فصل 21

Section III

From Solitude to Service

21

The Call of a Living Master

Summers are brutal in Florida, even in the woods. My house had no air-conditioning, and with a solid wall of glass facing west, it did not exactly have passive solar design. I still had a few months left before my classes at Santa Fe started again in mid-September, so I took a drive back out to northern California for a visit. Before returning home, I got wind that Shelly, my ex-wife, was living at some sort of yoga center in the San Francisco area. I managed to get the number and gave her a call. I had not seen her for a few years, and it fascinated me that I had gotten so deeply into yoga and evidently so had she.

I drove down to Piedmont and found where Shelly was staying. It was great to see her again, and my heart felt very open. She began to show me around the beautiful house that served as a meditation center for a small number of residents. We went upstairs to see the meditation room, and once again, life caught me completely by surprise. Scattered around the room were photographs of a yoga master they called Baba. I had never heard of him, but there was no reason I would have. I had been living in the woods of north-central Florida for a few years by then, and he lived in India. The pictures of that holy man were mesmerizing. I could not take my eyes off them. The energy flow inside of me welled up to the point between my eyebrows, and a tremendous peace came over my whole being. I asked if I could meditate there for a while. Shelly nodded and went about her business.

I meditated in that room for hours with shimmering energy coursing throughout my body. The whole room seemed to be filled with energy. Something was going on that I didn’t understand. I only knew that I was being drawn into deep meditation without my normal struggle. I stayed in the room for a very long time, and when I finally came out, it was time to bid Shelly good-bye. That was certainly not the visit I had imagined. What had started out as a very personal trip, life had managed to turn into a powerful spiritual experience. If that had been all that transpired from the visit, it would have been fantastic. But it was only just the beginning.

I returned home in early September to find someone I didn’t know staying at Sandy’s house. Evidently, Sandy had gone on a trip and allowed a friend, Rama Malone, to stay at her place. Rama was very outgoing and vivacious. She was filled with excitement and immediately drew me into her world. The first time I went up to meet her, she invited me into the cabin to show me what she had done with the place. Very enthusiastically, she beckoned me up to the loft. I climbed the rough-sawn ladder, and when my head cleared the opening, what I saw almost knocked me back downstairs. The entire loft area was covered with pictures of the same yoga master I had just encountered at Shelly’s place.

Now, I believe in coincidences, but this was twice in a row on opposite sides of the continent. In 1973, there simply were not that many people in America who knew of this holy man in India. It felt like he was following me. Rama immediately started telling me that Baba Muktananda was planning to come to America next year in the spring, and I should invite him to Gainesville. At first I thought we were having a fanciful conversation, until I realized she was dead serious. I took a deep breath and tried to reason with her. I reminded her that I lived alone in the woods, and I’d gone out of my way for years to not attract people. How could I be in a position to write to India and invite a highly respected yoga master to a small town in north-central Florida? There was no reasoning with her. She insisted that I write a letter to India, on Santa Fe Community College letterhead, and invite Baba to stop in Gainesville on his way from Atlanta to Miami.

I thought it was a crazy idea. My mind kept telling me that there was no way Baba would ever come here. I actually felt embarrassed to write the letter and send it off to India. But what choice did I have? I could either listen to my resistant mind, or recognize that life had brought me in contact with this great yogi, given me a deep experience sitting before his picture, and then stuck an impassioned devotee onto my own land to force me to invite him to Gainesville. Ultimately, I surrendered and mailed the letter.

Some months later I received a response telling me that someone would come to my place to discuss the possibility of a Gainesville visit. When he arrived out here, I was surprised to be meeting a very professionally dressed young man. Apparently, he was just as surprised to be meeting a hippie-type character living alone in the woods. You could tell that he wasn’t all that impressed. He began to explain to me what it would take to host a weeklong visit from Baba and his entourage. They would need facilities for his staff of up to twenty people, a room large enough for fifty to a hundred people for daily sessions during the week, and a weekend retreat site that could house up to a few hundred people. He was very skeptical about my ability to arrange everything, and who could blame him. I was a part-time teacher at a community college earning $350 a month—not exactly the credentials they were looking for.

In the end, he told me I was welcome to see what I could arrange, and they would get back to me. It certainly didn’t sound promising, but at least I didn’t get a definitive no. Before he left, I asked him an important question: If his group was trying to get people interested in Baba, how exactly did they promote him on his world tour? I didn’t think an Indian saint who spoke no English would attract that many people. All he told me was that Baba was a very powerful Siddha master and people would want to meet him. I didn’t understand what that meant, but I figured I’d find out later.

A few months went by, and we were given a tentative date for when Baba might pass through Gainesville: January 18, 1975. The excitement about a possible visit by a world-renowned yoga master only served to accelerate the energy around my classes and the Sunday services. Each week things grew until I was forced to build a small addition onto my house to fit more people. With the publication of my book, The Search for Truth, in spring of 1974, the energy was fanned even more.

Rama and Sandy had both come and gone by the spring of that year, and Sandy’s house sat empty until a young woman named Donna Wagner moved in. Donna was finishing her degree at the university when she started sitting in on my Santa Fe classes. Though just a few years older than the other students, Donna was more centered and mature. She had a very deep understanding of what I was teaching, and she came to most of my classes and all the Sunday services. For about a year before she moved in, it seemed like time and again we kept bumping into each other in town. These chance meetings happened so often that I began to wonder what was going on.

Donna started to help organize the Sunday group after Sandy left. She would often stay in Sandy’s house on Saturday nights to help set up for and greet the people on Sunday mornings. Eventually, she just stopped going home. If I had known then that she was moving out of a nice condominium her parents had purchased for her, and into this tiny cabin in the woods with no plumbing or electricity, I might not have been so quick to let her move in. If I had known then that we were destined to fall in love, get married, and have a beautiful daughter together—given my mind-set at the time, I definitely would not have let her move in. It would take a few more years of learning to surrender before I would be capable of dropping my spiritual self-concept enough to accept the special relationships that life had in store for me.