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A Guru Story
In year 2001, my parents came to New Jersey for the first time and saw their formerly normal IITian son frequently wearing whites, meditating an hour a day, doing yoga and kriya and doing satsangs all over temples in NJ. At that time, I was making six trips a year to Montreal to be with the master and all that flood of love and energy was making me very tearful and emotional. I would drive with my parents to the mall with the 28 Bhakti Sutra tapes in my car’s deck and hallway; my eyes would completely cloud up and wash over like a torrent of sudden east coast rain. His love is the most intoxicating feeling I have ever known, and I don’t think driving under the influence makes your passengers feels safe, does it? Now when Guruji walks with or blesses even with a stray monkey, people assume that monkey must be some saintly being. So one day I was that monkey. I got to walk with guruji from his kuteer to the meditation hall and in the hallway of the Montreal Ashram in one of those tearful, spaced out moments, for no particular reason, I got a stream of hugs from a line of about fifty or sixty people including mothers and children and some very young and attractive young men and women from all over the world. That was a huge shock for my very traditional parents on their first trip abroad. What was much more painful for them was my newfound propensity to preach. The more tearful my parents got about the whole ‘our son has lost it’ bit, the more I ‘shared the knowledge’ with them. They probably got all the knowledge sheets that existed at that time from me, and then some original stuff from me too. Finally mom had enough and decided to go meet guruji. I was sitting with Guruji upstairs, when he suddenly said in Hindi ‘Oh, Amma aai hai, teri shadi karana chahti hai (Amma is here! Hmm… so she wants to meet me so that she can get you married’. He stood up and in his magical flow, white robes and all, gently stood at the top of the stairs. I don’t know what my mom saw from the bottom of the stairs but she could not stop her tears for the next half hour or so. Once the tears stopped and she could speak, she said, ‘Guruji, I feel so great around you, but Ajit preaches to us all the time – he talks about death and once he even drove us to the graveyard and said, Ija why do you make a long face, we are all going to die. Besides, he is our only son and he doesn’t want to get married. One day he even put his car in the ditch.This is not good, I want you to make him normal again ’. Guruji gave a big smile and pinching my cheeks, poked me and said – ‘Kyon re, tu bada gyani ho gaya hai, Amma ko bhi gyan de raha hai (You have become so wise now that you even give knowledge to amma(mother) now?)’. And then he turns to my mom and says, “Amma, tum to khush ho ki ye is taraf aa gaya, kaheen aur phans jata to na jane kya hota (I know you’re happy that he came to me, if he had got stuck somewhere else, it wouldn’t be so)”. Mom finally smiled, got a hug from guruji and touched his feet. For me, that was quite an ego buster. I don’t remember having preached to my parents ever again. As for my mom, her tears have continued since. She’d see him and she’d flow in tears. And art of living was never a subject of debate in my family ever again either. Ajit Tripathi
Guru Story - Art of Living Universe
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