Autobiography of a Sadhu Read online

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  OF A

  SADHU

  “An authentic and fascinating account of a Western yogi who has made India his home for his body and his spirit. Autobiography of a Sadhu is bound to challenge your view of reality and the spiritual life. It is not just the story of a personal quest but of a journey beyond the Western civilization mind-set to the real India of the yogis, where the limitations of both our cultural ideas and our egos are continually exposed. An adventure into a different kind of reality.”

  DAVID FRAWLEY, DIRECTOR OF THE

  AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF VEDIC STUDIES

  AND AUTHOR OF YOGI AND AYURVEDA

  AND YOGA AND THE SACRED FIRE

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1 Meeting Cartouche

  2 I Dream India into Existence

  3 Hari Puri Baba

  4 Becoming Rampuri

  5 “I Can Only Show You a Path”

  6 What Is Remembered

  7 Kashi: The City of Liberation

  8 Kumbh Mela

  Photo Insert

  9 Angrez: Foreigner

  10 Tantric Attack

  11 The Healing Mantra

  12 A Question of Paths

  13 Hari Puri’s Miraculous Return

  14 Gangotri Baba

  15 The Ghost of Hari Puri Baba

  16 The Process of Un-Becoming

  17 Possession

  18 Deconstruction

  19 The Nectar of Immortality

  Afterword

  Glossary

  Footnotes

  About the Author

  About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

  Copyright & Permissions

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people for making this Destiny Books edition possible: Dieter Hagenbach, Sigi Hoehle, Adriana Knezevic, Ehud Sperling, Ossi Urchs, and Bikram Choudhury.

  It is only by the Grace of God

  That one yearns for Union with Him,

  And escapes serious danger.

  THE AVADHUT GITA OF DATTATREYA

  Introduction

  I was born on the fourteenth of July, celebrated in France as the day of the emancipation of prisoners from the infamous Bastille prison and the beginning of the French Revolution. And, although I have traveled to the edges of the world of my birth, my journey began in the middle of things: I arrived in the middle of the day, the month, the year, and the century, as well as in the middle of the American continent, Chicago, where my father was then a surgeon. But the future for my family lay in sunny California, where my father would be able to realize the American Dream; so we moved to Beverly Hills in 1953, and, with one loan from his father-in-law, and another from the bank, he bought a brand-new Studebaker.

  My first spiritual initiation took place at the age of four. Televisions were relatively new then and looked like half-size wood-paneled refrigerators with small screens. Inspired by The Adventures of Superman and wearing a large red bandana around my neck, I climbed to the top of the television as if ascending Mount Sinai, and made a great leap into space, as my hero would have done. My flight was obviously doomed, but something happened when I crashed to the floor that changed my life forever. I saw stars inside my head.

  “What are you, stupid? That’s what happens when you hit your head,” said my father impatiently, as he drove me to his office to get stitches. “Why on earth would such a smart boy like you do such a silly thing?” asked my mother.

  I knew that there was no use telling her about the clanging bells. There are certain things you just have to keep to yourself. You can’t explain them to people incapable of understanding them. I had seen the same stars inside my head as I saw in the sky on the rare clear night, and I wanted to know how they had gotten in there.

  But what I was really into was buried treasure. I dug up the whole of the backyard looking for some but never found anything. Messing up the earth is one thing, but damaging property is another matter, so, when convinced that a treasure must be there, I hacked a huge hole in the garage roof with my father’s favorite golf club, I faced the belt.

  “There are no buried treasures,” my father told me. “There is only hard work and the money you receive for it, and that’s the reality of life.” I didn’t believe him. There’s got to be more, I thought.

  I imagined my grandfather, who left Russia when he was thirteen, to be Long John Silver, the infamous pirate. After all, he had crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times: once to explore the world and discover America, next to bring his family to the “promised land,” and a third time when he spirited his true love, my grandmother, through Europe to Mexico and then to her new home in Corpus Christi, Texas. I would sit for hours listening to his stories of adventure in foreign lands: the people, customs, and languages, and his tales of survival not by money but by wits. He told me of desperate situations, how he pulled through, and the lessons he learned that I was now learning. One day he gave me a small treasure, a silver dollar, a modern “piece of eight.”*1

  Treasures are buried so that they can be found again, I thought, and hid my silver coin in the backyard, carefully drawing a map of where I had put it. I never did find it again. It didn’t seem to be where I had buried it—or was my map inaccurate? When I gave up my search, I swore that when I grew up, I would unearth a real treasure.

  At about the time my self-identity—that of a cowboy-pirate—began to crystallize, the hard reality of school threatened its very existence. I had to learn to be someone else, in fact, two people—one for those in authority and one for peers. My goals of secret knowledge, magic, and buried treasure would have to be hidden from all authority for fear of punishment, and from peers for fear of ridicule. From there, I went on to be a model student, athlete, and citizen until the mid-sixties.

  My mother wanted me to become president of the United States, but suspected I might become a dictator, so she settled for a wealthy lawyer. My father wanted me to become a doctor, but his hopes were dashed when, the first time I accompanied him and scrubbed up to observe him perform a minor surgery, I fainted at the sight of blood.

  As the sixties progressed and we went from one Kennedy assassination to another, to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and from race riots to the Vietnam War, I found myself with few answers to my many questions and doubts, and fewer places to turn to. I was becoming an outsider, an unbeliever. I found it increasingly difficult to live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois. Instead of thanking God for the privilege of affluence, I questioned it. I could no longer accept what I saw and touched as reality; it was paper-thin, and I could see through it. My mind was tender then, and I began to glimpse the chaos beneath the surface, beneath all the niceties and order.

  At that same time I discovered that I was not who I thought I was, and neither was I who everyone else supposed me to be. The real guy was in there somewhere, buried among a mound of temporary identities, and I needed to find a way back to myself.

  I felt so much smallness in my very big world. Beverly Hills with its eternal promise of fabulous wealth, fame, and glitter was just too small. I wanted something so big that it wouldn’t fit on a television screen or even on the 70-mm screen at the Cinerama on Sunset and Vine, something so colossal that it wouldn’t even fit into the twentieth century itself. I wanted the Truth. For even then, I realized that chaos must be faced and the Truth must be told. And I knew that this would necessitate a very long journey—all the way from the Same to the Other, from a place called the Profane to a space called the Sacred.

  1

  Meeting Cartouche

  The three-decked
steamship had been following the contour of the palm-lined Indian coastline since sunrise, weaving its way through flotillas of fishing boats and other small ships until it reached Bombay. The voyage from Karachi was the final leg of a six-month overland journey that had taken me from Amsterdam to what would become my new home.

  A deck-class ticket bought you a place on the ship but not a seat, berth, or cabin. You were on your own when it came to claiming a piece of the deck, usually the size of your straw mat or blanket. The two upper decks soon became a multicolored sea of bedding and people. When I first came aboard, Sigi, a young German, led me to a remote corner of the deck, where I could smell incense and there was a casbah partitioned with pastel silks into passageways and small camps. This, apparently, was the foreigners’ quarter.

  We were pilgrims, refugees, children of the revolution! We came from North America, South America, Asia, the Middle East, and every country in Europe. We had encountered one another at every stop along the way—Istanbul, Ankara, Konya, Tabriz, Tehran, Mashad, Herat, Kandahar, Kabul, Peshawar, Karachi—individuals, groups, and clans, all making the great pilgrimage. Where to? We were on our way home, moving toward the Light, or so we believed.

  “Watch out for thieves,” my new friend warned, as we put down our mats at the edge of the little colony. “It’s usually the French. One of us must guard our belongings at all times.”

  “Pardon,” said an orange-robed European with flowing black locks, accompanied by several young women. He resembled one of the three musketeers, except for his pointed Aladdin slippers. “You are going to Inde-ia for the fairst time?” he asked, introducing himself as Cartouche. “May we join you?”

  “What kinda name . . .” I started.

  “Egyptian,” he said, “from my father’s side. My mother is French.”

  He instructed the Pakistani coolie where to put each bag in what appeared to be flawless Urdu, argued over the price, said something that made the man laugh, and then paid him.

  “We wanted to share this journey with spiritual people,” Cartouche said, as he explained why they had moved from the Italian section of the deck. Cartouche and the girls spread their bedding next to mine. “You and I must have met before,” he said, “perhaps in a previous life?”

  A man dressed in a green Afghan robe came over to harangue Cartouche in Italian and was the recipient of a long burst in the same tongue. Cartouche’s scowl turned to a smile as he remarked, “I told him to fuck off in his own language, if he wanted to remain attached to the material world!”

  Sigi was suspicious. “Why did the Italians force you to move?”

  “They are Greens,” replied Cartouche, “You know, Muslims , and they thought it inappropriate for a Hindu holy man to camp beside them. They are making a pilgrimage to the holy places of their Sufi saints before heading down to Goa.”

  “I’m going straight to Goa,” said Sigi. “A night in Bombay at the Carlton, and the morning boat to paradise.” He said that he had some kind of a problem in Germany, and didn’t plan to return there for many years. Everyone seemed to be headed to Goa.

  “This is actually what he wants.” Cartouche’s eyes flashed as he pulled a drawstring bag out of another drawstring bag out of a shoulder bag. With great reverence he removed a small statue of the god Shiva, wrapped in red silk. “Swat Valley, maybe one thousand years old,” he explained. “He wanted to pay me shit! And he’s not even a Hindu!”

  “I’m going to find me a nice shack on the beach,” said the German, carefully placing his valuables under a makeshift pillow.

  “Me, I want to find the ice palace of the Mother of the World, where the gods and goddesses hang out,” crooned one of Cartouche’s young women from under her veil. She was high on something.

  “And you, my friend,” Cartouche turned to me with his infectious smile, “Where will you go?”

  I thought for a moment, like a child about to enter an amusement park, before blurting out, “I’m not sure, maybe Goa, but I’m looking for something . . . I’m not sure what yet, but it’s something that we’ve lost in the West. Yeh, I guess I’m also going to India to have my mind blown!”

  “Not enough action in your, uh, San Franseesko? That’s why you have come?” he asked with raised eyebrows.

  “Well, actually, I think I’ve sort of been pulled here.” I grinned.

  “That’s the case with all of us,” he said. Cartouche had very old eyes in contrast to his youthful face and body. He looked about twenty-two years old, a few years older than me, but had the demeanor and maturity of a man at least a generation older.

  I had dropped out of high school. I had questions they wouldn’t or couldn’t answer. I had other ideas, perhaps immature and incomplete, but compelling. I had lost my faith in them, but not lost faith. I thought of Eric Hofstadter’s Manifest Destiny as a pack of lies. I wanted to go join up with the American Indians. But they were all dead.

  “Where are you from?” I asked him.

  “From Paris,” he said.

  “You were there in May, the one before last, for the Revolution?” I asked him.

  “ Non, I was in India at the Kumbh Mela, the largest spiritual gathering in the world, with my guru. The real revolution is to transform yourself, not society. If you can succeed, then society will follow. The world is fucked up, corrupted by capitalist elites, but we cannot hope to win any war on the material plane. Finding the Truth is the only way.”

  For many young people, the lines that existed between politics, spirituality, and lifestyle were faint, if they existed at all. We were wildly idealistic and naive. I told Cartouche that I wanted to find a treasure in India that would somehow make the world a better place.

  “A better place?” Cartouche asked. “For whom? Is it Heaven that you wish to bring to Earth, or is it Earth you’d like to raise to Heaven? If it is the former, you are following a long line of failures. Ask Karl Marx. And my friends who made the Revolution of ’68, one day they will rule France, but nothing will be any different.”

  Cartouche had crossed the line and made it to the other side. He was confident and authoritative. He seemed to know India well, so I asked him if he could give me a list of places to visit.

  “A waste of time,” he replied. “You’ll find all the right places. That’s how India works.”

  “And what’s with this ‘ice palace’?” I asked, feeling a bit stupid. “Come on, is it a real place?”

  “Sure it is,” he said, “but you can’t go there. Foreigners aren’t allowed. It’s in the Himalayas, within what they call the inner circle, too close to China. I guess they’re afraid of spies.”

  “Have you been there?” I asked.

  “Non, but I tried. The police caught me and sent me back down the mountain. My guru had told me that if I would meet him there, he would give me a magic potion that would let me live forever.”

  The small group that had been listening to our conversation dwindled until Cartouche and I were alone watching the moon sail across the sky. He enchanted me with more stories about his experiences in India. For as long as I could remember, I had been fascinated by what, in those days, we called the occult. I wanted to meet real shamans and wizards. I believed they existed, but I needed proof. I wanted to find ancient manuscripts containing secret knowledge, mantras, and spells. But that was all surface stuff. I desperately needed some answers. There were the basic questions concerning the meaning of life, death, after death, and Truth, and there were other less formulated questions that had arisen after I had taken mind-altering substances. In America I had been unable to find a Don Juan to guide me, but my omnivorous reading of the Upanishads, Vedanta, and books on Theosophy led me to believe that I could indeed find these answers in India.

  “Don’t waste your time going to Goa, hanging out with hippies. In India there are real masters that can teach the Path and help us understand who we are. The first thing you have to know before you begin your search is that there is no search, you are already there at th
at place where you hope to arrive, but it takes time to discover that. So, with that in mind, go and search,” he said.

  “But, where should I start?” I asked.

  “Hey, enlightenment is not subject to the illusions of time and space. The possibility of transforming consciousness lies only in the here and now, but I’ll give you some addresses,” he replied.

  He drew the Sanskrit character Om at the top of one of the pages in my notebook, explaining that this symbol would ensure the success of my quest. Then he wrote the names of a few temples and holy places and those of some of the big gurus. He explained which temples were dedicated to the Mother Goddess, which to Shiva, and which to the blue god Krishna. He rambled on about the claims and the feats of various teachers, including Satya Sai Baba, who could remember his past lives and materialize objects out of thin air, and then gave me the names and addresses of some sadhus, characterizing each as he wrote.

  The last name was of a sadhu in Rajasthan. “Hari Puri Baba is a bit more modern. He speaks English, which my baba doesn’t. I studied with my guru the traditional way, in Hindi and Sanskrit. Still, they say Hari Puri Baba is a gyani, a Knower. They say he knows how to read the world,” Cartouche laughed. “Perhaps you would prefer to follow the Path in your mother tongue. Ah, if only the whole world spoke English, no?” He could be very sarcastic.

  It was difficult for Cartouche to mask his contempt of Anglo-American culture. He was a spiritual Che Guevara, more so than I understood at the time. He made it clear that I would have to go native if I wanted to experience the real thing. He suggested that I buy a copy of The Universal Hindi Teacher as soon as I landed.