The Bengali sage and teacher Ciranjiva Roy (born in Varanasi Dec. 11, 1913, left his body in attainment of mahasamadhi, San Francisco, March 22, 1981) was fully awakened at the midnight hour of June 14-15, 1966. He entered a trance state that lasted more than 3 terrestrial months, in which all pre-existing knowledge was synthesized and he was given a vision of the conscious evolution of humanity into the next 164,000 years, a period comprising a new age named Siva Kalpa, "the period of Lord Siva's omnipotent imagination." He was able to communicate the vision beginning September 19th, 1966 (from which the new year of the first year of Siva Kalpa is reckoned) and did so continuously, sometimes for days on end without sleeping, until the above mentioned passing of his form at which time the communication returned to its supraphysical methods.
Ciranjiva lived with his family in utter poverty in the village of Gorkhara, district 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India. Towards the end of October, 1968, a spiritual summit conference, sponsored by the Temple of Understanding, based in Washington D.C., was held in Calcutta. The conference was attended by Pir Vilayat Khan, Sri Chinmayananda, Thomas Merton and other recognized spiritual adepts of the day. It's proceedings were interrupted one afternoon by the appearance of a white bearded beggar who humbly asked to address the conference. This was Ciranjiva Roy. He was told that the agenda was full and answered that it was all right as he had "other ways by which he could communicate." Several California delegates to the conference were intrigued with the beggar and followed him to his village and began to absorb his revelations of the new period of time. Many westerners followed and Ciranjiva and his family moved to larger quarters in the village. In August of 1969 Ciranjiva was brought by his devotees to San Francisco, California, and in May of 1971 the rest of his family migrated there.
Ciranjiva was tireless in his communication of Truth, Knowledge, Power and Love. His every thought, speech and action exemplified the consciousness of a supreme yogi committed to the highest spiritual truths and unattached to the results or fruits of his actions. The form of divinity that spoke and acted through him, he insisted, was Lord Siva Himself. His methods were most unorthodox. With the exception of the short document entitled Siva Kalpa he left no writings. Most devotees were drawn to him by the compelling nature of his words and loving personality. Many hundreds of people around the planet knew him personally. No one learned of him via media nor subscribed to any courses taught by his followers. No money was ever charged for his teachings. Everyone who knew him felt like a member of his own family and indeed referred to Ciranjiva as "Father." He drew to him mostly those counter-cultural youth known as "hippies", whom he saw as the apprehensive children of the atomic age and whom he constantly reassured. A prime message of his is that we are actually gods and goddesses who have fallen asleep into a mortal dream and that the ignorant nightmare of our times will force our reawakening to our true divine and immortal nature. His main mantra is "Bom Shankar Bholenath" which he translates as "Wake up my Self-oblivious gods and goddesses."
The pages of this web site are dedicated to giving expression to the thought, speech and action of Siva still being constantly broadcast to those aspirants sensitive to supraphysical communication "beyond the conceptual opposites of existence or non-existence of Ciranjiva."
The following is a chapter excerpted from Harvey Meyers' account of his meeting with Ciranjiva in 1968. Better known as Hari, Mr. Meyers was one of the first westerners to be drawn to Ciranjiva and to live with the family in India. The book Hariyana was first published in 1979, contains 246 pages, with 10 illustrations and is an account both of one man's personal journey towards God and an historical recreation of Father's first communications to his western devotees. The book can be ordered by sending $15 (which includes $3 for postage and handling) by check to the author:
Harvey Meyers
1105 Wagnon Road
Sebastopol, Ca. 95472
t is common in hotels such as the Astoria that the doors to the rooms are split vertically and open out onto the corridor. Either a bolt or a chain will run across both halves of the door, and this would be crudely padlocked if the occupants were out. The doors to this room stood open as they had the day before, and the green curtain which hung just within was waving slightly, in response, perhaps, to an intense energy within. These curtains seemed to part of their own accord as we approached, beckoning us in. Neither a knock upon the door frame nor any sort of introduction seemed necessary. We made the transition from the hallway without effort and found ourselves within the room, comfortable and familiar in an instant, as though we had indeed been expected.
"For Thine is the kingdom and the glory forever," came the bass of Don McCoy's voice, and I saw him at the head of the bed close a book and place it upon a nightstand.
"And are these the toilers of the field?" Shotsy asked as we entered. She stood to one side at the foot of the bed and was clasping her hands as she began to pace. Though obviously high
strung, she did not seem as tense as she had yesterday, for she did not seem so much to be wringing her hands as merely keeping a good grip upon herself. Never fully relaxed, she struck me as an operatic singer about to step on stage; an after dinner speaker, perhaps, who no matter how prepared or well rehearsed could not quite take the address as a matter of course.
"Are these the troops passing for review?" she continued. "Thank you, foot soldiers and volunteers, shock waves of consciousness: thanks for absorbing all this. What a heavy duty to draw. Really, I don't know how you've done it out here. I'd have gone mad for sure. . . Oh, my goodness!" She began to laugh, taking note, I assumed, of the incongruity of our party and the absurd costuming in which we seemed to present ourselves before her. I wore a faded maroon robe, actually just a cotton kurta I had had made extra long like a nightshirt when I foresaw my wardrobe dwindling to a single all-purpose garment. Jim Shaw was dressed western, a short sleeved tailored shirt and plaid slacks. Also, his wire framed glasses made him appear a touch out of place in our company. The Baul was in ochre-dyed rags, and his wild hair was done up with crimson ribbons that fairly screamed with an eccentricity bordering on madness.
The party already assembled in the room was pretty much what it had been the day before. John O'Shea was there, seated on the floor beyond the bed. Long strands of his pale-orange hair lay over a naked shoulder. He was partly wrapped in a beige shawl, and the upper edge of his marine corps tattoo was just visible. His attitude was one of extreme absorption, but there was nothing tense or taut about him. Dr. Prasad too was present, seated upon a chair to our left. His pose was not relaxed. He fidgeted with impatience, possibly boredom. Both he and John were looking towards Father who was seated this time at the foot of the bed. His back was towards us, and he was facing Don McCoy. This giant was sprawled over the center and monopolized the greater part of the bed. There was something in Don McCoy that suggested he believed the show to be his, and that the rest of us were welcome to witness it, even participate, but the intensity of his attitude, the concentration of his iron-fixed
gaze, seemed to demand all Father's attention of the moment and to permit the others only peripheral roles. Buz, who looked a bit recovered from his dysentery, or less pale at any rate, sat upright on a small edge of bed to Don's left. Sheila stood between Prasad and Father like a dancer poised briefly between measured movements, and Shotsy paced the area of floor between Father's back and the doorway through which we had just entered.
The moment I am now describing appears to me, not only in memory but at the time of its actual transpiring, to be a sort of single frame extracted from my movie of life. Everyone seemed frozen in their actions, arrested from movement, presenting themselves as a group portrait for my leisurely and even static consideration. Sound too seemed to cease; breath, pulse, even time itself were suspended. I felt that a lot more than myself had entered the room with me. My brother Rich was present somehow, perhaps peering through the windows of my eyes in assured anticipation that a significant encounter, indeed even one of his cherished epiphanic moments, was about to ensue. This same expansion of my perception, this same dissolution of my rational cognition, this implied transfiguration of my very identity I had experienced in this same room the day before, and now it was happening again. I felt embarrassed to have blundered into this precious moment in so rag-tag a manner, ashamed to have stumbled upon it yet a second time so ill prepared. Perhaps I could adjust myself before the action would again resume, strike a more fitting devotional posture, before time, pulse, sound and breath would all proceed to unreel themselves towards the inexorable conclusion of this extended moment.
I would pay my respects to Father. That was the key. A sincere pranam, an obeisance of some sort seemed appropriate. In order to namaskar Father then, I had to move around Shotsy and step in front of Sheila. I barely saw his face as I bowed my head and pressed the palms of my hands together. "I have brought a friend with me," I thought I would say, in way of introducing Jim, and faltered for a moment to figure out a way to account for the Baul's presence. An apology hovered, a hope that we had not disturbed . . . what? I was not sure. . a communion that I, hav-
ing often sought myself, should not have taken for granted, or disregarded, or. . . Words are not necessary in the presence of a Master.
Next I felt a strong urge to touch his feet. My hands were already temptingly close, since Father was seated cross-legged upon that end of the bed. To touch an elder's feet is both the most elementary and cardinal sign of respect, a show of regard and reverence that is assumed as the basic ingredient of manners and good breeding. Every Hindu does it at least ten times a day - to his father, mother, eldest brother, to a host of aunts and uncles, schoolmasters, and to a guru, certainly, should he be blessed enough to have found one. I had stayed some months in an ashram in Ujjain, and the monks there were always requesting that I greet them so. Yet I could never bring myself to do it, perhaps because I had not mastered my western rebellious streak that made me shun what I thought was petty and pompous. And more than that, I did not feel that I had the right to do it.
"Leave them something," I had thought. "We wear their clothes, eat their food, invoke the names of their gods; leave them something." There was a part of me that yearned to do it, imagined myself a fine brahmin boy with sacred thread, but balked at cheapening, as I imagined, the inarguable ancientness and fragile dignity of their lives with this final imitative gesture. But with Father and in that moment it was altogether different. I felt compelled to touch his feet in a genuine surrender and awe which I fervently prayed would ripen into love.
Instantly his hands caught mine and stopped me from completing the genuflection. It all occurred quite quickly but in no manner was it rough. No, it was rather one of the most gentle and tender actions I have ever remembered. My face was drawn upwards so that my gaze passed over his hands and arms and up towards his shoulders, to become absorbed in the celestial clouds of beard that seemed to float like mist about the large rudraxa1 beads of his mala2. Above that I remember a pair of
1the seed pod of a plant sacred to Siva
2 a necklace with holy significance: something akin to a rosary
lips, softly pursed, the umbered tone of skin about his cheeks which seemed to me to shine like burnished gold, and finally I was looking directly into his eyes.
It all happened for me in that moment. I understood everything in that instant, though to comprehend in truth that understanding and to make it active and viable in the reflexes of my own existence has become the work of my years since, and I can conceive no end to it. All sages and rishis3 say that mind can not truly comprehend It and that thought and voice can never adequately express It; yet once felt and understood, there is nothing else worth expressing, and this very account and recollection is but an attempt to justify the perception of It in my form. Such moments are grace-granted and can not be commanded at will, and what I wish to tell you is that in that blessed moment I saw in the wave lengths between his eyes and mine the entire warp and woof of my world.
It was as though a single thread had been pulled at the center of the intricately embroidered carpet of my vision. I saw the entire pattern of my perceptions pull itself into nothingness upon that single thread. and from the edges of that cosmic loom working centerward I saw it all reconstruct itself with an impalpable but distinctly divine variation upon the theme. Maya danced and revealed so many aspects to me. This dissolve and reconstruction was circular in the extended peripheries of my vision, which broke into more and more disparate particles further from and nearer to the center of sight between us, which was at least a magnetic field, force current, call it what you will, this intense beam of recognition which had drawn me through innumerable circuitous and random-seeming routes from time immemorial to this very moment which was, and is, and ever shall be the eternal moment of existence.
Overwhelmed. I sank back, knelt for a moment, and finally sat upon the floor.
"What is it," Father asked, "that distinguishes this moment in reality from a dream? "The past is now a dream, the future is but a dream to come, so what is now? It also is a dream, but a dream
3 a seer.
which we contract to call and feel as real within our collective cognition of it. Right? You see, you have a dream, and while you are dreaming, you are not aware that it is but a dream. You see so many inconsistencies and absurdities in it that it seems preposterous that even while dreaming you could have been foolish enough to take it as real. So is the life you have just led. As you look upon it now, you will see that there was nothing to enjoy or suffer in that really ridiculous dream. What was it really but a dream of ignorance, petty strife, small incongruous pleasures, enormous and persistent pain - but I don't have to tell you or you wouldn't be here to awaken from it.
"To wake from that life into this life is so easy and so glorious. but takes again a contract in collective cognition, a conscious one this time, to make it real. We must agree to enjoy this reality together. Believe me, I have seen it all; I have done it alone, but it is so lonely!
"HOW could I wake you? You were each of you - and so was myself, more than anybody; please do not think it is this form that is speaking - so caught up in those dreams, and one dream just led into another, so that there was no way of getting in touch with each other. So, we made that dream so hard to endure, so insufferable, a nightmare even. . is that what it became, a nightmare? Say 'no'? You know when you have a nightmare, how you sort of force yourself' to wake up. Well, that's what we did. Thank you. Kali4. You did well, Kali, but the nightmare is over."
His eyes closed a moment, and he himself seemed to drift in the remembrance of it.
"When the nightmare has become apprehensive enough to shake us from that lethal slumber and we wish to dream it no more, what then are we to dream? Why, the eternal dream of bliss. of course. But how to keep from dreaming that mortal dream of self-denial once again? Well, in truth, you cannot cease from dreaming it for all time. There are only mortal and immortal dreams to be dreamt. They complement each other in
4 the last age, the darkest period of the Involution of consciousness is ruled by the goddess Kali, a frightening and destructive aspect of Siva's consort.
truth and each must have their sway upon the dreamer according to the time. The power to break that cycle will not be granted you. But you have just emerged from the nightmare of mortality into the self-conscious blissful existence of immortal gods and goddesses.
"Lend me your forms," he pled in a half whisper "and I will make them glorious. Your job" - his voice returned to its full authoritative tone - "is to make real the existence of gods and goddesses upon this planet. This reality, let us call it a dream no longer, you will enjoy for 164,000 years. Born Shankar Bholenath!
"The green curtains parted, and Richard Home, Lynne, Annalise, and Chris from downstairs all entered.
"More grist for the mill," Shotsy giggled. "Fuel for the fire."
"Isn't it wonderful," Sheila began "that we are all here in this room together once again?"
"Whoowee!!" Don McCoy shouted, "Are you washed in the blood of the lamb, brother?"
Jim Shaw in his vulnerable and suggestive state began to babble aloud his rambling thoughts as the energy swept him up. "Burn it down! That's right. It's all a burn down or a rip-off, right padre?" He'd gasp and blurt these expressions without any obvious context; he seemed particularly anxious to maintain communion with me and for me to share his cryptic insights. "Did you catch that red beam he just threw out? Can you dig the destruction of that beam? Burn down! But that green ray she's putting out might cool it. That's thought. The red is action." John O'Shea grinned broadly. He offered a sincere namaskar in my direction and then winked. He was taking a connoisseur's delight in the exchange. "Hey Buz," he motioned and rolled his fingers rapidly. Buz took a good-sized gooly of hash out of a pouch and handed it to John who began to lovingly work it in the palm of his left hand with the thumb of his right. Richard and his party nodded various recognitions and began to settle on the side of the room opposite me. Lynne, spotting me, came over. "Hey, that was really a hell of a rap you got into yesterday,"
she said. She continued speaking, but I could not grasp or follow. The cadence and accent of her voice was heavily east coast, U. S. A., and it seemed rude and unwarranted for this reminder of mundanity to hound me in so remote a place, in so inaccessible and tenuously ecstatic a moment. If I could, I would banish it from my thoughts; I tried to motion her to be silent. "Be still," I wished to say, "I can't hear you. Listen to Father," but there was too great a distance between my thoughts and any motor mechanism of expression. The bhang had slowed me down for sure, but more than that, Father's voice had lifted me out of body, and I seemed to float in an ether not of this room nor world. Lynne's voice and its unintended threat to the trance faded and receded as if on fly's wings the moment Father began to speak again.
"Every level of conscious and subconscious energy through which we perceive ourselves carries with it a whole legion of corresponding images and associations. As we came to accept mortality and our own death as an inevitable and incontrovertible fact, all our circumstances became proof and reminder of our own ephemerality. Everything died; like moths our ancestors vanished from our phenomenal cognition. If they died then so must we, we reasoned. The very first syllogism of any logic class taught anywhere in the English-speaking world begins, 'All men are mortal.' Yet, what has logic and reason to do with life and death. Life is not a matter of the intellect but an experience primarily of your feelings. You can no more stop your feeling of life than you could command your eyes not to see or your ears not to hear. It is nature that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and it is also nature that lives and experiences through your formal existence, so where do you come in? You enter the scene only and indispensably as a witness; and if life in some form or any form or even formlessly is eternal, then your witnessing of it must also be eternal, no matter in what form. Have you ever died, really? Can you imagine an existence without your cognition or witnessing of it? No, nor a time when you were not. What lives and dies then in the phenomenal existence? Only an incarnated thought, a materialized idea that, reaching the limits of its conclusion, kicks
the bucket, no matter how. What dies is your limited conception of yourself. The old world has already died in you without your noticing it. You may die once or a thousand times more before you are completely dead to your own mortality. The trick is to do that and retain a vision of your form too."
Father laughed, and after a pause Don McCoy did too. It seemed to ring some truth in Don which I could not yet comprehend. "If you can do that," Father continued, "then you will have achieved the purpose for which we entered mortal forms to begin with."
In the momentary silence that ensued I could feel our hearts beat in unison. The room itself seemed to throb in anticipation of a collective affirmation, independent of any individually accumulated understanding. "Go on," our united will urged.
"Our imagination, you see, creates our circumstances, negative or positive. Long before this present moment, we imagined this room and our meeting here. I could tell you exactly when
we did that but the recollection of it would blow you away. I will tell you sometime, don't bother. It is not my purpose to hold anything back. I will tell you everything, you may be sure. It is my duty and pleasure to do so, and even a bit of a compulsion too. You will pardon me if from time to time I tease you with hints of a knowledge that I will not reveal just now; I do it only to keep you on your toes, to give you something to aspire to. It will not be much that I withhold from you, a mere ten paise extra to give me an edge in the game. How else could we tell each other apart? If we all knew everything in the same moment, we would merge together and time would cease to exist.
"But what is the agency that enacts our imagination and translates it into the apparent reality of circumstances? Why, maya, of course. Maya is nothing but that, a projection and mirror of our collective will in time. Man will go to the moon very soon, you will see. It has been imagined and willed long enough now to materialize. It is so simple to understand. You could not go to the moon if you did not imagine it first. The method and experience of it will be different than you might have imagined, but it will be through the imagination that it is done. Maya must always surprise the individual imagination or else she would give her own game away too easily. You see, it is not the individual imagination of ego that is fulfilled but the collective imagination of time's will in us.
"Where we get into trouble is in forgetting that it is Time and Nature that is doing the imagining and acting through us and getting caught up in the individual ego's preoccupation that it is doing everything alone. The more we forget the collective urge of the existence and the more we live in the illusion of a limited individual experience the more our maya becomes harder and harder to bear. This we translate into negative associations and the more fearful and painful become our circumstances. Ego sees itself everywhere, so the negativity increases in geometric proportion. But God is so merciful, you know, that He has placed a limit upon this spiral of negativity. There is a mechanism of truth in every expression of the Self that will endure just so much obfuscation, illusion, and falsification before it recoils
against the distortion and responds with an invincible energy to assert right vision and true perception. That moment of recoil follows the limit of contradiction the existence can bear in an individual, and the Self begins to shout 'I am the same in all forms' in answer to this critical departure from truth. We reached this point - and by 'we' I mean the entire existence as we have known it on this planet - reached this critical departure point in 1966 and what happened is that I woke up.
"What I awakened to was my Self in everyone. Believe me I worship everybody and everything. There is nothing that I do not worship because there is nothing that is not me. When you awaken to this realization there is only one thing more to be done in the whole universe and that is to spread that realization from the individual to the whole of creation. How could I myself enjoy being awake if you did not awaken to enjoy it with me? And if we, say the handful of us that are in this room, enjoy together this awakening, do you think we could be content to stop there and enjoy it by ourselves? No, for we would still know our enjoyment to be partial, and we could not rest until it became total, and so it will. Everyone will come to enjoy this same recognition - in time. You cannot rule out Time's play in your or any other form of understanding. You see, if our individual awakening were not supported by a universal recognition, then it too, in time, would come to seem and feel as illusory as a dream once again. Remember, it takes our collective cognition to make it real. So how to do that, how to emerge from that world into this? We must constantly and persistently apply our will so that the maya of our circumstances becomes more and more blissful and increasingly pleasant to bear. It is so beautiful, I tell you, and easy too. Really, we have to do nothing. Time will do it through our forms. It is Time and our perception of it, individually and collectively, that dies and is born again. And, believe me, a new time was born in 1966."
Certainly there could be no better moment for the lighting of the chillum which John O'Shea had by now finished preparing. Hara hara mahadev, sambu!!! 5 We added then, together for the
[5] But three of the countless names of Siva, invoked before smoking
first time, the mantra that would ever afterward punctuate our agreement, the contract in collective cognition that would make it real: Born Shankar Bholenath!
The chillum was passed to the right, counter-clockwise, but hardly made it all the way around in good orthodox dhuni 6 fashion as we were not arranged in a smooth simple circle nor on the same level but scattered about with some seated on the floor and some on chairs and the bed. The smoke curled and circled about and between each dhuni member, finally forming a huge serpentine wreath around Father, whose pull upon the pipe was the largest I had ever seen, and I had smoked with sadhus and chillum babas whose renown rested upon the quantity of their inhalations. Awesome was the billowing column of smoke which he exhaled.
A short, rough-looking fellow entered the room as the smoke cleared. He was a friendly, out-going sort and introduced himself in a kind of cockney accent: Dan, an Englishman, just recently returned to India where he had traveled before, glad to be back. Somehow, in our meeting, it was communicated that he knew who I was, had had my name from David Lawrence whom he had lust seen in Delhi and somehow or other he had fancied he might meet me or come to travel with me.
"What are you supposed to be anyhow?" Shotsy, hand on hip and head cocked to one side, exclaimed of the Baul quite loudly.
"He is a folk musician of our Bengal," Dr. Prasad volunteered. "Their way of life you know has remained unchanged for hundreds of our years. Very, very fascinating! You know, our Tagore listened to these Bauls for so many the hours, and they are said to have inspired much of his simpler but most potent eloquence. You have heard perhaps the name of one Rabindranath Tagore? His writing is of so much beauty. . . the heart. . . you know. .."
"Why speak of Tagore?" Father asked softly. He shrugged his bare shoulders and looked about at each of us. "Tagore was great, it is true, but he is dead. If we worship only and speak of the dead, don't you see that we will become dead ourselves. Don't you see that we have been doing that for so long? It is to
6 a smoking fellowship, association; the circle of communication
wake up to our own glory in this present moment in time that we have been called together."
"Still and all," Dr. Prasad continued, "one must admit that Tagore had so much heart, much fame he has brought Bengal, and he was honored with your Nobel Prize too. We are in his debt for much cultural reappraisal. Why Shantineketan alone...."
"Of course," Sheila said taking and patting his hand, "but that hour is passed. We must all listen to Father now."
"Sheila, your hands are very beautiful," Dr. Prasad responded, "and do you know that these Bauls are also reputed to be versed in the reading of palms? I can tell you that there is much yet in India that is mysterious and wonderful, and I could with pleasure show you much that would astound."
"Can that dude really read palms?" Jim Shaw asked. "Here." he continued, reaching into his pocket, "how much would he take to read the palms of everyone in this room, say. or at least the palm of that babe over there" - indicating Shotsy. "Now what's that word for 'how much' again? 'Kitna,' right? Kitna, uncle, kitna?"
"It is not necessary," Dr. Prasad said, taking Shotsy's hands and placing them palm upwards in the thin attenuated hands of the Baul. "It is his duty."
"Not that I couldn't tell you some things about her right off," Jim said. "Half her story is written in every movement she makes with that high class body. Aristocratic hussy, aren't you? You're so wired and tense, you must be thoroughbred. Hey, I don't mean no harm. You're beautiful, baby, you're really beautiful. I mean it. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, you are... You are all beautiful people, I hope to tell you."
"Why thank you," Sheila said, coming forward and taking Jim's hand. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You yourself must be beautiful to see it in others.
" She patted him kind of condescendingly on the back and guided him to the edge of the bed which Buz had vacated at their approach. The Baul had begun and was muttering in a sort of sing-song monotone. Dr. Prasad attempted a translation.
"He says you have had and will continue to have a most good life though you have in the past suffered some hurts and mishaps too deep and, uhh... painful to mention."
"Don't you see that the rascal knows nothing?" Father laughed lightly. "He is out of his element and really only confused by your presence. That is why, Don, I told you that you really do no service to give those beggars so many rupees. I understand that you have a good and tender heart, but it only increases their greed at worst and confuses their sense of proportion and reality at best. You must be careful. If you act so irresponsibly and indiscriminately with the small amount of power you now possess, how can I invest you with more? You would only use it to oppress. Grand gesture never helped. Only knowledge can help, but knowledge demands discernment.
"Father spoke very tenderly in a lyric Bengali to the Baul. This latter indulged an imagined affront to his pride when Father spoke to Don and was just working up to really seething with it. I guessed this from the tell-tale flare to his nostrils. Bengalis always seemed to me blatant in their display of indignation, more demonstrative than with almost any other emotion that I could tell. His features relaxed as Father spoke. He then said something softly to Father in Bengali. Father sincerely offered his hands, and the Baul began to trace the lines upon the palms. He was slow and deliberate in this, pausing often and gazing from one palm to the other.
"Baba, 7 baba," he began to mutter, almost sobbing. " Bhagawan, bhagawan," 8 he whined. " Baba, ama bappi, baba . . .dayakuri, Baba, ama kalmakuru, Baba. 9 " Father's Bengali almost imperceptibly drifted back into English. I could not hear or understand what he said as clearly as I had before. I had hit the heavy and drowsy stage of the bhang. 1 had to struggle to induce concentration. I knew my crash could not be put off much longer. I strained to bring the words into audible focus, but I was drifting. The room began to undulate in
7 Father.
8 Lord.
9 expression of guilt and unworthiness: a Bengali "mea culpa."
waves and became definitely distorted. It was a bit elongated, and the people within it appeared foreshortened for the most part. And then some of the people present just vanished from my vision. Prasad was the frost to go. He just sort of eased out of the frame. Richard Home, Lynne, Chris, and Annalise also disappeared from the periphery of my consciousness. The Baul was gone; and Dan the cockney, who I swear had just been right beside me breathing heavily on my left, also was no longer there. Then I heard Father clearly once again, though his voice did not seem to emanate from his form so much as to surround and encompass it.
"Although we have always been together, you know, it has never yet happened within the cycles of His-story upon this Earth that we have chosen to assume so many forms at one time. The yajñah10 that we shall undertake has never before been performed on so grand a scale. This creation is so new and so unique that I must beg you all to suspend for the duration of our eternal association all reflexes and preconceptions that you carry from your recent past and involved and limited existence. Otherwise, remembering the suffering we so recently endured, we would stop content with what in fact would be only partial relief, a mere fraction of what is in store for us.
"You see the vision that took possession of this form in 1966 is so vast that no mere age can express it. It is an entire kalpa11 that begins with us. I knew and saw it all within an instant. the zero hour of creative destruction, the midnight of June 14th- 15th. For this form to be able to express it, it took three months of wild phenomenal meanderings on the earth plane and tremendous astral projections. There I spoke with everyone. you know, even your Jesus Christ. I worshiped him first of all. He was the doorway in.
Isa vasyamidam sarvam
Yat kiñca jagatyam jagat.
10 great sacrificial performance, requires participation of many.
11 vast period of imagination, containing ages.
Tena tyaktena bhuñjitha
ma grdhah kasya sviddhanam 12
Jesus and Moses, Buddha, Ramakrishna and rishis and sages too numerous to relate, all bowed down with tears in their eyes and blessings upon their lips, bowed down and prayed that this vision would at last find fulfillment in my, and now, our forms. Vyasa only would not surrender. He laughed, I guess, at the audacity of what had been prayed for and is now attempted in fruition.
"I knew that you would come, that the small village in which I live would become the yogic seat of knowledge for the entire planet at the commencement of this great kalpa. I told the villagers that; I told them over and over again that gods and goddesses born in the west, and mostly from America to begin with, oblivious of their divine nature, were coming and would claim us. And now it has begun! I am so grateful, Mother, thank you. Thank you, Yogamaya, and thank you, my gods and goddesses, for understanding me and surrendering your forms to this understanding.
"As it took three months for this instantly comprehended knowledge to stabilize itself in this terrestrial form, so it will take you some time to stabilize the feelings you are now passing through in your own forms, say five years. That is not very long, is it? It could be shorter, depending on your powers of concentration and your aspiration. I wanted to tell the delegates at the Spiritual Summit Conference, 'Listen to me. fifteen hours to Supermanhood.' Supermanhood would have been more than enough for them. They cannot conceive beyond that as yet. But no one would listen, not even fifteen minutes. So how are we to measure the completion of fifteen divine hours? I say five years because that is when, according to your western science, Freud said five years, that is when it is said the child's makeup is complete for a life of mortal ignorance. So five years to prepare us for the life divine is not too long an apprenticeship. You are
12 opening shlokas (verses) of Isa Upanisad
born into your infancy now, and infants are always impatient to stretch their limbs. But think of the thousands of generations and the years that it took us to achieve our recently depraved state. Divine intelligence works infinitely faster. It is difficult, you see, to create darkness from total light. We did that too. It is infinitely easier to bring about total light out of darkness for the light is never completely covered. That is the condition of the existence, divine or demonic, the light can never be totally eclipsed. This light has been carried in men of vision during every age to remind the rest of humanity of the eternal and vast aspiration, the satyam rtam vrat13 - to know God in a human form, in this mortal craft to enter the luminous and immortal regions.
"Each of those forms of light in each age only flickered and died without progeny for the will of the time was still to plunge the earth into further darkness. In order to stabilize itself this light must reproduce itself in more than just one form, ultimately in enough forms to overcome the objections of an apparently darkening existence. That is why my constant prayer since my awakening has been for you. I told you that I have been praying to you and waiting for you for two and a half years.
" Don McCoy's huge body suddenly leapt off the bed. He threw his arms in the air and stamped his feet. Charging about, he shouted. "Father, make them see! The light is upon us! Father is the light! Make them see!
" Speech came to me for the first and only time during this interview, and I blurted out "For God's sake, let none of us leave the room this time until we have figured it out." I fell back against the wall totally unconscious.
13 The Real and Vast Truth.
The Siva Kalpa document