If Truth Be Told: A Monk's Memoir (3 page)

I used to sleep with my mother and demanded a story every night. She knew countless legends from various scriptures. That night, she narrated the story of Krishna and his childhood friend, Sudama. Krishna loved him deeply and granted the poverty-stricken Sudama material comforts in the blink of an eye. Moved by the beautiful story, I slept with thoughts of God and with the conviction that he did exist.

A fair-complexioned Shiva with a slightly bluish throat appeared in my dream that night. His face was exquisite, his nose sharp and his lips pink and full; silver earrings hung from long ears. Matted locks were tied in a knot on top of his head and his broad shoulders glistened with drops of water, as if he had just come from the snowy Himalayas and the snowflakes had melted on his skin. In one of those drops of water, I saw my own reflection. He gazed at me with soft, loving eyes.

'I've come to see you,' he said.

'Oh, you are Lord Shiva. You must meet my mother.’

He smiled and stroked my head tenderly, his fingers long and slender.

'I've only come for you.'

'No, you must meet my mother, please. She really wants to see you. She prays to you every day.'

But he, the foremost yogi, disappeared.

I woke up my mother.

'Lord Shiva came, Lord Shiva came! I asked him to wait for you but he didn't.'

Then I began crying. 'I asked him to wait. I wanted you to see him. He was so beautiful. God was here, Mummy, Lord Shiva was here.'

She sought to pacify me but the more she tried, the louder I cried. I couldn't bear for her to be excluded from my dream, not belong to a place where God and I existed but she didn’t. I could not imagine a life without my mother.

'Stop crying, son,' she said lovingly. 'I'll pray to Lord Shiva to wait for me the next time.'

'Was it real? Did he really come? Are dreams real, Mummy?'

'Yes, of course it was real.'

Even though I was barely eight summers old at the time, I still remember how I had felt that night. I couldn't go back to sleep, not because my mind had any questions but because I was already in a state of deep tranquility—beyond sleep. Such was the touch of Shiva. I started to lose the sense of my individual self and felt I was becoming one with the vast and silent ocean that looked up at the endless sky. There were no boundaries and no resistance, only the expanse of blue ocean and sky, only peace, light and joy. My young body of a few years had just discovered my million-year-old soul.

A couple of years went by. Ten now, I had stopped reading comics and moved on to books. On the outside, I was mostly happy but, deep within, I craved to see God again, not in a dream but in full consciousness. I found myself deeply restless. I didn't just want to know more about him; I wanted to
know
him because I believed only he could answer the questions that dogged me constantly: Why was the world the way it was, and why was I the way I was? Why was it that some people lived in big houses while others slept on the road? Why did people fall ill and die?

Neither my friends nor my elders could hold a reasoned conversation with me, much less address these questions. Nearly a year passed as I searched in vain for answers. I finally turned to numerology, astrology and other esoteric disciplines, hoping they would bring me the clarity I sought. My mother knew a learned Brahmin, Pandit Suresh Sharma, who agreed to teach me astrology. From him, I understood the significance of the planets and planetary positions. He taught me how to draw the charts, how to normalize zodiac signs based on longitude and latitude and so on.

I studied all the major classical and contemporary works on astrology. These books had explanations and even remarkable insights for me, but no answers. I had read that the sages—authors of the classical astrological texts—had received divine knowledge by way of divination. Clearly, they must have had a way to receive and interpret that knowledge. Why did the Divine talk to them and not to me? The seers who wrote marvellous works of great profundity and foresight had something in common: living in secluded spots in mountains and forests, they chanted Vedic hymns and meditated on God. I couldn't go and live in the woods but I could sit still and try to meditate on God, I thought. I began meditating at every available opportunity even though I had no real guidance or practical understanding of meditation. My method at the time was to sit still and chant ‘Om’. That’s what I did. Whenever I had an hour to spare, I meditated.

A subtle change did start to come about. I often found myself at the intersection of time where the lines between the past, present and future blurred. It was like déjà vu bu
t
with one difference: I could see what the next moment would hold. Just as a flash of lightning illuminates the dark sky for a moment and you see everything around you in its full glory, these flashes of intuition revealed to me information about the person sitting before me that I simply didn’t know.

Sometimes, visitors would come for readings and I would know their questions even before they had started speaking. At times, I would be walking in the street and would get similar guidance about a complete stranger walking on the road. I wasn't just seeing people but seeing through them.

I wasn’t sure how to label this phenomenon. I called it intuition but there was a small problem with my intuition: it was wild and free. It ran its own course and I had no control over it. Even though it worked, I couldn’t call upon it with conviction or at will, nor replicate it whenever I wished. I wanted a more logical sequence, a degree of certainty. I needed my inner guide to answer my questions and not just give me random information about a stranger on the road, no matter how accurate that was.

In the meantime, word spread about my readings in astrology and more and more people started approaching me. Going to school, reading, meditating and meeting people made my schedule rather hectic and there was little time left to play. I didn't mind this because, being asthmatic, I could not engage much in physical sports. There were no inhalers back then, not until I turned fourteen anyway.

For four months every year, March–April and September–October, I was particularly sick. There was a high level of allergens during these months and the medication would take a while to ease my breathing. For long hours at night, I used to sit outside with my mother because lying down made breathing even more difficult. Resting in her lap under a moonlit sky, sometimes a dark sky, I used to look up and wonder about the vastness before me, the countless stars it held, some twinkling more than the others. The questions would come flooding back: Who made the universe? Why was I here and not on one of the other planets? Did people live on other planets too? Did God live on one of those distant stars? Where
was
God?

Minute by minute the hours would pass and my wheezing would finally subside by the morning. Only then would I manage to fall asleep. My father would pick me up and carry me back to my bed. Often, inhaling the air outside wouldn't work and he would rush with me to the hospital. I didn't mind going because spending a night at the hospital meant getting a day off from school. I would stay back at home and catch up on my reading or meditate. An injection in the hospital was a small price to pay for these delights.

I had learnt the basic Vedic chants from my astrology teacher, but he only specialized in astrology and didn't have the phonetic precision required in Vedic chanting. I felt it was essential to chant the Vedic hymns in the correct manner in order to continue my exploration and experimentation. It was not enough to just sit still and chant Om. I turned to my mother again, who knew a young but scholarly Brahmin called Pandit Surya Prakash Sharma. He had recently moved to our town.

Over the next few weeks, Panditji taught me the correct and rhythmic pronunciation of the core hymns from the Yajur Veda, one of the four Vedas. Verses from the Yajur Veda are used in the invocation of various forms of divine energies. Sanskrit, the language in which the Vedas are written, has the ability to take the mind into a trance-like state. This is chiefly because of the use of rhyme, rhythm and nasal sound across various meters. So, Panditji agreed to teach me Vedic chanting. My work with him, however, didn’t last very long.

Occasionally, people visited him for horoscope readings. Astrology was not his forte although his scholarly excellence in Vedic literature would have anyone believe that he was an expert in astrology too, for astrology was a
Vedanga
, Vedic branch, after all. One day, a man came to have his daughter’s horoscope matched. He had identified a suitable groom for her and wanted to ensure that the horoscopes of the two were compatible. Panditji calculated incorrectly and concluded that it was a flawless match.

The maximum possible ‘points’ you can score during the matching of horoscopes is thirty-six. Panditji’s total came to forty-three. He told the man that forty-three meant it was far better than the accepted thirty-six. I was alarmed. Though just twelve years old at this time, I corrected my teacher and informed him that this match yielded only twelve points, with two doshas, faults. It was actually a terrible match. The man was furious with me and shut me up, saying that Panditji was absolutely right and that such an excellent match was indeed possible because his own horoscope tallied at thirty-three points with his wife’s.

He was happy to believe Panditji’s incorrect interpretation since it gave him comfort and the permission to go ahead with solemnizing the alliance, something he so wished. This is what happens with most people: they are not in search of truth, they don’t want to know the truth; in fact, they are scared of the truth. They have an idea or belief that brings them solace and they merely want someone to validate it for them. They will run hither and thither until someone agrees with them.

'I can’t teach you,' Panditji said after the man left.

'Oh, what happened?' I didn’t realize he was upset with me.

'Who are you to correct me? You think you are some great astrologer?'

'I’m sorry, please forgive me. But if this man goes ahead and ties the nuptial knot based on the matching today, this marriage will be doomed. I was only trying to help.'

'I know. But you should not have corrected me in his presence. It was insulting and inappropriate.'

'I’m sorry, Panditji.'

'Don’t argue with me. I won't teach you anymore. Go elsewhere.' He added sarcastically, 'You are a Brahmin, a learned astrologer. You don’t need a teacher.'

I touched his feet and walked out of his life. We had both hurt each other: I had hurt his ego and he had hurt my dream. I decided I didn’t need hymns and astrology; I would go my own way. Over the next few months, I studied major texts on yoga, tantra and mantras for guidance, and concentrated on my meditation. My sadhana yielded some results in the form of an even sharper intuition, better memory and some visions and hallucinations, but these gains were nowhere near what esoteric literature promised.

Treatises on mantra science made remarkable, even unreal, claims. From flying in the air to the physical manifestation of objects, these books said all was possible. It's not that I was particularly interested in these powers but they were like milestones on the path. When you passed them, you knew you were headed in the right direction. This time around, I couldn’t find anyone to help me—no saint, teacher, priest or astrologer. I even started to think there was little or no truth to these texts on mantra science. Until, one day, when a dream woke me up to another reality. A sadhu, tall, bearded and robed in black, appeared in the dream.