The Mystic's Manual

The Mystic's Manual

A devotional Memoir

Book One: Love

1

A few days before I met Peadar, I met an archetypal false prophet.

I had just arrived in Rishikesh, India, having survived the night bus, and I was exhausted. I was twenty-four and this was my first moment of solo travel. I had been the only foreigner, and the only woman, onboard a dilapidated vehicle rolling through the dark Indian countryside in the dead of night, and I felt conspicuous even with my hood pulled completely over my face. Fortunately, though, everyone around me was unconscious.

I couldn’t understand how sleep was possible, sitting upright on the rigid plastic seats in a vehicle that was constantly dodging oncoming traffic, but the man on my left was gone to peaceful slumber. He had no idea that his elbow was poking firmly into my ribs. To my right, a head hovered an inch from my shoulder while snoring into my ear. I didn’t bother to nudge anyone. I figured I was much better off with all the men around me out cold. An uncomfortable night was a small price to pay for a safe arrival.

Just before dawn, enough people had departed the bus that I was able to stretch out across the seats and doze off for about an hour. In that momentary slumber, I had a vivid dream. 

I had been taken up into a hidden meeting in the clouds. I wasn’t supposed to remember what went on there, but just as I began to descend, I reached up with my awareness and pulled down a few of the words that had been spoken. 

The words were, “Rajaji will like her.”

The bus then jolted me awake as we pulled into a bus depot in the Himalayan foothills. In the very next moment, the door opened and everyone tumbled out into the dust, diesel smog, and mayhem of the Haridwar station. Suddenly there were new men, all clamoring for me to come with them and insisting that there was no bus to Rishikesh proper. I only had so much energy in me to fight the crowd, so I surrendered and let one of them take me to an auto-rikshaw, which —as it turned out — instantly transformed him from an annoyance into an ally and bodyguard who then shouted at everyone else to leave me alone. I made note of that.

As I then traversed the highway in a vehicle with no doors, I pondered how the place I was just shown in my dream was such a stark contrast to this one. There had been so much light in that sanctuary in the clouds. There was a pervading sense of peace. It almost felt like I was barely an individual at all. I was one of them — these glowing beings who were all around me. Now, I was clutching the bars of a 3-wheeled motorcar, trying not to fall out as we navigated a lane-less highway in a slalom around trucks and cattle. 

Was I going to meet someone named Rajaji? It was an Indian name, and I was in India; it was certainly possible. I also knew enough Sanskrit to recognize that Raja meant king, and Ji was an honorific. Whatever it meant, I was open. I was ready to meet whoever I was supposed to meet. In fact, I was only there to follow what had felt like a call. My hope was that I would know what I was seeking when I found it. 

When I arrived in Rishikesh, it took me many hours to find the right place to stay. Some foreigners had sent to the Bombay Guest House, saying it was the “best place to stay in Rishikesh,” and my intuition felt it was right, but my first impression of my room was that it was basically a jail cell.

There was one tiny opening where light struggled to get in, blockaded by iron window bars that attracted a swarm of mosquitos. In the middle of the room was a wooden platform with a rock-hard, oil-darkened mattress. I was weak from exhaustion, but I decided that I wasn’t quite tired enough to lie down, so I dropped my bag and ventured out to find some food. 

Just up the road, I came across a café where a western-looking Indian man was sitting with a chai. It was such a great comfort to see him that I decided to approach. 

“May I join you?” I asked with a grin, pushing down the loneliness that darted up into my throat.

“Sure!” he said, gesturing to the chair across from him. “My name is Samir and I’m from California,” he said. “I’ve been here a few days. How about you?”

“It seems I'm one of the rarer New Yorkers in India,” I said. “And I just landed this morning from Vrindavan.”

“Never heard of Vrindavan,” he said. 

“Neither had I, until I dreamt the name.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, I’ve had dreams about India for several years now and they’ve given me a rough itinerary to follow.”

“Cool! And what did you find there?”

“To be honest, I’m not sure,” I said. “Apparently it’s the region where Krishna grew up. There were temples everywhere, and the Indian women who were hosting me wanted to go into all of them. To me, the place itself was interesting. The villages, the monkeys, the way of life. But for my hosts, the only destination was a temple, and to me they just seemed like tourist traps. There were crowded lanes of vendors, and animatronic displays, and then we’d reach a priest who seemed anything but pious. He would sit on the altar and use all kinds of manipulation techniques to coerce us into making donations. Honestly, I have no idea why I dreamt about the place.”

“Sounds intriguing,” he said with a smirk. “And what brings you to Rishikesh?”

“Well, I dreamt the instruction to sit at the banks of the Ganges, and I did that a few hours ago. Now I’m waiting to see what happens next,” I grinned, satisfied with the mystery I presented. “What about you?”

“I’m passing through Rishikesh on my way to the higher Himalayas,” he said. Then he gave me an even more mysterious look than mine and said, “I’m on my way to visit the temples where Jesus was initiated.”

This was mysterious indeed. “Jesus went to the Himalayas?”

“Yes. There’s a whole section of his life that’s missing from the bible. Many have speculated that he went to learn in the Himalayas.”

“That would make sense,” I mused. I liked the idea of Jesus learning from the other spiritual paths that already existed at his time. Why wouldn’t he? To me, it seemed that if any of those paths that claimed to be true universally actually were, they had to apply to everyone, and that meant they had to include the rest of the world in their concept of reality.

Just then, two other people Samir met at his guesthouse walked in and joined our table, and the conversation went in another direction. I didn’t want it to, though. I was intrigued.

I didn’t know much about Jesus, but I always respected him. He just wasn’t much of a topic in my secular Jewish upbringing. Oddly, there were several times in my childhood when I had the feeling that I’d once known the guy, but that was such a strange idea, I never gave it any thought. 

I couldn’t have guessed how the young man I was sitting with knew about those temples, nor could I have guessed his intentions. But the subject didn’t come up again and I soon left his company to go rest. 

I returned to my room at the Bombay and laid down using my sweatshirt as a pillow. The pillow that was on the bed when I arrived smelled like someone else’s head, so I tossed it onto the floor. Staring up at the cobweb-riddled ceiling, an overwhelming sense of regret crept through me. I was finally there, having followed the dreams and signs that came to me for years, and all I felt was exhaustion and disappointment. I wasn’t sure why I’d been led to Vrindavan, and now I was in Rishikesh and the world around me felt so dismal.

Glancing around at my room with its graffiti and melted wax, I wondered if the call I’d heard was just a projection of my youthful idealism. I suddenly missed my home, my friends, my parents. I felt guilty that I’d risked so much for this adventure. Had I come all this way just to realize that a simple, comfortable life was good enough?

Above me, a gecko clung to the metal rafter, barely betraying his aliveness except for an occasional blink of his eyes. Along with him, a potent awareness hovered, quietly suggesting to me that winding up in a jail cell in Rishikesh might not have been a punishment. I had waited a long time for this. The call was there, and now I had walked a few steps toward it. Meeting that young man in the café was an important juncture. The adventure was about to begin. I just had to trust it enough to get through this moment.