Close encounters of the Guru kind

 Somehow, right from day one, I had very few questions for my Guruji, Ramesh Balsekar. This is not to imply that I was wise or knew everything; it simply means that I was in love and for some reason questions did not arise. However I did have some interactions with him that left a deep imprint on my memory.

The first one happened the day I met him. I had been blown over by his book 'Consciousness Speaks'. And then by an interesting chain of circumstances I was led to meet him at his Gamadia Road home in Mumbai. (I have narrated the entire sequence of events in How I Met Ramesh published by Zen Publications. This is a compilation of accounts by a large number of spiritual seekers who mysteriously landed up at Rameshji's doors).

Those days the satsangs were yet to begin and you met him one-on-one. So we three – my spiritual mentor Guru Dayalji, his dear friend solicitor Mahendra Patel, and yours truly – trooped into the small room and sat at his feet. Once we had settled down, Rameshji turned to Guru Dayalji and with that trademark twinkle in his eyes, asked, ‘So Guru Dayal, you still have a question?’ Dayalji laughed and said, ‘No sir, I have no question. But he (pointing to me) has a question.’ So now Rameshji turned to me. ‘So what is your question?’ I gathered up courage and began, ‘When I sit down to do Vipassana…’ And then an amazing thing happened. The question dissolved! All four of us were laughing so much we had tears in our eyes. When we stopped laughing, Rameshji asked me, ‘Do you still have a question?’ I shook my head. And that was that.

The second encounter. This was a few months after I met Rameshji. Life had suddenly encountered very severe turbulence on all fronts – work, business, finance, relationships. I happened to bump into a friend and former colleague at Churchgate railway station. ‘Hey what’s happened?! Why are you looking like this?!’ I told him all that had happened. Then my friend (his father had been one of India’s best-known tantrics) held me by my shoulders and shepherded me to the counter of the tiny chemist store at the station. There he borrowed a ballpoint pen from the sales person and compassionately jotted down three mantras for me on a scrap of paper. ‘You must chant these every single day. Trust me, everything will be fine.’

I took the paper and thanked him. Now the problem was that, intellectually, the idea of volitionally doing something to achieve a desired objective, posed a problem. So the next day I went to my Guruji, sat at his feet and told him exactly what had happened and how the friend had asked me to chant some mantras. ‘Now, the question is, if everything is just happening and nobody is doing anything... well, the question is, WHO is doing the mantra?!” Barely had the words come out of my mouth when, in a spontaneous burst of energy, Rameshji almost propelled himself from his chair, his eyes blazing wide and round, and exclaimed: “The one who is afflicted is doing the mantra!”