Making Peace with the Waves

“Sahib, have you met Guruji?” My uncle’s driver asked me this as he was taking me to a business appointment in New Delhi.

“Who is Guruji?” I asked. 

“He assisted your family when they were having trouble finding a marriage match for your cousin,” he said.

I asked the driver to take me to see him before continuing on to my appointment in the city.

“But, sir, he lives in an area where you may not want to go.”

I said, “Let’s go.”

He turned the car around, and soon I could see what he meant. The area was one of the poorer sections of New Delhi with an open sewer that had a strong, offensive stench. 

Guruji lived in a small, one-room house. When we went in, he was seated cross-legged on a cotton mat on the floor. He acknowledged me with a nod and, for several minutes, we sat there in total silence. I looked around the room, assessing my surroundings. 

My host appeared to be in his seventies, with a full head of white hair, yet his physique was of a wrestler, befitting that of a much younger person. He was dressed simply. I learned that he used to be a cow herder and milk delivery man, a gwala.

After we sat together for a few minutes, a gentle smile crossed his face. 

“What brings you here today?” he asked.

I hesitated. I was there on a hunch, with no particular question or reason. He laughed and said, “You are here to test me.”

“Yes,” I agreed. He had articulated my thoughts. 

I told him I did not believe in psychic powers. I believed those who claimed to have such powers were duping the ignorant and fostering superstitions. I was curious to see if there was any validity to such phenomena as psychic powers.

He nodded his head in agreement.

“You wonder if all of these things—miracles, magic—are nonsense? The fact is that everything is connected,” he said. “Sansar—the universe—is one body, and we are all getting the information simultaneously about what is happening in this universe, but we have blocked ourselves so that we can’t listen. Just listen internally. You will be able to access all the information from the past, present, and future. Everything.”

I challenged him with a rhetorical question: “But all religions tell us to follow their preaching.”

“Ignore that. Listen to the voice inside,” he said.

I asked him how to do that.

“Come back tomorrow exactly at 7 a.m.,” he said.

There was nothing more inconvenient than what he had asked me to do. It was a 45-minute drive by car from my uncle’s house to his. The morning was cold and his house had no heat. But I was anxious to hear his answer, so I arrived at 7 a.m. sharp.

The four walls of his house were covered with images of religious prophets from practically all the religions of the world … something I had not noticed before. When I arrived, he was in the process of touching each image with his forehead and quietly mumbling a prayer. There must have been 50 such images. Patiently, I waited about 15 minutes until he was finished and sat down.

“Aren’t you a hypocrite?” I asked. “Yesterday, you said it’s all about going inside yourself. You said religions are all structures of the mind. Now you are going around bowing to each of these images.”

“Why do you think I called you here at seven in the morning?” he asked.

“I have no damned idea,” I said, irritated. “How would I know?”

“I asked you here just to demonstrate: The first thing I do each morning is come to terms with the outside world, because if I don’t come to terms with the outside world, it will not let me go inside. I will be stuck in the outside world.”

I spent the rest of the day with him. At his suggestion, we drove to a market in old Delhi, about an hour away. Our destination was a hole-in-the wall bookshop, where he bought a particular book for me about the mystery of the breath. Guruji told me that by understanding our breath, we could understand the mysteries of the universe. He explained that our breath is the connecting force between us and the rest of the universe. He was trying to teach me that one could go inside by paying attention to their breath.

At the market, we passed a shop renowned for jalebis, fried dough soaked in sweet syrup, a mouth-watering dish for Indians.

“Would you like some jalebi?” I asked him.

He was walking on my right side and pulled me down close to emphasize what he was about to say. “If you want to go inside, you will have to become highly disciplined,” he said. 

After our day together, Guruji and I became good friends. Whenever I was in New Delhi, I went to see him. This man, who had practically no worldly possessions and lived by himself in his old age, turned out to be a great thinker and philosopher. During those visits, there were numerous occasions when I witnessed his ability to reach in and share remarkable information.

One day, my uncle’s driver visited Guruji to talk about his son’s future. Rather than responding to the driver’s question, Guruji asked the driver when I would be coming again from America to India.

“There is no plan for him to come anytime soon,” the driver told him.

“Mr. Mathur will be sitting right where you are sitting in three days,” Guruji told the driver.

I had no plans to go to India. But that night, at about 11 o’clock, I received a call from a client who lived in Texas. He asked me to fly to India as soon as possible to handle a business deal for him. I told him my passport had been sent in for renewal, and I did not expect to receive it for several weeks. To my surprise, the next morning, the postman delivered my passport to my office. 

My secretary checked on flights. The next one was leaving in an hour-and-a half. I rushed to the airport and bought my ticket. My secretary packed my briefcase, Treva packed my suitcase, and they met me at the airport. Within 24 hours, I was in India. The family driver was at the airport to receive me.

“Sir, I have one question,” he asked, after we’d driven about half-a-mile. “When did you decide to come from the United States?”

I laughed. “Just 24 hours ago.”

“Just 36 hours ago, Guruji told me you would come today.” 

When I accounted for the time difference between the U.S. and India, I figured out my client had called me almost simultaneously to when the driver was meeting with Guruji.

On a subsequent visit to India, I planned to see Guruji after having lunch with a client. My client took me to a posh restaurant in his gold Mercedes. After lunch, he offered to take me to where I was staying. I tried my best to turn him down, as I didn’t want him to know I was going to see Guruji instead of going home. I was fighting with my own skepticism about what I was experiencing. I did not expect this man to understand.

Finally, when my client wouldn’t take no for an answer, I explained to him the real reason—that I was going to visit my friend who lived in the slums.

“I want to go,” he said. “I want to experience this.”

When we arrived, the first thing that Guruji said was, “How was your trip to Bombay?”

I was startled. I had taken a last-minute side trip to Bombay, but I hadn’t told anyone I was going.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“Three days ago, you had planned to come, and then you didn’t show up,” he said. “This afternoon, after lunch, I took a nap. In my dream, you came to me and said you had gone to Bombay and that’s why you didn’t come sooner. You said you were bringing a friend, and you drew his natal chart for me.”

After awakening, Guruji had drawn the chart, which was now placed in front of him. My client looked stunned.

Most of the teachers I met left me in some sort of quandary. I often wondered if Guruji was simply viewing the incidents from far away or if he was instrumental in shaping them? I was skeptical that if such people were truly able to see an event in advance of it happening, then they were in some way, even if unintentional, influencing events. 

On a subsequent visit, Guruji, who knew that his death was near, suggested that he train me to learn his abilities.

“No, that is not the role I am destined to play in this life,” I told him. I tied a knot in my memory with one of the first things that Guruji ever taught me: If you want to live where the undercurrents are, you must first make peace with the waves. Make peace with the outside world, so you can go inside to realize your connection to the universe.

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