Meeting Papaji, 1990

For eighteen years I had been searching. Teachers, meditation, psychedelics, activism, communes, therapy, one book after another — a long journey that began the night an old revolutionary identity fell away in a cabin and never fully ended, because the seeker himself was still intact. I had realized freedom, but not how to incarnate it. There was still a somebody who had realized. Searching for a sign, I climbed the circular tower to the roof of an old palace — now my hotel — and smoked my holy herb, calling for help. Two kites appeared in the sky, and in that sign I somehow knew where this unknown teacher could be found. On January 19, 1990, with an address copied from a phone book, I walked the back streets of the Narhi market in Lucknow until neighbors pointed me to a small door in a row of attached houses. I had told no one I was coming. Yet the man who answered smiled and said, “He is upstairs. He is waiting for you.” Up a narrow stair, in a room just big enough for a bed and a chair, an eighty-year-old man sat up in his bed and called to me, “Come in, come in.” He had me sit on the bed with him, and asked why I had come. I told him I was ready to wake up. He laughed, and we embraced, and in that moment my mind stopped and my heart opened in love. Every question fell away. I knew I had met my Master, and I knew without a flicker of doubt that I was looking at my own Self. When he read to me from the Hsin Hsin Ming — the old Zen poem of non-duality — it was simple confirmation. I was home. The search was finished. My mind fell quiet at a level I had never reached, and I dropped into a vast and silent bliss. One evening it became clear what I was being asked to give up: not merely this life, or this world, but the entire universe. “None of it ever existed,” he said, smiling. I told him that even knowing this life to be a dream, I had taken Bodhisattva vows — I had promised to come back. “Oh my God!” he said, with mock horror. “It is a good thing that I found you, or you would have brought me back with you!” I stayed near him through those weeks. I gave him my passport, my tickets, my money. I told him I no longer cared about enlightenment — I only wanted to sleep outside his door and care for him. He laughed and playfully slapped me. We walked the city together; he showed me its sights and its food; and he told me he had plans for me beyond my wildest dreams. For a time I was his attendant. He asked me to work with people in his satsang who were not getting it, and he tested me in different ways. Then one day he invited me into his room and began to tell me to hold satsang — but I stopped him. “My wife is the Satguru,” I said. He asked to meet her, and when she came he named her Gangaji and recognized in her the purity to carry this transmission. He sent her out, door to door, and in this way satsang entered the West.

What I witnessed in that house was, plainly, a miracle. People arrived from all over the world, sat in a living room that had outgrown his bedroom, and within weeks dropped the mind and the idea of a personal ego to discover what had always been present. One after another they knew themselves as emptiness, as silence, as love. He met each person where they stood — speaking as a Hindu to a devotee, of the Buddha to the vipassana practitioners, of the inner meaning of Jesus to the Christians, of Kabir when someone spoke of the Sufis — and underneath all of it ran the same wordless depth of silence that simply radiated from him.

I asked his permission to write a book, and read him the early passages, which he enjoyed and encouraged. I wanted to bring his living word to the people who would never find that small door in Lucknow. Wake Up and Roar gathered the tape-recorded satsangs from Lucknow and Hardiwar, given between January 1990 and April 1991 and open to everyone, and set the many questioners down as a single voice — so that anyone, anywhere, could sit in that room and hear him.

Papaji and I corresponded over the years that followed, and I have kept his letters. He would open them, “My dear son.” They are instructions, blessings, and the ordinary practical business of a teacher directing a student’s life — where to give satsang, how a book should be published, where a foreword belongs. In one from September 1992, written through Yamuna at his request, he sent me to Seattle and Boulder and Mill Valley to sit with people there, and gave his directions for the Indian edition of Wake Up and Roar.

To read them in his own hand is to feel the directness of the man. You can see them here: Papaji’s Letters

Everything I have taught since — the Enneagram of Liberation, the work of the Leela School, every meeting and retreat — is an attempt to keep that one promise: to be a candle that lights other candles. Papaji left his body in 1997. The transmission did not leave with him. It is here, now, in this silence, available to anyone willing to stop and look.

The longer arc of how a revolutionary became a student of silence — and what that has to say about our collapsing world — is the story I’m telling in A Revolution of Love.