We ended last time with the dramatic way that Rajneesh used to pass me on to whoever was to be the next teacher. Like Dumbledore of the movies, whom he resembled in many ways. Remember the explosion of light in the Phoenix episode “You can say what you like about Dumbledore, but you have to admit, he’s got style.”

The dueling gurus thing had happened to someone else we heard about through the devotee grapevine. The lady was going crazy too, this time about Muktananda and Sai Baba. She didn’t have the advantage of a radio phone to the guru hanging round her neck so she just acknowledged that she was fed up with mind spinning and needed a definite and unmistakable answer by the next day or she was quitting. Then she went to bed, locking her door as usual.

Next morning she awoke to a strong smell of roses. On the pillow next to her was a beautiful single rose and next to it a small, silver framed picture of Sai Baba. She and her friends reckoned that was an answer to her request.

Now though I knew that Rajneesh had said goodbye, or Bon Voyage, I certainly wasn’t sure that Muktananda would say hello. Shirley read Play of Consciousness too and was very impressed. As a few days passed it just grew on us that we really had no choice in the matter, so we booked passage to the nearest airport to Santa Monica, where the intensive was to be held.

We had a helpful very strong companion we called James. He got us and the luggage from the airport to Santa Monica and we found the place to stay. Now at that time I had pretty severe back problems and Shirley, as it turned out later had walking pneumonia. Neither of us by normal standards should have been traveling at all, let alone sitting on the floor for hours on end, but there we were.

The intensive was held in a huge circus tent holding 1,000 people or so. We had a thing called an orientation that was a total joke, and entered the sacred space, men on one side and women on the other. People came and sprayed the carpet between the rows with a delightful perfume that we later found was Heena. Nag Champa incense has it as one of the variety it manufactures.

After an introduction, Baba, as he was called, walked in. I was about thirty feet away, sitting with hundreds of men as he passed by. I hadn’t seen him enter because the door was behind me but I felt a wave of energy run through me, another new experience, and there he was. A little man in orange with a ski cap on, bearded and vibrating with energy as he sat totally still on his big chair.

Shirley was sitting facing the door and saw him come in and got the distinct impression that he just kept coming in until he had entered into her. Tears arose.

We listened to his talk, myself in acute discomfort from trying to sit cross legged with a psoas muscle that kept going into spasms. Baba spoke in Hindi with his words translated by an utterly gorgeous young Indian woman named Malti. I was quite disturbed by the fact the whole of his book, Play of Consciousness was devoted to the mantra Om Namah Shivaya, which I had been practicing for hours a day to be prepared. But it is a rule of sadhana…the spiritual practices, that the guru is not there to fulfill your expectations. He didn’t. His whole talk was about a different mantra, Hamsa and Soham.

During the break in the program Baba stayed in his chair…read throne…and people could come up and have darshan…a meeting with a holy person…and some of them asked for a new name to pin point the change in life that was happening. This is the equivalent of the new names given at occult initiations. The new names of course were names from Indian mythology, legend and religion.

Thereby hangs a little tale. Shirley was sick and was dosing herself with cough sweets, throat sprays and aspirin at frequent intervals, just to stay upright and awake. The lady next to her had a cold and a tummy upset and was anxious to exchange symptoms and indulge in small talk. Shirley, sick or well is very direct and pointed out that she hadn’t come over a thousand miles at great personal discomfort to talk about ailments. She had come to get the Shakti of a Siddha. The conversation ceased.

Now Shakti as most of those reading this will know is the creative energy of the goddess, the conscious energy from which everything has been formed. A Siddha is a holy person whose discipline and practices have produced a higher state of consciousness than the ‘normal’ person enjoys, and around whom happenings, Siddhis, occur that in some places would be considered as supernatural. The Siddha in this case was Baba Muktananda. The Shakti was the energy he transferred by touch in the ritual called Shaktipat which we had come to experience. It woke up the Kundalini and started the enlightenment journey under the control of the guru instead of at random, which could cause problems.

So, at the darshan, Shirley went up, bowed as was customary and asked for a name. Baba casually reached into a long box full of filing cards, without looking, picked one apparently at random, handed it to Shirley and that was that. He had a box on each side of him, one for male requests and one for females.

So Shirley, a little disappointed at how casually and effortlessly her fervent wish was treated, went off and looked at her card. The name on the front was Siddheshwari, very pretty. She turned it over for the translation. It said,”The Shakti of a Siddha.” Just what she had told the garrulous invalid she had come for. So much for random selection. I didn’t go up for a name on the first day. I was too busy trying to focus on the words of the talk while ignoring the muscle spasms. But we knew we were in the right place.

Then it came time for Baba to do his hands on stuff. The lights were low and everyone could hear the progress as he came down the rows one by one and strange noises began to resound through the hall. Shaktipat often energizes what are known as kriyas. When the rising Kundalini encounters an obstacle there is often a physical reaction known as a kriya. People with acute arthritis have gone effortlessly into the lotus position for example. Some roar like lions, or other animals, One person was totally incapacitated with all her joints swollen with what was called osteoarthritis. That one went into a full lotus and then jumped up and down,still in full lotus (Try it) going about six inches in the air each time with cracking noises every time she landed. She came out of it with teen age flexibility. This sort of thing was unusual but it happened. It probably wasn’t publicized much because of the AMA.

I heard Baba coming down the line towards me. People all around were doing their mantra pretty hard. I felt him stop in front of me and he massaged my scalp hard and dug his thumbs into my eyes till I saw bright lights, not the sort that the meditators were reporting.

Eventually he had given Shaktipat to each of the hundreds there and staggered off stage so to speak, loaded with hundreds of karmas. His job then was to meditate on the Self and teflon them off.

We had spent some time meditating during the morning and afternoon and the person hosting the intensive after Baba left to do his auric cleansing invited people to report their meditation and Shaktipat experiences. And boy, was that humiliating. So many people, some of them well known celebrities of stage and screen reported amazing visions and complex stories in 3D, stereo sound and technicolor. My own experience was sitting there aching just about from knee to neck, before Shaktipat. And then eyes, after Shaktipat. No visions, no lights, no peacocks, no music…zilch.

Next day was similar except that I sat in a chair on the sidelines and went up to get a name. Mine turned out to be Vaman, the name of one of the Vishnu incarnations, rather like Narayana, my name from Rajneesh. I read the story of Vaman later and it fitted rather well. Meditation was a little more comfortable but no more fruitful as far as pictures and visions were concerned. Baba came around to everyone once more and was less intrusive in his attacks.

This all happened over the Christmas weekend of 1980. We then caught a plane to Colorado, aided by the mighty James. The planes were overbooked and people were offered better seats tomorrow, and cash if they would give up their seat to someone who just HAD to travel that day. James saw the opportunity of an easy buck and a free hotel stay and took it. We went off and visited Shirley’s family in Colorado for a couple of days.

Both of us were pretty high on Muktananda and the esoteric couple of days we had spent in the atmosphere of ancient India. Shirley attempted to explain some of this to her adult nephew. He stopped her in mid sentence by saying, “Did he tell you that Jesus was the only son of God.” On hearing that this password phrase didn’t arise he said that he wasn’t interested.

Yet as we both agreed, watching Muktananda move around and do his thing made it much easier to understand how Jesus must have appeared when he talked to the crowds and did his stuff.

We got back to O’Hare a couple of days later, on New Year’s Eve, to the bitter Chicago cold, to find the VW Rabbit covered in snow. When we eventually got in and Shirley turned the ignition key it was wonderful to hear that little engine start straight up after nearly a week by itself in the cold.

We got home and Shirley did the sensible thing and went to bed for some days. I totally rearranged our previous meditation room to accommodate the new guru and his accouterments.

So we began the next phase of our spiritual journey together. We would get up at 3:00, meditate, tea and then chant the Guru Gita, the song to the guru, a Sanskrit chant with 181 verses. Then some reading and breakfast and Shirley would go off to teach, after the holidays.

We found that there was a Siddha Yoga ashram in Chicago, very small, held in a house and difficult to access because of the one way street system in the city. But we went as often as we could and befriended the resident swami, who had been an MD in civilian life.

We both endured the same phenomena. Just about everyone else was having their visions and kriyas. Nothing ever happened to us. Sometimes it was less uncomfortable than others. Shirley had no difficulty sitting on the floor. It was always hard for me even if I took cushions with me.

Then one day in 1981, always to be remembered, I had my break through as far as visions were concerned. Up to that day I couldn’t even visualize. I would read self help books telling me that the secret was just to visualize this or that, and I would throw them against the wall so hard that they disintegrated. It was always a miracle to my professors that I did college mathematics successfully without being able to visualize diagrams and graphs. It never occurred to me that such a circumstance could ever turn out to be an advantage. But it did.

Muktananda gave certain of his swamis the right and authority to do intensives in which the power of the guru to give Shaktipat was assumed by the swami in charge. We both attended an intensive in the Chicago ashram, more from duty than expectations. The swami did the Baba thing and came round and touched everyone on the third eye according to protocol.

I experienced the most amazing thing in my life, up to that time. Suddenly I could see, on the back of my frontal bone a huge cockpit instrument panel bigger than that of a 747. And it was in color, and all the instruments and gauges were registering with flickering needles and lights. I just sat petrified at my first ever inner viewing, scarcely daring to breathe. Then I noticed that outside the windows I could see stars and planets and asteroids just zipping by. I was in some sort of space craft in the pilot’s seat. A miracle indeed for one who couldn’t visualize a triangle at will.

And then I felt a presence behind me and an orange sleeved arm moved down over my shoulder and a lean brown hand extended its forefinger and pressed a black button on the instrument panel. A rectangular screen flashed on and a phrase appeared on it: Automatic Pilot to the Self. Maximum Thrust. A familiar deep gravelly voice said ‘Milega’ and I watched as the astonishing speed increased many times and I was hurtling into what was now obviously inner space, my previously inadequate space ship repaired by the master engineer, fueled by the mantra and guided by the master navigator. Another first…I experienced no doubt.

For the very first time in my life I had something to report from a meditation experience and when the swami pointed to me I stood up and tried to describe it. But the words kept being interrupted with sobs as I told the unbelievable thing that had happened to a total non-visualizer after 51 years of inner blackness. Several of the audience were crying too. What a thing to happen as a first time picture. I wasn’t sure what ‘Milega’ meant and found out later that it meant ‘It will happen.’

As you can imagine, this locked me into the acceptance of Baba’s teaching of Kashmir Shaivism as the way to go. It took years and many twists and turns before any of that changed." Enough for today," as Rajneesh would say at saturation point. More to come.