. When I recovered and got up, I asked, “What was that?”

“Oh, didn’t you know?” a more experienced devotee answered. “That’s Holy Breath. That’s what happens the first time you go thru darshan.”

The experience was powerful, but it was also holy, blissful, magical. After that I wanted more of it, whenever I could get it. I started going to festivals as often as I could, and in 1977 I spent over $2500 in airfare, which was a lot of money in those days. However, I soon discovered that if I went thru darshan wanting the experience, I got nothing. The only way to receive the experience is to give Maharaji your love, expecting nothing in return. This proved to be very hard for me because I was so needy, so wanting the holy experience. Furthermore, in 1976 Patricia and I broke up by mutual agreement, even tho I was still totally in love with her and missed her terribly. It was so bad that every time I would see a car like hers – a 1965 tan Thunderbird – I would feel great pangs of loss. Despite meditating and attending satsang almost every night, I felt completely off center, tortured to the point of craziness.

In this state I flew to Rome to attend a major festival at the Sports Palace with 14,000 other devotees in October of 1977. I felt totally stressed. As we waited in line going up some steps to get in, I heard the rattle of someone’s beragon dropping onto the steps. A beragon is a T shaped frame we used to prop our elbows on when we meditated with our hands over our ears or eyes. They generally are in two pieces that fit together. Somebody dropped their beragon, I thought, what an idiot! Then someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Excuse me, did you drop this?”

Humbled, I walked up several flights of stairs and into the amphitheater, only to discover Patricia saving me a seat. The pangs of loving someone with all my soul and knowing it somehow couldn’t work! We took a horse-drawn coach ride that evening to view the sights of the city, and our guide took us to the Voice of Doom, which looked like a six or seven foot mill wheel with a carved face in the middle, a hole for his mouth. The guide said, “Put your hand in his mouth and ask a personal question. You will get an answer.”

I put my hand in the mouth of the Voice of Doom and asked if Patricia and I would ever get back together. Immediately I very clearly heard No! inside my head. I was devastated all over again, altho years later I realized that if Patricia and I had gotten back together, I never would have had all the wonderful relationships and adventures I have had since. But at the time I was crushed.

The next day Maharaji did darshan. I knew I was not in good shape to go thru darshan, but I did anyway. During darshan Maharaji generally kept his eyes downcast, in meditation. But when I approached, he gave me this intense stare, as if he could see right thru me, see how crazy I was. Then he turned his head and looked at the wall behind him. Again he stared right into me, seeing all the ugly craziness. Then again he turned to the wall behind him. I didn’t know what to make of this except that is was very very bad. I never heard of him doing anything like this! I felt like I was full of shit, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Of course I didn’t know then what I know now, so I was completely run by my emotions and thoughts.

A month later another program was held in St. Louis. I was still feeling just about as crazy, but I forced myself to go. When I went thru darshan, Maharaji again gave me that intense stare, again saying, how crazy are you! But then he lowered his eyes into a meditative pose, and inside my head I heard him say, “Just keep working on it.” I might as well have been struck by lightning. I staggered off the podium, somehow found my seat, and cried for a solid hour, all the pains, all the frustrations pouring forth. Afterward I felt much better. I knew what to do.

During the winter of 1978 I gradually improved. I entered into a deep relationship with beautiful red-haired Shirley, and that helped a lot. But I also kept meditating and kept going to satsang. I recorded some of the satsang and some of the singing, and even today they are powerful to hear. In May there was a major program in Montreal. As we flew in, we saw a full circle rainbow in the clouds below us. When I went to stand in line at the front door of the auditorium to get in, I noticed an open side door with no line at all, and slipped in very easily. After the program the first night, a large number of us took the subway back to our hotels. Someone started to hum one of the devotional songs we had all just sung, and immediately others picked up on it. Since we were all just humming, it was difficult to determine where the sound was coming from. The few Montreal residents on the subway looked around in amazement. What was happening? It was a magic moment, far better than the staged performances of supposedly spontaneous singing currently available on UTube. Things were going very well indeed!

When I went thru darshan, I didn’t expect anything unusual to happen. There was Maharaji, sitting with his eyes downcast as usual. But almost as soon as I entered his purview, he looked up at me, not the heavy stare but a look of kindness. It was just a quick look, and then he resumed meditation. I took a couple more steps in the slow moving line and he looked at me again, quickly, slightly quizzical, kind. A few steps later he looked at me a third time, in the same way. Just before I kissed his feet I looked up at him, and he was looking at me again! After kissing his feet, I could not help myself. I looked up at him, and he was looking at me for the fifth time. I fainted.

It’s the only time in my life I have ever fainted. My knees buckled under me. I thought, I don’t need to do this, and then I was briefly unconscious on the floor. They carried me off to the recovery room. I was in a state of holy bliss. Clearly I had just received Maharaji’s blessing in overwhelming abundance! I remained blissed out for the remainder of the program.

Nevertheless, I found myself asking, where do I go from here? I had experienced enough of that holy vibration in meditation so that I knew it was real, solid, utterly quiet, peaceful, and basic. Sometime during that summer of 1978 I realized I no longer had any doubt about the existence of God. I was feeling God keeping me alive inside myself. I started writing poetry:

No Separation

I am here

in the deepest part of my beauty

looking upward and out

through this creation

called man.

I want to create him

clear & clean & capable,

as perfect and beautiful as I can.

I want his head to be filled with wisdom

and his life with love and laugher.

I want him to discover the exquisite pleasure

of grokking his fellow beings,

and to look carefully

into his origin

to see that I am he,

no separation between the Creator and the Created

but one being

acting out his humanness

from his ultimate source.

During the following two years I wrote over a hundred poems. I’m not saying they’re great poetry, they’re not, but they expressed a sense that I had gotten myself together to a certain point. What further need did I have of Maharaji? Where did the path lead if I continued to be his devotee? I had a sense that the only way I could progress further as a devotee was to give my love fully and personally to Maharaji. If I did, I might experience more and higher levels of bliss. But it didn’t feel quite right. Give my total love to God, yes, but to another human being, no. Now that I was in tune with the Divine Energy that is keeping me alive, I wanted to go out and save the world, put an end to the distrust and wars among humans, persuade everyone to treat everyone with love and respect.

In February of 1979 I decided to leave Maharaji. This was such a momentous decision after six years of dedication that I decided to give myself six months to consider it, just to make sure I was making the right decision. I continued to meditate and go to satsang, and the satsang seemed just as precious as ever, devotees talking about their experience with knowledge. Some of the women used to go around the neighborhood asking flowers if they would like to be on Maharaji’s altar and then picking them. No one ever objected.

In October Maharaji scheduled a program in the old Paramount Theater in Portland, just a few blocks from where I was living. How serendipitous! I could go thru darshan one last time and ask Maharaji in my head if it was appropriate for me to leave. And just to make sure I heard the answer, I decided to take acid, which I had never done at a program before. Knowing that darshan always takes several hours, I wanted to plan this trip so that I would be peaking on the acid just as I went thru darshan. Darshan generally started with the front rows on the right or left side of the hall, so I decided to sit in the back row in the middle. That way it would take a couple hours for the ushers to get to my row, and I could take the acid just as darshan began.

At the appointed time, the ushers started to take the first rows on the right side of the theater. Accordingly, I popped the acid. But after taking only two rows, the ushers came to my row. I hadn’t even begun to get off, and I was being taken to darshan! I did my best to ask my question. Maharaji was sitting in meditation. He didn’t look at me. But it seemed to be all right to leave if that’s what I wanted to do. I kissed his feet and walked out of the theater, feeling very puzzled. I hadn’t caught any sense that I should not leave Maharaji, so I did. There were no thunder claps, I did not get hit by a car. I proceeded with my own life.

A couple years later I told my friend Hans about this event, and only then did I get it. What a dummy I am! By having the ushers take me before I had gotten off on the acid, Maharaji was clearly telling me that I am always in his hands, whether I leave my devotion or not. A couple years after that, the event with the magic mushroom tea took place, which I wrote about in Guidance, completely confirming that I am always in his hands. I still have a couple of photos of Maharaji in my altar space, and it would not surprise me if I heard more from him before I pass out of this life. He blesses us with his love, and he gives us a direct experience of the primordial vibration, which enables us to understand what we are. He certainly showed me that he has a considerable capacity for what I might call Psychic Guidance, one more demonstration of how subtle our reality may actually be. I shall always be grateful to him.

Please send questions or comments to  

donangelo@spiritualadventurer.com