Cutting the roots

It was during a summer holiday in 1979 in Mexico while I was hanging out on a beach on my yearly 3 weeks’ vacation from my job, doing nothing in particular, that all of a sudden I became keenly aware of the lack of fulfilment in the life I was living. I knew in that moment that a radical change needed to happen, and upon return to Italy, I was determined to clean the slate. Even though I had no idea what to do next, it was absolutely clear that whatever I was doing it was not IT and before the new could come I had to end the old.

I terminated my work as a technical consultant for two large mechanical factories, sold a shop where I had been selling holiday and sports equipment, and separated amiably from my wife, who also wanted to leave Italy and explore the world.

After a few months of relaxing and doing nothing but fooling around with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, I finally got bored of this too and booked a ticket for a flight to South America, planning to travel for several months through Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, in time to arrive in Rio de Janeiro for the yearly carnival.

A week before leaving Italy, an old acquaintance of mine returned from India after having spent three years there. I invited him to stay at my house as he had no place to go, but mainly also because I was incredibly curious about India, which was another of my secret dream places, but I thought that it was no longer so groovy to go there now as it had been during the 1960s.

However, after a few evenings of listening to fascinating stories about his time in India, where he lived as a Sadhu, I realized that India still needed to be discovered, and without hesitation I changed my mind, cancelled the flight to South America, and booked myself on a plane to Bombay without consciously realizing that THE path of my new life had just begun.

The Indian way

With no program and no particular place to go, I landed in Bombay in April 1980. I hated the place on first sight; I found it very hot and dirty, but mainly because, for the first time in my life, I felt lonely and far away in a culture totally different from what I was accustomed to; I wanted to return to Italy with the first plane available. However, the next morning at the travel agency, I found out that because I had bought a cheap ticket, my return flight could only be booked two weeks ahead of time.

As I couldn’t leave, I bit the bullet and changed the semi-interred room in my middle-class hotel for a bed in a dormitory located on the third floor of a non-descriptive building in Colaba (the infamous “India Guest House”), which had three large windows facing the ocean and the Gateway of India.

It didn’t matter to me that during the day there was a constant flow of people coming in and waiting in front of the medical doctor’s practice located on the first floor, nor did it matter that during the night there was a constant flow of men entering the whore house located on the second floor. They were probably the same people I would see again the next morning at the doctor’s door!

The laid-back Indian way of life started to grow on me, and after a few days, I felt like I had always lived there. I first discarded my jeans and shirt for a set of the typical Indian white long collarless shirt and white drawstring baggy pants, and then began eating at the cheap local Indian chai shops. A few more days and I did not mind not finding any toilet paper in the communal toilets and thought it normal to go the “Indian way”, which included the use of the rusted can sitting under the low tap located on the left of the latrine, and fully understood why Indians consider the left hand as being “unclean”.

Every morning I woke up incredibly excited, wanting to discover or better re-discover more of this very fascinating exotic world.

The journey begins

After the first excitement, I soon reached a state of boredom with the local fauna of foreign residents in Bombay, most of whom were deeply into heavy drugs and dirty scams in order to provide for food and supplies. Therefore, I decided to start travelling together with an Italian man I had met in Bombay (a heroin user), and we went by train to Delhi. After staying one month at a guest house in the Paharganj Bazaar for three rupees a night (at that time, 30 cents), the monsoon rains started, and Nepal seemed the best place to go, where, as someone had told me, there was no monsoon; only much later did I discover that this was not true after all.

I booked a seat on a German bus equipped with a German driver because everybody was discouraging us from using the local Indian buses. It turned out that this was a Mercedes bus, probably discarded by the Germans after the First World War. The “German driver” was an aged freak who kept half a kilo of hash for the trip on the right side of his seat and, on the left, a crate of beer.

After a very eventful trip that lasted three days and two nights, we reached Nepal. I stayed there for two months and went from living for a while in Kathmandu’s Freak Street to a rented room at Boudhanath. While I was there, thousands of Tibetans gathered to see the Dalai Lama, who was visiting, but even if I had been somehow intrigued, I didn’t get to see him. I had a falling out with my travelling companion after trying to get him off the heroin and realizing that he was not interested at all in changing, and travelled alone on to Dhulikhel, a remote village in the mountains north of Kathmandu on the border of Tibet, just to be with myself.

I enjoyed getting up early in the mornings to see the splendid view of the Himalayan mountain range, going for walks, and doing nothing much else for weeks on end. During that time I befriended a German man called Günther, and we hung out together.

I found out that monsoon did come to Nepal after all, so in order to avoid the rains, Günther and I decided to travel to Kashmir and Ladakh because we were told that the monsoon does not reach there (this time we found out this to be true).

We slowly developed an interest in spiritual matters and visited Buddhist monasteries and Hindu temples as we went along on our journey, which led us through Nepal to Patna, to Bodhgaya, and then Varanasi. From there, we went along the Ganga up to Haridwar and Rishikesh.

En route, we visited many temples, and by the time we got to Rishikesh, I was frustrated because I couldn’t find the Indian spirituality I had heard of and had been looking for; I saw how every priest was just running a business from his temple.

Günther was also fed up, and he told me about a visit to an ashram in Poona he had made two months before we met. He showed me a book entitled Dying for Enlightenment that contained black-and-white photos of people who lived at that ashram. I was fascinated by the faces of the people; they all looked so happy, relaxed, and beautiful. I was intrigued, especially by the fact that the book contained barely any words but just photos. I considered the possibility of visiting that magic place one day in the future and left it at that. From Haridwar, we took a train to Amritsar and then went by bus to Srinagar, finally resting on a houseboat on the lakes for a few weeks. During that time, I decided on a whim to dye all my clothes red and orange.

I had high hopes to find an authentic spiritual way of life when we would get to Ladakh, which I thought would be unpolluted by spiritual tourism. After the most spectacular trip of my life, sitting on the rooftop of a local truck going over a pass 14,000 feet high, we arrived in Leh. There we ventured out all over the place trying to find an authentic Tibetan monastery but sadly also here, wherever the monasteries allowed visitors, they seemed to be set up as business ventures and tourist entertainments.

As it was starting to get cold in Ladakh and the shortage of water, and therefore showers, made it hard for me to stay there, I went back to Srinagar in order to plan the next leg of my magical journey.

Once in Srinagar, Günther and I settled into another houseboat, and after a week, I felt a strong pull to go to Pakistan to see the ancient ruins of Mohenjodaro, which are reportedly 6,000 years old. Even to this day, I don’t know why I wanted to go and see those places; maybe there was a deep old memory left inside of me from a past life…

Looking back now, I can see that during the entire India experience, I was guided by spontaneity and, for the first time in my life, without the interference of my mind. Bhagawati says I was slowly and purposefully guided by Existence toward Bhagwan. Now I can also say that every time since then, all changes in my life, big and small, have happened this way, and I know that I am being guided towards my “melt-IN”!

Günther was determined to go back to Poona, and I declined his invitation to join him. We separated, and a week after he left Srinagar, I set out to leave for Pakistan. I stopped over in Amritsar, where I decided to stay at the Golden Temple’s guest house, mainly because it was free of charge. I spent a few days sitting inside the temple, listening to the music they play for 23 hours every day. I enjoyed the beautiful energy and meditated inside the temple, or, at least I did what I thought at that time meditation was; little did I know!

This very, very special train!

One evening after having bought my train ticket to Pakistan, I went to the station an hour ahead of time for the six o’clock train to Lahore only to find out that the train was 9 hours delayed, which was very typical of the Indian railway schedule during that time.

A few other western travellers and I sat together and spent the next hours at the train station’s waiting room, talking, smoking, and getting high. All of a sudden, I looked at my watch and realized that nine hours had passed and it was time for the train to leave. I grabbed my backpack and started running towards the platform without checking the board. Platforms 1 and 2 were overcrowded with people because there were two trains standing there, ready to leave.

My memory was slightly hazy because I was still out of it; I wasn’t clear anymore which train to take and was looking desperately for somebody I could ask as the only signs I could see on the train were in Hindi writing.

I finally spotted the ticket collector in his dapper white pants, white shirt, black tie, black jacket, and distinguished golden name plate tag. He looked unusually clean and proper among the writhing mass of all the other Indian passengers who were crowding the platform and entering the train through the windows in order to secure a seat in the overcrowded 3rd class compartment. I approached him and said, “Excuse me, is this train going to Lahore?” He said, “No, sir, this is a very, very, very special train; it happens only once in a long while, and this train goes directly from Amritsar to Poona. Do you want to board, sir?”

I was in shock. I remembered that Poona was the place Günther had talked about, but I was so fixed on going to Lahore that I shook myself and decided not to take that train. Months later, I checked and double-checked and found out that such a train does not exist and there never has been a train that goes from Amritsar directly to Poona; it is virtually impossible as all the railway tracks go through Delhi and the trains are reformatted there.

Still wandering

As planned, I went through Pakistan, saw the ruins of Mohenjodaro, and finally went to Karachi, where at first when entering Pakistan I had been told I could cross the border back into India. However, I found out that I had been misdirected – the border was closed to travellers because of military presence there and high political tensions between Pakistan and India. I waited three weeks in Karachi for the next ship to leave for Bombay, staying in a small hut on the beach. In the meantime, I forgot all about Poona, the ashram, and the guru.

I spent three fascinating nights on the deck of the boat as the only westerner. During the day, it was so hot that I and most of the people were resting and sleeping; during the night, I was staring at the stars and listening to the stories of the many Indians who were coming back to their home country of India after having worked as labourers in the Gulf. Many of them were very depressed and poorer than when they had left, as they had been cheated out of their salary payments. When I disembarked in Bombay, about 500 people must have had my address and phone number in Italy and promised to come and visit me.

From Bombay, I had planned to travel to Sri Lanka. As I loathed that big, chaotic city and didn’t even want to stay for one night, I all of a sudden remembered Günther telling me that Poona and that ashram were only 300 km away from Bombay. I decided straightaway to go there for a stop-over on my way to the beautiful white-sand beaches of Sri Lanka.

Starting to blow up

By three o’clock in the afternoon of that same day, I arrived in Poona. I jumped into a rickshaw and instructed the driver, “To the ashram, please.”

Needless to say, on the way to the ashram, I started looking around to see if I would see Günther, and strangely enough, I spotted him on the road on a bicycle! After a warm hug and a sweet welcome, I was so happy to see a familiar face! However, he told me that he was now called Devaprem, a name given to him by Bhagwan. He took me into the ashram and showed me around, and we had cake and chai at the ashram’s tea shop called Vrindavan, which was located within the premises. I was overwhelmed by the feeling of freshness, coolness, greenness, and cleanliness on the premises. I felt like I was in heaven.

I settled at the Shalimar Hotel in town and went to the ashram every morning, and although I did see Bhagwan, I could not get to understand any of his messages because he was speaking in Hindi. But I observed all these people in the ashram being in obvious harmony; just to walk through the ashram was so uplifting, and among the people there was such beauty, such a fragrance. I was fascinated by the way I saw how people were working and living in gentle harmony, and I fell in love with that energy.

After a few days, I again met Günther, who told me he was participating in some of the groups offered in the ashram and that I should sign up for some too: “Just go to the office, and someone will suggest which ones are good for you.” I really had no idea what a “group” was, but it sounded like fun, so I went to the office, where a young woman named Masta listed eleven groups to participate in, starting with Enlightenment Intensive.

I really dove into it, and for the next four months I migrated from groups to therapy sessions to methods of meditation and started to peel away layers of family and social conditioning, childhood and adult traumas, and repressed emotions of pain and resentment.

When the first English discourse was to be given, I went to Buddha Hall to see Bhagwan, expecting to find the truth pouring from his words; however, it did not happen that way, and I was slightly disappointed. The reason I stayed was the people of the commune, the energy that bonded them, and the single-pointedness that connected every one of them until there was no more separation but one unit meditating, working, and breathing in harmony.

Starting to grow up

It was only later that I realized that Bhagwan was the orchestra’s conductor, the one who showed me the way, and found out that what I developed for him was an enormous trust, respect and devotion and especially an enormous gratitude for having put me ON the path, and after a deep clean-up kicked me in the back and let me walk my way alone.

This was the first time in my life that I was able to wake up and open my eyes, and see the whole world lit with a different light. It was the first time I understood that every person involved at any time in my life was my teacher and every experience was my opportunity to grow. In the years to come, I kept travelling the world, and among travellers often the question arises, “Where did you grow up?” In those moments, I often found myself saying, “I grew up in India! Before that, I only vegetated.”

Needless to say, my life began to accelerate at an incredible rate the day I walked into the ashram; it is not always an easy or comfortable feeling to live with, but I would not have it any other way, and most importantly for me, I have never been bored since!

Today, 29 years later, I know that this feeling of acceleration will never stop; on the contrary, if I am on the right path, it will always increase until every atom of my body accelerates to such a speed that it will melt me with the universe.

“In the East that has been the surest way for the seeker. The seeker will search for a master…. And the only way to know is to listen to your heart. Wherever you fall in love, wherever your heart starts beating a little faster, wherever you feel ‘This is the place!’, wherever you feel suddenly possessed by something unknown – something mysterious, something miraculous, you know you have found your master; this is the criterion. Then the seeker will sit with the master. Days will pass, months and years will pass, and slowly slowly, sitting there continuously, the disciple will start disappearing.

That is the whole art of disciplehood: to be able to disappear, to become absent, not to be. And when the ego is completely gone – any moment the ego is gone – instantly, something from the heart of the master jumps into the heart of the disciple. It is not that the master gives it; it is not a thing to be given. It is not that the disciple takes it; it is not the thing to be taken. It simply happens!

The master is aflame with god and the disciple has dropped the ego. In that very vulnerable state, in that opening, the fire enters the disciple. That moment is called ‘satsang’. The communion has happened. The disciple is pregnant now. Now the seed will grow. Now, even if the disciple is thousands of miles away from the master, he is not away, he cannot be away. He may be on another planet but there is no distance.”

Osho, Turn On, Tune In, And Drop the Lot, Ch 9

From the book, Past the Point of No Return by Ma Anand Bhagawati