Sacha—The Way Back

by Stan I. S. Law

  Sacha’d read the Bhagavad Gita. The “Song Celestial.” He’d read it all in LA. The Hindus, or mankind, was given this poem about the same time Moses got his Ten Commandments. It was a good time for mankind.

  What happened since?

  Sacha’d spent two days in Delhi from where he only just escaped with his life. An ancient taxi narrowly missed a head-on crash with a bus carrying, what looked like, a few hundred natives. They rode everywhere—on the roof, hanging out through the windows, balancing on fenders.

  The driver reassured him: “You’re alive? No problem.”

  Perhaps the driver was right. As long as you escaped with your life… You needed your life to fulfill your mission. Your destiny. If you didn’t––you would have to come back. Again. And again.

  If I only knew what my mission is…

  He bit his teeth.

  Later he saw an elephant walking down the street. Atop it carried two tourists and a driver. Slower, but much safer than a taxi. You stayed alive longer.

  That was another reason why he’d decided to take the train. To stay alive a little longer. He smiled at his thoughts, and then grew pensive again. To learn of my mission. My purpose. My raison d’être.

  The wobbly train—that must have seen better days at the time of the British Empire—finally arrived at its destination, within a day’s drive to the foothills of the mighty Himalayas. The name of the town was Varanasi. From what Sacha’s heard, the place boasted a double claim to fame. The first was that the Beetles once came here. The second––Buddha had chosen this place to give his first lesson. Sacha came because of the latter reason, but the first brought in more tourists.

  Or so they said.

  Actually, Buddha had preached his first sermon some twelve kilometers north of Varanasi, in a place called Sarnath. Sacha looked forward to paying homage to the land on which the Enlightened One trod so many years ago. Varanasi also experienced a transformation. Until fairly recently, till 1956, it had been called Benares. The name had been changed abruptly, perhaps in homage to Varuna and Assi that still flowed north and south of the city in a loving embrace.

  Sacha got off the train at the Kashi station on the far side of the city. He arrived just in time to see the long graceful prows of countless boats, silhouetted across the Ganges against the setting sun. The boats seemed to hover at the edge of time. Floating, suspended, in a world of their own. After a long while, Sacha decided to walk back towards the town center.

  Ashrams were anywhere. Good places to stay for a night or two. The cots were hard but clean. They didn’t cost much. Anyone could stay if they obeyed the rules. Usually the no-looking-no-touching-no-nudity type of rules. Why are those people so obsesses with sex, he wondered?

  The Far East is plentiful of gurus.

  “Namaste”, he heard everywhere. “Welcome,” in English. The real Sanskrit meaning is “I bow to the divine in you.”

  Inside, some men sat perfectly still in Padmasana, the Lotus Seat, others rotated their bodies clock-wise in the graceful Laukiki-mudra, while waiting for their guru to appear. Other acolytes stretched their backs in the pose of Paschimottasana or, or the easier Dhanurasana, while others still, particularly women, oxygenated their brains while resting in Sirshasana, an internationally known aid in beauty-culture. Sacha preferred not to stand on his head, regardless of the purported benefits. He had problems enough remaining on his feet.

  Sacha had two main reasons for coming to this country of contrasts. He hoped this ancient culture would help him clarify his destiny. His second reason was more flippant. He wondered if yogis could really manipulate time and matter. And space.

  So far neither of his quests were satisfied.

  The rishis, the swamis, the gurus, exuded eastern philosophies with an amazing diversity of colour, tone and inflection. It became apparent, confirmed rather, that every man must follow a different path. Even at the feet of the same guru, in the same ashram, the receiver metabolizes the teaching at his own rate; within the context of his own accumulated dross. The dross of life. Of Karma.

  And then there was the country itself.

  From Varanasi Sacha took to the hills in a rented car. At least, according to the driver that came with it, it once was a car. In the West it would have fetched a small fortune. As a relic. The road soon lost its paving to the ravages of time. Also of climate. During the winter this road was closed. It was impassable. The man drove slowly, stopping very three hours to stretch his legs, drink some water and chew on local pancakes. Sacha told the driver to take enough food for three or four days. They stopped at Sarnath, rested, and then continued northward. The mountains loomed on the horizon, some 150 miles north of Varanasi.

  The Himalayas were very real. Physically real. Hard. They imposed themselves on the sky with absurd authority. Sacha wondered what mind had created such monsters. They represented a peculiar mixture of adamant power and sublime beauty. He always thought that beauty was gentle. Not here. Here it was hard, impenetrable. Uncompromising.

  Then he remembered the Far Country.

  The stars were like that. They moved, yet were immovable. They were beautiful, yet unforgiving. From afar, they were as cold and as hard as diamonds. From up close, they consumed all with the fire of detached indifference. An oxymoron, until you experienced their enigma yourself. They contained both sides of the equation. They were in no man’s world.

  They inhabited the lofty worlds of gods.

  On the second day, they spent the night on a broad plateau, about 3000 meters above sea level. Here and there Sacha noticed peculiar white pyramids––like the giant termite hills that pepper the waysides of Brazil. His driver told him that the white cones were ancient sarcophagi; graves protecting the ashes of past lamas. Strange. They burned their bodies then tried to preserve the ashes. By first darkness they pulled up to the side of the road. It was still warm enough to spend the night in the open. Sacha took the final look at the panorama, and fell asleep almost at once.

  He woke in the middle of a moonless night.

  He felt cold and decided to take a walk to improve his circulation. To warm up. He approached the peculiar white cones silhouetted against a darker background. There was a man sitting in front of one of them, his feet crossed in padmasana. The man was neither young nor old, yet, in a peculiar way, he was both. Sacha felt that the man knew many answers. Only he wasn’t sure if he, himself, knew the right questions.

  “As a spectator, you are where your attention is.” The man spoke in measured, very precise, accentless English. “You can go anywhere, into any time...” he was responding to Sacha’s stream of thoughts. There were so many of them...

  “Isn’t my physical body in danger when I am absent from it?”

  “You should be the last man to ask this question.” In the darkness Sacha thought he detected a smile. It was neither condescending nor scolding. Just amused.

  Of course Sacha should have known better. Each time he’d ventured into the upper realms, particularly into the Undiscovered Realm, he lost all awareness of his physical body. It’s not that his body was or was not in danger. It was simply that the physical body was of absolutely no consequence. It was as if he could create any number of such bodies, should the need arise.

  “Are you afraid for your body when you dream, or sleep?”

  Funny how the monk, for surely, this must have been a monk, made it all sound so easy. In or out of his physical body the man was very knowledgeable. He must have been one of the departed lamas whose dust lingered, hidden within the conical structures. Of course Sacha wasn’t worried about his physical body. He hardly knew why he’d asked the question. He never gave his body any serious thought. He recalled how Grandma was nervous when he dived into the oncoming waves of the Pacific. It seemed as though that was a million years ago. Time was so fluid...

  “Then how do I contact others? I can, can’t I?” Sacha was thinking of Father Pio and others who appeared simultaneously in different parts of the world.
He felt that he needed this information. He just didn’t know why.

  “You contact their mental bodies. Or their astral sheath. And they in turn translate this communication to their senses. Actually, the physical body, the senses, are hardly aware of this. When you dream, your dreams are vivid, but how often do you remember them in your waken state?” The man spoke in soft monotone, as if he didn’t try to convince Sacha of anything, but merely stated facts.

  “Can one manipulate time and matter with one’s mind?”

  The same smile of amusement appeared on the young man’s face. This time the smile was clearly visible and the man wore a face as young as his own. As they talked, the lama became more and more visible. Only the light did not come from any external source. It came from within the man’s being. By then his face was really young, or better still, ageless. Yet it was the same face only adorned with the innocence of youth.

  “You do so all the time, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” For once Sacha was lost.

  “Reality has its existence in the present. Past and future are figments of your imagination. You manipulate them to arrange events in a sequence suitable to you.”

  It all sounded too easy. Yet, thinking of some past events, Sacha knew that the monk was right. He did, on a number of occasions, do things, which altered his perception of the reality he was in at that moment. Not just sleeping or dreaming or traveling to inner realms, but even right here. On Earth. He changed things to fit different patterns. Anyone could do it. If they only believed they could...

  This time Sacha smiled, his teeth showing in the darkness. Miracles? Why bother? They’re so childish. If I want miracles I just go to Home Planet, he thought with a broadening grin. Now, there you can see miracles! Only nobody else can. Except mom and dad. And obviously many others only he’d never met them. Not so as to know them on an individual basis. Yet there must have been many others. Someone had to maintain the reality for others to share. And yet, his dad still thought that Home Planet and the Far Country had reality only in your head.

  “All reality exists only in your head,” the monk said quietly.

  Gradually it dawned on Sacha what people meant by miracles. They were stuck in a certain mindset they couldn’t change. When someone changed it for them, they thought it miraculous. Yet it was the simplest thing to do. All it took was a little faith. At the time, Sacha had done it intuitively. Now he understood what it was that he’d done.

  Still, the laws in the inner realms were more permissive. Exacting, but still, easier to obey. The beauty was also more intense. The dreams––more vivid. He felt that people there did not believe in miracles. They all created their realities consciously. Not by accident. Not by trial and error. Well, not all the time. Sacha wondered why he never attempted to see other people there...

  “Then why are we here?” he asked, instead. He thought he knew the answer but still, he wanted to hear it. He wanted to travel the world, to sails through a storms, to visit the Far Country. He wanted to...

  “...experience the mode of becoming.” The monk finished his thought for him.

  But there was more. There had to be more. You couldn’t have so much fun––all for free. Surely, one had to give back something. Anything? Otherwise there would be a state of imbalance. One would feel like a parasite. A taker...

  “There is also your destiny,” the monk’s lips didn’t move yet the words rang in his head like a Buddhist gong, reverberating on and on. It grew and receded, like the essence behind the holy syllable of Aum. “You pay by fulfilling it.”

  “And what is my destiny?”

  “It is written inside you. When you’re ready you’ll know.”

  There is a time to play and there is a time to pay, Sacha thought. He hoped his account wouldn’t be too overdrawn. On the other hand, he was keen to do it—to experience the joy of restoring the balance in his own life. The physical life, where balance was a fundamental law underscoring all duality.

  The next moment he found himself in the car. He still felt the cold. He closed his eyes and changed his view of reality. The windows in the car became misty with the difference in temperature. He grinned. If I raise the temperature any more, I’ll have to open the windows. The monk was right. We manipulate reality all the time. We just don’t know it. And if we did, we wouldn’t believe it. And then Sacha closed his eyes, again, and slept till the first light.

  His driver didn’t bat an eye.

  Next morning Sacha decided to drive back. There was little more he could learn here. He had a feeling that finally, after this entire search, after all the books, and travels, he was nearing his destination. Manipulation of time and space was of little interest to him. He knew he could do it. He still wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with his destiny, but he knew that he could. Everyone could. It was a question of one’s point of view. Or the way of looking at reality. You might say, of faith. Whatever you really believed in––was. The patterns you created would remain, obeying the laws of its reality until you changed them. We do it all the time. We translate one form of energy into another, or matter into energy, and we are not even surprised. Yet reality is like that. It is flowing, ever changing, metamorphosing itself. With or without our influence. We just step in, give a little push, and the waves continue to expand in ever increasing circles. Hence the universe.

  And what of God?

  He closed his eyes and saw the lama’s face.

  SACHA 20+117 days

  God is ‘I’ without physical, emotional or intellectual limitations. Without body, without emotions, without the intellect. God just IS. Like the sum total of all realities. Like the Reality that spans the universes, oscillates Itself into supernovas and collapses into massive black-holes only to feed the universe with a different form of Itself. With equal ease. Yet, in essence, It never changes. It is like an ocean that entertains countless billions of different waves, currents traveling in diverse directions, yet always remaining an ocean.

  Perhaps, ultimately, I am the only true reality.

  The only Reality.

  He wrote the notes in his pocket diary and went for a little walk. The last peek at India. Then he sighed, smiled and continued towards his car. There he stopped once again. He wanted to add another memory.

  SACHA 20+117 days, cont.

  It was the second time that I’d met myself face to face. Why is it that we must travel thousands of miles to find that that which is right before our eyes is within us? The moment I got back to the car, out there on that freezing mesa, I knew that the lama wore my own face. My face in different stages of my development. I wonder how long I’ve spent in India. In which life it was. Was it difficult? Had I perceived that life as difficult? Did the ashes guide me to wisdom I’d once had and lost? I could probably find answers to at least some of these questions inside me. Yet it seems that finding the answers right here and now is part of my mission. Perhaps we must learn to function in all realms, in all perceptions of realities.

  There is still so much I must do.

  Another thought struck me on the way back from the plateau seemingly frozen in the hoary past. If the lama and I are one, what of everybody else? Would others find their own faces in his ashes?

  Does it matter?

  Chapter 12

  You’re Never Alone

  The next ten months Sacha spent wandering all over southern India and later Japan. The last three weeks he’d spent in China. The People’s Republic wouldn’t grant him a visa for a longer period. Yet even in such a short time, China surprised him tremendously. He found it just as crowded as India, and Japan for that matter, but he also found, in the land of the rising sun, a paradoxical feeling of space. The Chinese gave an impression of being extremely well organized. Even disciplined. He doubted that this could have been imposed by a relatively totalitarian regime. Relatively––because at the onset of the Age of Aquarius, Uranus ruled with a powerful hand. Few people realized that democracy is but a thin wedge ris
ing from an ocean of autocracy on the one side, and anarchy on the other. The torrents of fate were gradually dissolving the old ways to make room for the new. New ideas and new people to apply them.

  The systems, the methods employed by the old power structures, the ideological concepts based on the principle of centralization, were dying. The Third Reich, the British and the USSR Empires, the Chinese Communist Oligarchy itself––in fact all attempts to centralize power have been destined to fall. Even the American feeble attempts at the beginning of the twenty-first century to ‘unify’ the world under its watchful wing were already showing signs of weakness. The same was becoming true of the once all-powerful international business conglomerates. The age of the individual was coming to the fore. To avoid anarchy, the new system required specific personal traits.

  And the Chinese had them. They were more disciplined. It was in their nature. Sacha felt sure that they were destined to inherit the Earth.

  Apart from that, the Chinese philosophy always appealed to him. Not the modern schisms, nor even various outgrowths of Zen Buddhism. He loved the depth of wisdom hidden in the ancient poems of Lao Tsu. Confucius he’d found more, perhaps altogether too, pragmatic. More practical, in a strictly worldly sense, but over-concerned with the result. Lao Tsu appealed to Sacha’s heart. He thought that perhaps the Old Master was the last great poet the Chinese race had spawned. Not that he’d read that many Chinese poets. But perhaps one that is truly great might be enough to sustain a nation. Sacha thought Lao Tsu’s philosophy as pertinent today as it had been centuries before Christ brought us his version of malleable reality.

  Sacha found his visit to China intensely interesting. Yet, in spite of their hidden promise, the Chinese were not yet ready for the final step. Sacha felt the radical metamorphosis was imminent. He could feel its scent in the air. Alas, there was no time to study them any further. His time was up, as was his visa. Sacha bid them a silent success as he made his way back to New Delhi. He’d promised to see a friend there. A searcher, like himself.