The Saint’s Whisper: My Adventures With An Indian Saint (Part 1)

RAM RAM

Quick Note: The following story implores the possibility that certain people — and more specifically, saints who have attained enlightenment like Maharajii — can manifest in the world long after the death of their physical bodies. If you have problems believing that such a thing can happen, I invite you to suspend your disbelief and read this with curiosity. Maharajii entered Mahasamadhi in September 1973. The following incident occurred in 2018.

I traveled to Thailand because I wanted to escape the unique distractions that come with living in a place like the United States. The petty advertisements. The pressure to succeed. The shallow and materialistic fog that invisibly pervades the hustle and bustle of a spiritually dead culture.

I was done with all of it. Plus, I had just graduated college, so it made sense to the romantic and idealistic part of me to go — just go. Where was I going? How was I supposed to make money? What was my plan? These questions — though entirely necesssary— were not easy to answer, because I was leading solely from my heart. Call it what you like: a spiritual impulse, a longing for union, the pilgrim’s itch. Whatever it was, nothing in the world would stop me, even my comically low bank account.

As I write these words, though, I need to give a little bit of credit to younger Preston where credit is due. There were two plans he had in mind: (1) Teach English in Thailand to save up money to go to India, and (2) Get to my Guru’s ashram in India by any means necessary. I visualized it exquisitely: I arrive in Kainchi and receive the Darshan of a saint in India who is thought to be an Avatar of Hanuman. As soon as I get to Kainchi, I fall to my knees, weeping tears of ecstasy.

But, of course, plans never go according to plan. Even though I did eventually make it to one of Neem Karoli Baba’s ashrams near Rishikesh later on in the trip, the rascal-saint had other plans in mind for me — which leads me to my first story about an encounter I had with him in Prachinburi, Thailand. This was two months before I would travel to India.

It was a Friday afternoon. After a long and exhausting week of teaching extremely noisy teenagers the basics of the English language, a part of me desired nothing more than to hop on a train to Bangkok and go dancing. Simply put, I wanted to let loose. So, off I went, determined yet exhausted.

To say I was irritable when getting on the train in Prachinburi would be an understatement. I had just finished teaching the worst class of the day (teenagers just can't hold it together on Friday afternoons), it was scorching hot, and the pollution in the air (thanks to the tuk-tuks) made me feel like I was being suffocated. The last thing I wanted to do was engage in a conversation with someone, so I put my headphones in and played music as loud as possible, hoping it would drown out the noise from outside.

It was hardly a second before I put my headphones in when I heard a man screaming at the top of his lungs, “ENGLISH TEACHER! ENGLISH TEACHER!” Surprised, I looked behind my shoulder and saw a disheveled man who seemed to be dressed in attire for construction workers. I ignored him, put my headphones back in, and continued walking to a seat far away from him. Really far.

But he said it again: “ENGLISH TEACHER! YOU TEACHER — I AM STUDENT.”

I regretted wearing my uniform on the train that day because, at this point, I intuited that he wanted me to teach him English. That was precisely — and exactly — the last thing I wanted to do, so I ignored him and took my seat.

About 30 minutes into the train ride, while peering out the window, lost in a melancholic daze, watching the world go by, I gently looked to my right, and there he was, on the seat next to me, with child-like excitement emanating from his facial expression.

“ENGLISH TEACHER,” he said, “YOU TEACHER — I AM STUDENT.”

There was nowhere I could go, so I took my headphones out and, dismayed, listened to what he had to say.

As soon as he knew he caught my attention, he pulled a book out of his backpack and opened to a page with simple English words. He pointed to each word and looked at me to confirm that he was saying each word correctly. And in between each word, he would say those lovely words with the type of excitement I could not make sense of: “YOU TEACHER — I AM STUDENT.”

The first page he opened up to had the names of animals, if I remember correctly. He would say the name of each animal — “DOG!” or “CAT!” — then look at me. Truly breathtaking stuff! I’d nod in encouragement, and he’d move on to the next page and the next page, each containing different words associated with different themes and topics.

All I could think about was when he was going to stop and leave so I could be in my own space, but at the very moment I had such a thought, he turned to a page with sentences written on it.

Before reading these sentences out loud, he looked directly into my eyes and said it again with authority and playfulness:

“YOU TEACHER — I AM STUDENT.”

And off he went to the first sentence: “I am very proud of your courage. You should keep going.” He read it out slowly, then looked at me. What happened in that moment is difficult to describe. All I can say is that I started to listen. Deeply.

He went on to the next sentence: “You must love everyone; otherwise, you cannot accomplish your goal.” When he said that sentence, I knew I was receiving the darshan of Maharajii because the strangest feeling overcame me: I wanted to weep. Even stranger, I wanted to hug this man as if he were my Baba. In addition to that, these are words he directly said to many of his devotees.

And guess what? It did not stop. He continued to repeat four or five more sentences that could have — or genuinely did — come directly out of the book by Ram Dass, “Miracle Of Love,” which included the sayings of Maharajii.

The funniest part about this whole story is that he never stopped reminding me that I was the teacher and he was the student between every sentence he shared (“YOU TEACHER! I AM STUDENT!”). No matter how utterly shocked my expression was, he just continued as if everything was normal. He was teasing me in the most loving way possible.

I went from feeling like an English teacher, here to help a random, poor old man, to feeling like a little child in the presence of divinity. I went from despising him for taking away my solitude to wanting to hug him as if I had known him for countless lifetimes. All of this transpired in a matter of a few minutes.

That is such a trick out of Maharajii’s book, for he is the embodiment of prophetic playfulness, a real rascal.

While feeling absolutely stunned, curious, and abnormally drawn to a man who I hated just a few minutes before, he got up and sat down back in his seat, which was pretty far away from me. I do not even remember saying goodbye.

At the next stop, when I looked behind me to see where he was, he was gone.

For the next hour or so on the train to Prachinburi, I wept. Tears of gratitude poured out as I listened to songs by Krishna Das. I am careful to use the word “Miracle,” but there is no other way to describe it. Remember, Maharajii left his physical body in 1973.

Many people have asked me what it’s like to receive his darshan.

Some people have asked me how I knew that it was Maharajii. How do you answer such questions? While I am an advocate for healthy skepticism, there is no room for doubt when you receive darshan.

The rational mind has nowhere to go in the presence of grace. It can try to find a reason to doubt and attempt to explain it by other means (just like Ram Dass tried to do when he experienced a miracle with Maharajii), but eventually, that doubt gives way to an experience that can only be described as revelatory.

In the presence of grace — true grace — the Truth envelops everything. Nishitani said it best: “Heaven is the abyss for hell.”

These saints have the ability to bring one into a state of consciousness that is self-evidently true, absolutely true, so true that it makes no sense to the rational mind.

That is all that can be said about it. Words fail me here.

RAM RAM

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