Chapter XXI: THE FARTHEST SHORES


I began to understand Baba in a new light. Through him I had begun to glimpse a reality that existed on other dimensions as well as this. He had provided me with a fountain-burst of inner knowledge. My entire life—experience, both inner and outer, had begun to flow into one.

A shower of wisdom scattered its drops over me as would rain on a warm spring day. I was more alive in that moment than I had ever been. Now I saw that he had been stretching the skin of my spirituality to its utmost. Finally, it became so taut that the bubble had burst. And, as it burst and transformed itself in a shower of a million drops I experienced an inner transmutation where I sensed a new-found freedom in which the spirit was everywhere.

My life began to heal. After more days than I could recall, Jenny and I managed a conversation for the first time. It hadn’t been much but it had been more meaningful than the closed-circuits in which we had been trapped until then.

She had suggested that we might breakfast together before my departure for Bangalore. Coming out of morning darshan I saw her waiting for me at our usual meeting place just outside the women’s mustering compound. Part of me, still angry and proud, wanted to walk away in the opposite direction. But the other part stopped to think it over.

No I couldn’t walk away.

We stood before each other with tears in our eyes and I told her that I nearly hadn’t made the rendezvous.

“The only reason I suggested it, in the first place, was to keep you quiet last night!” she replied in a quavering voice.

I looked at her through eyes awash in tears. “Couldn’t you see, Jenny? We’d stopped communicating a long time ago. That’s when we both started shouting at each other. It was the only thing left! After what I had put you through I felt you must hate me. I was too proud to ask you to forgive me so I ended up shouting instead.”

“... And I was having to learn to live with what had happened and to release you ...” she replied.

Just then, a Seva Dal moved us on. We walked towards the little neem tree in the outer compound near the bookshop. But, no sooner had we done this, than another Seva moved us on again! Another day I would have found this irritating but I could see that this was Swami’s way of moving us in the direction of breakfast and making up.

We ate at Raju’s and, afterwards, climbed the path towards the tamarind tree. Finding two rocks, already warm in the morning sun, we sat down.


At the Tamarind Tree: Jenny, Paul Gopaul, Charles and Heather Murphy

“This place can be like a circus sometimes,” I said. “It’s practically impossible to find a quiet spot.”

The irony had been that, though we had had the privacy of a room to ourselves, it had become the noisiest corner of the ashram!

At last we were able to talk about our fears and all that had happened to us in Prashanti over the past few weeks. I told Jenny about the strange incident of the Calcutta races through which I had felt Baba teaching me. The other woman involved had unwittingly provided the catalyst which had caused our egos to turn on each other.

(“You are always arguing!” Swami had scolded us so many times).

“We do spend a lot of time shouting at each other,” Jenny reflected. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life like that!”

I agreed that neither of us needed or wanted that.

“Somehow we’ve got to find a way of going beyond all our personality differences. People who are brought together for a spiritual purpose always have to face that one. Right through the time you were hurting, part of me hurt as well. But I didn’t know how to share that with you so sometimes I switched off and looked at you from a distance. Other times I shouted.”

We held each other’s hands and promised that, whatever happened, we would not part company whilst holding onto all the grudges and negative fears, most of which were already of the past.

“I promise you your freedom, Jenny. You are free to do whatever you feel you must. I can look after myself. I’ll spend the next six months writing about all this. I don’t know what will happen when I return to Woodend. Maybe I’ll move elsewhere.”

We walked back to the ashram and said goodbye to each other outside the roundhouses.

“I don’t like goodbyes so I’m going now,” Jenny said. Embracing each other we parted and I watched as she walked away into the shimmering heat, not knowing if or when we would meet again. Maybe she would go to Australia to join the Murphys on their voyage across the Pacific. It seemed that we were both about to embark upon uncharted waters. I felt slightly apprehensive, yet exhilarated at the thought.


At two-thirty that afternoon I squeezed into a grey Ambassador taxi with four others to start down the hot, dusty road to Bangalore. My other companions were Andrés who was returning to Mexico, Suzanne, a north American, and an Indian lady who lived in England.

Suzanne and I talked about past lives and I told her of my work as a regressor as well as other Aquarian things. She was interested to undergo a regression — the fifth person who had approached me at Prashanti. Surely, this must have meant that Swami supported and blessed my work.

The taxi bounced along the winding road that led out of the Prashanti Valley. For the last time, I gazed at the odd rock formations of red semi-desert landscape which stretched away into the afternoon heat. In two hours the dust would give way to the traffic fumes of Chowdiah Road in Bangalore.

“Goodbye Baba, goodbye Jenny, I don’t know when I’ll ever see either of you again. But I guess I will one day.”

As a chapter of my life closed another began to open.


Late that evening, the taxi dropped me off at the airport and I went to book my Bombay flight. I was offered a stand-by ticket as every seat to Bombay was booked solid for days.

“I’m giving you Chance Six,” the ticket officer at the INDIAN AIRLINES counter informed me.

“Is that good?”

He nodded his head in the inimitable Indian style. “Good chance! Ring us on Wednesday and we’ll endorse the ticket.”

On Wednesday, the ticket was endorsed and I prepared for the homeward flight back west. The three days in Bangalore were over all too soon and I found myself sitting in the back of a baggage-laden autorickshaw careering down the road to the airport.

I said my goodbyes to the old colonial city which I had first visited at the age of six. Thirty-five years later it had become the fastest growing metropolis in India, full of all the problems facing that kind of expansion.

Blowing wildly on a bulb-horn straight out of an old Marx Brothers movie, the driver of our intrepid little vehicle steered his way through the evening rush hour fumes in Richmond Road, dodging huge trucks by just a hair’s breadth. India seemed to be full of both the most sublime spirituality and the most ridiculous everyday farce. What a country!

In my heart I wished Baba another farewell. I knew it was only a gesture. No longer was I separated from my Lord. Now I knew he was always with me.

Inside the busy terminus I checked in and sat down on a plastic seat to wait for a delayed departure. And, in that crowded place, full of Twentieth century rush, I heard him speak. Everything merged into a oneness and I could feel only God.

“When you experience God, you experience Reality. When you doubt, you fall back into the illusion,” I heard Swami tell me.

Then, as I watched the busy-ness of the world around me, I sensed the vast stillness within that had arisen from this growing sense of fusion.

Every part of my experience was the unravelling of the myth I knew as me. At last I understood what Jung had meant when he had said that it wasn’t God who is myth — rather it was myth that is the revelation of a divine life in man. We didn’t invent myth. Myth speaks to us as God’s Word. It is truer than truth. This inner voice, my own, most intimate experience, the dimensions into which I had travelled in past lives — the occasional glimpse outside Time ... in all these I heard one Voice, one Truth, Divine Spirit and Matter.

All my life I had doubted the inner revelations, dismissing them as ‘only the imagination’, never once pausing to consider what ‘the imagination’ really was! I had fought against my own inner evolutionary growth. In this I had been aided and abetted by a materialistic world which recognized no phenomena beyond any that could be seen or touched. I had travelled across that wasteland on my spirit quest and, at Bhagavan’s feet, I had discovered the Spirit of the Grail. At both the physical and metaphysical levels my pilgrimage had been fulfilled and now it was time to go home and live out the unfolding of a new heaven.


The fat body of the A300 Airbus lifted off the runway, its huge turbofan jets powering up into the south Indian night. Below, the glittering sprawl of Bangalore soon appeared. A silver jewel sparkling in the Deccan’s black, nocturnal womb. I was returning from the warm heartlands into the icy grip of a more northerly parallel. In hours the church bells would ring out the old and ring in the new year, 1988 A.D.


Ascending, ever higher, towards the astral Light
My heart swims warmly in the Midnight Sun.
Flying through the visions of the Night
I know that I may return to your call many times;
Forsaking my burning, wilderness sky,
I will return to You.1


When I had first written those words three years before I had never imagined them to be part of a love-song which I would sing to Sai. As I sat inside this vast Garuda I watched the future become the present, lighting up the Eternal Now.


The return to Bombay had taken seventy-five minutes whereas the outward journey had lasted a whole day. My life was accelerating, it seemed, speeding towards a velocity faster than light itself. Baba’s deep, dark eyes had peered into my heart and had begun the process of transmutation. The grey world of my past was disappearing and my heart felt to shine brighter than any earthy metal. The Alchemist of All the Universes had touched me.

The quest of many lifetimes was over.

At Santa Cruz, I waited for the luggage to come bumping down the carousel. Airports, like cities, are much of a sameness.

Then midnight came.

My wristwatch played The Bluebells of Scotland as the Year of Rainbow Dreams slid away into the past. But much greater things lay ahead and I knew that, even as we clapped and wished each other a Happy New Year, the Eternal Alchemist had begun the great planetary changes which would stretch beyond the sun itself to the farthest shores of the Milky Way and its star systems.

We were all on a new adventure that would take us to those stars.


My baggage came around. I picked it up and walked over to Tourist Information. An hour later I was in the room of a tiny airport hotel, the kind found anywhere in the world on the peripheries of an international airport: bedroom, noisy air-conditioner, bathroom and a small colour TV with bad reception. Without thinking, I switched it on only to be assailed by the screeching tyres of a car in some cheap western gangster movie. Back to reality!

Was it another one of Baba's little jokes that he had directed my taxi to the Hotel Columbus?

Downstairs, the New Year revellers were busy getting drunk. Outside, the real screech of tyres burned up the midnight asphalt as drunken drivers played dangerous games with each other’s lives. The Angel of Death hovered over a crazed world living on borrowed time. Above me, great metal birds roared into the sky and spewed vast clouds of burnt kerosene oil — what had once been the Earth’s life-blood — out into the skies and over the city. What a nightmare!

I tossed and turned in my bed as I tried to find a temporary peace in sleep. About two-thirty I must have drifted off.


A commuter train rattled along the line to Churchgate Station. Suburban trains, like airports and cities, are much of a sameness anywhere in the world. Two years ago I had been commuting, everyday, on the 8.05 to Waterloo. Now the names of the stations had changed to Santa Cruz, Bandra, Matunga Road, Dadar, Mahalaxmi, Bombay Central and Marine Lines.

From the relatively cool interior of a First Class compartment I gazed at the poverty which flowed off the streets and pushed against the shining steel tracks of the railway. A child played in an open sewer. Where were the parents? Working, if they were lucky, by day and by night to eke a meagre living while their child played alone among the bacteria of death.

An old woman slept by an electricity pylon ... too tired to hear the noisy rattle of the train’s wheels as it swept within inches of her dreams. A torn hessian sack was all that protected her from the ravages of the waking world. I wondered at the lives of those who dream and awake into this strange world, surviving just another day like frail lilies in the midst of all the teeming cities.

I wondered why they waited so patiently in squalor and misery while the rich fell into uneasy nightmares of a finite end to all this?

To live without meaning is to know a living death. But other than the Lord himself who, on this suffering Planet, was truly alive?

And what would happen if, for one moment in time, the most beautiful dreams and the highest aspirations of all humanity — be they materially poor or rich — could converge to rise up in a fountain of rainbows to fall as Heaven’s raindrops on our dear Planet? What would Gaia’s children dream then and what would their world look like on the first morning of their Awakening?


The train stopped at Elphinstone Road. Above a refreshment kiosk on a crowded platform I spotted a picture of Shirdi Sai Baba. From his healing hand shone a light which sent out its rays into a world still struggling in darkness. Shirdi Sai had lived not far from Bombay — in the Ahmednagar district. Bombay was very much the territory of Shirdi’s devotees.

But how many, I wondered, recognized their Lord reborn at Parthi as Sathya Sai? Caught in the duality of outward appearances and in the trap of finite time the Planet’s children await the Messiah and the coming Millennium. Looking to that future we so easily forget that it is already here and that the Messiah is within as Baba reminds us.

“Past is gone, future is uncertain. Live in the Present!” I heard the Lord’s words echo in my memory.

To drown in the River of Spirit is to know Eternity. Our egos drown and, sooner or later, they are discarded when each of us goes beyond the limitations to become a conscious, individual part of the greater River that Aquarius, the Water Bearer, is pouring out across our Galaxy.

As we approach midnight together we find our boats in uncharted waters. And to each must come a kind of death before the birth. If we but knew it. Our race approaches a new world. God appears in our dreams and asks us if we will leave it all behind and go with the Mother-Father into the future. Pioneers make that journey into a new dream, a new reality.

All this outside the moving train was part of the play that awaits the change. Again, I heard his voice whisper, “Look beyond the illusion for there you shall see Me!” I glanced at Baba’s ring and rubbed it to make sure it was there. I had been to visit God in a small Indian village and now I wore his ring — his ‘calling card’.

A passing ray of sunshine lit up the ring and his golden face beamed at me. I felt myself lifted out of the mundane world of the commuter train as I heard his voice in the memory-banks of my mind.

“Always! Always!”

As a young man just out of his ‘teens, I had spent a lot of time writing poetry. After flying, I loved poetry — the making of images from words was what I liked to do. The power of the word and the thought behind it beckoned me. And — while opening my mind to the flow of consciousness that had begun to emerge — I had received an apocalyptic glimpse into a future time.

Lost in consumerism and the totalitarian politics of unbridled greed the world we knew would soon reach a point when it ran out of time. For it there was no future. And yet, beyond this hopelessness, lay a different picture as if the destruction of one civilization presaged the birth of another age.

I saw myself walking out of the devastation of one and entering another.

While the train rattled on to its destination I began to ask myself where this glimpse of the future had come from. Was it the Spirit feeding and preparing each of us for the coming changes? Baba tells us that the day of Awakening is not far off and, that after the storm, there will be a new beginning and the atmosphere will be completely different.

He had been preparing me for what now dawned inside me as a waking dream. Through all the apparently empty and pointless struggles Baba had waited to see me open my eyes to the vastness of His Spirit.

The Poet of the Dawn.


Returning on the same line that afternoon, I sensed a strong inner urge to visit Baba’s Dharmakshetra, situated in Andheri East.

Two hours later I was in Mahakali Caves Road and soon found the ashram gates. In contrast to the noise outside it was deserted except for a few tourists and Seva Dals. Reconstruction work was moving apace in preparation for Baba’s visit in the spring and the famous nine-petalled lotus Sathyadeep was being repainted. As I walked up the hill towards it a pink Sarvadharma rose up ahead of me and, before it, the rainbow sign I had come to associate with Baba wherever I went.

A man swept the steps outside the Sathyadeep. Across a small gully the deafening blare of a hi-fi system emerged from a shanty perched atop another low hill. From the Sathyadeep a thick electric cable stretched into the gully. Upstairs, in Swami’s apartments, workmen were renovating. The Seva Dal finished his sweeping and went inside the building.

I peeped in through the half open door. All the furniture was stacked away under dust covers. Only Swami’s throne was visible. A rope partitioned the area. I knelt before the throne and prayed Baba’s forgiveness for the way in which I had left Prashanti. Then, slipping under the rope, I touched Swami’s foot stool.

“No Sir, you are not meant to do that,” the Seva Dal called out. “That’s why the rope is there.”

I apologized and explained that I had heard Swami tell me to touch the stool.

“Well, maybe you were meant to touch it, then,” he nodded, accepting my explanation.

Now I could return home, knowing that I was healed of the harrowing experiences I had undergone during the last weeks in Prashanti. I knew that Swami had been with me on that train as Krishna, revealing the illusion and taking me beyond what we describe as reality. It was he who had inspired me to visit the Dharmakshetra — the Realm of Righteousness. I hoped that when he next rested his foot on the stool he would sense the hand of a humble devotee who had touched it with reverence.

As I emerged from the Sathyadeep I was faced by the idols of the Dasavathara 2 — the ten principal Avatharic forms of the Lord Vishnu. My eyes were attracted to the first of these:

“Recover the treasure of wisdom from the deluge of doubt.”

MASTYA Avathar.

Again, I sensed a great stream of oneness flowing through me. The Avathar had called me to him and, after re-educating and re-aligning my spirit, he was sending me back to the world as one reborn. A great journey lay ahead and it would take many light years of lives to fulfil.

But I could sense that the old struggles were receding into the past. Now I could walk with my hand in the Lord’s. My life had begun to vibrate with rich, new meaning and I began to grasp that — for, perhaps, the first time— I could live fully knowing it as the poem that God has inspired within me.

As I walked down the hill from the saucer-shaped Dharmakshetra I stopped and looked again. The building began to remind me of something I knew. Then, a picture of the Vision of Sagittarius transposed itself against what I saw before me, now, on the third dimension.

There it was. A likeness of the Mothership I had seen so vividly in an out-of-body experience after Baba’s birthday.

By the entrance to the ashram an imposing figure of the Sun God, Surya, astride a chariot drawn by seven horses adorned the front wall of a stage. Surya who is the Lord of Time, symbol of the Life Principle who lights the world, nourishes all life and bestows enlightenment upon those who seek the Truth. The holy Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwara, creating, sustaining and drawing back, into him, all that lives.

The Seven Rays.

Here, then, was confirmation of the Vision, what the inner sight had revealed. Sri Sathya Sai Baba — the earthly form of Vishnu in his ultimate incarnation as the Kalki Avathar. He who is prophesied in the Book of Revelations, the Alpha and the Omega

“ And now I saw heaven open, and a white horse appear; its rider was called Faithful and True; he is a judge with integrity, a warrior for justice. His eyes were flames of fire, and his head was crowned with many coronets; the name written on him was known only to himself, his cloak was soaked in blood. He is known by the name, the Word of God... the King of kings and the Lord of lords.”3

The Lord had returned to bring, with him, the promise to humanity of a New Jerusalem, telling us that the day of Awakening is nigh and, “when it comes there will be a great revelation of the true power of God ... it will be like a new age, the age of love ...”

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth: the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the holy city, and the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven as beautiful as a bride all dressed for her husband ... Then the One sitting on the throne spoke: ‘Now I am making the whole of creation new’ he said ... what I am saying is sure and will come true ... I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give water from the well of life free to anybody who is thirsty; it is the rightful inheritance of the one who proves victorious; and I will be his God and he a son to me.4

“Everyone should prepare now for the change,” says Baba, “for I promise you it will come, and only those who are ready will survive.”

The beam of evolution shone through. The prophecies of the Amerindians, the Maya, the Hebrews, the wisdom of India’s Sanathana Dharma, were really all part of a much greater Truth. The Truth contained in the seed of every light of spirituality.

Our Planet, our Solar System, our Galaxy, is preparing itself for a very great transmutation. According to Maya that time is upon us. The Ozone layer is primed for destruction and who knows what shall follow when Surya’s rays shine in all their fullness upon Gaia? Will the moment of the great change follow when all God’s children move into a new world, a new hologram?


My ‘plane taxied onto the runway at Sahar. The engines reached full thrust and we catapulted forward and finally lifted off Indian ground, made a wide circle around the foothills around Bombay and flew up into the night over the Arabian Sea. I had been to the Lord and felt myself heading into a new world and a new dream.


© RW1989