Searching for the Miraculous

How The Animals’ We Gotta Get Out of This Place led to baffling perceptions of a separate reality

ON A HOT SUMMER DAY IN 1979 I approached the shut door of an ashram situated in a small town deep in the Rajasthan desert, and rapped my knuckles on its metal skin. I hadn’t ever been to a Christian monastery, let alone an Indian ashram, so I had few expectations. But I didn’t think I would find battered metal gates so nondescript they could as easily be the entrance to an engineering shop as an ashram. I also anticipated some level of formality, that a follower would open the gate for me and I would be taken to an audience with Shri Mouniji Maharaj, the yogi whose ashram this was. My arrival didn’t pan out that way at all.

After knocking three times, I stood back and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Perhaps I had come at the wrong time? Maybe the yogis were meditating. A battered sign hung by the gate, but it was written in Hindi, or perhaps Sanskrit, and I couldn’t read either. What if I had arrived at the wrong gate?

The allure of the miraculous

For years after, whenever anyone asked me why I decided to travel alone to a small town deep in Rajasthan, knowing no one, not able to speak the language, not clear about what I would find, I was never able to offer a sensible explanation. The truth was I actually didn’t think much about it. Going to India was something I just felt compelled to do. India was a place something deep inside me needed to experience, the latest step in a quest that had begun years before.

When I was growing up in suburban New Zealand a pop song expressed the frustration many of my generation felt about living in a world shaped geopolitically by the Cold War and socially by 1950s conservatism. The song was We Gotta Get Out of This Place, performed by The Animals. Realising I was ignorant of so much, the place I felt I “gotta get out of” wasn’t the suburbs, it was my own uninformed self.

This feeling, and my desire to ride it into dazzling revelation, reached a turning point in the mid-1970s. Hungry to learn, I had been reading everything I could get my hands on. Books became highways along which I raced, intoxicated by real and imagined vistas from the past, present and future, as I soaked up others’ insights into worlds I longed to enter.

As readers, we’ve had the experience of excitedly turning a book’s page and suddenly, click!, what we are reading causes some fragment deep within us to spark into life, pushing us towards what we are convinced we truly need to explore. During my late teens one book in particular entranced me: In Search of the Miraculous, by the Russian writer, P.D. Ouspensky. In 1915 Ouspensky had arrived back in St Petersburg after travelling through the East in search of what he called the miraculous.

The “miraculous” is very difficult to define. But for me this word had a quite definite meaning. I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us. But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say. I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The “miraculous” was a penetration into this unknown reality. — P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, New York: Harcourt, Brace (1949), p 3.

Other writers I came across at this time confirmed the possibility of what Ouspensky sought. Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Reality provided dazzling visions of otherworldly vistas that exist in parallel to our everyday world, which his teacher, Don Juan, claimed we can access by adjusting our perceptual processing. And in A Search in Secret India Paul Brunton described encounters with extraordinary individuals who had so honed their inner capacities they were able to perform apparently inexplicable tasks — such as surviving being buried underground for a decade. Hence when I arrived in Rajasthan I was primed to meet extraordinary people who could help me transform my perception of reality.

But would this actually happen? As I stood at the ashram’s gate, waiting for it to open, the question that kept coming back to me was what would I find? Paul Brunton had found sly fakers as well as wondrous fakirs during his travels around India. Would I encounter truth or falsity? Would a road open up to me? Or would I be led into a blind alley? As it turned out, the reality was more complex than this simplistic dichotomy allowed. I soon discovered my biggest problem wasn’t that I risked being given wrong answers, my problem was that I was asking the wrong questions.

The miraculous and India’s enigmas

I was considering what to do next when I heard bolts pulled back and the gate squeaked half open. A man well past middle age looked out at me. He was slight, had straggly grey hair and beard, and wore only an orange cloth, tied loosely around his waist. I introduced myself. He said nothing but signalled me to enter. So I met Shri Mouniji Maharaj.

After we were seated on a concrete pad outside the ashram’s main steps, Shri Mouniji offered me cool water, which I gratefully accepted, then quizzed me on how I knew about his ashram. I pulled out a introductory letter from a friend, one of his former pupils. During this process I learned more about Shri Mouniji. First, he didn’t speak. He communicated by pointing at letters to spell words. I found out later that he understood English very well but had taken a vow of silence many years before — “mouni” means mute.

I also discovered why Shri Mouniji had responded personally to my knock on the gate: there were no followers to do so. Only Shri Mouniji and his right-hand man Chelaji — “chela” means pupil, “ji” is a term of respect — lived in the ashram. Chelaji was a solidly-built man in his forties who laughed a lot, spoke a little English, and did all the talking to visitors. Otherwise two boys rented rooms at one end of the ashram. They attended a local school, went home during the weekends, and kept to themselves. The ashram was a quiet compound on the edge of town, with the desert blowing beyond its walls.

Conditions were austere to an extreme. L-shaped in design, the ashram’s single building consisted of a public reception hallway, a kitchen, and a number of rooms for sleeping. Everything was constructed of concrete. The rooms had no doors and there was no furniture. Everyone sat and slept on mats laid out on the concrete floors. Outside, the ashram’s dirt grounds formed a rectangle about one hundred metres by eighty. They were surrounded on all four sides by walls well over head height.

The ashram had originally been built in the desert outside Merta, but over the years residential building had crept out, and now lanes and squat concrete houses ran along two of the ashram’s walls. The only greenery inside the grounds was a small vegetable garden and a eucalyptus tree donated by one of Mouniji’s Australian pupils. There was also a shower block and a septic tank toilet. The desert beyond was dry and hot, and when winds blew dust flew everywhere.

Shri Mouniji showed me to the small room where I was to sleep. I remember putting down my pack, looking at the concrete walls and the thin dust-covered sleeping mat on the floor, and wondering if I had made a mistake. Was this really where I could find the miraculous, which would lead me to Castaneda’s “separate reality”? What I didn’t know was that the starkness of the physical conditions belied the richness of the experiences I was about to undergo — and that they would topple key foundations that supported what I thought constituted reality.

Meeting the “miraculous”?

Several days later a knock rang out from the ashram gate. A taxi driver had arrived. Chelaji told me I was to accompany him. In town we picked up three other men, travelled a short distance through the streets, then stopped at a shop. One of the men went in and soon returned carrying a bottle of whiskey. As we drove out of town I became confused. Were we travelling into the countryside to drink? Is that what sadhus in India did? No one spoke English, so I only found out what our journey’s real purpose was an hour later, as we pulled up outside a small complex of buildings. The complex housed a temple. Barely a dozen people were present, so we had only a short wait before it was our turn to make an offering.

The shrine was a three-sided alcove. Inside was a plinth on which stood a statue resembling the human form. It had a body, face, and eyes, but no mouth. The shrine’s priest — I assumed he was a priest, although he wore street clothes rather than robes and seemed somewhat bored by the whole process — took the bottle of whiskey we had brought. He opened it and poured whiskey into a small metal cup. After muttering a short prayer he lifted the cup to the statue’s head and held it up, above his own head, where a mouth would be if the statue’s face had one. After a few seconds he lowered the cup. It was empty.

Really? That would be anyone’s natural reaction. The priest’s sleeves were pulled up above his elbows, showing he had no tube to surreptitiously suck up the whiskey. The statue had no mouth, and therefore there was no hole for a tube to be inside the statue with someone sucking madly on the other end.

I watched closely as the priest filled up the cup again, held it up for a few seconds, then lowered it. Once more the whiskey had been sucked away. A third time the same action was repeated. However, this time when the priest lowered the cup only half the liquid had been taken. Chelaji nudged me and said, “Two halb.” He meant that the statue only ever “drank” two and a half cups of whiskey. No less, no more. The priest replaced the lid on the bottle and gave it back to us. The ceremony was over.

I found out later the bottle had to be unopened, otherwise it was rejected, and that only good quality whiskey was accepted. Fair enough. If you’re drinking copious amounts of whiskey each day, even if you’re a statue you want the good stuff, right? As we bounced along the road back to the ashram I was left to ponder what I had witnessed. What had really happened?

Another puzzling event occurred soon after. Late one morning a man arrived at the ashram. He had heard that a Westerner was in town and wanted to show me what he could do. There was nothing remarkable about him except he talked flat out. He began by showing his credentials. Unfolding a newspaper article, he described how he had once stopped a train using mental concentration so a politician could climb on board and keep his schedule. The newspaper article confirmed what he claimed. Next the visitor asked for a metal wok to be brought out from the kitchen. He placed the wok upside down on the concrete floor and tapped it with a small piece of charcoal while repeating a short phrase several times. He then lifted the wok and revealed that underneath it was a bunch of bananas.

I had watched carefully. The man had pulled up his sleeves. Sleight of hand was difficult given the bunch of bananas was too big to fit into his clothing. As we ate the bananas — which felt and tasted just like bananas — I wondered if their appearance here meant a seller in the local market had just discovered a bunch of bananas was missing? Years later I read a book by the Sufi Idries Shah, who described witnessing exactly the same “miraculous” banana trick in Central Asia. He was similarly left bemused as to how it was done.

Siddhis, consisting of physical, mental and paranormal powers, play a significant role in Indian mysticism. Paul Brunton witnessed a yogi who swallowed a cloth and manipulated it so it travelled down his gullet, through his stomach and intestine, and came out his anus. That’s one way to do an internal body flush. Brunton also observed a yogi who meditated for years without food or drink. Mouniji told me that when he was young he heard of a yogi who had been walled up in a cave outside Mumbai. Every ten years the yogi’s pupils removed the bricks to check he was still alive. Mouniji was there when the wall was taken down. The yogi was alive but remained in deep meditation. After checking that no insects had eaten parts of his body, the pupils rebuilt the wall and the next ten-year span began.

Other strange incidents occurred. One day I craved fruit so asked if I could go to the local market to buy oranges. Half an hour later a visitor arrived with a bag full of oranges. Laughing, Mouniji gestured they were for me.

Punching holes in the known

What was going on here? What had “drunk” the whiskey? How had the bananas got under the wok? Star Trek shows machines teleporting people and objects. Had I witnessed some kind of banana teleportation? Or was something else going on? And how about the oranges? Had my desire “reached out” and caused a visitor to buy oranges on the way to the ashram? Or had my awareness somehow picked up that a visitor was bringing oranges and responded with anticipation? Or was it just a coincidence? I lacked information to decide what was actually the case.

The enigmas India was presenting me were mounting. They remained unresolved when my time in Rajasthan came to an end. But one point was clear: my stay on Shri Mouniji Maharaj’s ashram exposed me to enigmatic yet apparently real phenomena for which I had no ready explanations. Indeed, if I wished to seriously engage with what I had perceived, ready explanations were to be avoided, because when applied peremptorily explanations are often used to “explain away” fleeting perceptions and enigmatic experiences rather than dig into them. Serious answers only follow serious study. It is a study to which I have repeatedly returned over the course of my adult life.

Encounters with the miraculous, in whatever form they arrive, have one fascinating result: they punch holes in what we think we know; they intimate that the skein that separates us from deeper perceptions can at times be surprisingly thin; and they challenge us to enquire deeply into the nature of our existence, which certainly contains many more mysteries than we willingly acknowledge.

REFERENCES P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, New York: Harcourt, Brace (1949), p 3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, London: Penguin Books, 1971. Paul Brunton, A Search in Secret India, London: Rider & Company, 1970 (orig. pub. 1934). Idries Shah, Oriental Magic, London: Octagon Press 1968 (orig. pub. 1958).