Table of Contents
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
I did not have this wisdom of Solomon to comfort me;
I gazed searchingly on any excursion from home for the face of my destined guru.
But I needed to finish my high school studies.
Two years elapsed between:
- my flight with Amar toward the Himalayas, and
- the great day of Sri Yukteswar’s arrival into my life
During that interim I met a number of sages:
- the “Perfume Saint”
- the “Tiger Swami”
- Nagendra Nath Bhaduri
- Master Mahasaya
- the famous Bengali scientist, Jagadis Chandra Bose
My encounter with the “Perfume Saint” had 2 preambles:
- Harmonious
- Humorous
“God is simple. Everything else is complex. Do not seek absolute values in the relative world of nature.”
These philosophical finalities gently entered my ear as I stood silently before a temple image of Kali. Turning, I confronted a tall man whose garb, or lack of it, revealed him a wandering sadhu.
The confusion of benign and terrible aspects in nature, as symbolized by Kali, has puzzled wiser heads than mine! Few have solved her mystery! Good and evil is the challenging riddle which life places sphinxlike before every intelligence.
Attempting no solution, most men pay forfeit with their lives, penalty now even as in the days of Thebes. Here and there, a towering lonely figure never cries defeat. From the maya of duality he plucks the cleaveless truth of unity.
I have long exercised an honest introspection, the exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one’s thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers. The way of ‘self-expression,’ individual acknowledgments, results in egotists, sure of the right to their private interpretations of God and the universe.
I was enjoying the discussion.
The sage was silent for a moment, then answered obliquely.
The sage and I were present in Calcutta’s Kalighat Temple, whither I had gone to view its famed magnificence. With a sweeping gesture, my chance companion dismissed the ornate dignity.
We strolled to the inviting sunshine at the entrance, where throngs of devotees were passing to and fro.
As I was reverently bidding farewell to the eloquent sadhu, he revealed a clairvoyant perception:
I quitted the temple precincts and wandered along aimlessly. Turning a corner, I ran into an old acquaintance — one of those long-winded fellows whose conversational powers ignore time and embrace eternity.
But he held me by the hand, forcing out tidbits of information. He was like a ravenous wolf, I thought in amusement; the longer I spoke, the more hungrily he sniffed for news. Inwardly I petitioned the Goddess Kali to devise a graceful means of escape.
My companion left me abruptly. I sighed with relief and doubled my pace, dreading any relapse into the garrulous fever. Hearing rapid footsteps behind me, I quickened my speed. I dared not look back. But with a bound, the youth rejoined me, jovially clasping my shoulder.
And he actually left me. The similarly worded prediction of the sadhu at Kalighat Temple flashed to my mind. Definitely intrigued, I entered the house and was ushered into a commodious parlor. A crowd of people were sitting, Orient-wise, here and there on a thick orange-colored carpet. An awed whisper reached my ear:
I looked directly at the saint; his quick gaze rested on mine. He was plump and bearded, with dark skin and large, gleaming eyes.
I thought his remark rather childish.
He made a gesture of blessing. I was a few feet away from Gandha Baba; no one else was near enough to contact my body. I extended my hand, which the yogi did not touch.
To my great surprise, the charming fragrance of rose was wafted strongly from the center of my palm. I smilingly took a large white scentless flower from a near-by vase.
A jasmine fragrance instantly shot from the petals. I thanked the wonder-worker and seated myself by one of his students. He informed me that Gandha Baba, whose proper name was Vishudhananda, had learned many astonishing yoga secrets from a master in Tibet. The Tibetan yogi, I was assured, had attained the age of over a thousand years.
I inwardly resolved not to add myself to their number. A guru too literally “marvelous” was not to my liking. With polite thanks to Gandha Baba, I departed. Sauntering home, I reflected on the three varied encounters the day had brought forth.
My sister Uma met me as I entered our Gurpar Road door.
Without a word, I motioned her to smell my hand.
Thinking it was “strongly unusual,” I silently placed the astrally scented blossom under her nostrils.
She seized the flower. A ludicrous bafflement passed over her face as she repeatedly sniffed the odor of jasmine from a type of flower she well knew to be scentless. Her reactions disarmed my suspicion that Gandha Baba had induced an auto-suggestive state whereby I alone could detect the fragrances.
Later I heard from a friend, Alakananda, that the “Perfume Saint” had a power which I wish were possessed by the starving millions of Asia and, today, of Europe as well.
Years later I understood by inner realization how Gandha Baba accomplished his materializations. The method, alas! is beyond the reach of the world’s hungry hordes.
The different sensory stimuli to which man reacts — tactual, visual, gustatory, auditory, and olfactory — are produced by vibratory variations in electrons and protons. The vibrations in turn are regulated by “lifetrons,” subtle life forces or finer-than-atomic energies intelligently charged with the five distinctive sensory idea-substances.
Gandha Baba, tuning himself with the cosmic force by certain yogic practices, was able to guide the lifetrons to rearrange their vibratory structure and objectivize the desired result. His perfume, fruit and other miracles were actual materializations of mundane vibrations, and not inner sensations hypnotically produced.
Performances of miracles such as shown by the “Perfume Saint” are spectacular but spiritually useless. Having little purpose beyond entertainment, they are digressions from a serious search for God.
Hypnotism has been used by physicians in minor operations as a sort of psychical chloroform for persons who might be endangered by an anesthetic. But a hypnotic state is harmful to those often subjected to it; a negative psychological effect ensues which in time deranges the brain cells. Hypnotism is trespass into the territory of another’s consciousness. Its temporary phenomena have nothing in common with the miracles performed by men of divine realization. Awake in God, true saints effect changes in this dream-world by means of a will harmoniously attuned to the Creative Cosmic Dreamer.
Ostentatious display of unusual powers are decried by masters. The Persian mystic, Abu Said, once laughed at certain fakirs who were proud of their miraculous powers over water, air, and space.
On another occasion the great Persian teacher gave his views on the religious life thus:
Neither the impartial sage at Kalighat Temple nor the Tibetan-trained yogi had satisfied my yearning for a guru. My heart needed no tutor for its recognitions, and cried its own “Bravos!” the more resoundingly because unoften summoned from silence. When I finally met my master, he taught me by sublimity of example alone the measure of a true man.
Footnotes
5-1: Kali represents the eternal principle in nature. She is traditionally pictured as a four-armed woman, standing on the form of the God Shiva or the Infinite, because nature or the phenomenal world is rooted in the Noumenon. The four arms symbolize cardinal attributes, two beneficent, two destructive, indicating the essential duality of matter or creation.
5-2: Cosmic illusion; literally, “the measurer.” maya is the magical power in creation by which limitations and divisions are apparently present in the Immeasurable and Inseparable. Emerson wrote the following poem, to which he gave the title of maya:
Illusion works impenetrable, Weaving webs innumerable, Her gay pictures never fail, Crowd each other, veil on veil, Charmer who will be believed By man who thirsts to be deceived.
5-3: The rishis, literally “seers,” were the authors of the Vedas in an indeterminable antiquity..
5-4: Flat, round Indian bread..
5-5: Laymen scarcely realize the vast strides of twentieth-century science. Transmutation of metals and other alchemical dreams are seeing fulfillment every day in centers of scientific research over the world. The eminent French chemist, M. Georges Claude, performed “miracles” at Fontainebleau in 1928 before a scientific assemblage through his chemical knowledge of oxygen transformations. His “magician’s wand” was simple oxygen, bubbling in a tube on a table. The scientist “turned a handful of sand into precious stones, iron into a state resembling melted chocolate and, after depriving flowers of their tints, turned them into the consistency of glass.
“M. Claude explained how the sea could be turned by oxygen transformations into many millions of pounds of horsepower; how water which boils is not necessarily burning; how little mounds of sand, by a single whiff of the oxygen blowpipe, could be changed into sapphires, rubies, and topazes; and he predicted the time when it will be possible for men to walk on the bottom of the ocean minus the diver’s equipment. Finally the scientist amazed his onlookers by turning their faces black by taking the red out of the sun’s rays.”
This noted French scientist has produced liquid air by an expansion method in which he has been able to separate the various gases of the air, and has discovered various means of mechanical utilization of differences of temperature in sea water.
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