A True Experience of Babaji

During Sunday Service at Ananda Village, Sundara Traymar shares a beautiful true story about an Ananda devotee visiting Babaji's cave in the Himalayas. You can find the complete talk here.

Transcript

Sundara Traymar:

There's a wonderful story about a devotee who wasn't a devotee at the time. He was a fundamentalist Christian. And he, he said, was very rigid with dogma and doctrine, and just, this is the way, no other way.

Going to India

And then his uncle, who was an Ananda devotee, asked him if he wanted to go to India with him because his wife wasn't able to go. She got sick. And so this man, Marlon, went with him to India, and his uncle sent him a copy of Autobiography of Yogi to read. And he said you should read the chapter on Babaji because this is a pilgrimage to Babaji's cave we're going to. So Marlon read this chapter and Babaji's cave on Babaji. And he said, "Yeah, that's interesting, but that's really not for me."

So he goes to India. They have a meeting with Swami Kriyananda, and after the satsang, Swami is leaving; he goes up to Marlon, whose name now is Rajananda. And he goes up to Marlon, or Rajananda, who is six foot eight tall, tall! And he weighs about 250 pounds. And Swami says to him, "You're in for quite an adventure." And then he taps him three times on the spiritual eye, and he said, "but you must keep an open mind. "And then he taps him three times in the heart, "But more importantly, you must keep an open heart." And he said "you're in for quite an adventure."

So the adventure begins. They go to Babaji's cave. And once they're in Babaji's cave, its monsoon season. And it just starts raining cats and dogs. And he's... Marlon Rajananda said it was raining so hard that you really could you could barely see in front of you. And the group, as they're walking from Babaji's cave back to the bus, started kind of getting longer and longer, and he was kind of by himself. And the rain was coming down so hard, it was like rivers were coming down the hillside. And the red mud was just, it was getting wet, and it was just getting very slippery. He couldn't see where he was going.

And all of a sudden, he slips, he falls, and he starts going down into a ditch. And he knew that if he was to go into that ditch, he never would have been found. He grabs on to a root; he holds the root. And then he cries out, “God! I did not come to India to die!” And at that moment, a hand pulls him up. And he thought, he assumed, it was somebody from the group.

The hand pulls him up. And it's a small boy. Remember, Rajananda is six foot eight and 250 pounds. This boy was maybe 11 years old, and he's carrying a gourd in his left hand, so he just pulled Rajananda up effortlessly with his right hand.

And he pulls him up, and then he points him in the direction he starts walking him back to the bus. As they're walking back to the bus, Rajananda starts to slip and lose his footing. The boy says "Trust me," and then he was able to walk fine. And as they continue walking, Rajananda noticed something very interesting, and that was that the boy was not wet at all. Amidst the monsoon Rajananda's own clothes were starting to dry, and that there was a bubble of dryness around them amidst monsoon outside.

Is that interesting? So they get back to the vehicle and, or, get back to around the area where you could see the vehicle in the distance into a field, and Rajananda undergoes in this pouch to give the boy some money and by the time he looks down, looks back up, the boy's gone completely. He says there was nowhere he could have gone, and running real quickly just wasn't possible. So they have this experience; he tells everybody that that very well could have been Babaji or Babaji's blessings.

And so they go back to Swami. And Rajananda looks at Swami. They don't say anything at first. They just laugh. And Swami said "It was quite an experience, wasn't it?"

Thoughts on Miraculous Occurrences in Today's Time

And I share this story because so often, you know, in the Bible, we hear these miraculous occurrences. In Autobiography of a Yogi, we hear these miraculous occurrences, but sometimes we don't think that these things can happen to us. And while we might not have an experience like that, remember what it says at the beginning of the Autobiography, the quote from the Bible, “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.”

We think that this podium here is solid, but we know, and in reality, it's not solid. We think that we are fixed in our karma, in our circumstances in life and there's no way out of it. But as we know, that's not true. That's the whole purpose of the spiritual path, that we can transcend our karma. And stories like this help us to remember that there's something so much going on that we can't... the reasoning mind, it says in the reading, can't understand.