I must have been in my late twenties or early thirties
strolling in Harvard Square in Massachusetts.
I saw a flyer for a group meditation open to the public
at Harvard U. at 7 pm on a Thursday night.
A fervent seeker with years of meditation experience
and spiritual experiences, well read on various
eastern and western spiritual paths, I had to attend
that group meditation. I had to see what it was all about.
I met a tall blond-haired guy there named Woody, a kindred soul. I said, “Where is the guru?” He said, “He’s in Europe, but at 7 pm he will meditate on us and you will feel his powerful presence.”
I looked at the guru’s photo between two flickering candles. His mystical eyes suggested he was in an enlightened state of consciousness.
But, I wondered if anything would happen at 7 pm, or if it was all just a bogus power of suggestion and nothing more.
The guru was punctual. At 7 pm KABOOM! the room got blasted with phenomenal, powerful beyond belief, spiritual energy. I was blitzed out and blown away from the cosmic energy lighting up the room.
I’d felt this kind of a guru’s spiritual energy before. In Hinduism it’s called the guru’s darshan, but this was something more. This was like something utterly miraculous.
His followers at the group meditation told me their guru meditated on them at night and they’d awake feeling his spiritual energy blasting into them.
The purpose of the powerful spiritual energy infusions was to aid them in their quest to attain sat chit ananda, eternal bliss consciousness, courtesy of the guru’s uber potent spiritual energy transmissions.
I attended those group meditations a few more times, the results the same, my consciousness elevated into the stratosphere.
I brought friends there who had never meditated. They got blissed out too.
I meditated on the guru’s photo once and saw him in a dream where he tapped me on the head, as if he were anointing me to become a student of his.
I never became a follower of this guru, which may surprise you given the phenomenal, transcendent experiences I had at those group meditations.
His path required celibacy and as a romantic, I felt that deprivation was entirely unnecessary and possibly harmful.
Ironically, years later, that guru became enmeshed in sexual scandals, diddling female followers, disgracing himself, as many of those gurus from the east did so wantonly and surprisingly.
I remember reading in their Vedas something like this: “Sin will avoid an enlightened being, like deer avoid a burning mountain top.”
Based on the actions of many allegedly enlightened gurus, this just wasn’t true or many of them, though powerful, were either unenlightened or tragically flawed despite their higher states of consciousness. Some of them acted like full-blown lunatics. Think cults.
After reading and hearing about so many of these gurus falling like disembodied flies from grace, I eventually left the east and came to believe a single act of compassion is more important than most of the spiritual experiences on the planet, as I still believe decades later and to this very day, this very moment.
Bob Boyd