Encounter with Babaji at the 1995 Kumbha Mela

According to fate and karma, I attended the 1995 Kumbha Mela festival in India, where Babaji appeared to me. This Mela was the ardh or festival of six years, with only ten million sadhu, holy men and spiritual seekers present, compared to the twelve-year Maha Kumbha Mela cycle which often reaches even larger numbers, such as up to seventy million souls. . This Kumbha Mela is believed to date back to almost 3500 BC. Even being here is the equivalent of a thousand other pilgrimages! As we approach the confluence of the Ganges, Saraswati and Yamuna rivers, my heart almost leaps out of my chest. OMG! Mahadeva! This concert made a Rainbow reunion look like a little cocktail party. This was the adult dose for Ripley’s Believe It or Not. It is so large that it can actually be seen from satellites in outer space. This concert on the alluvial plain of the Ganges River in Allahabad is about two miles wide and seven miles long!

My travel companions and I got our own bike rickshaw as we were carrying a lot of luggage. Belgium Mark lent me his chimtah, a huge tambourine that looks like claws. I used it to improvise to the holy songs blasting from the loudspeakers of the bells atop the telephone poles. The energy this opening night was as intense as it gets and strong, very strong. I have never felt anything like this and have been to many concerts, including seeing The Beatles three times! We had copies of a reduced map that covered 200,000 acres with street names. We were trying to locate the camp of our guru Babaji, in this monstrous city illuminated by the full moon of canvas tents and intense noise. It would take our poor and frustrated rickshaw wallahs over two hours to locate the Om Namah Shivaya tents, ironically just down the road from Yogananda’s Yogoda Satsanga Society camp. We were located at Moarie Road and Sangum Crossing this Friday the 13th, February full moon, opening night 1995. The rush doesn’t stop here. Too much is happening all the time.

When my poor driver finally came to a stop in utter confusion, exhaustion, and despair, the great crowd around me suddenly parted, like Moses parting the Red Sea. A male figure approached me and the closer it got, the faster the changes occurred within me. I felt like I was in the twilight zone again. My mind slowed down and the only internal feeling I remember, I knew that this man here, now in front of me, knew everything about me, the good and the bad and about those ten grams of hashish that he had eaten on the bus here. This was Babaji, in person and this time, I finally recognized him! He could have cared less about the charis he had eaten.

With piercing, unblinking black eyes, he looked at me deeply and then asked in perfect English, “Are you having fun?” I couldn’t find my voice to answer. He was wearing a woolen sweater and a topi hat, so he stood out in his previous incarnation as old Herakhan Baba. Then he melted into the crowd and quickly disappeared. It has been said that Babaji always attends every Kumbha Mela, in one form or another.

Suddenly the sights and sounds of the Mela hit me full force again, like waking up from a dream or pressing play after a DVD has been paused. Belgium Mark and German Kalavati were behind me, oblivious to what had just happened. They were still upset about how we would find our Herakhan camp among ten million occupied souls.

Before we finally located our shelter of refuge, the crowd began to prostrate on the ground. Now what was happening? As we watched in bewilderment, here came six of the largest decorated elephants I had ever seen. On top of each sat ancient-looking kings or maharajas, who seemed to have traversed India at some time to even be here. I wanted to scream with all my might! Yes! Here was the eternal India of my childhood dreams. At the Herakhan camp, we were greeted with open arms and loaded chillums. We were among the first to arrive at this sanctuary of peace, to finally physically separate ourselves from the tumultuous masses of the Mela and have a semblance of personal space. Mark and I had our own large military tent, perfect for God’s soldiers. We decorated our space with the newly bought batiks that we had bought in Varanasi before coming here. A thick thatched floor was our mattress. It actually seemed like a modern miracle that we ever found this little campground, among hundreds of thousands of other tent complexes. A beautiful Italian Madonna named Titti was our acting pujari for the worship services at the camp. Here was a separate store, which served as the temple compound. I slow down the bronze statue of Ganesh of my son that I had bought in Varanasi from Titti. He bathed the little elephant every day at 4 in the morning and then applied fresh chundun and the sacred silk thread to him. This was a great blessing that I wanted for my young and distant son, separated from me due to divorce. I prayed that maybe one day he would come to understand the meaning of my journey here and know that he is always with me, like Babaji, even though we are far apart.