Mahendranath thought for himself. He looked at words and ideas carefully, turning, studying and comparing. He deeply examined everything in life that we take for granted. He never believed anything that he had not himself confirmed. Eventually this gave him an exalted view, or rather, a view from a high place, a panoramic view. To become a naked Nath in India, to form no attachments to people, places or objects, to gather together nothing at all, to embrace poverty and solitude, these are odd choices. These are the choices of someone who views life from outside and far beyond any local reality tunnel. Looking into his future as a young, healthy, englishman, he could see a world of possibilities. He experienced wild freedom while gazing at a plenum of potential pathways spread out at his feet.

There is a persistent belief that we are about to see a planetary reset to default, a mysterious, unknowable default. The lodestone mind that carries its own inner maps may steer true when our other maps no longer correspond to a newly altered reality. Preparing for total novelty seems impossible but in fact it is the way of life for a magician.

Years ago de Ropp wrote a useful and clarifying book on the subject of life paths called “The Master Game.” This is a very good book for youths who wish to examine their motivations and the deep desires and goals that influence their creation of lives that conform to (hopefully) their greatest ideals. Power, fame, wealth, family life, wisdom, experiences and freedom (jivanmukti) are all legitimate aims. If we make our choices from the handbook we are given by society and usually our families, we have very limited choices, we do what has already been done, what is always done. This is what makes the world go around, perhaps. The salt of the earth, the propagators of life, the growers of food and new software, inventors, lovers and soldiers make this planet function as it must. These are the salt and the pillars, the men and women of the world.

Dadaji first picked to be a soldier, or to be much more accurate, he chose to attend wars. I never heard him mention shooting a gun. He was rescue and medical help on the battlefields in Spain, and rehab for the soldiers in the 2nd World War. He was always getting himself into trouble with the higher ranks so he wasn’t planning to rise through the military. Perhaps the horrors and destruction of war, tyrannical rules and sudden death were useful catalysts to push him further outside the gates of ordinary life. I suspect we have all spent lifetimes as rank and file soldiers, following some leader, dying for one cause or another, on the battlefields of time. The saddhu ranks are filled with such men.

He was rejected by the military world. He was a troublemaker, a big troublemaker. He asked too many questions and proposed unthinkable solutions.

At all times, from a very young age, he was meditating, seeking out “saints” and sacred places, reading and researching… this at a time when there was very little information or example available to a western seeker. Meanwhile he worked at lots of jobs. He didn’t drink or smoke or gamble so his money went far. He travelled. He painted houses, designed ingenious ways to make jobs better or easier. He was a journalist and editor for an english language newspaper in Bangkok. He was a window washer in Darwin. He was clever with his hands and meticulous to an extraordinary degree. He lived by his skills and wits on the surface of society, but formed no roots, no ties, no attachments.

He spent his own time researching cosmic mysteries, scientific advances, and ancient cultures and forms of magic. He learned that true information and accurate maps are hard to find. He talked with Wallace Budge at the British Museum. Budge was the foremost scientific investigator and expert on ancient Egypt. His most valuable words to the young man were, “We really don’t know anything about ancient Egypt. So much of what you read, even in the history books, is pure imagination.”

He sought out conversation with Aleister Crowley because he always looked to the despised and the discounted one, the object of mockery. “The one favoured by the crowd is sure to be as great a fool as the crowd around him!”
He knew Crowley in the final years when he was fairly derelict and addicted to pain killing drugs. He had become a man of greatly diminished energy and influence. He had, however, a long view of his own life and accomplishments. He advised the young man and summed up what he felt were the triumphs and disappointments of his adventure filled life. His great despair was never feeling satisfied with his encounters with magick. Dadaji was most surprised that western magicians, including Crowley, still dreamt of finding “the Book” wherein would be written all the secrets of magic.

I wonder how Dadaji knew the true nature of magic long before he went to Asia? He said he had his first experience of enlightenment while still a young man in England. At that time he was camping out in a tent in a forest, where he could be alone and meditate without distraction. He had just returned from there to his tiny London flat. He had come to take care of his mundane reality and regroup before going back to the forest to continue his assault on the barriers to consciousness. He had just put a piece of music by Grieg on the phonograph and he was profoundly relaxed, sipping a freshly brewed cup of tea when … Bom Bolenath! Shiva Shankar Alakh! Alakh! Alakh! … he was swept up in a towering vision of Lord Shiva. The image was overwhelming but the power and information transfer were unspoken, unspeakable and knowable only in another state of awareness altogether.

He said Crowley suggested he study the I Ching and visit India. He did both to his everlasting benefit. He finally sailed into Bombay harbour in 1954, landing without a single penny in his pocket. He had given away the last of his shillings as tips to the ships staff. That very day he was initiated as a sannyasi and as an Adinath by his new guru, Lokanath of Uttarkashi. This saint had been patiently awaiting a mysterious arrival for two weeks. A vision of Shiva had told him to leave his silent cave in the remote Himalayas and come down to the blasting hot, crowded, coastal city and wait for the one who was to be his successor, his inheritor, his spiritual son. They must have recognised each other immediately. He was given the name of Mahendra, a name of god Indra who had blessed and protected him his whole life. Arriving penniless, no way back, was the magic pass for Dadaji, and he knew it.

We neo-naths talk often about no Gurus, no traditions; the new ways, the modern patterns of our path here in America and Europe. I wonder, though, how can we ever replace this exalted moment of utter clarity and dispassion and determination, this moment of nivritti marga, turning away from all that life has to offer? Taking the sannyas vows and taking on a guru are supreme moments, ultimate experiences, unalterable steps. It is death and rebirth. The old life is cast off with every attachment and responsibility that belonged to that life. This moment is understood as an exit from the womb of the world and rebirth into…. the other life, the mirror of life as it used to be.

Motivation and desire are now only for freedom and renouncement, less not more, smaller not bigger, solitary, single-minded, already dead. Committed to renouncing heaven and therefore hell, this life and the next, everything we love in this life.. we had better have a damn good reason, some reward that is greater than life itself. Promise not to work for another or for wages, promise not to marry or breed, promise to be so poor that you can’t even feed yourself, change your name (lose that identity!), never visit your family again. You are dead for them. Everyone knows that some of these promises, vows, rules will get bent and broken, but nonetheless promises are made. This is a commitment that will certainly alter viewpoint, motivations and the outcome of one’s life. This is a particularly odd choice to make for your life.

Most of Mahendranath’s life in India is a complete mystery. He gave little peeks,
“I was studying I Ching in Penang and …”
“I was meditating on Serpent mountain when..”
“I met this movie star in Benares and she..”
“I visited Goa and saw…”
“It was while I was wandering in the Rann of Kutch that..”

The saddhu wanders. He walks from Parasuramakund to Kanyakumari and back again. In every nook and cranny of India you will find saddhu signs. Tiny temples, painted rocks, fire rings, nath graves, rusting trishuls nestled into the trunks of giant peepul trees. Saddhus wander and gather experience. They test the strength of their saddhana against the world and they do so half naked and unarmed. Using alcohol or drugs, starvation, privation and pain, gambling, sex, celibacy, meditation and contemplation, solitude or crowds they storm the walls of perception and explore the limits of human consciousness. They come up with endless wild and silly schemes for attaining Godhood, siddhas, all-knowing, all-power all- whatever they figure they are seeking. Some saddhus are very radical beings who experiment and push back boundaries and restrictions and limitations with the zeal of maddened warriors.

Mahendranath despised modern saddhus. He felt they almost never fulfilled the potential that the saddhu life had given them. This is never an easy life and most fall by the wayside, giving up their inner freedom in favour of greedy cravings, crime and a closed mind. Drug use takes an enormous toll. Ignorance and politics turn them into small minded, dangerous idiots. They are no longer widely supported by the population upon whom they depend for food and shelter. Meditation is often spoken of, but is seldom practised. Dadaji was considered odd for his fascination with and practice of meditation. Lokanath sent him off to the Buddhists to seek more information because it was so little studied among the Hindu wanderers.

The saddhu who acts out his knowledge and understanding is a delight to see, for a while. I spent one day following an old saddhu around the streets of Bombay. After a while I figured out that he had decided that for this day he would not exert his will. He would be tossed and twirled by the currents of the moment and the whims of passersby. What a hilarious, instructive and illuminating day! He became entrained in the energy streams of a passing business man who was caught up in his thoughts and moving fast. Soon he became entangled with this goofy little old man, half-naked and toothless, grinning and glazed eyes shining. He was swatted away into the stream of a housewife who looked around to find that he had followed her to her doorway.
“Ah, Maharaj,” she said sweetly, “please enter. You must eat. And you, foreign girl, you come too and eat.”
Half a bite taken when a little whirlwind twirled him out of the courtyard and back out into the street, light as a feather.

At sunset we went down to the sacred lake at Walkeshwar, near the shoreline in Bombay. He went into the water among all the others washing themselves, their clothes, their kids, their cows. The ritual of bells and horns had started and incense and firelight streamed from the hundreds of little temples that surrounded that lake. It was the magic twilight moment, sandhya. Nothing is seen clearly, the light is tricky and smokey. Is that a snake or a rope? Suddenly that goofy clown of a saddhu looked me straight in the eye, I was up on the dry steps, his eyes shining in that commanding magical way that eyes shine when signaling important parts of the script. He lifted his loincloth most deliberately and seriously and exposed his nakedness. I was stunned. I couldn’t guess the significance of what I was seeing at that moment but it was all etched so clearly in my memory to be understood later with more experience and words and knowledge. That was magic! The actor, the audience and the play, consciousness and the moment and the message. I hadn’t met Dadaji yet, but I would be prepared to meet him, shortly thereafter.

Anyway, I just wanted to say something about choices and arrangements that can be more favourable to allowing strangeness and alternate realities to start manifesting intensely in one’s life. I believe saddhu life points to this method. We mostly meet reflections of our mundane selves in habitual life, but it is my impression that jivanmukti is more often found on very strange pathways. Improbability may be the royal road to enlightenment. Magic is found where the weight of probability is less and the unlikely is becoming the norm. There is a strange buzzing of bee sound in the ears. The only power here is to be a skillful surfer, don’t fall off among sharks or the ordinary life and learn to relax. Dadaji’s choices were as wildly improbable as some wonderful number in the mathematical theory of playing the odds. He was just another fellow with a wild idea who ended up not too badly. The future may find a use for his work or not. To quote the gypsy, “He did what he did and he got what he got.”

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