I've had so many people I've learned from that I'm hesitant to write about any of them for fear of leaving someone out. So I've decided to write about those beings who have had a primary influence on me. I'm going to write about them in the order they appeared in my life, or perhaps I should say, in the order I became aware of their being in my life.

Haidakhan Baba

My first conscious meeting with Babaji was in 1980. I was in bed, asleep, when I suddenly awoke, feeling as though there was someone in the room with me--my first thought was that someone had broken into the house and had come into my bedroom,

Babaji

The next day I went down to a local store to do some shopping. They had a small book section that I always browsed when I shopped there. The previous weekend I'd seen a small, black-covered book with a very intense person sitting cross-legged on the cover-- it wasn't someone I recognized so I didn't pay much more attention to it. When I went into the book section this next weekend, the day after the figure appeared in my bedroom, here was this same small black book facing outward on the shelf so that the cover was in plain view, with this intense person on the cover looking at me-- and I knew immediately that he and the being in my room the previous night were one and the same--and he turned out to be Babaji. And that was the beginning of my conscious relationship with Babaji.

I frequently feel as though Babaji is “inside” my body, or super-imposed on it—I’ll bend down to pet my cat and it feels as though Babaji is bending down with me, “inside” me. Or I’ll be taking a shower, and be washing my chest, when I feel as though I’m washing Babaji’s chest. Or I’ll be sitting in meditation and suddenly feel him literally come into my body from across the room (I make sure to pay close attention when that happens, because it usually means I’m going to learn something!) Sometimes I’ll sense him in the room, around me, and I’ll know enough to sit still and pay attention.

Nityananda

I became consciously aware of Nityananda through Muktananda's book The Play of Consciousness. Some time after I read the book

Nityananda

Perhaps ten years later, I was living on Vancouver Island, B.C., and feeling quite depressed and lonely. I was sitting in my bedroom, very lonely, wishing I had a woman in my life and thinking that it was never going to happen-- I was very polarized off to the male side. I stood up, and suddenly off to my right I saw Nityananda, plain as day, moving toward me. I was wide awake, standing up, eyes open, looking at my bedroom, and I saw him move toward me, merge into me without wiping out my awareness, but so that I could see the world through his eyes-- and I saw every female as myself, I saw every male as myself, but especially every female (females of all sorts, human and non-human). About a day later my awareness returned to "normal"-- note the quotes. I can always return to that state at will now because of what he gave me. He was reminding me of what I knew, and what I'd experienced before, but what I'd forgotten in my unbalanced emotional state.

About five or six years ago I was trying to make sense of my early life, my life as a child and young person, the experiences I'd had, and so on. I knew that to some extent I was interpreting myself and my spiritual experiences through the eyes of my parents and my family, that I was forgetting events, and that I was unable to form some kind of continuity with what I've experienced as an adult. I went to bed one night with those thoughts in mind: that I knew I didn't understand my early life, that I was forgetting and misinterpreting certain things, and that I really wanted to get things figured out. I hadn't been asleep very long (judging by the clock when I woke up shortly after) when I had a very intense vivid dream: I was in a small room, perhaps the size of a small bedroom, and on the wall was a large picture of Nityananda. As I looked at the picture, it started to move, to come alive, and Nityananda stepped out of the picture and into the room. He sat down on one of the chairs in the room, and motioned to me to sit on another. And we talked. We talked almost the entire night. I woke up perhaps three or four times during the night, once because of my cat, and each time I was fully awake, got out of bed, went to the bathroom, got a drink of water, fed my cat, and so on. And each time when I went back to bed I would immediately be back in the room with Nityananda as soon as I closed my eyes. Nityananda showed me my childhood, my early life, and it was if he was picking it up piece by piece and with each piece was saying, “look at it this way. Change your perspective, try seeing it from this angle.” And he told me about what it was like for him to be in the world, how hard it was for him to live a physical life, and I could see parallels between what he was telling me about his life and my own life-- not so much in the actual events of our respective lives, but in the way it felt to be here.

I cannot express in words how grateful I am for that conversation. I sat there talking to Nityananda, feeling that he loved me very much and that I loved him just as much, and that he was intimately concerned about my well being. It was like I was talking to an older brother who was telling me about his life when he was my age, letting me know that I wasn't alone. Incredible. I still sense him around me, and I always feel his love and caring for me.

Karunamayi

Karunamayi is someone who has helped me immensely, healing those parts of myself that I couldn't reach on my own, and giving

Karunamayi

It took me awhile to figure out the depth of my relationship with Karunamayi, whom I'll call Amma from now on. Back in about 1997 or so, a friend of mine phoned to ask me if I'd be available for her to practice jin shin do (basically shiatsu/acupressure); she liked practicing with me because I could give her feedback about her technique. So a couple of days later I was stretched out on my friend's massage table and she was doing pressure points on me. Somewhere along the line I decided to pull in some additional energy: I did this by focusing on my heart, “reaching” from there straight into the space above my body, and pulling energy into me. I found myself shifting a bit to my right heart (I always experience myself as having three hearts: one in the center, one on the left, and one on the right), when suddenly there was a much larger influx of energy—nothing overwhelming, but more than I'd expected. At the same time I heard a fairly loud voice say to me, “You are my beloved son.” That seemed rather Biblical to me, so I just kind of ignored it in favor of the loud crashing that was coming from above my head. I thought my friend had tripped over something, since she'd been standing at my head, and had her hands on my head when the energy influx happened. I noticed that she'd removed her hands and I could hear her shuffling around and things being moved on the floor. A short while later she again put her hands on my head, then quickly removed them. Some time passed and then she tried again to put her hands on my head, and this time she stayed.

After the session was over, I sat up and looked around: my friend was standing there giving my very strange looks. She asked, “What happened?” I said, “Not much. Why?” She told me that she'd been standing above my head, with her hands on my head, when there was suddenly such a strong burst of energy that she was thrown bodily against the wall behind her, which was probably six feet from where she'd been standing. The noise and shuffling I'd heard was my friend trying to get back on her feet. After she got back up she again put her hands on my head but couldn't keep them there-- they kept getting repelled.

Shortly after all that my life changed and I started thinking about moving back to the US, from Canada, where I'd lived for thirty years. By the beginning of 1998 I'd pretty much decided on the move, but I was still very apprehensive about it: I loved living in Canada. But every time I started questioning myself about moving I would see my entire room light up with a very bright light, and I knew I was doing the right thing, regardless of my fears at the time. At one point, a few days before I was to leave, I was outside loading my truck and again questioning myself, and again the whole world lit up with a bright white light, as if to tell me not to worry.

So I moved to Tucson. I didn't meet Karunamayi until a couple of years later. The first time I went to see her, I hadn't heard of her and went basically out of curiosity, or so I thought. I listened to the evening talk she gave, received a quick darshan, and went home not sure if I wanted to go back the next day. She wasn't saying anything that I hadn't heard before, and it was information I'd known for many years. I lay in bed that evening, trying to decide if I really wanted to go back the next day, and the next, much less go to the homa (fire ceremony). As I lay there it occurred to me that I was missing something, that I was approaching her based on what she had to say rather than who she was or might be. So I decided to go back the next morning, only I'd go back with a different approach: I'd see her through my heart rather than through my head.

I sat there the next morning, perhaps thirty feet from her, in the middle of the rest of the people siting in front of her, and I consciously chose to change my means of looking at her: I looked with my heart instead of my head. And as soon as I did so, she looked straight at me, smiled and nodded her head, and put her hand over her heart. And everything changed. It didn't matter to me what she was talking about: I didn't care if she was talking about Sanatan Dharma or making compost. For me it was, and still is, only about being in her presence. Everything else is secondary.

A few years after my first meeting Amma, we had our first meditation retreat with her here in Tucson. At that time we had three day retreats (the good old days), and this retreat was at a guest ranch just north of Tucson. At the end of the first day of the retreat we all lined up to get a blessing and darshan from Amma. When I'd done this before, she usually said something like “my child,” or “my baby” to me and I assumed to everyone else. But this time it was different: this time, as she put her hand on my head, she looked me in the eyes and said, “My beloved son.” I went back to my tent that night and thought about the possibility of Amma being the source of the large energy influx and the voice that said “My beloved son” when I was on the massage table back in Canada. Next day, the second day of the retreat, I was sitting, kind of half meditating, half listening to what Amma was saying, when I started thinking about Amma calling me her beloved son and the connection to what had happened in Canada several years earlier. At that point, something like seven years had passed between my friend getting thrown against the wall and my sitting there with Amma. So I was thinking about that when I suddenly realized that Amma had stopped talking. I looked up at her, and she was looking at me, saying nothing, and making hard eye contact. I looked back at her and thought, “was that you back then, when I was on the massage table in Canada?” And she continued to look at me, making eye contact, and then she nodded, not just a single nod, but nodding her head “yes.”

So for me, the primary purpose of my moving to Tucson was to meet and be with Karunamayi. It's now late April 2008 and she was here a week ago for four days. I sometimes feel as though I live the rest of the year just for those four days that she's here.

Shivabalayogi

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