Gods and Godmen of India (16 page)
While I waited for the appointed time for
darshan,
Narayanan of the
Malayala Manorama
briefed me on Mata’s background. She is the second daughter of a family of eight children belonging to a tribe of fisher-folk. She was born on 27 November, 1953. She was a precocious child and was able to talk when only six-months-old. And run around before she was two. She went to school, studied up to class V and then she found she knew more than was required for class X. She gave up. She was wayward and often went into trances. Her parents got tired of her. She moved over to her uncle but soon decided to live on her own, making her ends meet by stitching clothes.
She was uncommonly attractive and many suitors sought her hand. Then she was fully absorbed in world and meditation. She also saw herself as
Kanya Kumari
and decided to remain unmarried. Some of the many young men who were drawn to her, took a vow of Brahmacharya and stayed on with her. Needless to say, much gossip and scandal was spread about the goings on in this
math.
She ignored it. Many scandals attributed to her: how she turned water into milk, gave
tulsi
leaves to fishermen to get more than their usual catch; how while in a trance she was declared dead for eight hours. She no longer indulges in performing miracles. Her chief miracle as I said before, is the enormous warmth which oozes out from her body.
My first question to her was, “How can one overcome the fear of death.” Her answer was translated for me: “Body is physical and must perish on death. But life continues. It is like an electric bulb which fuses but the current continues. If you cut your finger, it will not heal by simply looking at it. You have to apply medicine to it. If you fear death, find the means of overcoming that fear. Anyhow, why do you ask me questions to which you know the answers?”
“I ask because I do not know, I do not believe in life hereafter because there is no evidence to support it,” I replied.
“You cannot totally rule it out,” she continued, “in any case, it serves a useful social purpose. You tell a child that if he lies, it will go blind. It is not true but a useful ploy to keep it on the path of truth.”
“There may be some justification to keep the illiterate masses on the right path by frightening them of consequences. But that does not apply to a thinking person. I am quite happy to admit I do not know.”
She smiled – she smiles most of the time – and replied, “It is not only through personal experiences that you realize everything. You have to accept the experiences of sages and rishis who train themselves to attain mystic knowledge. Take a simple example. Mix sugar with white sand. You will not be able to sift one from the other but an ant will unerringly take the sugar and leave out the sand.”
I changed the topic. “I don’t need God to make me good. We can sustain from others without believing in God.”
“Denying God is like lying on the ground and spitting to the sky. The spit will only fall on your face.” She replied gently but firmly.
“If there is God, tell me why bad things happen to good people?” She replied, “To the God-fearing it is fate; it is punishment for evil deeds done in past lives. To the non-believer it is an accident. If a child is born blind, the believer will ascribe it to sins committed in its previous life, the non-believer in some hormonal deficiency in the parents.”
One of my security guards interrupted the dialogue. “Mata, do you believe in between heaven and hell?”
“Heaven and hell are here on this earth. You do something bad and your presence will make life a living hell,” she replied.
We had taken more than the time allotted to us. I moved myself from the marble floor and touched her feet. Once more she took me in her embrace kissed me tenderly murmuring,
Namo Shivaye, Namo Shivayel"
And once more, I had to hold back my tears. As I turned around, I saw a sallow, bloodless-faced European girl who had been standing like a marble statue at the door take ice-cubes out of a flask and gently rub Mata’s face, lips and arms with them. I was told that every encounter Mata had with people raises her body temperature to dangerous levels. She takes on their ailments and sins on herself. Having been sinner all my life, she must have required a lot of icecubes to get rid of the fever that contact with me must have brought on her.
8/12/1991
O
nce upon a time, but not so long ago, there was a police officer living with his family in a small village, Khunder, in district Ferozepur. Amongst his children was a son named Madan Handa, born on 2 August 1931. The Handas were a very religious family but not in the narrow sense of the word. They sang songs of Baba Farid, Mira Bai and Guru Nanak. After the Partition the family settled down in Delhi. Madan took his degree from the Delhi School of Economics, became a lecturer, got married and had a son. He then took his doctorate from the London School of Economics and got a job in Toronto and has lived in Canada for the last 23 years. On the surface all seemed well in his life but inside him was turmoil. In the summer of 1958, while still in Delhi, he happened to be whiling away his time browsing through books at railway book stalls when his eye fell on a volume of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. “In an instant I saw a dot of light, light celestial somewhere far away but within me … for me a new dawn had began,” writes Madan Handa. He began to practise yoga of the mind and body, went deeper into Farid, Mira, Nanak, Ramakrishna and Aurobindo.
It was after the Handas migrated to Canada that tragedies struck the family. Their 23-year-old son was killed in a car accident; his wife deserted him, his father died of grief and his mother was stricken by cancer and he developed heart trouble. He describes it as the “Dark Night of the Soul”. His soul cried out, “I want to be an empty jar,” i.e. empty out the grief within him.
On 16 June 1984, he had a mystic experience. He was taking an early morning walk by the river when he felt strangely in tune with everything about him. He describes the experience in the following words:
“There is a state of consciousness which is described as Nirvana, Enlightenment, Self-Realization, Illumination,
Satori,
Rebirth,
Un-al-Haq,
Cosmic Consciousness, etc. By whatever name it is called, I have realized that state; it took me close to 25 years.”
Two months later a voice spoke to him:
“Take thy pen and write. ‘I’ shall speak to you the last book. The Gospel of Peace. Start with the Beginning. There was no beginning. ‘I’ never created anything.
There was no moment of birth, nor shall be one of death; of the Universe.
Do not be confounded and write. ‘I’ never created anything outside and apart from ‘Myself.’
‘I’ will speak to you from heaven and from earth;
from within you and from outside of you; for ‘I am’ everywhere.
This is your first stanza. This knowledge is given to you in the dead of the night waking you up.
Wait as more comes to you.
*
Keep in mind this coming forth to you is like the pouring down of the rain. The rain of Truth.
*
‘I am’ giving you the last book; your last book; it is your gospel. Whether T give more to another when or where, to whom is ‘My’ choice. For, alone, ‘I am.’
*
‘I’ sent for you the great masters to be the guides for you. T sent to you the Buddha and then Jesus to live with you, to breathe with you, touch you, purify your thoughts and mind. Last of all T sent Mohammed to you without whose touch no soul may advance hereafter to certain spiritual summits. It is the spirit of these that washed you of every impurity and readied you. It is in that purified vacancy T came and chose your inside to be ‘My’ abode.”
Madan Handa has become a guru and guide to an ever-increasing circle of devotees. He has founed the World University of Peace and Cosmic Way Peace Community in Toronto. He writes under the name of Maitreya (compassionate friend). His first book of revelations is being widely discussed in esoteric circles. It is called the
Gospel of Peace: Scripture for the Age Peace and Enlightenment
8/4/89
N
ot Jiddu Krishnamurti but Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti, known to his friends and admirers as UG. Besides having the same surname there are other things about UG that make you think of Jiddu. He is handsome, into discourses and dialogues, writes books and has a philosophy to propound. He is not as well known as Jiddu, hence a short biographical sketch may be useful.
U.G. Krishnamurti was born in Masulipatam on 9 July 1918, the first and only child of his mother, who died of puerperal fever a week after giving birth to him. His father remarried and went out of his life. He was brought up by his maternal grand parents both of whom were ardent theosophists, knew Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti. UG spent his childhood years around Adyar, the centre of theosophy. He also travelled all over India and spent seven years in the Himalayas studying yoga under Swami Sivananda. He rejected yoga and asceticism and in his mid-twenties took a wife. Although he felt that marriage had been ‘the biggest mistake’ of his life, he remained married for 17 years and sired four children. He migrated to the United States, found a job for his wife and then abandoned his family. He eked out a miserable living giving lectures on theosophy and Indian cooking. From the States he went to London, then Paris and ultimately to Geneva to have himself repatriated to India. He had no money to pay for his passage. At the consulate where he narrated his dismal tale of failure, the lady secretary who was translating his narration was fascinated by his life-story and offered to house him. The lady, Valentine deKerven, was in her early sixties. UG was 17 years her junior. They have lived together ever since and have travelled extensively over the world. She is now in her eighties; he is 70.
It had been predicted in his horoscope that his 49th birthday would be a crucial turning point. It was on that day he heard Jiddu Krishnamurti speak at the Swiss village Saanen where Valentine and he had bought a chalet. On his way back from the lecture he sat by a stream and pondered. He came to the conclusion that: “There is no such thing as spiritual or psychological enlightenment because there is no such thing as spirit or psyche at all. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end.”
The change in outlook was accompanied by a change in his physiognomy. “The hands and forearms changed their structure, so that now his hands face backward instead of to the sides. His body is now hermaphroditic, a perfect union of animus-anima, and enjoys a sexuality the likes of which we can only guess. His right side responds to women, his left more to men.” UG, whose teaching was described as destructive as Siva in his role of a destroyer, became veritably an
ardhanari.
I am not sure if I have caught his message right. In the compilation of his interviews entitled
Mind is a Myth: Disquieting Conversations with the Man called UG,
Terry Newland gives a summary of the many things UG stands for:
“Making love is war; cause and effect is the shibboleth of confused minds; yoga and health foods destroy the body; the body and not the soul is immortal; there is no Communism in Russia, no freedom in America, and no spirituality in India; service to mankind is utter selfishness; Jesus was another misguided Jew and the Buddha was a crackpot; mutual terror, not love, will save mankind; attending church and going to the bar for a drink are identical; there is nothing inside you but fear; communication is impossible between human beings; God, love, happiness, the unconscious, death, reincarnation and the soul are non-existent figments of our rich imagination; Freud is the fraud of the 20th century, while J. Krishnamurti its greatest phoney.”
Back in India for a few days was U.G. Krishnamurti who has become a homeless wanderer. I have read and reviewed a compilation of his utterances,
Mind is a Myth.
I share many of his disbeliefs – in God, prophets, scriptures and organized religion – distrust of godmen and utter contempt for their gullible followers. What irritates UG, as he is known, is that despite his denunciation of religion and godmen, a growing number of religiously inclined men and women hang on to every word he says and regard him as a modern messiah.
UG happened to be in Delhi staying with Frank Noronha of the Indian Information Service who first introduced me to his writings. I went to see him to discuss matters like, if God, then who, the purpose of life, the phenomenon of death and why so many people continue to believe in life after death. As I shook hands with him, there was a long distance call from Bombay. It was somebody speaking on behalf of Parveen Babi who had attached herself to UG. He was pretty rough in his reply: “No, I cannot come to Bombay and will be in Bangalore tomorrow; don’t waste your time and money coming to see me; I can do nothing.”
He brushed his silver-grey locks and took his seat. He is an incredibly handsome man and looks closer to 50 than the actual 72. A movie camera recorded every word that passed between us. Actually, it was more of a monologue than a dialogue. After saying that he had nothing to say, no message to give but only respond to questions put to him he proceeded to deliver a long oration denouncing Sai Baba, Rajneesh and their followers. It was a good fifteen minutes later that I was able to butt in with a question: “I go along with you in rejecting accepted beliefs, but then how do we explain existence?” He discarded my question as irrelevant as it was based on the assumption that everything had a cause; according to him the cause and effect theory was fallacious and operated within the religious framework. I was not convinced. It was the same about death. While he agreed with me that it was a full stop to consciousness, he holds that our atomic existence continued in a different shape. That also I could not comprehend. I gave up the battle – he had too many words in his armoury for me to contend with.