Author: Balbir Mathur

I told the story of the healer and the lemon trees to my family and friends. One of the friends was a teacher. She asked me to share my story with her eighth-grade students.

“Planting fruit trees is a great idea,” one student said. “It not only helps the environment, it also gives people food for years to come.”

“What can we do?” asked another.

The students were excited to talk with me about ways they could help. They called a local nursery and learned that one apple tree can give 10,000 pounds of fruit in its lifetime. They decided to hold a car wash and donate the money to help plant fruit trees in India.

The children’s enthusiasm gave life to the idea that people in different parts of the world would be willing to help each other on a grassroots level. 

On that day, in Barbara Hubert’s eighth-grade class at Wilbur Junior High in Wichita, Kansas, the idea behind Trees for Life was born. 

Their car wash raised $303.

As I was searching for alternatives, two things were for certain. One, that whatever I did had to be socially relevant. Getting back in business and making money to get rich was no longer an option. Furthermore, I did not wish to start something new for myself. I would be satisfied to give up a leadership role and work for others. As I was struggling with this second issue, I had a powerful dream.

In that dream, I was riding the small green bike I had as a boy. I was peddling very hard and fast and the speed was dizzying. It was as if the bike was in control, not me. My knees were almost reaching my chin, and I realized the bike was too small because I was now an adult. 

I came to a roundabout and realized I was in the old neighborhood where I grew up in Allahabad, India.

With the great speed that my bike had attained, I somehow ended up at what looked at first like a farmhouse.

Once in front of the house, the bike came to a sudden stop. I noticed that three or four other people had come into the yard and were standing nearby. 

From inside the house, an Indian monk stepped out onto the porch and addressed those who had gathered. “He is not here,” the monk said, indicating that whoever these people were looking for was not in the house.

Hearing this, the other people begin to disperse. But as the monk spoke, I noticed he motioned slightly with his head as if to indicate that I should look behind me. Until that time, I had not noticed that there was a small garden there.

Leaving my bike, I began to walk toward the garden. In the corner was a frail, old man about 90 years of age sitting cross legged. His skin was deep brown from spending hours in the sun.

I realized this was his ashram. He greeted me as if he had been expecting me, and motioned for me to sit down in front him.

I was now in a reverential mood and the old man said, “You are in the wrong place. You must start your own ashram.”

In the dream, my body felt a very strong vibration, and then the dream instantly vanished, and I was fully awake. 

The dream was another message that I had no choice but to start a new organization.

A powerful vision in a plane over Cyprus. A mysterious illness that grew incrementally more debilitating. Then a six-day fast and a second, more powerful vision that healed me. What was next?

I knew from these visions what I had to do, but no instruction manual came with them. I had no idea where to start. I knew giving people food was not enough. I had heard people say, “If you give someone a fish, you feed them for a day; if you teach them how to fish, they will never go hungry again.” But how?

This was a very tough time for our family. The most obvious problem was our financial situation. Treva and I had chosen to pay back as much of our bankruptcy as possible even though, legally, we did not have to do anything. We could not get rich by taking advantage of others. It was her idea, and I concurred. Almost every month, Treva would look at the available cash, and I would make personal contact to deliver the funds.

I remember taking a partial payment to one of the people to whom we owed money, and he asked me how I had calculated the partial payment. I told him that it was almost all of the money we had in the bank that day. There was a long silence, then he asked me to wait. He came back with about ten of his staff members. When they were all gathered, he asked me the same question about how I determined the sum of the partial payment. Embarrassed and head down, I reiterated the statement that this was all the money we had in the bank today. There was a stunned silence in the room. He then leaned over his desk and said emphatically, “This was your final payment. You do not owe us anything. We owe you.”

We had some savings, but it was nowhere near enough to cope with the financial resources used up during my long illness. Now that I was healed, I still wasn’t making any money.

“We need money,” Treva said. “You’re so good at selling; you could sell anything. That’s something you could do.”

She was not alone; everyone was asking me what I was going to do. But I could not explain. It was as if I had left the shore and was swimming but could not yet see the other shore. 

I thought I might work for someone who was already helping to fight hunger, because I didn’t want to go it alone in a new enterprise. I wasn’t sitting idle. I traveled to several places, including Washington, D.C., Minnesota, and Los Angeles, interviewing with various non-profit organizations to see if I could help. The search was eating up our limited resources, and no doors were opening. During this dry period, I felt as if I were Moses walking in the desert. Close friends advised me to give up my quest.

Earlier, during one of my business trips to China, I had bought a couple dozen expensive, hand-woven rugs. They came in very handy at this time. Besides Treva’s modest salary from her job at a printing shop, the intermittent sale of one of these rugs would provide us income for a short time.

In late 1982, I happened to run into one of my old business contacts. He discussed his plans for international ventures and asked if I could help. A few days later, I sent him a note that I had been invited to participate in an Afro-American conference in Zimbabwe where I could identify some opportunities for him. But I did not hear back from him.

Our financial situation was becoming even more critical. All of our credit cards were maxed out. There was barely enough money to feed the family.

One morning, a very loud cry came out of me, and I started to sob as if someone in my family had died.

“I am not in a position to do anything,” I cried out loud, in a state of total helplessness.

After ten minutes of intense sobbing, I suddenly stopped. I felt something change. It was not only psychological, it was a physical change. A feeling of silence and calm enveloped me. 

At that instant, the phone rang. It was the businessman’s secretary. She told me her boss wanted to see me. He had decided I should go to Africa to represent his company and attend the Afro-American conference. The contract turned out to be for a large sum.

The response to my cry was not an hour, a day, or two days later–it was instantaneous, before I could wipe the tears off my cheeks. I looked around me in wonder. I stood there stunned. Somehow, someone, somewhere was listening.

When I arrived in India from Mozambique, I first went to my mother and asked, “May I plant a lemon tree in your yard?” 

“My son, I am getting old. Young trees need watering. Who will care for it when I am gone? If there’s no one to care for it, that will hurt my soul,” she answered.

I went to one of my friends. “May I plant a lemon tree in your yard?”

“Soon I am going to move to another house,” my friend said. “Who will take care of your tree then?” But he took me to the home of his father-in-law, who had a large yard and a gardener to tend his plants.

“May I plant a lemon tree in your yard?” I asked.

“I already have two lemon trees,” he told me. “What will I do with a third one?”

That afternoon I was dejected and sobbed like a child. “O God, why is this happening? I can’t convince anyone to plant trees, not even my own mother. I can’t do it on my own. I need your help.”

A familiar calmness fell over me. Within minutes, my mother, who did not know about my crying, asked me to take her to see a healer in a nearby village. He had become well known for healing people by merely touching the water containers they would drink from.

When we arrived, there was a long line of people carrying bottles of water to have the healer touch. He touched everyone’s bottle, including my mother’s, but when it was my turn, he waved me off and said, “You come back tomorrow.”

I had no interest or intention to return the next day—or ever. But for some reason, the next afternoon, I had an urge to go see the man. Several miles from the village, two people were standing at an intersection, and they stopped my car.

Angrily, they asked, “What took you so long? We’ve been waiting for you since morning.”

“I never said I would come,” I told them.

“You were ordered to come,” they replied.

They got into the car and when we reached the village, the healer, a frail man, invited me into a small mud hut and told his assistants to tell all the people in line they must wait because his friend had arrived. We entered the hut and he laid down on a small cot. I sat on the floor beside him.

He started speaking and I soon became bored. I hadn’t gone there to listen to his lecture. After ten minutes, a thought emerged, and I asked, “Would you bless a few lemon trees for me?”

“Why?” he asked. I noticed that he did not act surprised at my question, as if he were expecting it.

“You touch a glass of water, and a person who drinks that water is healed,” I said. “Imagine how many people might be healed by eating the fruits from trees you have touched.”

The healer shook his head and said in a calm voice, “If you are talking about the good it will do for others, then you also will have a hidden agenda and wonder what good it will do for you.”

“The trees you bless will have children and grandchildren,” I told the healer. “They will spread all over the country. You will become very famous.”

The healer smiled and said, “If someone wants fame for me, that person will also want fame for himself. A man who seeks fame is like a dog that wags his tail to please people and get a reward. Are you comparing me to a dog?”

Having acquired the skills of salesmanship, I knew that I should not give up, and I tried again. “How about planting a seed and not worrying about the fruits it will give?” I asked. This surprised me, because not only was I quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of Hindus, but I was speaking in the healer’s colloquial dialect.

At that, the healer jumped up and with fire in his eyes proclaimed, “Yes! Yes! Plant trees only because that is the nature of your soul, your being. Then the whole world will join you. Do it not because it will do good for others or bring fame to you.”

He was looking straight at me and added, “I will be glad to perform the act of blessing. But remember, I am like a lightbulb, and the power comes from its source. If you want to serve people, then you have to go to the source itself.”

I provided the funds for several of my friends to buy all the lemon saplings they could acquire from the nurseries in the area. The healer blessed 2,500 lemon saplings.

Over the next few days, people patiently lined up to receive a blessed lemon sapling from the healer. Each person pledged to use the seeds from their tree’s lemons to plant 18 more trees. They were no longer just recipients. They were now part of a chain, a vision, to help each other.

But the impact of my meeting with the healer went far beyond that. He not only blessed those saplings, he gave me the key that unlocked my entire path forward. Internally, he completely turned me around. He helped me realize that the motivation to serve was not about what I would gain, nor even how it might help others. The key was simply to do whatever is a natural expression of one’s soul.

One of my business clients had made a last-minute decision to send me to the first Afro-American Conference in Harare, Zimbabwe. The travel agent worked feverishly to arrange the ticket for a flight leaving the next morning. Following the conference, a business tour to Mozambique, Zambia, Kenya and Ethiopia was planned. More arrangements would be made once I landed in Africa.  

When I arrived in Harare, my luggage failed to show up, which surprised me since it was a direct flight. The airline staff promised to deliver it to the hotel when the next flight arrived the following day. I had only my traveling clothes: a gray leisure suit and my slip-on shoes. No pajamas, no change of underwear, not even a hairbrush. 

On my first night in Zimbabwe, I was awakened by a thunderous voice saying, “Johnny Appleseed!”

It sounded as if the voice had come from the window. Immediately, I opened the window and looked out. It was dark outside. I was on the fifth floor of the hotel. There was no way anyone could have been outside the window.

I ran from the window to the door, opened it and looked down the hallway. I saw the beautiful pattern on the carpet, but there wasn’t a soul in either direction. Puzzled, I stood there wondering, Who said that?

I could not go back to sleep. My body was vibrating with the echo: Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed.

The next day, my luggage still hadn’t arrived. Most of the delegates to the conference were ambassadors dressed in expensive suits, and they were changing their clothes two or three times a day. Most of them had their staff with them. And there I was, solo, in my leisure suit and burgundy Johnston and Murphy slip-on shoes.

Later that afternoon, I saw people noticing me wherever I went, maybe because I was the only native Indian there, or because I was grossly underdressed for the occasion. That made me more self-conscious. But soon I realized they were trying to befriend me.

Tired after a full day, I lay down to sleep and it struck me: the vibration of Johnny Appleseed had been going through my body all day long. I thought perhaps others were also hearing or feeling it. They were not noticing me or my clothes. These vibrations were drawing them. I was not the reason why. That night I slept like a baby. The pressure was off.

Having become aware of the mystery, I started to observe it in action. 

People were forming a semi-circle around me wherever I went—in the lobby, the conference room, the restaurants. Even in the local bazaar. Three ambassadors attached themselves to me as special friends. Even the U.S. Senator from Kansas, who was there as one of the keynote speakers, spotted me and came over to visit. She knew me and had sponsored my name for a presidential appointment.

The most sought-after personality in the conference was a New York Times columnist who was syndicated around the world and well admired. He approached me and wanted to know who I was. After a brief visit, he asked me to meet him for breakfast the next morning in his room. 

The breakfast lasted an hour and a half. He was more interested in my philosophy than in my business life. He insisted on driving me to the airport the next day, as we were both going to Mozambique on the same flight.

As I checked in at the airport, they brought out my luggage. 

“Where was it all week long?” I inquired. 

“It was always here, Sir. Your luggage came with you on your flight,” the airline agent informed me. I had been calling them twice a day, leaving my phone number each time, and no one had called me.

I realized that someone or something was playing games with me. I am in the magical field of your dance, I thought to myself. I shall dance with you and enjoy every step. I laughed out loud. My new journalist friend was puzzled by my approach and told me so.

There were eight passengers to Maputo, Mozambique, all of them Americans. It included the immediate past Ambassador to the United Nations, the Mayor of Los Angeles, a State Department officer, and three vice presidents of major international corporations. The journalist, while friends with all the others, chose to sit next to me. Upon reaching Maputo, everyone got their luggage, except for one. Me. We had seen our luggage loaded on the small plane, so I asked if they would check once again. Members of a top-level delegation of government ministers were there to receive the VIP American guests. They intervened and confirmed my luggage did not make it.

I steeled myself to travel through the rest of Africa without baggage. I had packed even my leisure suit jacket in my suitcase. The vice president of Star-Kist tuna company gave me a black T-shirt with the famous tagline on the front, “Sorry, Charlie.” That t-shirt and my well-worn trousers became my wardrobe for the next several days. I wore it for dinner at the house of the Indian Ambassador to Mozambique and his wife, as well as to meet with some of the top members of the Mozambique government, the prime reason for my trip there.

The government of Mozambique offered the possibility of providing 10,000 fertile hectares of land to my client to start an agricultural operation to provide food for their people, as well as crops for export. 

The last night I spent in Mozambique, two things became clear. The vibrations going through my body were all that I needed to fulfill my life’s work. No fancy clothes, wealth, or status could compete with it. A mere t-shirt would do the job. 

I vowed to plant 100 lemon trees before returning to the U.S. In that split second, the vibrations left. 

I wrote to Treva that night, in January 1983:

An interesting phenomenon is taking place. The ministers and ambassadors from these countries are chasing me—I am the one they seek. I do not mention this because of vanity—which I am not short of—but because it is a wave that I am riding. It is a force not of me. I feel at the top, 10 stories high, not because I am that tall but because the tide has lifted this body that high. Just as sure as in a short time it will put me back down. It is the recognition of these times and tides that make a good surfer.

Doors are opening. I am not opening them, they just open. I feel as if I’m in an enchanted house. There is an entrance, for I know I have just entered, and there is an exit. The trick is to be able to enter this house at will and stay totally detached. It is not my house. I am merely a visitor, as I would be in a museum. I do not own anything, anything, and yet, I own it all.

My world is not limited to my imagination, nor by my will to use the power that has been bestowed upon me. . . 

The next day I decided to reroute my journey through India, instead of continuing through Africa.  

Now I was in a rush. I had a mission propelling me forward.

When I experienced the moment of clarity during my flight over Cyprus, I started to feel a discomfort in the middle finger of my right hand. During the weeks that followed, I felt increasing pain as a small blister bubbled up on the joint where my finger met my hand. The size of the bubble grew and the pain intensified and began to travel to other parts of my body. 

Eventually, the bubble of pain traveled to my spine and back and my entire body was in knots. I kept up with my business travels, though the pain was more and more debilitating. On a trip to Europe, I traveled with a bag of ice tied to my back. As the ice melted, it soaked the back of my shirt and the top of my trousers. I attended important meetings lying on the floor, talking to the other participants who were sitting in chairs. Finally, I became so ill I could hardly walk. For several months, there were many times I had to crawl on the floor to answer the phone or go to the bathroom. I consulted many doctors who recommended all sorts of medicines, both traditional and alternative. All of them caused severe side effects. I was admitted in and out of hospitals. Nothing seemed to work. Doctors couldn’t explain my illness. Somehow, I knew it was the physical expression of the struggle going on within me.

I knew I was being called upon to do something for the poor, and I was resisting it. I was very nervous and fought the idea intensely. I prayed and tried to tell the calling to get off my back and find someone else. Other times I would shake my fists, using curse words to make myself clear: “You’ve got the wrong person!”

One reason for my hesitancy was that I came from an upper middle-class family and had little contact with the poor or people in the villages. When I moved to the U.S., I was lucky enough to find a good job, and I had a wonderful family. I had absolutely no desire to leave that or to do something in which I had no experience or know-how. 

But the calling was beyond my ability to resist.  

Psychologically, it tore me apart. My long illness was a time for intense dialogue with myself. I had all the time to dwell on “Who am I?” Going down and down the layers of my fears, I could feel that the source of my fears was being without money. But from where that fear emerged was a mystery. I could see how that fear had seduced me, how it led me to hide behind the cover of ambition and success. But my fear was beyond reason. It would send chills through my spine and I would wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. 

In the beginning, I was baffled by my ailment. Then I was angry—angry at the ailment, angry at myself, angry at the doctors, and angry at the world. This was followed by a period of bargaining—OK Spirit, if you will do this, I will do that. Nothing worked. My ailment kept getting worse.

Next was a period of defeat and depression, during which I felt I would never get better. Then came acceptance of the defeat. This was followed by a period of cleansing—of my anger and the knots tied within me. During this time, I had experiences and heard sounds that I could neither comprehend nor welcome. 

One day, in 1980, my sister suggested I try fasting. 

“I have never fasted before and I have no intention of fasting now,” I told her. 

But that day, somehow, I didn’t feel hungry, and that feeling kept on going. For the next six days I didn’t eat anything. I drank only a third of a glass of water during those six days. On the fifth day of the fast, something took place for which I have no understanding. For a complete lack of words, I would say it was a vision.

It was as if a curtain opened and I found myself back behind the scene of a play. There I saw that everything is connected, one thing leads to the other. I was going deeper and deeper behind the stage with dizzying speed. Then it stopped. No motion. It was dark, yet I could see. There was a man. He seemed old. He was alone; there was nothing else around. The man was floating in a thick vacuum, like in space. The scene was fuzzy and yet there was a sense of recognition. I know this man. I have seen him somewhere. The man was dying of starvation. There was total calm, a knowing presence. My eyes started to adjust. The man came into focus. He was me. I was not surprised, as if I had been expecting to meet myself there. He could see and feel me as I was seeing him. I felt the presence of a magnetic power. 

Where is this power coming from? Then I realized this magnetic force was coming out of a commitment the man had made to something eons ago, before his death. 

That force and I are the same! I am that presence! The link between me, the dying old man, and me, the 20^th century man, had never been broken—it was one long, continuous chain. What I had believed to be my mistakes in the past, were not mistakes. My learning and completion of those lessons helped prepare me for the next lesson. I realized there are no mistakes in nature. It was clear to me that there was a meaning to all that had happened and was happening in my life. 

We are the source. We are the source!

A conviction beyond belief or words emerged. This experience was perhaps just a split second, but I was filled with gratitude and love. I fell to my knees and kissed the ground. I knew who I was and what I was doing on this earth. I vowed to spend the rest of my life fighting world hunger.

I got up and realized I could walk again. I went for a five-mile walk, something I had not done in almost two years.

I was now seeing everything from a new perspective. I could no longer relate to the old perspectives I had held so strongly only a few months ago.

My healing was followed by a new kind of frustration. I knew what I had to do, but I had no idea how to go about it. I had no more interest in business, but I needed to work to feed my family. I wanted to share my new-found world, but I was unable to communicate. I did not have the words. My friends and family thought I had gone crazy.

On one of my travels in 1978, the pilot of the airplane made an announcement that we were flying over Cyprus. It looked so small and I was struck by the thought: If the island looks so small from seven or eight miles above, what would it look like from a divine point of view?

At that moment, I felt as if I were being pulled outside the plane, traveling in space farther and farther away, until the earth looked like a distant, tiny speck. I came to a stop and heard a voice asking, “What do you see?”

The voice was of an elder person, speaking to me near my left shoulder. I turned around but could not see a face. What I saw was myself in two places. I was observing the earth like a speck of dust floating in the night sky from a great distance hearing that gentle voice. Simultaneously, I was experiencing myself going around that little speck of dust at a dizzying speed.

I saw the earth close up. I noticed people on one side of the earth starving, while people on the other side had so much food they wasted it. I was seeing that on one side we have such light, such hope, so many resources, and, on the other side, there was total darkness and children were dying. And this process was not taking place due to a lack of resources, or understanding, or good will, or know-how, or money. It was simply the result of a lack of awareness. It was as if there were two different planets and one had no knowledge or understanding of the other.

Slowly, I felt myself return to my seat on the airplane and had a moment of clarity. I had experienced a world of opposites. Light and dark, hot and cold, big and small, hope and despair, wealth and poverty. These opposites were embedded in the same speck of dust, yet light could not experience darkness and darkness could not experience light—they could not penetrate one other.

That one moment of clarity or vision was like a bolt of lightning. It seemed to have burned out all my circuits. Nothing I had done up to that point had any meaning for me.

Starting in the early 1970s, I worked as a management consultant specializing in joint ventures between American and overseas firms. This work took me around the world, and I was paid handsomely for it. Once, in a three-week period, I literally went around the world twice. I calculated that, in an 11-year period, I traveled around the world, in mileage, about 45 times.  I was constantly experiencing jet lag. 

During that time, I started to realize I was not only traveling through space, but also traveling through time. On any given day, I would be in the U.S. talking to some of the top business people in the country and, within 24 hours, I would be in a remote part of Afghanistan or some other country where things had changed little during the past 2,000 years.  

All of the travel in a short period of time helped me to gain perspective about where we, as a people, had come from, where we were, and where we might be headed. And in that universe, how I fit in. This perspective was both enthralling and unnerving.

I had grown up in India during an agricultural age with practically no industry. People were mostly illiterate and poor. We were a colony of the British, and they held all the power. My people were without much hope.

As a child I wanted to know why the white man on horseback, carrying a gun, had all the power and we had none. What gave him the power? Why was he the occupier and we the occupied? I wanted to find the secret to the power.

At the age of 18, I gained an understanding that the secret to that power was industrialization.

In 1958, I felt as if destiny picked me up like a pawn and moved me to the United States. Here I was to learn the secret of industrialization from the maestros. I had a role to play. I felt my mission was big and my time was short. A sense of urgency enveloped me.

Now in the 70’s, I was being paid by the maestros to help them set up industries in developing countries. There was both a sense of accomplishment and yet a sense of emptiness.

I share a dream to describe that dichotomy:

One night I had a dream in which I saw a giant with its head touching the stars. I felt like a bug in comparison. With every step the giant took, the earth shook like an earthquake, denoting the power of this mighty giant. I had an urge to climb up the giant and to find the secret to its power. I had no idea how I would climb that great height, with danger at every step, but I started to climb anyway. Next thing I knew, I was standing on the giant’s left shoulder and looking into its eye. What I saw startled me and woke me out of the dream.

The giant was blind. It was made of iron and had no awareness.

Waking up, I realized I was working for a blind giant … a giant that was unaware and unconcerned who it crushed under its feet. People, groups, nations looked on helplessly, hopelessly, as it made a grist of them in the name of raw materials and markets. 

It was like I was standing on the shore of a mighty sea. I wanted to leave this shore, but I did not know what was on the other side of the gulf or how to get there. I was torn.

It took me a few years before I realized that the experiences I was having with the “many teachers” started to happen after my meeting with Devraha Baba, the 350-year-old saint, at the Kumbh Mela in 1977.

I decided to go to India to visit Devraha Baba again in January 1982. The first time I had met him in a state of unawareness. Now, I believed I was aware. It was as if he had taken a man who had been standing on his head and had set him upright on his feet. The new perspective had overcome me and filled me with reverence. I needed to see Baba, to be near him as an offering of love.

Baba’s camp was approximately ten miles from my mother’s house, where I was staying. My plan was to see him at midnight, the same time I first met him five years earlier. Not wanting to be late, I allowed plenty of time to get there on my borrowed bike. I would have to watch for potholes on the road in the pitch dark and would need to walk on the sandy beach of the river Ganges.

On the way, I made a sudden decision to stop and see my friend Dr. Sinha, (more on Sinha soon) who happened to live along the way. It was late at night, but I knew Dr. Sinha might already know I was coming and if he did not wish to see me that late at night, he would not be under the tree where we always met. Meetings were always under his control. 

Sinha was under the tree and welcomed me enthusiastically. He did not show any surprise in seeing me back in India. I told him I was on my way to see Devraha Baba and just stopped by to pay my respects. 

“Devraha Baba!” Sinha’s eyes lit up. 

“He is the saint of saints. The saints worship him. What takes you there?” he asked.

Upon hearing my answer, Sinha went on to relate the story of a man who was getting in his car to go to see Devraha Baba when the man’s wife reminded him to purchase some makhana, puffed lotus seeds, for a worship service that evening at their house. 

The man found the Baba seated, as usual, on his platform ten feet above the ground.

“Oh, you want makhana?” Baba called out to him as the man opened his car door. 

Baba manifested a 50-pound bag of lotus seeds from the side of his body and dropped it from the platform to the ground. This was a much greater amount than the man had  planned to buy. 

As he finished his story, Sinha told me, “Devraha Baba knows what’s in a person’s mind.”. 

“You should go now,” Sinha remarked after a few minutes. “You don’t want to keep Devraha Baba waiting. You are very blessed.”

I had ridden my bike about a mile when a thought entered my mind. 

Devraha Baba is likely to know what is lurking in the back of my mind. I should be conscious of my thoughts. What would I like to see happen because of this meeting?

The idea soon started to rattle my mind. If it was true that the Baba could grant any boon, then what should I ask for? What would show me his power to manifest, as Sinha claimed? My first thought was of my wife, who was having back problems. Maybe I could ask for Treva’s back to be healed. 

Immediately, the image of a few white kernels of makhana, the popped lotus seeds, dropped into my otherwise empty mind, as if my thought was a bubble being burst into nothingness. The meaning was clear to me: I needed to think of something else.The man in Sinha’s story had been thinking of his wife’s request to bring her lotus seeds, an insignificant thought. He received many times more lotus seeds than the amount in his thoughts, but still it was insignificant. I needed to think of something bigger.

Maybe I should ask for our son to have a successful career. More popped lotus seeds.

Something for my daughter? Lotus seed puffs.

Perhaps those wishes were too intangible. What could I ask for that would be measurable, visible proof to me of Baba’s powers? What if I asked for a boon of $1 million? More lotus seeds.

OK, if that is not enough, $10 million? More lotus seed puffs.

All right. I raised the ante. What about $100 million? Again, lotus seed puffs.

A story came to mind. There was an old couple, blind, in poor health, and childless. One day an angel appeared and offered them one boon. The man wanted money to live on. The wife said she always wanted children. They could not make up their minds, and they asked for a day to think about it before stating their wish.

The next day, when the angel came, the couple was ready with their answer. “We want to see our grandchildren play with toys made of silver and gold.”

Again, the meaning of this story was clear to me. I needed to think of one thing that would be inclusive of all my desires.

The paved road ended and I was walking my bike on the sandy banks of the Ganges. From a great distance, I could see a small candlelight emanating from Devraha Baba’s cottage on the platform. Time was short. Every desire I thought of was being popped up as lotus seeds, as if my mind were the popping machine.

Finally, I was within a few hundred yards of Baba’s platform. The tiny light in the distance was flickering, and my body was feeling the warmth of that light, as if it were next to me. That warmth evoked a peculiar feeling of remembering something.

I was on earth to experience the sheer joy and beauty of what I was here to do. Not to own desires. 

It felt as if I had been walking in a dream and had suddenly awakened. My body was vibrating and light, as if ready to take off in the air. My mind was empty. No desires were left to be popped. Nothing. Not even the desire to see Baba, though he was so near.

I stopped and began to laugh. How would I ever explain to anyone that I had traveled 10,000 miles, left my family and my work and now, within yards of my destination, I had no reason to move forward? 

I dropped my bike and sat down on the cold sand. In that instant, the tiny light in Baba’s cabin went off. 

A broad smile covered my face, and I shook my head in disbelief. Baba had been tracking my trip, and he knew all along what I had come for.

“Scoundrel,” I muttered under my breath.

I was running late for an appointment and was stalled in a New Delhi traffic jam. The smell of noxious fumes took me back almost 30 years to when there were hardly any automobiles in India, and air pollution of this sort was unimaginable. Now it was almost impossible to breathe. New Delhi has been changing rapidly. Each time I have come back, I have found the scene to be totally different. India is like a kaleidoscope; it remains the same, yet each time one moves the barrel, the scene changes completely.

Suddenly, I heard the gentle reminder of the inner voice saying, “Be here now.” I closed my eyes to get rid of all memories and to look afresh. Taking a deep breath, I filled my lungs with exhaust fumes; they had an aroma of their own. I listened to the sounds; they were unique.

I opened my eyes. To the right of my hired auto-rickshaw was a chauffeur-driven white Mercedes with a diplomatic license plate. In the back seat, reading a newspaper, was a short, stubby diplomat from one of the African countries. In his air-conditioned car, he was protected from the fumes and oblivious to the sounds. He, like me, was engrossed in events of the past and of some other place.

On my left was another auto-rickshaw. Standing in the front part of the rickshaw was a two-or-three-year-old boy of Laotian or Cambodian parentage. He was gazing at me, perhaps watching the flow of my mental gyrations.

How wonderful, I thought. A child’s attention is naturally focused on the here and now.

I smiled at the child and mentally thanked him for the lesson. He smiled back. In the language of silence, I told him that I loved him. He responded by stretching out his hand to touch me. Alarmed, his parents leaned forward to see what the boy was trying to do. We smiled at each other, and I extended my hand to the young boy.

As our fingers touched, I felt a spark go through my body and was filled with a familiar vibration.

 “Ah, Spirit! You are the child,” I hummed to myself.

Now I saw Spirit all around me. The diplomat was Spirit pretending to be lost in another world. The diploma’s chauffeur was Spirit. The cacophony of sounds was Spirit. Spirit was my rickshaw driver. Spirit was embodied everywhere.

The light changed and traffic started to move. A moment in eternity had passed.