This is the typed and edited version of a ‘manuscript’ I discovered recently that I wrote when I was a fully committed member of the Brahma Kumaris in 1977. It describes a series of visions and out-of-the-body experiences that assailed Lekhraj Kripalani, a prosperous and very devout jeweller in pre-war Karachi, then in the province of Sindh, which became a part of Pakistan in the Partition of 1947. He was in Varanasi (known as Benares at that time), one of the main pilgrimage destinations for Hindus, when this experience came upon him.
That experience is the core of the teachings of the Brahma Kumaris. Kripalani, however you want to take this, felt he had been taken over – possessed, if you like – by God, and his earthly task made clear; to serve Humanity with the message of divine truth. Back in Karachi he started to hold meditations, séances, whatever you choose to call them, often delivered by the Supreme Soul – God – through his mouth. Those who studied with him are very clear about the difference between how ‘Dada Lekhraj’ sounded, and how he came across when possessed by Shiva, the Supreme Soul. Kripalani became known as ‘Brahma Baba’ to his community, and Shiva as ‘Shiv Baba’ – ‘Baba’ is a Hindi term of endearment for Father.
This is strong stuff, not for the fainthearted, and very easy to pooh-pooh as a crock of woo-woo hippy nonsense. All I can say is that I came across the teachings a generation later, in Mount Abu, Rajasthan, on my way to study Hatha Yoga with B.K.S. Iyengar in what was then known as Poona. Suffice it to say I never got to Poona, and found myself wholly committed to the radically disciplined way of life taught by the BKs – celibacy, ‘pure’ vegetarianism (No Garlic or Onions), 4am meditation 365 days a year.
And further suffice it to say that my experience of writing the text that follows, was that it was not written by me. I don’t claim to have been possessed in the way Brahma Baba was; but I do know that these words came out of my head without me even trying or knowing quite what was happening. Make of that what you will.
… and do I still hold this to be true? I left the highly disciplined devotional life in 1981, after six years of trying to live up to the standards. But the basic teachings still abide with me to this day – non celibate, a proud father, a functioning alcoholic, a successful curator and presenter of design conferences, a passionate motorcyclist and musician. It still lives inside me.

If you want another take on this experience, I unreservedly recommend my friend Anthea Church’s recently published and profoundly moving memoir ‘The Price of Devotion’. We overlapped; our experiences could hardly have been more different. She stayed in the institution 20 years: I ‘escaped’ after six.

Brahma Baba’s Vision
I still can’t explain it – wires of light shooting into me from a point that spoke; a deep red glow, a powerful fire such as no human has felt or seen, glowing in my bones…
Now I know that I cannot go back, that my life is not my life, my eyes not mine, my heart not my own.

How to start? Where to start? For some time diamonds, business, money have had no pull for me. I seem to need only the grace and silence of the figure of Narayan, of meditation in the early mornings – but still there are questions, nothing is really clear, only things pushing me on, in a dark world, towards light… 

… And then Vishnu came.

At first he made me think I was God! How can a man make sense of this, bursting inside the forehead? The early mornings are so sweet – in this time I really think I can feel close to God, begin to feel what he wants of me – but how to see a picture that comes alive before my yearning eyes? Radiant, golden, magnificent beauty, the father and mother of the world. Vishnu comes in front of me and speaks – will he explain the dream I saw before?  Take me back there – I’d love to go there … in rainwashed sunlit air, cool and clear and bright, colours evanesce inside my sight, because I have no need of looking, to feel the beauty and power of the world. Animals I’ve never seen move around me in a nocturnal dance, their skins and eyes shining in a purity that exists nowhere in the world I know – this is a world I know only in wonder – I stare in amazement as tiny stars float in the beautiful light – themselves pinpoints of living energy, it seems, shining not like the stars in the sky but like the ones in our hearts and eyes – moving slowly down, they float above my head; my throat is stretched and dry in awe as I watch them come to earth – such earth, my feet have never touched … and these are sparks, not from a fire, that will wink out as they touch the ground, but living sparks that turn, as they come close to earth, into living beings – beings of a beauty, divinity and grace that take my breath away – living deities, whose images we sit before in temples – pale and paltry images, a desperate attempt from a saddened sight to recreate the wonder and love of these beings that now smile and move before me, every action part of the same courtly dance. They beckon and invite me, richest golden fancy woven into their gossamer clothes, diamonds and more subtle jewels of rosy light flaring as the delicate cloth around their arms and bodies sways and swishes … I’d love to go there, to stay there.

My bursting heart opens hard and I am sitting in my early morning room again, that heart pounding, staring at my bare wall… and it is at this time that Vishnu arrives, coming through an opening in the darkness as if he had walked through a perfectly ordinary door – glowing delicate and bright, gentle yes, almost blinding, his four arms seem so natural, his dark eyes so deep that they swallow me down for generations – just standing there with light around him, holding out his palms to me, showing himself to me, making me know what he is. He speaks to me in Sanskrit – TAT TWAM AS – thou art also this, thou art also this, thou art also this, thou art… his words echo with every breath, even now as I sit in my room days later and wonder and wonder … how can a man be the ever loving God …

I go to my guru and touch the ground before his feet with my forehead to thank him for his blessing but as I kneel back and look into his eyes, I see him look a question into mine – he knows no more than me. He cannot lead me in this path. He cannot even follow. From the eyes I have looked into lately, his are so deeply different, the eyes of a limited, frightened human being, himself with so many questions deep inside and fear still in his heart. With love but with no regret I must leave him… must let him go.


TWO
… and must let myself go, too, back to the land where I was born, back to old Sindh, to be with my wife and daughters and to look more deeply inside. To find the answer I only have to look within, with honesty. Of this I am sure, that no human being can show me now – those terrible days in Benares still burn in my brain, the waiting and suspense, the agony… Sure that a door will be opened to me any minute and then when it finally comes…  finally the feeling that I am looking through, looking beyond, it is at such suffering, horror, pain, misery, blood and fire that I cannot bear it and must scream. Let my opened heart bear the scars for ever of such human suffering; this I cannot bear to see again.

I see the big cities of Europe and America, their gleaming, towering buildings toppling, great holes gaping in their walls, the sky black, the ground a brilliant arid orange, streets and towns of fire, the people down below deranged in their fear and fury, shaking fists at the clouds and screaming insults at God as they all at once, with the terrible desperate mental stench of fear, realise that they are going to die from the flocks of flying weapons whining out of the sky, birds of destruction that drown their prey in the brightest and cruellest firework display. Millions and millions dead and decimated. The winds that blow towards the incandescent centres of the fires sweep everything before them – bodies, bins, trees, cars, trucks …so much debris. Crying people clawing at walls and roofs to stop being bodily sucked into a vortex of fire like ragdolls… but those very walls and chimneys are going too, into a sea of fire … that burns the sin and – maybe – cleans the world again, after it is blackened.

In my own streets and cities, in Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay, in Hyderabad, Madras, Benares and Lucknow, all over beloved Bharat, I start out in a cold sweat for the cruelty and cutting that lines the streets with bloodied limbs and corpses – all the tensions and fear that we have known and kept down in Mother Bharat for centuries, rising up and parading in the open air in the eyes and hearts of murderers; pillage, loot, arson, rape – how can the land itself bear such crime?

My own streets literally slippery with blood and still in manic fear people move and run against each other, killing each other, killing themselves, slipping the long curved knife into the bosom of Mother India herself…. tears searing my cheeks, my hands practically tearing my hair from my head, I am found by my friend, woken by my screams from the little garden house in the hot Benares night… Oh God, that I should even see such things again, that you should put me in a place to pull a world like that from under the devil’s hammer…

And the cool grace and beauty of that world I saw before, the living stars turning into decorated deities, return to me again, to peace and silence.


THREE
And now I must tell of the deepest, most startling thing that has happened – to me – to anyone? At any time? Am I mad, that God himself is telling me I am to create a new world – that I am to be his instrument – that though not He, I am His chosen? Let this be true, and throw the rest of the world to the winds – or, let this be my own mania, and I am thrown to the winds for ever – let all be on His head, as He seems to say inside my mind, let all be His worry and I am free – and then the world will blow in the winds before Him.

I am at the family house in Sindh and all is quiet.  It is an evening after the many visitors have left the house… without really wanting, I have found a satsang gathering around me to hear the things He seems to want to speak through me. I feel a strange lightness in my mind, for although already the community of Hyderabad has been scandalised by my change, I feel that it is all up to Him – and I know there is no choice for me but to do this.

I am upstairs in my room, and a deep and powerful peace settles in on me, on the whole house… a powerful and hushed presence, a vibration that speaks in silence and seems to bring awe and wonder, a presence that is not human… My wife and daughter have felt it too and they are with me in the room, but I cease to be aware of them – cease to be aware of anything but the long lines of light shooting into me, white hot wires, from a point of focus so totally concentrated that I cannot bear to look at it in my mind’s eye… cannot bear to see it, with thoughts or with eyes.  I am transfixed by the current in these lines, these subtle wires that run right through me and glow almost unbearably hot… and the form, burning so brightly and powerfully, yet with such a soft and delicate centre, like a father or mother or child, moves down on me, in on me… I’m staring at the people in the room but my eyes see nothing except this deep glow, a pervading red of gold, a subtle energy of life itself, a living speaking and conscient being entering my heart and soul, glowing deep down, burning and cooling at the same time.

My mind wants to cry out loud, my face and eyes, head, nose and ears, and when I open my mouth to speak, it is as if I speak words carved out of red gold light… But they are not my words: my Father is here, is on me and in me, showing Himself and showing surely that He will show more… His words… NIJANAND SWARUPAM, SHIVOHAM SHIVOHAM: GYANSWARUPAM SHIVOHAM SHIVOHAM: PRAKASH SWARUPAM, SHIVOHAM SHIVOHAM… I am the Blissful Self, I am Shiv. I am the Knowledgeful Self, I am Shiv. I am the Luminous Self, I am Shiv… I am Shiv.

BlIss… Knowledge… Light…

I am gone.

I know nothing of this, only I am suffused in this Light, only I am totally His, only I am bathed like a newborn child in the depths of a baptism of water and fire, of Knowledge and Light… cradled in Bliss. My heart is made of His Light, My forehead shines His Light; my eyes see His Sight, my mouth speaks His Words. I am HIS.

I am His. The open hand that carries his light and might… Let there be no one else, let there be just we two, that that New Heaven will be born from this marriage… I am free. As I stare into the gold red distance, near and far, I can make out forms and pictures – of past and future – Krishna, a baby I always thought was God, plays in that same Heaven I saw earlier, to the dancing notes of an angel’s flute – and I recognise something in him. He looks at me and his look says: ‘I am the Prince of the Newborn World, and I am you.’

And I look into another distance, and see many people, souls, young and old, girls and women, men and boys, dressed in white all all of them, but with every colour of skin this world can show: black, white, yellow, brown, light, dark –  all are looking to me with loving eyes, and on all their lips is one word – ‘Baba’.  They are looking at me their father and I am looking at these my children, and gather them all easily with one sweep of the arm, into my lap… And still that Father who is light shines out of my eyes and forehead like a beacon, like a signal that says beware the old, beware the Devil… I am here with my children and the new kingdom of purity and peace is on its way – and this living light, who now I begin to know as my Father Shiva, is turning His glow to me and saying Inside my mind: ‘You are Brahma, you are the first creation of the Creator. You are the channel for the construction of heaven on earth, you are my first and special child, you are the father of the people of the Earth, all are your children, descending from you, you are Brahma, you are Krishna, you are Adam – the first man, the soul closest ever to God… Do you realise who you are?

And I am still staring sightlessly into the gold red haze that summons my body and soul, and as it begins to die down I see I’m looking into the bewildered faces of the two souls in front of me – I see they are souls very clearly, for that light has changed my eyes – and, in my own voice, I hear myself say, ‘Who was He? It was a light… a might… very powerful….’ but inside, I already know the task and as I speak the words, I’m setting myself to it, with a free mind and heart – for they too are His.