EPISODE 68: DIVYA DIKSHA.

Welcome to my blog which begins with the large size photo of Muktananda that dominates my small study and in front of which I do my occasional meditations. Last week I received a ‘Divya Diksha’ card from my friends in America which annually remembers August 15^th 1947 as the day that Baba Muktananda received the final initiation from his guru, the extraordinary Swami Nityananda. It is not untypical of Indian mythology that for most Indians this is the day of India’s independence from the Raj and the beginning of the dreadful mistake called Pakistan. Also not atypical is the local disputes about whether Muktananda was really the appointed successor or just seized the position for himself.

In his book, ‘Play of Consciousness,’ Baba describes his experiences in the most purple of prose. I no longer have the book because quite honestly a time came when everything in it seemed so far from my own experience as to be either lies or irrelevant. I was much happier with the down to earth Shaivism which was beautiful in its language and its truth without making me feel that my own meditations were feeble beyond belief. Why did Muktananda gets dancing goddesses and blue gods and all I got was a restless mind and lust?

Here’s an atrocious poem about Muktananda’s divya diksha written by a devotee.

Walking through a drizzle,
Muktananda sizzled.
 Nityananda had given to him
What was surely everything.
 

Into Muktananda's eyes, a penetrating beam arrived
That made his soul become alive,
And lit a fire inside his being,
So illusions would be fleeing.

Nityananda had also given him
His own sandals and prasad
And after this auspicious day
Muktananda traveled far

To the town of Sukhi
Where he meditated for hours.
He was absorbed
And could not ignore
The shakti's inner power.

Soon after he got to Sukhi
He saw the field outside ablaze.
“What,” he thought, “is happening to me.”
He was very, very crazed.

Then one day the inner fire rose
And, in meditation, he saw a naked woman.
He felt desire
From passion's pyre.
He did not know what was happening to him.


Distressed by what had happened
He took off his swami clothes
He left his hut and walked to Nagad
Where a landowner gave him a small home.

In that little hut in Nagad
Another yogi had lived.
“Read the book inside the cupboard,”
A voice said, and it had a lot to give.

The book describe the effects of shaktipat
Which he had received through Nityananda's grace.
And now Muktananda knew that all was good,
And light shone in his face.

So he went to see Zipruana
That naked avadhoot.
And Zipruana told him precious things,
Things he never knew.

Zipruana told him the woman
Was Kundalini herself,
And she was divesting him of sexual desire
So he could attain the greatest spiritual wealth.

Zipruana told him shaktipat
Would completely purify his being.
And he would become a supreme king
Since his essential nature shaktipat was freeing.


Zipruana told him that
What was happening to him was great.
Later, he would give grace to many thousands.
He had a blessed fate.

And the writer of this story poem
Was one of those many many folks.
If you asked me, “How important was
Muktananda's divya diksha day to you?”
My answer would be, “Of auspicious days to me,
It really was the most.”

After Muktananda died in 1982, his appointed successors, brother and sister Subash and Malti took over and then fell out. Out of the two, it seemed to me that Malti, who became Chidvilasananda and then Gurumayi, was the more impressive. A battle between the two ensued. By this time I was out of the movement and wasn’t that concerned to take on either one as my teacher. It was Gurumayi, however, who captured Ganeshpuri, Muktananda’s home ashram. I went to see her there once in the late eighties but felt none of the old magic and subsequently left and didn’t return until the beginning of last year. What I found then was emptiness. Where once there had been a thriving beautiful ashram was now dereliction, defensiveness and hostility. Gurumayi, I was told, hadn’t been seen for years. This I find extraordinary. How could a queen with two enormous palatial ashrams, in Ganeshpuri and upstate New York, simply disappear. How and why? It bothers me. Recently I was being told about a film, ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ which tells of a woman’s spiritual meeting with a guru in India before a trip to Bali in which she ‘found’ love. The guru in the story was, apparently, Gurumayi.

A young woman I know is so influenced by the film that she now wants to go to India and Bali, with the hope of having the same experiences. She’s the same age I was back in 1976 when I met Baba. I have often said that I feel sorry for our young because they don’t have a generational alternative to the status quo like we did back in those days. Okay, most, if not all, the gurus turned out to be money-mad deceivers, liars, smugglers, politicians, and philanderers, but the things they talked about were of a higher reality than the normal greed and materialism in our societies. Nowadays even communism is an unknown, so no hope at all for ‘spiritual’ values.

So when I meditate in front of my picture, I’ve no idea if I’m just teasing myself with the idea that Muktananda was special or whether it even matters as long as I get something from what I do. But do I really think that on August 15^th 1947, Swami Nityananda passed his power and lineage on to Muktananda in the way it is described in the book? Not really. Does that matter? Not at all.

___

This rather pointless reminiscing probably tells you all you need to know about my last week in which not a lot happened and I spent another three days in my grandson’s world where nearly all our communication is mediated through fantasy dialogues between Jedi Knights and Sith Lords. As these contain humour, philosophy, history, strategy and all types of life and death, they are not inconsequential, just difficult to maintain for ten hours a day. Not even torrential rain stopped him coming out into the back garden where my quiet smokes became unquiet and his pyjamas, which he only changes out of if made to, soaked.

___

On the day before going to the soggy midlands, I did in fact have a meeting with Alison about the day of the dead but no sooner had we started that she got a phonecall from her daughter’s father’s family in Wales, saying that the grandmother was about to die. Ten minutes later she and her daughter were on their way North to say goodbye and prepare for a funeral.

Death imitating art.