Last week-end I travelled to Sunderland to bury the ashes of my father-in-law at his parents grave. I woke in the middle of the night in the hotel thinking about the Siddha Guru, Chidvilasananda.
I met her twice in the American Siddha Yoga Headquarters Ashram in 1983. (For some reason I have shifted the place in my mind to the Ashram at Ganeshpuri in India, which I have never visited.
When I arrived at the American ashram thirty five years ago with my partner and small child we were ushered into a long queue for Darshan with the new Guru, who had taken over the headship of the order from my guru, Muktanada, after his death, despite being a young woman still in her twenties.
As we reached the head of the queue, at the feet of the guru, she spoke to us. She said only,
"When did you come?"
I blustered and flustered about, trying to reply to her question, before becoming aware that this was not a question that I was supposed to answer. It was a koan, something like "the sound of one hand clapping", a puzzle, something to meditate on. It has stayed a puzzle to me for all this time.
The moment passed and we were ushered away.
This was not what most people would call a meeting. Yet Darshan, being brought before a great being, is regarded as very important in India. People have had immensely powerful experiences in such moments. I merely felt foolish at the end of a journey across the Atlantic and up country from New York for 100 miles. Perhaps I should have felt honored that she spoke to us at all. Most people just receive a swat with a peacock feather at most.
This was not to be the only meeting with Chidvilasanada, however.
Ashram life has a number of elements to it. All are considered to be ways of worshipping the Guru, who is both the inner Self of all and an outward embodied person, who was in residence with us in this Ashram.
The ashram day begins with a wash before an hour of meditation, sitting in the dark meditation hall. Then there is a first breakfast. Next comes chanting of introductory mantras and the guru gita for well over and hour. After that there is a second breakfast.
When this collective activity is over people are broken up into work groups. Work activity is called "Seva" and should be considered as devotional labour.
There might be lectures at different times of day. There is another act of communal worship called Arete at tea time.
Other times are for personal study or Seva. Everyone has some kind of job to do at an ashram. Over the two weeks we stayed at this ashram I did various cleaning jobs as well as food preparation. We also attended a two day meditation intensive.
It was while I was cleaning the kitchen floor with a mop that I met the Guru a second time. She was wandering around the ashram seeing how things were going. In business I think they would call it managing by walking about. It was evening as I recall. Suddenly I looked up from my work and there she stood. For a few seconds we stood face-to-face looking at each other eye-to-eye. It was slightly spell binding. No one spoke. I think she smiled. Then I broke the eye contact and looked back down at my mop.
The silent meeting was over. When I looked up again she was gone as silently as she had come. Not a word was said. I think it was in this moment that I decided she was not my guru.
I cannot tell you how I made this decision. She was a young and beautiful woman with a slightly bewitching smile. But there was nothing in her that invoked the incredible power I feel looking at Baba's picture even today.
Back in the dark strange bedroom in Sunderland I was thinking about this encounter from long ago without knowing if there was a dream or why else this memory had come to me.
A bizarre idea came into my head. There was now an answer to that koan question. I had met her, had come to her in another lifetime. When where or why I had no clues.
As I think about it now, while writing, it seems a silly idea, making a simple meaning out of a mystical utterance, a western mind's attempt to make something definite from what was never meant to be so clear.
I share it now as a story relating to a meeting with the spiritual head of an order that goes back before Christianity.
Gurumayi, Molti, or Chidvilasananda, as she was called at different times, had travelled the world with Baba Muktananda as his translator for a number of years. She was chosen as guru because her younger brother, Nityananda , whom Baba chose to succeed him, at the age of 22 was seen as not yet able to carry all the responsibility on his own. How true! Within another couple of years he had withdrawn or been pushed out of office by this fiery young woman, who assessed her brother as having broken his obligations and hence unworthy to be a guru.
I have continued with my meditation over the next thirty five years, but it is only in the last year that my practice has shifted on to a different level, leading to the creation of deeper mindfulness.
Muktanada is my guru. I read his works and follow his teaching. But I have no living teacher and I no longer visit ashrams.
If something more profound had happened in one of those short encounters my story might have been a very different one.
That is life and that is fate.
There will be more stories to unfold before my story is done.
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