If Truth Be Told: A Monk's Memoir

by Om Swami

‘Dashashvamedha Ghat.’

I hadn’t been able to find any place to eat where the food wasn’t deep-fried.

However, I stopped recommending stones and amulets for people to wear for I no longer believed in these remedies.

The truth is that our future is determined by the choices we make today, and today is resting on the choices we made yesterday.

Above all, there were the joys I knew within. I had experienced the pleasure of diving into the ocean of meditation.

I was ready to take up the position except for a moral dilemma I found myself in. I wasn’t sure I was OK working for a casino. The issue was resolved when I happened to meet a member of their customer service team while I was making a round of the office. He was replying to an email from an American customer who was begging for his transactions to be reversed because he had made a huge mistake. The American customer had gambled away $60,000 between his four credit cards. In his email, he wrote that he was going to lose his home. I asked the customer service person if anything could be done for this man. ‘Don’t worry, I get many emails like this on a daily basis,’ he

said, dismissing the man’s plea.

‘A salad, a bruschetta, a coke and a sparkling water with a slice of lemon,’ I said. ‘Two vegetarian pennes for the main and one of them with bocconcini cheese, please.’ ‘Did you want anything else?’ I asked Rajan. He shook his head.

religion and religious rituals and practices do not get rid of the restive tendencies of the mind because it isn’t just about practising a ritual or sadhana. What matters is how they are done, with what intent and sentiment they are performed.

work on the self, on one’s fears, patterns and conditioning. External worship doesn’t guarantee one will rise above one’s ego or ‘negative’ states such as anger, hatred and guilt. In fact, at Baba’s ashram, the more religious a devotee seemed, the more rigid, narrow and egotistic I found the person to be.

I knew then that my love couldn’t

melt him and my service was of no value. Money I had mostly run out of.

what happens with someone may not necessarily be about who you are or what you can give but also abou...

mango. I may have fancied myself as a monk but, in reality I was a beggar. Unlike ascetics, a beggar only takes and gives nothing in return, not even a blessing.

We met four young men there who had come to visit Vyasa Gufa, one of the main attractions of Mana Gaon.

When I told him I was looking for a cave, he decided to take me towards Neelkanth right away. Neelkanth, named after Lord Shiva,

is a mountain in Badrinath and a popular tourist site. From Mana Gaon, it took us over two hours to reach the spot, situated a few kilometres before Neelkanth.

She turned out to be a bhairavi, a female practitioner of tantra, and claimed she had acquired a couple of siddhis.

Then, she dictated the mantra of the karna pishachini and asked me to write it down for the sadhu.

‘Ma, with all due respect, I have been invoking the Divine with mantras for nearly twenty years, and I am sick and tired of signs, signs and more signs. If she, the Empress, is real, why doesn’t she give me her darshan? Why doesn’t she manifest her form in front of me?’

There was complete silence in the cave. Outside, you could hear the rain falling on the leaves. Between that sound and the absolute stillness within, there was nothing else. Then the bhairavi smiled. ‘Is that so?’ she said softly. ‘Granted.’ Her words gave me goose pimples. She continued. ‘In less than one year,

you will have her most unambiguous vision, and then you will visit the tantra peetha, Kamakh...

She went on. ‘Now, you must do a forty-day sadhana, which I shall teach you. On that mountain,’ she said, and pointed to a distant mountain. ‘Gandharv, the celestial musicians, will come to you and you will hear their performance. If my words turn out to be false, may I be a leper for the rest of my life.’

But whether I had to bathe with icy water or rub snow into my skin, I wasn’t bothered. For that matter, what I ate, or if I ate at all, wasn’t a concern any longer. My time at Baba’s ashram had made me quite indifferent to such situations.

Even though I had never been to Odisha, an image of Jagannath Puri came into my mind. I longed to meditate by the sea and thought Puri would be the best place to do so.

Rain, storms, mountains, seas, trees … they are all there for a reason. Nothing is non-causal; everything supports a bigger cause.’

Meditation is predominantly of two types: concentrative and contemplative. In the first kind, you build your concentration. In the second, you use it to reflect on the nature of reality and your own existence. Contemplative meditation gives birth to insight, and it is this insight that changes how you see and interpret the world around you. Deep concentration leads to samadhi, and deep contemplation allows you to maintain that state while dealing with the challenges of the world. I alternated between the two types of meditation.

Then I realized that I had to give my body and mind some rest. So I forced myself to nap for two hours in the evenings.

The lineage of the sages protects a true seeker, and this is, in fact, the primary purpose of initiation through a mantra.

The answer is rather simple. Our identification with the body is so strong that most people spend their lives simply taking care of the body.

The body feels cold, let’s clothe it; it feels hot, let’s remove the layers; it’s hungry, feed it; it’s tired, give it rest. We become so preoccupied with fulfilling the body’s many desires—cleaning, feeding, clothing, decorating

and protecting it, that we become...

I learned with him around: to be at ease.

Just like you don’t need the raft once you cross the river, these conditions no longer apply once an adept has mastered the art of staying in samadhi. At that time though, I was a seeker and not an adept. I hadn’t yet learned to go into samadhi, much less stay in it.

Around 5 a.m., while I was meditating with full awareness, a form appeared a few feet away from me. It was partially turned away from me.

The form sat on the floor and faced me. I still didn’t look at it properly. I was in deep absorption and determined to ignore this being. ‘Aayo ji, aayo ji, Sarvanand Baba, aayo ji,’ (Come here, come here, O Sarvananda, come here), a most mellifluous feminine voice called out to me.

It was an opportunity to express my gratitude to Mother Nature, to the farmers who

produced the grain and to Pradeep who cooked it.

‘Self-realization is not an

instantaneous act. We may have an aha moment but it is mindfulness that allows us to navigate the world with the utmost awareness of our verbal, mental and physical actions. It is one thing to grasp that we are not just the body, but it is another thing altogether not to react when someone hurts us. We may recognize that anger destroys our peace of mind, but to remain calm, no matter how strong the provocation—that is real realization.

Panch-mundi asana is a tantric seat made by burying the skulls of five different creatures, including that of a human, in the ground.

went back to the northern Himalayas and meditated for the prescribed duration in a tiny hamlet called Rudranath, situated at an altitude of 14,000 feet. Rudranath is open only six months in a year because of the extreme weather conditions.

‘The universe is trillions of years old, our galaxy and planet are billions of years old. The human race is a few million years old, while the average human life is seventy years. It’s a very short life. It must be celebrated, it must be lived. Life is not a challenge that needs to be faced. Nor is it an enemy that needs to be fought. For that matter, it’s not a problem that needs solving either. It’s a flowing river, and all we need to do is to flow with it,’ I said. ‘Live. Love. Laugh. Give.’

Enlightenment does not mean you have to live like a pauper.

Religion is our creation.

long as you have a compassionate view and you are not hurting others, everything—well,

almost everything—is okay.