Tapaswiji Maharaj and Shivabalayogi

(repost from 2013)

 When Tapaswiji Maharaj met Shivabalayogi for the first time the yogi was 15 years of age and the elder sage 182. Despite the great disparity in age they hit it off but at their first meeting the younger was deep in samadhi and not available for mundane colloquy. Tapaswiji was an adept in the use of rejuvenating herbs and the esoteric branches of ayuravedic medicine combined with kaya kalpa. At the age of 90 he had undergone this course and become a new man. Previously at the age of 55 he had taken up sanyas after an interview with the last Mughal Emperor. The stories he could tell!

When he came back on another visit Shivabalayogi was in everyday consciousness mode

 but due to his long period of sitting in asana his legs had become fixed like the twisting

 of dried cooked spaghetti and he was forced to drag himself about. Using oils and

 massage Tapaswiji made him limber again. He related to him that he was bound 

to do him service as in a previous  incarnation Shivabalayogi had done him service

 during his tapas back in the day. ‘Now’, he said,

 ‘is there anything more I can do for you, to make you comfortable’.

- Well, said the youth, whom it would be recalled had undergone a great deal of

fhardship at  the hands of louts who at one point had thrown his body into the nearby 

canal whilst lost to  the world in samadhi. He sank to the bottom and then

 popped up again like a cork and back on the bank. After this they had

 let him alone.

- Well, there is one thing that is bothering me,that is a great distraction and an impediment

 to my meditation. There is a window at the back there with a loose catch and when the

 wind is in a certain quarter it rattles. Can you get it fixed?
- Done, said Tapaswiji.

Tapaswiji Maharaj and Shivabalayogi

When Tapaswiji Maharaj met Shivabalayogi for the first time the yogi was 15 years of age and the elder sage 182. Despite the great disparity in age they hit it off but at their first meeting the younger was deep in samadhi and not available for mundane colloquy. Tapaswiji was an adept in the use of rejuvenating herbs and the esoteric branches of ayuravedic medicine combined with kaya kalpa. At the age of 90 he had undergone this course and become a new man. Previously at the age of 55 he had taken up sanyas after an interview with the last Mughal Emperor. The stories he could tell!

When he came back on another visit Shivabalayogi was in everyday consciousness mode but due to his long period of sitting in asana his legs had become fixed like the twisting of dried cooked spaghetti and he was forced to drag himself about. Using oils and massage Tapaswiji made him limber again. He related to him that he was bound to do him service as in a previous incarnation Shivabalayogi had done him service during his tapas back in the day. ‘Now’, he said, ‘is there anything more I can do for you, to make you comfortable’.

- Well, said the youth, whom it would be recalled had undergone a great deal of hardship at the hands of louts who at one point had thrown his body into the nearby canal whilst lost to the world in samadhi. He sank to the bottom and then popped up again like a cork and back on the bank. After this they had let him alone.

- Well, there is one thing that is bothering me that is a great distraction and an impediment to my meditation. There is a window at the back there with a loose catch and when the wind is in a certain quarter it rattles. Can you get it fixed?
- Done, said Tapaswiji.

Shivabalayogi

Shivabalayogi looked bored almost to the point of fidget. He sat, his legs under him casually not in an asana with his attendants watchful of the audience. There wasn’t many of us that day at the Bannerghata Rd. Bangalore, Ashram which was out near the Banglore Dairy I think, not that the taxis and the auto-rickshaws didn’t know about him because of the crowds that flocked there every Sunday for bajans or devotional chanting. During the bajan many of the crowd would go into bhava samadhi or divine trance in which they would see visions of gods and goddesses. I visited him a few times but not on those days as I didn’t want to complicate my sadhana and in India one gets blasé about phenomena. My father used to tell the story of a man he worked with that all you had to do was mention the name of a lake or river and he would exclaim - fished it. Life isn’t long enough to fish in all the spiritual streams of India still being in the neighbourhood it seemed rude to pass.

Shivabalayogi

These collective phenomena are world wide and give great entertainment to the rationalist and the sceptical. I recall a great ebulliance of devotion and spiritual experience that centred round a statue of the Blessed Virgin at Ballinaspittle, Co.Cork, Ireland.
Ballnaspittle
Pace Yeats, The Statues‘it moved or seemed to move’.

Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

Reading the banal Freudian type explanation from an initiate of the Golden Dawn and the psychopomp McGregor Mathers incidentally a relation by marriage to Henri Bergson, one is disappointed. There was an opportunity here for a disquisition on participation mystique or at least the induced Great Mind of A Vision.


I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are—
(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.
I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.

Magic