IN SEARCH OF THE SELF – Audiobook by Dr. JACOBO GRINBERG

Discover the In search of the self, perception, and reality, written in 1987 by Mexican neuroscientist and psychologist Jacobo Grinberg.

🔮 Why Listen?

Challenges conventional views on consciousness & reality
Written by Jacobo Grinberg, whose mysterious disappearance in 1994 deepened interest in his work.

Now translated into English by Bending Realities & subtitled in 10 languages.

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⏱️ CHAPTERS:

00:00:00 Start.
00:02:31 Introduction.
00:24:45 January 28.
00:47:25 January 31.
01:00:59 February 10.
01:02:45 February 11.
01:25:29 February 24.
01:31:00 February 26.
01:33:58 February 27.
01:52:01 March 10.
01:56:27 March 4.
1:58:01 March 5.
02:05:11 March 6.
02:26:47 March 10. (Part 2)
02:38:14 March 13.
02:44:01 March 16.
02:51:12 March 17.
03:04:14 March 19.
03:06:06 March 20.
03:15:19 March 22.
03:27:13 March 24.
03:49:16 March 27.
03:54:53 March 28.
04:00:55 March 29.
04:15:12 March 30.
04:20:07 March 31.
04:28:02 April 2.
04:31:38 April 3.
04:38:45 June 21.
04:40:00 June 22.
04:44:38 June 24.
04:49:22 June 28.
04:52:31 July 4.
04:55:40 THE END.

#mindexpansion #reality
#jacobogrinberg #audiobook #awakening #SyntergicTheory #completeaudiobook #shamanism #neuroscience

In Search of the Self By Jacobo 
Grinberg-Zylberbaum, 1897. Preliminary note by Bending Realities. In an era where humanity struggles between 
extreme materialism and spiritual awakening, In Search of the Self emerges as a beacon 
of wisdom that challenges our perception of reality. Written in 1987 by the enigmatic Mexican 
neurophysiologist and mystic Jacobo Grinberg, this book plunges us into a profound 
exploration of consciousness, perception, and existence itself. More than just a 
text, it is a gateway to the unknown—an invitation to question everything we think 
we know about ourselves and the universe. Jacobo Grinberg was a visionary scientist 
who dedicated his life to studying the relationship between the brain, the mind, 
and reality. Fascinated by ancestral wisdom, he combined scientific rigor with shamanic 
knowledge to develop the Sintergic Theory, a revolutionary hypothesis on the nature of 
consciousness. His mysterious disappearance in 1994 only added to the aura of 
intrigue surrounding his legacy, turning him into a legendary 
figure in alternative thought. One of the most remarkable aspects of In 
Search of the Self is its ability to merge science and spirituality into an accessible yet 
profoundly transformative discourse. Despite being written more than three decades ago, its message 
resonates today more than ever in a world thirsty for answers. Now, thanks to the Bending Realities 
team, the book has been carefully translated into English, ensuring its essence remains intact. 
Additionally, subtitles are available in 10 different languages, allowing its wisdom to 
transcend borders and reach a global audience. This audiobook is not just a narration—it is an 
experience. Every spoken word echoes in our minds, awakening fundamental questions about 
our identity and purpose. Are we ready to face the ultimate truth? In Search 
of the Self does not offer easy answers, but it does provide a path to finding them. Introduction. It is raining, the humid mist supports the flight 
of swallows that descend towards the terrace where I am writing and end up perching on a copper wire 
that emerges from a nearby pole. Sitting there, they sing and strengthen me; they seem 
to be sent by the “resistance”. The   rain connects the sky with the earth and 
almost brings joy. Surrounding the valley, the mountains become wet and receive the 
colossal energy of the lightning. The cool   water bathes the swallows, who maintain their 
balance as they twist their wings and bodies to shed the moisture. My back aches near the 
mouth of my left kidney. It is the result of the last battle. I was going to meditate to 
ease the pain, but decided to start writing. During the afternoon walk, I had met Don Ramon, 
younger than ever despite his 75 years, mounted on a concrete beam, laying adobe bricks for his new 
house. The old one I had occupied years before and now it all seemed like a repeat. Sara had shown 
me that six planets were in a retrograde position, signifying a tendency to repeat. Repeat to 
elaborate… Don Ramon thanked me for the observation about his youth and added that he 
intended to live until the occurrence of the   war. The government, he told me with his most 
serious expression, is getting so far ahead of itself that there will be no other choice. 
I replied that the thought was a triggering   factor and that it was better to remain silent. 
It can’t be done, he told me with conviction. The brothers want the imbalance and one can only 
accept that this is the way the world is going. Suddenly, I felt he was right. It was 
very clear that something had changed   in the “field”. When I was plunging into 
the depths of myself during meditation, I had already noticed an unexplainable decrease 
in optimism and vitality. It was as if I was in contact with the space-supporting matrix 
inside myself and found it to be out of balance. I had the impression that this matrix 
connected with the origin of consciousness, with the one that nourished it, and I feared that 
the flow of sustenance was blocked or diverted. I had gained strength based on a desperate 
struggle. She did yoga, meditated and, for months, had not tasted meat. However, I felt that the 
struggle was totally involuntary. I did not want it, and yet something continually threatened 
my contact with joy and with a line of light that I had learned to recognize and follow for years. 
A platform of power had been built within me and, now, a strange and mysterious enemy threatened me 
everywhere, placed me in impossible situations, made me cry out inside in a desperate complaint 
that nothing relieved except the struggle. Yet I doubted. The last few weeks I had decided 
that I was to blame for all the signs; my mind invented and developed in front of me a scenario 
with all the necessary and sufficient actors to convince me that the external enemy existed, 
and I only watched the game of my own destiny, managed by hands bigger, smarter and more powerful 
than anything I could ever imagine. I traveled between the conviction of the existence of 
the external and the confidence in my own identity with the whole. At times, a new and 
different way of experiencing myself would present itself. Questions disappeared, doubts 
and contradictions ended, and I entered a space in which there was no question. No purpose, no 
goal, only that which laughed at the useless effort to place the experience in one category 
or another. Victory, however, never lasted long. It smells like wet earth. I like life when it is real. I consider as a 
message any sentence that someone utters in total unconsciousness of intentions. I lived 
in a cabin located on a mountain so high that no refrigeration was needed to keep a tomato 
fresh after weeks in the open. In that mountain, the unconscious was “sucked” and everything 
surfaced just like in the afternoons of any Mexican village, with the children and 
their cheeks leaning against the walls   of their houses. One walks through the streets 
and there they are, with their little faces rosy from so many thoughts, seeing you as a 
fantasy arising from their unconscious, without distinguishing you from all their 
internal images… sucking the unconscious. It has stopped raining and everything I had 
wanted to write has been diluted in its juice, and a sensation of wishing for a 
nap remains as a result of inaction. The sun is reflected in the glistening 
cleanliness of the alleys freshly washed   by the rain. The river stones, which 
serve as cobblestones for the pavement, glisten in the low cloud afternoon, and 
the leaves of the trees send fresh greenery everywhere. My eyes no longer inhabit my 
body because I have just remembered that   they see without my consent. They 
are there, behind the seen, seeing. His words struck a chord in my being. It 
was becoming increasingly clear that the   feeling of being one with myself in 
the absence of any other content was the only alternative to continue 
to find meaning in life. That is,   the feeling of selfhood was the only one that 
could not be uprooted by various contacts with aberrant adults or falls. It was preserved after 
searching for it deep within me and felt real, magnificent and infinite in attributes. This 
last quality made it always new and fresh. The criticism of Molanda’s attempt to live in it 
I felt with distrust. I looked at the convulsions of the woman’s body and asked her being again 
to be careful and respectful of her envelope, her matter, her body, her vehicle …. 
She answered me in a zigzagging tone that I should not worry, since the body was 
already accustomed to such contingencies. The motor apotheosis ceased and a calmer voice 
said that she felt strange and begged me to lift her. I hesitated with a feeling of 
omnipotence: lift her psychologically, mystically, lift her spirits or just sit 
her up? It was the latter. I took her by the shoulders and the woman adopted a meditative 
position, identified herself and spoke. I was already accustomed to mediumistic trances. 
The last one had been with Faria, a teenager who, after reading my book of Pachita and 
identifying herself deeply with her,   had fallen into a trance and, when I asked 
her about her identity, she had answered me with the wisdom of a thousand suns: I am, she 
told me, a momentary personality arising from the source of my own unconscious…. Molanda did 
not so identify herself, she assured (throughout her monologue) that she was different, independent 
and autonomous with respect to the normal Molanda. -Why did you come to see me? -I asked her, 
still frightened by the convulsions. These   seemed like an epileptic seizure and 
not an entrance to a mediumistic trance, and had made me feel strange and fearful. Molanda 
answered me that he had come to tell me what he had heard during the convulsions: the whole 
cannot know the whole directly; the risk is too great and the result of such a daring would 
be disintegration! After that, Molanda left. I found her in the market one morning, luminous 
on the outside but strangely obscured on the inside. It felt as if the inner light 
had been blown off course. Actually, I had seen her on two previous occasions: 
in a play written by Machiavelli, holding a Coke in a garden while analyzing another 
woman’s dreams. As she left the garden she had confirmed to me that her beauty was not of 
this world. Something in her energy radiated off the flowers and the sun shone around her 
hair, surrounding her with gifts. Sitting, listening, she seemed more goddess than woman, 
and her presence gave me an exciting curiosity. Seeing her again in the market, I felt her 
presence again and an inner, exciting bond was established between our bodies. Then I felt what 
I have so often hated to feel: the impossibility of being totally honest and being able to manifest 
my thoughts with all their intensity. I could only mention his name and shyly introduce myself with 
mine. She replied that she knew my name but had not recognized me and that she felt tired because 
she had not been able to sleep the night before. I told her that the moon had been in Scorpio and 
she confessed that she was from that sign. I wanted to hug her for her lightness, I told her 
that I was not to blame for her tiredness. The word “desire” almost escaped me; I saw her body 
and could not believe that such beauty existed. I remembered that she was not Jewish and I didn’t 
care; then I saw her eyes and recognized her sign in them, in her gaze and in her courage as a 
liberated woman. I congratulated myself for not falling into temptations and I hated my 
lack of spontaneity because what I wanted to have told her was that I wanted her and 
that surely there was an obstruction in   the light and that was surely the reason for her 
tiredness. But I told her nothing, I let her go; I felt sad and wrote this thinking that it 
would alleviate my sadness for not having been able to attract her to me, enjoy 
her and share a little of our lives. A week later, I decided to live in the 
monastery. The sea can be swallowed   in a single gulp, in a single glance. 
So can the ringing of a morning bell, especially when its sound announces 
the first meditation of the day. It is 5 o’clock in the morning. The stars glitter 
against the velvet black background of space. My room faces east, towards a set of mountains 
that repeat themselves in the distance until   the last one blends into the sky. I live in a 
monastic cell, small and unfurnished. A thin mattress on the floor serves as my bed and a 
sleeping bag shelters me from the cold of the night and the humidity of the early morning. I 
love the meditation of the first interphase of the day. I savor the entrance of morning and 
the clearing of space with sensual pleasure. I stretch out my arms, hug my pillow, gently shed 
the haze of sleep and the memory of other worlds, prematurely blurred from my mind. I feel 
fresh and strong. I turn on the electric light and shelter myself with my wool poncho. 
I reach for the small bag containing my quartz crystals and hang it around my neck. I 
immediately feel a heightened level of   vigilance. In the communal bathroom I rinse 
my mouth and refresh the back of my neck. I walk to the temple, savoring the sweet 
aroma of the vegetable garden and the   vegetable garden full of gigantic leaves. I 
distinguish the beets and smell the onions. I find the temple deserted and I am very 
happy. I gaze along the curved walls   of volcanic rock and decide to sit down 
next to a concrete armchair built behind the altar of crystals. I spread out my small, 
rectangular rug, place my cushion in position, open my pouch and, extracting my crystal, hold 
it between the intertwined palms of my hands. I begin practicing Zen; with my eyes open 
I let myself be free to flow. However, I avoid dispersion. Three years of 
transcendental meditation have taught   me not to repeat the mistake of giving my mind 
total freedom. Maharishi has the luxury, I do not. I hear the temple door, turn and recognize 
Nurayan. He comes wrapped in a blanket and covered with the Aztec poncho I gave him some 
time ago. I feel his presence and something about him subtly frightens me. I try to forget, 
but it is too late. Some recent and unelaborated problem has infiltrated my body. I tell myself 
that it is a small price to pay compared to the possibility of meditating in the temple. I 
accept the unhappiness and begin the battle. This Being from which one feels and in which 
all feelings flow is not a conglomerate of experiences, a conjunction of lives or a complex 
of experiences. It is what remains of them, what appears when the feeling has 
got rid of its shell of data, what   was origin and remains as center, 
what in essence does not change. First it is necessary to carry out a cleansing. 
One places oneself in the position of Observer, allowing the thoughts to appear. Before thought, 
it has no quality; before pain, there is no pain. To see the thought is not only to observe 
its quality as the end product of processing, but to glimpse its origin in the place where 
its antecedents are not thoughts. Sometimes, it is necessary to accept pain by 
immersing oneself in its reality,   diving into its black depth until everything 
becomes pain and this totality ceases to be glimpsed in contrast with the absence of 
pain; since the comparison ceases to occur, pain disappears, confused in itself 
with the whole identical to itself. This, or any other cleansing technique, serves 
to bring the experience closer to its origin and, in this way, to abandon culture, stereotype, 
moral support or social conditioning. Gradually, the experience loses salient locations and, 
more and more, a shining mirror with a flat, undisturbed surface appears. Mahamudra the 
Tibetans call it. There are no longer focal points of attention, for in the dissolution 
of letting go, it is silence that takes over. Thus, one begins to leave the realm of 
the first attention, populated by concrete objects, individual bodies, space and time. 
The being oscillates as it crosses the first parallel line (to recall here Carlos Castaneda) 
and, in perplexity, situates itself in the desolate desert that forms the interface 
between the first and second attention. If one possesses sufficient strength 
and impeccability, the will guides.   The latter is experienced as an autonomous and 
independent force that seems to possess a life of its own. The will determines the direction and 
mobilizes the Observer toward the search for the encounter with himself. If the power of the 
will is greater than that of the interphasic oscillations of the space between the two 
parallel lines, one crosses the second and penetrates into selfhood. In this realm of the 
second attention, the emperor is the Self and his castle has no spatio-temporal location. There 
is, however, total meaning and sense. Therefore, whoever comes to visit the Self must pass through 
its courtyard, so full of it that whoever breathes there inhales its breath, penetrates its body 
and becomes one with that which has no reason. However, the selfhood of the second 
attention is not personal and, even less,   restricted to the ego. Rather, it 
is the selfhood that we all share and that we all explore when we 
come to connect with ourselves. However, this contact is not enough. It is 
necessary that the experience of selfhood be accompanied by the awareness of its true meaning, 
and this is none other than that of a contact with the transcendent and supraindividual Self. 
Precisely because of this, when the second attention is penetrated, everything coincides 
and synchronicity is the reality. The world as a concrete entity disappears to be transformed 
into consciousness and, from it, into Being. Sometimes the will is not enough, and if the 
light cannot be gathered or is shrouded in   mist or obscured by agreements, 
structures or personal history, the Self is not reached and the Observer, 
in his consciousness, is stranded in the   desolate desert between two worlds. There he 
oscillates, pushed by autonomous currents of fear and anguish. He belongs neither to one world 
nor to the other and his loneliness terrifies, pain paralyzes and nothing can remind and 
connect the Observer with his true nature. When, on the other hand, one succeeds in 
penetrating into the experience of the Self, one realizes that in it the consciousness of unity 
is identified with the experience of sameness. In reality, in any experience there is totality 
because the one who experiences is the whole focused in each one of us. The experience of 
the Self is the actualization of such a state, and in it we understand that there are 
neither frontiers nor spaces of separation between beings. In this way, as one advances in 
one’s own development, one experiences and is sensitive to what exists as the frontier 
and basis of the consciousness of all. The great contemplatives of all ages have been 
experts in detecting the subtlest and, therefore, common and shared levels of consciousness. They 
felt directly the contact of their experience with communal, archetypal and universal levels 
of consciousness, and their task was to open the “gates of heaven” to allow the entrance of 
divinity into human consciousness. In other words, they belonged to an elite conscious that 
their intimate experience was the threshold   or frontier of human consciousness, 
the source from which it is nourished. Their task, therefore, was to push the boundary 
line beyond its limits in order to extend the field of human experience into unexplored 
and virgin territories. His responsibility was a major one; it was guided by an intense 
sense of unease and fear. This fear appeared in the form of a sense of anguish, fear and 
discomfort, whenever the mystic abandoned his contact with himself at the level of Being and 
placed himself somewhere in between his silent selfhood and the temporal world of objects 
and beings seen from a concrete perspective. The anguish awakened by such distances from the 
Self forced the mystic to seek the right path, that is, the one that would bring as a consequence   the tranquility and peace of 
the encounter with himself. There are human beings who have never heard the 
voice of the Self, for whom the estrangement from their contact with themselves is experienced 
as an eventuality of human nature. For the contemplative, on the other hand, the same 
estrangement provokes a state of supreme discomfort and anguish. The only 
solution to not penetrate into   such emotional hells is the encounter and 
the constant establishment in the Self. The contact with the Self is realized 
in the consciousness that is located in   the realm of no-mind. It is only when one 
transcends the linear mind and penetrates to what lies behind and beyond the logical 
mind that it is possible to know and live the answers. The mind only knows how 
to ask, it is the Self that answers. The distant mountains blend into 
the sky and their spiky silhouettes   of trees appear in ever-darkening layers 
until the nearest one manifests itself in such detail that my eyes do not stray from 
it. A farmer, walking on the damp earth,   leads some cows, while a flock of lambs 
is tended by a mastiff. The clouds travel almost skimming over virgin fields of pure 
gold, laden with blessings for the future. I feel fresh and at one with the landscape. I am 
amazed that so much flatness can be seen through the narrow window of my cell. A mattress on the 
floor awaits my body, while the linen-laden walls frame the narrow room that has become my refuge 
and home, the only place in the monastery where I can maintain a secluded privacy. One of the walls 
has a rectangular opening that communicates with an adjacent room, always ready to receive 
my daughter when she visits the monastery. It is nine o’clock at night. I get ready to 
rest. I spread out my sleeping bag, undress and penetrate into its coldness, feeling myself 
sheltered by a soft and clean cloth. I observe, through the window, some stars shining in the 
silence and I remember my life in Tepoztlán, when I used to sleep outdoors watching them. I fall asleep and dream of a park in 
Mexico City. Its appearance is normal, except for some palm trees out of 
place and a strange environment.   Something in me is startled and suddenly 
I realize that I am dreaming. I am aware that I am dreaming and, simultaneously, 
that the dream continues uninterrupted. Within my dream, I am amazed and decide to 
test my power. I extend my arms to the sky and command myself to fly to India. I lift 
myself off the ground, begin to hover over the park. Slowly I gain speed and direction. Soon 
I am an arrow flying away at an increasing speed; everything around me begins to blur and, 
from a once clear vision, only a grayish   hue remains. My lucid dream disintegrates 
into the oblivion of unconsciousness. January 28. Departure for India, real “childbirth”. Mexico’s last wish was not to let 
me go. The country’s conscience   was focused on an emigration agent who 
found an error in my passport. I have not passed to second reserve even though my 
age merits it. She told me that the absence of the paperwork was an impediment 
to departure and I was impressed. I have spent the last few weeks overcoming my 
fear, fluctuating between going and staying, and this signal about to leave the 
country would have been enough to   make me stay if it were not for all the 
evidence that I have managed to overcome. A couple at the counter argue as I write this. 
She, with crimson lips, upturned nose and huge eyes, caught me interested in her persona. Mexico 
is full of psychics who detect emotional changes! In the morning, as I packed my things, I 
remembered the village of Nepopualco and   its spiritual temple. The peasants gather there to 
heal and practice meeting “disembodied beings” who guide the healings and offer magnificent messages. 
I did not want to stay in Mexico, partly because I considered that the Nepopualco method makes one 
accept the existence of entities external to the Self. I confess, however, that this opinion arises 
from a center plagued by unknowns and prejudices. Perhaps, the peasants of Nepopualco, like Pachita 
and Don Lucio, know how to go back to the depths of the consciousness and there they get in touch 
with what the kabbalists call “universal echoes”. It has just changed. I am frightened by the 
North American mentality so abundant in the waiting room of Mexico City’s international 
airport. My emotional state assails me with a sense of dread that leaves me no way out except 
to observe it. This was taught to me by Goenka, a Buddhist master, a meditation disciple in 
California. According to Goenka, everything is change and process; nothing is permanent 
and one can observe, with equanimity, any sensation even if it dilutes the Self and personal 
consciousness in a sea of fearfully rough waters. Of course, the consideration of the North 
Americans as guilty of my emotional change is the same criticism I unjustly make of the peasants 
of Nepopualco: dependence on the external! This trip will transform me, I have suffered too 
much for positive change not to happen to me. I am already on the plane, knowing that 
of the two alternatives I faced (going to India or trying to rebuild my life in Mexico), 
having chosen the first one will make me feel the deepest loneliness. I chose a very difficult 
path, full of thorns and trials, and all because I grew up surrounded by deaths. I feel tired of 
jumping over obstacles; everywhere I go I take myself and it is increasingly difficult for me to 
live in the present. The plane is full of Italian tourists returning from Acapulco, dark, happy 
and carefree. Seeing my boots and my worsted cap, the purser asked me if I was a mountaineer. I 
replied that one of the places I would visit in India would be the Himalayas. She told me 
about her mother, a follower of Rajneesh, and told me she had seen a photograph 
of the Babaji of Hairakhan. I felt that   what he was telling me was a sign, that 
I should not worry; directions and goals will be given to me and this sense of loss 
will end when I find myself again. For this, I must be very cautious, especially with those who 
live without respect and awareness of the Self. I sat next to an elderly American. He was 
very angry that I was taking up part of his space. I felt him very badly hurt, then the 
purser told me that the “gringos” are spoiled. What I would most like to do is to find a master 
in the Himalayas and stay and meditate with him. Not knowing the environment or attending courses 
organized and rigidly run by them. My God, this plane won’t move from its resting place! 
I’m already desperate to leave! As I case it, I realize that most of my days have been filled 
with sadness. I learned to love that emotion, now I’ve known other ways of being. What it makes 
me feel is a lot of pain. I love Estusha totally, it is a love that has neither borders 
nor limits, that is why it hurts me.   In Estusha I manifest what I can’t manifest 
with anyone else, what hurts me most is not being able to be near her. I am starting to 
get scared, I am getting sick, feeling very lonely. Nothing satisfies me and all my badness 
is internal: it’s a lie that the outside is to blame! It’s like being empty, feeling death, not 
being able to communicate with anyone. Before, I was enough for myself. So I feel that I am on 
the verge of collapse. I have tried to meditate with the Vipassana technique that Goenka taught 
me and I can only communicate with my pain. I wish I was in India. I feel like I will collapse if I 
don’t get there fast. It just occurred to me that I could change my flight in New York and travel 
to Jerusalem instead of going to India. I would go to a Hasidic kibbutz to work the land and talk to 
God, visit my family…. Partly I really like the possibility but in another part it scares me. It 
feels like cowardice. A friend came to see me in the morning. She brought me a letter to give to 
Sai Baba. My God, what is wrong with me, why so much loneliness? I see all these people around me 
who seem so happy and my pain increases even more. I am really very confused but I have to bear it. 
My brother, his wife and my father took me to the airport. My father talked to me about my life 
as if it was a piece of crap. I felt very bad, I don’t know if what is happening to me now is 
related to that judgment. The purser is becoming unbearable, she seems to want something with me, 
that worries and disgusts me. Her presence and appearance indicate dispersion and playfulness 
and I feel inside a shell that I must maintain. At least I have this journal to write in. Estusha 
read her first book and is preparing to read Anne Frank’s diary. I adore her, my precious little 
daughter, I adore her with all my capacity to love and I would really like to love like this, 
the Self, I don’t know where this path is going to take me, to be more real, to be able to feel 
compassion and give love, even if it hurts. I thank the cycle for being able to 
write. I am no longer interested in   what I say or how I say it, only what 
comes out and I have to overflow, to get all my pain out from 
inside to be able to be reborn. I am already at the airport 
in New York. I feel better and   my fear has diminished. I spoke to Lizette 
on the phone to say goodbye. She encouraged me to continue my journey and assured me 
that Estusha will be perfectly cared for. After much testing, I find Zen meditation to be 
extraordinary. It connects with the Self in purity and innocence. On the plane that brought me to 
this city, I meditated while a movie was playing. Over the loudspeakers the departure of 
my flight to London is announced. I am heading towards a 747 jumbo jet that will fly me 
across the Atlantic. I am in awe of contemporary technology. The power required to lift this device 
surpasses anything imaginable. If levitation is so difficult in meditation, the technological 
“levitation” of this monster is thanks to the ancient dinosaurs. Its psychic levitation 
would require a colossally powerful mind. Yesterday, Master Guevara was surprised to hear me 
say that the way was detachment. I, he said in his always cautious voice, am of the opposite opinion. 
It is necessary to know how to become attached. An extraordinary and logical observation 
coming from a highly evolved Capricorn. I am preparing to cross the Atlantic and 
I realize more and more the seriousness of this trip. We take off from New York and 
I have the feeling that I am repeating a journey that other seekers have 
undertaken throughout the ages. I like the seriousness of the Earth. It is 
magnificent in its power and capacity to sustain. I love the responsibility of life when lived with 
integrity. From there power protects and cares, loneliness and fear disappear. I feel that 
integrity is the only alternative because it stimulates congruence and the latter, coherence. 
Even from a physiological point of view, the above is true. The Self is experienced 
when the brain is unified and its lobes work in high coherence. On this day, the dichotomy 
between individual being and collective being, the morphology of the neural field fits with that 
of the quantum field, making the absolute approach the person as a bride approaches her beloved on 
her wedding day. It is like the Song of Songs, where the nuptials of the Bridegroom of God 
with the soul of man are described. I feel reborn! Or maybe it’s because the plane 
is approaching Europe and the Atlantic   mimics the contact with what has no name, 
moving away from any concrete object. Below, a huge swamp of cerebrospinal fluid, immobile 
plasma, physiological serum and above, the stars of an endless sky, not yet sullied by 
a holocaust. One can still live on the planet, enjoy the English breeze aboard an immense British 
Airways airplane while listening to Mendelssohn and admiring the British seriousness, so eloquent 
and silent, so dignified and joyful, so proper and centered. Admirable people in the former owners 
of the noblest and most spiritual country: India. I feel accompanied by myself and cognitions begin 
to blossom, again, within me. I remember one of them that filled me with joy. Near New York, the 
sea appeared as a gigantic mass in a state of relative calm. Its surface was rippled with tiny 
excrescences that cast intense shimmers reflecting an evening sun. The tiny patterns appeared, in 
turn, forming patterns of patterns, the latter integrated in a kind of matrix thanks to which 
I understood that the arrangement of that watery surface was not random. Moreover, I seemed to 
see in the phenomenon a model of what happens in the brain. Patterns of patterns of patterns… At 
that moment I experienced again the magnificence of Being and realized, once again, the miracle 
of experiencing and feeling. It is a true wonder that passes us by, that we forget because 
it is such an everyday and automatic event. I am in a restaurant in London airport. Is 
it because I am about to start something   that has no return and the spirit that guides 
me has chosen to be my only mentor? Or perhaps people are gathered whose emotions have filled 
the place with an indefinable and subjective   atmosphere that has been perceived that I have 
guessed, simply because here the ambience and atmosphere of pleasant excitement, though not 
pleasant but present with an intense reality, have been purified. Of course I have been 
working intensely with myself and I have also lost track of time. For me it is night, 
but for London it is a Sunday morning. Perhaps the people of this airport live, as I do at 
this moment, in timelessness and therefore have transcended one of the dimensions that 
structure and limit our human condition. Is that why the atmosphere feels so free and fluid? 
The tables are surrounded by plants that overhang from a high ceiling and the walls are painted 
in pleasant and vivid colors. A Hindu girl, Estusha’s age, dressed as a princess, caught my 
eye. I know Estusha would have admired her and would have immediately asked me to buy her 
a silk dress just like the little girl’s. I have been working intensively with Vipassana and 
again I notice remarkable results. The technique consists of feeling each and every one of the 
bodily sensations by going over the surface of the body and then inside it, until the attention 
flows without obstacles, blockages or deviations, maintaining an equanimous and concentrated 
observation. The idea is that the mind is in direct contact with the body and the memories are 
recorded in the body structure. Fluid observation is achieved after clearing obstacles, being 
these the manifestation of painful, traumatic and conflicting memories, or the representation 
of events associated with worldly pleasures and sensory and emotional attachments. If one manages 
to observe with equanimity all bodily sensations, regardless of their degree of pain or 
pleasure, one becomes free from the past and manages to live in a present full 
of fluidity and beauty. I had decided to experience the technique in order to prove or 
discard its theoretical assumptions. One of the main reasons for going to India was precisely to 
continue working with the technique at Goenka’s side. In fact, my first objective is a 
Vipassana course to be held in Jaipur. I remember that before leaving Mexico I met a 
clairvoyant who promised to help me through the spirit of her great-grandfather and recommended 
me to stay several months at Goenka’s side. Suddenly, I felt dizzy and in contact 
with a dispersed and painful energy. A man sitting behind me began to cough, and my 
sensation was that of energetic and psychic contact with a powerful entity. It must 
be something to do with great-grandfather. The coughing continues and I feel 
like I am about to dive, again,   into the unknown and fear. The presence feels 
heavy and produces a feeling of confusion and nausea. Why did I remember it when it 
was so delicious to be in contact with   myself? Once again an entity was introduced 
into my body and that is something I hate. I am sleepy and would like to go to sleep. I 
remain in discomfort for about ten minutes. I remember that Pachita used to order the entities 
that entered the bodies of her patients to occupy them completely if that was God’s decision, or 
to leave them completely free if that was not the divine command. His orders were always carried 
out. I imitate Pachita to no avail. Obviously, what is happening to me is either related 
to areas of myself that I have not resolved, or that is simply how interactions with 
discarnate beings work. Whatever it is, it is really annoying. Because of this happening 
to me, I did not agree to work with the Nepopualco group. In fact, one day they invited me to be 
formally initiated into their tradition and I accepted. I arrived at the village temple and 
saw three figures dressed in white meditating sitting on chairs next to an altar. After 
giving a message, a thin, dark man asked for new followers and I was ushered in to present 
myself to him. I felt the most powerful energy I have ever experienced and almost fell on my face 
before the being who at that moment was occupying the medium’s body. He asked me for some desire 
I wanted to fulfill and I told him that I wanted a direct contact with God. He told me that this 
would be done and suddenly indicated to me that he alone was the gateway to God, and only through him 
could I find the way. Obviously, that contradicted my request for the absence of intermediaries. 
I had not realized that such a request – to an intermediary! was in itself a total contradiction. 
I must not describe the rite of initiation, I can only say that during it I felt paralyzed by 
the tremendous strength of the one who occupied the thin and fragile body of the medium. The 
chimes spoke of the presence of the “essence”, and I felt that to have betrayed my 
request was a great offense to her. Several hours have passed and now I am traveling 
towards Sado in a dense fog. I don’t know why God sent me to Kuwait, I only know that He is the 
one who has planned all this. He has confronted me with my fears and this plane, surrounded by 
a milky white light, reminds me of my mother’s agony on her deathbed. I am rediscovering that 
fear’s worst enemy is love. Because, ultimately, what is there to fear? The unknown, what is 
thought to be unlovable, what reminds us of a painful past. That is what one fears and, in my 
case, other things as well. I transform myself into the minds of others and, when I can’t hold 
on to anything, I slip into an abyss of emptiness. The plane is full of people from India, Kuwait 
and Arabia. The Muslim presence is strange to me, although the faces, shapes and colors remind me of 
Mexico. I have even come close to confusing some Hindi phrases with Spanish in Mexico City. 
This similarity, the whitish light and the great-grandfather who came to “take care” of me at 
the London airport have me filled with fear. Fear from the peaks in my head, fear in my stomach, 
fear that this will not take me somewhere, and suddenly I am overcome with the hope that this 
trip will be worth it just by overcoming my fear and reconnecting with myself. Overcoming fear 
with love, the same love that Huria and I gave each other one night when together we relived our 
past lives in a floating palace, all white marble, where I was a maharaja and she was a tantric 
maiden. Palace of gushing fountains in milk-glass halls. Shining marble, floors, walls, ceilings, 
domes wanting to pierce the sky after caressing it. Tantric maiden, all of her, beautiful as 
she is now, with all the femininity in her skin, giving all of herself like a divine flower, 
just as all women wear a diamond around their neck and in their nose like yours, homage to 
the earth that is about to receive me like you, strong and painful, but pregnant with good 
intentions, gallant and flirtatious fury, I remember you as you are, love that wants 
to conquer fear in this birth of the human. My sense of identity is powerfully linked 
to being Jewish. As I understand it, Judaism is the love of that which has no form 
or end, of the intangible but ever-present presence of God. To inspiration without 
concrete reference, without image or figure, to that which requires no body and therefore 
does not conform to or depend on some entropic law or decay. This is Judaism and whenever the 
atmospheric mentality approaches such a portent, when the level of abstraction is sufficient 
to detect the immediacy of the absolute, at that moment my fear is transformed into 
joy and love. Mediocrity is what kills, what kills the possibility of growth; but it is 
only seen when it also dwells within oneself. We are arriving in Kuwait after crossing 
the most tense region on the planet. I think that the fear I felt during the 
journey is related to that tension,   in addition to my inner self alarmed by 
so many changes. Once again I managed to establish my inner peace. I do not understand how 
it happens that one loses it and finds it again. We stopped in Dubai, the “Pearl of the 
Persian Gulf”. Beautiful weather and a fresh and rejuvenating sea breeze. Next to me, a 
gentleman in a red turban has been transmitting magnificent emotions through an invisible medium. 
Dubai must be a multi-billion dollar country judging by its airport: marble and contemporary 
Islamic style. Replete with lights, columns, arches and arabesques, bright lights and people 
reclining on a marble floor upholstered with a magnificent carpet, sitting on armchairs 
covered in shiny brown-toned velvet. The women show off their frowns painted 
with a red dot, feminine and sinuous   next to strong and dark men wearing turbans and 
long cloaks… Another world. I wish Laizette and Estusha could be here. It made me want to 
leave all my luggage behind and buy a white suit, an Arabian robe, a turban and visit India. 
I am waking up to the excitement of a new place and I love the oscillation 
between the ancient and the modern. People argue, gesticulate and are 
hyperactive. I have the impression   of belonging to an ever-growing 
society, playful and uninhibited. The women are beautiful, with 
Moorish eyes and gypsy souls. We are already on the territory of India and the 
sensation is very beautiful, it is like being in the Self, if so below, India is the country I 
have been looking for for years. It is true that in another life I was a maharaja and in another 
more Tibetan monk, this trip is like a return to my origin. With Huria I saw myself as a child 
touched with the same eyes as my sitting neighbor, hiding by a monastery steps and watching 
elderly monks pass by, holding candles in their skeletal hands, illuminating gray stone 
walls as fundamental and old as they are. It is three o’clock in the morning and an hour to   Delhi. My seat neighbor has been 
very helpful and I am grateful. January 31. My neighbor keeps calling my attention. He seems 
to be doing invisible energy work on me because, little by little, my worries and doubts have 
been fading away and, in their place, a warm and tender light full of magical omens and love 
is beginning to appear. I realized that this has to do with the presence of my neighbor, because 
when I think fearfully about the coming days,   he reacts with annoyance and, on the other hand, 
when I have positive thoughts, he smiles. He asked me to fill out his India sign-in sheet. I did 
so and realized that his last name is Singh and that he only speaks and writes Arabic. The feeling 
of pleasure in his presence grew until it became static. I felt that he knew about Babaji and, 
with the help of signs, I asked him about him. He replied that he knew him and that he lived in 
Srinagar and that I should go there. I felt dizzy. Singh had boarded the plane in Kuwait carrying a 
huge radio recorder and dressed very smartly. My first impression of him was negative. He struck me 
as a rich, spoiled Hindu. In Dubai, he went down to buy a quartz watch and his interest in objects 
made me think that his spiritual development was low. Now, after all my experiences and his 
recommendation, I was hesitant. Something told me that I should go to Srinagar, that there I would 
find a great teacher from whom I could develop all my sensitivity and psychic understanding. The 
idea began to change and I prepared to change direction; not to Delhi, but I would go to 
Srinagar, however, doubts were coming out. The Delhi airport made me understand the disdain 
an English girl had for peering in. Disorganized, dirty, noisy, noisy, absurd and crowded. I 
found Singh queuing up and I stood behind him. I was still hesitant to follow his 
advice. I thought there must be thousands   of Babajis all over India and the one Singh 
knew about I didn’t think it was the right one for me. On the other hand, I imagined myself 
living in my tent in some snowy field beside the Himalayas and receiving magnificent 
teachings from an enlightened master. After an hour in line, I was still hesitant. I 
said goodbye to Singh feeling too unbecoming of my doubts and inability to make a decision. I 
headed for the exit; I had to exchange dollars for rupees and could not see where to do it. I 
asked for a bank while hating myself for bringing so much luggage. I wandered around the airport, 
sweaty, tired and scared, not knowing where to go. People came to me offering their services 
so insistently and rudely that I ended up angry. Finally, I found a bank and an Air India office. 
My idea was to buy a ticket to fly to Srinagar. A huge queue made me give up my 
attempt. I took a truck, which, noisy, sped through Delhi and deposited me in a 
smelly building surrounded by small Tata buses. What I saw of Delhi disgusted me with its 
filth and dilapidated state. The houses and buildings looked old and the people lived in 
the streets as if the streets were the living   rooms of their homes. I asked for a truck to 
Srinagar and was told there was none. Instead, the one to Jaipur was there, as if waiting for me. 
Someone told me that there was an express train that took twelve hours to Srinagar. A little 
girl, asking, I was impressed by her eyes, so beautiful, they reminded me of Estusha’s 
as a baby. I decided to go to Jaipur. The truck started moving right away, 
which I thought was a good sign. The   interior was a pure party, typical of 
the Hindu dawn. I loved the free, joyful, intense and simultaneously innocent spirit. During the ride, the one who looked like a truck 
company inspector kept arguing with at least three passengers. He was shouting at them and his 
face was reddening as he was shouting loudly. From his expressions and the magnitude of his 
anger, I expected a tragedy. I would not have been surprised to witness a murder or, at the very 
least, a bloody fight. However, the argument never went beyond being verbally violent. Outside the 
truck, I watched caravans of camels walk by with regal calm, in total contrast to the hustle and 
bustle inside. The road was full of merchants and noisy trucks honking their horns in the midst 
of an earthy, semi-desert landscape. Twice we stopped by food stalls and we all got out to 
drink tea and eat cookies. People were laughing, shouting and waving to each other as if they 
were at a family party. I was still doubting my decision to go to Jaipur, even though it seemed 
to have been firm. Three times I had the urge to get out of the truck to go back to Delhi and 
from there to Srinagar by plane. I thought that the Jaipur meditation course was not for me; I 
already knew the Vipassana technique and what I was about to experience would be a repetition, 
not a development. However, on all three occasions I held back. I felt that going to Srinagar was 
too risky an adventure for me. Besides, I had the obligation to attend the course with Goenka and 
to see a Mexican friend who was in Jaipur waiting. The primitive scenery and the emotional 
force of what was happening in the truck   saturated me with sensations. My joy and vigor, 
exciting and virile, clashed with the violence inside the truck. I felt that upon entering 
Jaipur, I suddenly found myself in the “Pink City” because of the color of its buildings, 
built with the pink stone that abounded in the region. The city disappointed me, although its 
movement was vertiginous. Hundreds of bicycles, powered by motorcycle engines and camels 
with small carts, were everywhere. I had tried to return to Delhi, but a middle-aged, 
gray-haired gentleman sitting behind me had stopped me with his advice. I had expressed my 
doubts and indecision to him. Now it had occurred to me that I could go to Srinagar by flying from 
Jaipur. I asked him about the Jaipur airport, confiding my plan to him, and he openly 
mocked me. It made me feel absurd and crazy. Hindus seem to like to openly 
express their emotions,   or perhaps vent through their discussions 
what they normally dare not express. I say this because the discussions with the inspector 
had spilled over to the rest of the passengers. A three-wheeled rickshaw took me to the meditation 
center on the outskirts of Jaipur. We crossed part of the Rajasthan desert, picturesque and full 
of cacti, squirrels and monkeys. The center consisted of a series of rustic buildings 
that housed the kitchen, rooms for visitors, a meditation hall and a pagoda whose interior 
was divided into individual meditation cells. Three or four people cleaned the place and set up 
tents to house the students of the course. All was sand and dryness, and hundreds of small trees and 
shrubs planted in tiny holes, patiently watered. I went for a walk in the desert. I 
came to an area of large buildings,   gardens surrounded by walls and what appeared to 
be very old palaces. One of them was decorated on the outside with scenes of animals and 
princes and a plaque on which one could   read the history of the place. The palace 
had belonged to a maharaja, who committed suicide there after ruling the region for seven 
years. I was impressed with the history and kept walking. I came to a street flanked by buildings 
supported by slender columns, where hundreds of monkeys frolicked happily. I kept walking for 
hours. I had come out of the desert and now saw fields of farmland. I was exhausted when I came to 
another palace surrounded by cool, shady gardens. I wanted to rest and do yoga; as 
I approached the garden entrance,   a guard stopped me and asked for half 
a rupee to enter. I searched through my clothes and realized that I had not 
brought any money with me. I walked on and,   in a vacant lot next to the road and next to 
a rocky mountain, I meditated and did yoga. I remembered Tepoztlán, my meditations in the 
Atongo Valley, in the middle of fruit trees, with Tepozteco in front of me as a colossal 
and mute witness of my inner journeys. I felt India so much like Mexico that I had 
to remind myself that I was on the other side of the world and not in a small town 
in Oaxaca. The energy was much the same, as were the landscapes and the people. There was, 
however, a very important difference: in India, ten million renunciants (sadhus) wore orange 
robes, lived on charity and dedicated themselves to meditation and travel. India recognized 
them as beings who had decided to leave the system to seek spiritual liberation. There 
was an obligation to care for and feed them, and they formed a world apart. On the other hand, 
India was full of ashrams, spiritual communities that welcomed travelers and seekers and offered 
them an environment conducive to meditation. After yoga, I set out to return to the Vipassana 
center and suddenly realized I was lost. I started walking around looking for familiar clues and 
signs and knew that, in my excitement for the novelty, I had not even written down in my memory 
how to get to the only place in India that I knew. I thought that if I had gone to the north of 
the country in search of Babaji, without any   direction and without precise indications of his 
whereabouts, the same thing that was happening to me would probably have happened to me, but 
on such an alarming scale that I did not even dare to imagine the details of this experience. 
Obviously, my thinking demonstrated my lack of faith and my great attachments and insecurities. 
I remembered, at that moment, an experience I had had in Mexico several years before, which I had 
not been able to understand when it happened, but which now began to become clearer. Two 
friends and I decided to go to Oaxaca to try   hallucinogenic mushrooms. We traveled in an open 
jeep through the green and fruitful highlands of Oaxaca, while the wind and the majestic landscape 
caressed our bodies filled with anticipation. In Huautla, a little boy came running after crossing 
the street and climbed onto the running board of the jeep. He told us that his grandmother 
wanted to see us to guide us on a mushroom   trip. When we arrived at the old woman’s hut, 
we learned that it was Maria Sabina. Delighted, we prepared for the night. While we waited, one 
of the Sabina’s grandchildren, a lost drunk, disappointed us, as did another, 
sober but obsessed with our money. Finally, at dusk, Maria appeared 
at the threshold of her hut and,   after rubbing our arms with a black powder, made 
us ingest a dozen tiny mushrooms. It was raining and an icy wind was seeping through the cracks in 
the hut. Thirty or forty minutes after ingestion, we decided to lie down. I closed my eyes and a 
vision of a city of undulating streets appeared in my mind. I looked for my house among the 
buildings and, after an enormous effort, I found it. My favorite armchair was waiting for 
me, warm, comfortable and safe. The instant I felt safe, Maria Sabina began to repeat a prayer… 
St. Peter, St. Paul… that brought me back to the damp hut, to the cold and the discomfort. 
Again I closed my eyes and the same undulating city reappeared. I looked for my house and, 
when I managed to sit down in my armchair, Mary began…. St. Peter, St. Paul. Seven 
times the same thing was repeated until I, in desperation, left the hut, preferring the rain 
to the torment of the Sabine. Obviously, that was a lesson I began to understand years later in 
India. I preferred comfort to novel learning, security to growth? Without realizing 
it, India was beginning to introduce me, confronting me, to a raw and unvarnished 
reality, a reality that I had always denied. After much pondering, I was able to recall the 
surname of the maharaja in the story of the ornate palace: Singh, identical to the family name of my 
former airplane seat neighbor and supposed envoy of Babaji. I asked about maharaja Singh’s palace 
and no one knew how to give me instructions about its location. I got scared and walked in the 
direction of a valley. To my right was another palace with hundreds of domes supported by columns 
and dozens of monkeys jumping between them. To my left, a mountain with a zigzagging staircase 
ended in an ashramic construction arranged in heights. I knew I was on the wrong track and 
suddenly I could see the shape of a mountain. I looked for it and saw it in the distance. I 
walked in its direction and saw Singh’s palace. February 10. I am in India, I tell myself over and over again. 
I have fallen in love many times, but never like when I met Joan. My God! Her eyes and mine met in 
a psychic embrace that could last for eternities. I am in India and I have yet to find similar eyes, 
and the problem is that I am not willing to accept one iota less than that intensity, surrender 
and love. Probably Babaji, maybe Srinagar, hopefully Goenka, but I doubt it. I know I have a 
mission and she is bigger than I realize. It has to do with the state of consciousness, with 
the light that nourishes the essence of man, with what sustains the human mind and heart. That 
is what my mission has to do with and someone, someone I don’t know yet, will help me 
to realize it and to work in the right   direction. Someone who is already waiting 
for me somewhere in India to immerse myself in life with the same intensity with which 
I used to immerse myself in Joan’s eyes. It is four o’clock in the morning at 
the Vipassana center in the desert   of Rajasthan. They have just rung the 
bell for the first meditation of the day. Today begins the Vipassana 
course that will last ten days. I live in a tent and bathe with ice-cold water 
in this desert that is the foundation of the   earth. I wonder where this longing to get to my 
roots will take me. I hope it is not to the same place where it took maharaja Singh, maharaja 
who perhaps was myself and who I remembered on that tantric night in Mexico City. Singh did 
not resist so much desert? will I resist it…? February 11. I was forbidden to write, I was not allowed to 
speak and for ten days I sat for twelve hours a day next to a battered sar with a chronic 
cough. I hardly know who I am anymore. One day I was amazed by the warmth of 
the place and I liked the meditation   room. A full and calm atmosphere filled 
it. When I signed up for the course, I was struck by the thought that this 
was my last chance to change my mind and,   instead of staying in Rajasthan, return 
to Delhi to catch a plane to Srinagar. I overcame the temptation and at the moment of 
delivering my things I was told that another Mexican was in the meditation camp. Of course, it 
was Maura, who had come to India three months ago. I was delighted to find her and considered it a 
good sign, a welcome omen and a confirmation that my decision to stay for the course had been 
the right one. I set off in search of Maura, found out the number of her tent and left her 
a message. A few minutes later we met. I knew our energy did not match. I told her that some 
psychics in Mexico had given me messages for her. They said that her mission and mine were not the 
same. Maura complained about Vipassana and then told me that she had been told of a meeting of 
saints in early February in northern India. The news upset me. It was the last piece of the 
puzzle associated with Srinagar. It confirmed to me that my premonitions about Srinagar 
did not come from a false and unreal void, but from a real event. I felt I should 
leave immediately, but something stopped me. I looked at Maura and invited her to go 
to Srinagar together. She returned a look full of anxious questioning and told me that 
it was worth another try and stay. I agreed, feeling again that our energies did 
not match. He escorted me to my tent   and we said our goodbyes. I was left with the 
feeling that I should leave, but I did not. In the evening another meeting occurred, but 
this time with one of Goenka’s top aides, a certain Mor, a Harvard graduate, a student 
of Kissinger and director of the International Vipassana Academy. He invited me to do 
research at the Academy and I agreed, even though I knew I could work with him. Mor 
offered me money and accommodation for research and extended the invitation to Maura. The latter 
had confessed that she had almost no money and I, instead of offering her mine, informed her of 
Mor’s invitation. I felt miserable about it. I dreamed of a gathering of sadhus in 
an oriental tent in the middle of the   Himalayas. Yak butter torches lit the 
room where dozens of bearded beings, magnificently present in their wisdom 
and spontaneity, masters of themselves, were holding a meeting and thanking God for 
being together. I was arriving at the meeting and everyone knew that my presence implied 
that I had managed to overcome very difficult trials. Among the smoke of the torches and the 
crackling of voices I found my true master. I woke up sweaty and desperate,   thinking that I had missed the opportunity 
of a lifetime by not attending the meeting. The cleanliness of it. I also postulated 
that there was no other way to accomplish the above. To me, so much attention maintained 
in such a technical and powerful way on the body seemed to be an attack against the Self, which 
is non-existent for Buddhism, since this religion denies the reality of an Observer and only accepts 
the observed in itself. I discussed this with Goenka in an interview after the ninth day. He 
received me smiling and invited me to sit on the floor in front of him; I occupied a chair and 
the difference in levels made me self-conscious. I looked into his eyes, an electric violet glow, and 
a sense that his sight came from an unimaginable background enveloped me. I told him that, for me, 
his ideas required the existence of an Observer independent of individuality, but interacting with 
it in order to transform energy into qualitative sensations. According to Goenka, bodily sensations 
were the result of the interaction of the mind with the body. I agreed with this, but the 
existence of a transformer of interaction into experience was a requirement that could not 
be set aside. Goenka denied the need for the Observer. His plump body, his round, good-natured 
face rejoiced when he told me that observation was self-made, or “Smell smells itself and sound hears 
itself, just like vision. There is no such thing as a separate Observer and that is a unity,” 
he asserted confidently amid tight laughter. On the night of the second day I dreamed of 
a newborn baby with gigantic fingers against a background in which the Popocatepetl 
volcano was erupting. It was February 3, my dream had such a reality that I woke up 
trembling from the earth movements triggered by the volcanic eruption. I was sure that 
something great had happened in Mexico. I thought that I was some kind of magician king 
on my way to receive the Messiah and that I had been stranded in the middle of the desert 
of Rajasthan deceived by a series of routines that wished to concretize the abstract and 
make the spirit lose itself in a denial of the transcendent. I felt tremendously angry with 
myself and the words of my airplane neighbor, on his way to India, sounded thundering 
inside me: Go to Srinagar! I hit the floor of the tent in my despair and suddenly it 
all seemed like an absurdity. So what if, I said to myself, the meeting I claim not to 
have attended did not require physical bodies? I woke up the next morning feeling better. 
My mind was playing absurd tricks on me, I was beginning to be aware of living a kind 
of incipient madness. However, as I sat in the meditation hall, a backache began that would not 
leave me for a moment for the rest of the course. Goenka affirmed that everything is resolved when 
one manages to maintain an equanimous observation of the contents of experience and, above all, 
a glimpse of bodily sensations regardless of whether or not they are pleasurable. My back 
pain was a testimony that there are sensations that require more than ten days of equanimous 
and constant observation to cease to exist. I miss Mexico and I don’t know exactly 
what it is that I miss. Perhaps it is the feeling of familiarity. It may be that 
what I most desire is to stop searching, to remain in stillness and that what I have 
sometimes lived with such pleasure dissolves as soon as I question it or try not to have 
it. How is it that I am practicing a Buddhist technique when I doubt the existence 
of the Self? Perhaps the contradiction   is only apparent or semantic. The Self is 
all-inclusive, therefore, with it there is no separate Observer either. I believe it is 
the total unification, pure, without parts, it is the Jewish Jehovah. This reminds me that 
I plan to live in Israel, in a Hasidic kibbutz. On the night of February 6, I dreamt of a 
Hasidic gathering in which my grandfather was present. It gave me great pleasure to see 
him there, the one who spent his life in the most devoted and devotional Orthodoxy. During 
the last months of his life he no longer spoke, and when I visited him we would stay for hours 
looking into each other’s eyes. I felt that those gazes pierced my soul and discovered in 
it hidden memories and patterns. The last word I heard him utter was the abbreviation Besht 
for the name Rabbi Israel Bal She Tov, a Polish visionary who discovered mystical ecstasy in 
one of his retreats in a Polish forest and who later transmitted the key to establish a joyful 
communication with God: the Chassidic movement. The next day I began to recover my memory. The 
Vipassana technique brings as a consequence an outcropping of unconscious contents and I noticed 
it at every moment. It was enough to ask myself about some date, some friend or relative, for a 
whole chronologically perfect sequence of images from the past to appear before my mind. The 
images were clear, they answered me and soon I felt the capacity to scrutinize my entire memory 
with the simple procedure of asking a question. On one of the afternoon breaks, lying in the 
tent, I became aware of an extraordinary change in my perception. The song of a bird appeared in 
my mind as coming from the mind itself. Either the bird was inside, or I had expanded myself in 
such a way that what was happening in the world was happening inside myself as the only Observer. 
There was no outside or inside. Reality was one, undivided. However, the experience enchanted 
me as if I still, in spite of the unification, wore “someone” with the capacity to be enchanted 
by the experience. The experience was clear, defined, and the experiencer formed a unity. It 
was like a sea in which a wave was transmitted from one point to the nearest point of the 
same Observer. The objects belonged to me as if they were part of my body and there was 
no external environment separate from me. I remembered my life in Tepoztlán. For three 
years I dedicated myself to writing in an idyllic environment, surrounded by fresh and fertile 
vegetation, and in contact with artists who, like me, were dedicated to exploring their 
own being, manifested through painting, theater or writing. Above all, I remembered Rita, 
a painter with whom I had endless dialogues and who had once been shocked when I mentioned 
to her the existence of a separation between   the internal and the external. It was only 
now, in India, and years after those talks, that I began to understand, by living 
it, the consciousness of Unity. The next morning I broke the rules of 
the meditation center and went for a run   in the desert. Thousands of stars shone and 
seemed to perfume the barely visible dunes, while a cool wind caressed my face. All around me, 
small temple-tombs bloomed in the sand reminding me of the nearby village, a sandy street 
surrounded by buildings supported by columns, with walls full of drawings and plagued by 
families of monkeys. The same village I went to visit with Maura the morning the course 
ended. Some monkeys followed us curiously   as we admired the buildings; we were amazed 
at the resemblance of the Indian fritangas to the Mexican ones. Lemons with chile piquin, 
the same color, aroma and flavor that Mexican children like to enjoy. Peanuts, some 
kind of charritos, fried green chiles with a breaded vegetable and who knows how 
many other things cooked by a smiling Hindu, while his companions kept the monkeys away and 
laughed as they watched the tourists pass by. I noticed a profound change in my emotions. 
Something had happened to my reaction times and emotional thresholds. I was enjoying 
everything without a hint of restlessness, without thinking about the past or worrying about 
the future. I was walking along a cobblestone road that zigzagged up the side of a mountain until 
it reached a waterfall that sent sparkles of crystals. The water from that waterfall fell from 
a rock and spread its coolness into a pool that was part natural and part constructed. Naked 
men bathed in the icy water of the Rajasthan desert spring, climbing up to a bell that showed 
the entrance to a temple. I approached following the perfumed trail of delicious incense, 
an altar with figures with amazingly vivid eyes greeted me surrounding me with a wonderful 
vibration. I went into ecstasy and could not move from the entrance of the temple, while a monk 
explained to Maura the Hindu trilogy of Rama, Vishnu and Krishna. I was still enraptured 
by the magnificent vibration and asked the temple caretaker for permission to meditate at the 
temple entrance. He agreed and soon I was assailed by the thought that what I was experiencing was 
finite. I remember, at this point, that a similar thought I began to have a few months ago whenever 
I experienced a lot of pleasure. Something told me that that experience would end and that I should 
not identify even with the delicious sensation of my selfhood. I must confess that the first time I 
accepted that it was no longer possible for me to flow with the pleasure of the inner encounter, 
I became frightened and despaired of myself. I saw this as a terrible prejudice that 
had taken hold of me and that there was   no longer even that possibility of growth. 
That was precisely the sign and the beacon that had always guided my steps. I 
doubted what I never thought could   be doubted. What a horror! What a lack 
of hope! An absence that, I thought, nothing could fill until I met Vipassana 
and I knew that, since the time of Buddha, someone had discovered the same thing that I felt 
as failure, but without that consideration, on the contrary, as a sign that the path consisted in not 
identifying oneself with either pleasure or pain. In the afternoon we returned to the meditation 
camp. There the possibility was announced of attending an intensive meditation course 
based on the Buddha’s most famous discourse on techniques for maintaining vigilant 
awareness: the Maha Satipatthana Suttam. I decided that I would really find out 
if I could find what I was looking for. In the end I said goodbye. I thought that, if I 
came back, it would be after a while. Ten days passed in which my mind began to release memories, 
just by asking about some incident, person or place, and the answer was clear, sequential, 
precise, complete and deep in my consciousness. I tried to ask questions and receive answers 
until I felt that there was nothing more to ask, although in the end the process was blocked 
by my impossible doubts about the past. Suttam emphasizes the need to observe all 
processes and leads, little by little, from an attention restricted to the breath to a 
total openness to all components of experience: thoughts, mental states, bodily sensations, 
emotions and levels of consciousness. All of these are observed from what could be 
considered as silence in absolute purity, the only point of reference from 
which all the rest can be detected,   catalogued and considered. If I can observe a 
state of my mind and say that it is confusion, I must necessarily possess a state 
of my mind that transcends confusion,   for otherwise I would be included “below” the 
confusional state, immersed within its tentacular changes and not “above” it, observing it 
from a position of absence of confusion. Buddha emphasizes the observation of each 
and every psychological state. This is first done sequentially or serially, and then 
simultaneously or in parallel. The need to open to the whole experience and observe all 
its components simultaneously seemed to me to be a wonderful way to increase the algorithmic 
power of the Observer. I had already theorized about it and had even proposed a synergistic 
therapy in which the subject should learn to recognize more and more complex patterns, 
including them in unified algorithms. Obviously, the technique is an approach to Judaism 
in which Jehovah is seen as the total Unity, with no “disassemblable” components 
or possibility of disintegration. At the end of the course, I felt that I could 
not take it anymore. It had been three weeks   of almost continuous work in Vipassana 
and my feeling was that I was floating in a kind of shell that was impenetrable 
to my inner self, but totally transparent to the external. I felt unable to oppose 
any barrier to the inflow of information and the last two days were spent terrified 
by the invasion and unable to sleep. This, when it appeared again, was lucid, that is to 
say, with vigilant consciousness. I had been longing for lucidity during sleep for years and 
now that it finally appeared, it seemed useless. At the end of the last meditation session of the 
morning, I met Maura and we went for a walk in the desert. Two hundred meters from the center, the 
feeling of oppression ended and, in its place, deeper analysis about the roots of the experience   took the place of what was once 
irremediable external invasion. In this walk with Maura, we analyzed 
each sensory quality as belonging to a category of the energetic field, which, 
upon reaching its limit of organization, undergoes a qualitative transformation and 
becomes a new sensory quality. During evolution, this had happened with the 
development of perception. First there had appeared the simple bodily 
sensation, low in vibrational frequency and with a very limited field expansion. When the 
associated field reached its limit, another sensory quality appeared, which underwent another 
similar development and a similar transformation. Today, our three-dimensional vision with 
all its colors, textures and complexity is beginning to be replaced by a new sensory 
quality: that of psychic perception of thoughts and mental contents of other beings, groups and 
communities. The field associated with vision is reaching its maximum limit of complexity and is 
beginning to be transformed into another reality. The technique of Vipassana, by stimulating the 
simultaneous perception of all the contents of experience, seemed to be in accordance 
with the evolutionary development of increasing complexity and unification, 
so well explained by Teilhard de Chardin in his theoretical considerations about the 
phenomenon of the evolution of consciousness. The desert of Rajasthan surrounded these 
thoughts with its dunes, bushes and trees totally green and with tiny leaves, designed by 
a wise nature, concerned to conserve sufficient internal humidity to maintain plant 
life without excessive evaporation. We arrived at a small village and saw people 
spinning on small rotating machines. Maura got excited and we approached. They were 
lepers working in their own asylum. I was appalled at the spectacle of mutilated 
limbs, missing noses and deformed faces, but I admired their work and lust for life. 
The asylum is nestled amidst domed temples with white roofs glistening in their reflections 
of the desert sun. We continued to analyze; I was torn by a fierce questioning. On the one 
hand, the meditation technique seemed perfect and ideally constructed to stimulate the development 
and fulfillment of the Self. On the other hand, however, it produced an emptiness in 
me, a kind of attack against a level   of connection with myself and, in turn, 
a distancing from a treasure center of inspiration and grandeur, because of its 
unlimited capacity to produce ecstasy. Vipassana seemed to demand the loss of 
self or ego, or center, and instead, total openness to the experience of the present 
without a separate Observer to it. It was curious that Vipassana led to such a state, when the means 
it used was contrary to the goal. In other words, it encouraged observation as a means to 
end the Observer, it reiterated contact with the body and its sensory experiences to 
postulate a nirvanic state in which the body was finally disintegrated with the subsequent 
disappearance of all sensory impressions. I began to miss Muktananda and his emphasis on 
the Self and direct contact with it. His phrase: “God is in you as yourself” seemed palatable to 
me after the absence of the Self in Buddhism or, at least, in what my poor understanding 
understood as Buddhism. Of course, siddha yoga also demanded a payment and this 
was devotion to the Guru, whereas Vipassana was opposed to this devotion in theory. In practice, 
however, Goenka was considered a Guru and everyone maintained an undoubtedly devotional attitude 
towards him, especially his senior students. In addition, the meditation center became 
a kind of fortress of watchmen attentive to every step of us, those who began 
the serious study of Vipassana. After all these thoughts, I went for a walk around 
Agra. I am now on my way to see the Taj Mahal, trying to behave like a tourist, but with such 
bad luck and so little aptitude that I fear I am not prepared to see buildings, regardless of 
their architectural wonder and romantic history. I prefer to see throbbing, living, 
burning minds and not venerable,   but dead, marble stones. However, my condition 
remains human and so does my curiosity. February 24. One o’clock in the morning. I am at Ketawah 
railroad station after leaving Agra. At the Taj Mahal I did yoga and met a group of 
Vipassana meditators who were going to Nepal, to the mountains. I joined the 
group and I am traveling with Lila,   a Dutch girl. I accompany her, but 
I don’t feel comfortable with her. Lying on my bunk on the train to Nepal, I think 
that there are three problems I have to solve: my anguish when making decisions, my difficulty 
to live in the present and my feeling of total annulment in front of authority. It is urgent to 
transcend my state of inability to make decisions, and part of that difficulty (I glimpse 
in my mind) is due to the loss of contact with myself. I must understand whether 
that loss is favored or retarded by my relationship with Goenka. Going to Nepal is 
a kind of escape and the delay of a necessary confrontation. Going to Dharamsala and Srinagar 
means at least knowing whether or not what I imagined in my fantasies was true. I feel that I 
cannot continue to believe that I have missed the unique opportunity to know my true path at the 
side of an authentic and unblemished teacher. Any path seems to be plagued by these doubts 
and my feeling towards myself is that of an impossibility to accept living in the present 
as the only and most accurate possibility of life. Why have I neglected this aspect? I feel 
somewhat useless in asking myself this question. It simply pains me to be so weak and so unable 
to stick to any chosen path, no matter the time. I took advantage of a train stop to get off 
the train after explaining to Lila that I no longer wanted to continue traveling to Nepal. 
I told her that Maura was waiting for me in Delhi. I felt guilty for abandoning Lila, 
but for my comfort, I overcame my guilt. I took a train headed for Delhi. I got into 
the wrong carriage and, noticing her contrary movement, I panicked. I recognized myself as 
fragile and with an absurd fear of the unexpected. I felt that everything was synchronous karma. I 
saw Lila alone in a carriage full of strangers and I had to pay for the damage. Finally, I 
told the train conductor what was going on, which in India is quite a feat. He helped me 
and showed me to my first-class cabin. I had chosen such a luxurious prospect of travel so 
that I could be alone and meditate. But again, my mind prevented me. A Hindu with a wracking 
cough and heavy smoker occupied the upper berth. A couple of coughs added (in their buzzing) to my 
traveling companion’s cough, and this, together with guilt, loneliness and the feeling of having 
missed the opportunity to get to know Nepal, filled my conscience with endless discussions 
always accompanied by anguish and regret. I had arranged to meet Maura at 3 p.m. in Delhi, 
and the train was due to arrive there at 3:30 p.m. Again, I thought, it’s punishment. During the 
most painful 23 hours I remember living in my entire life, my mind became my worst enemy 
and a sense of death enveloped me body and spirit. I tried to meditate, to play the flute, 
to read. I threw the I Ching twice and both times I got the first hexagram: the Creative one. I was 
shocked: in such a state of disaster as the one I was living in at that moment, the Creative could 
not have come out! However, I recognized that in the midst of my terrible anguish and perhaps 
feeding it, there was a power so gigantic that I had lagged in the distance trying to control 
it. It was impossible to do so and, moreover, futile. I gave up after ten hours of struggle, 
leaned back upwards amid accelerated breathing, and began to watch the compartment of the carriage 
revolve around me, while my consciousness was sinking more and more into a deathly stupor and 
heaviness. In the end, only a faint light seemed to accompany me, telling me that everything was 
all right, and then it suddenly transformed into a crystal clear voice dictating a message to me. 
I wondered why he was punishing me and what it was that made him not accept any arrangement 
on my behalf. “We have tried to help you,” he kept telling me, “and you have not listened to 
our messages. I asked him to identify himself, to no avail. He just kept telling me to give me 
a chance and to calm down, that everything would be okay. I learned that Lila had suffered 
and that I felt her suffering as my own. I arrived at the Mexican embassy at 4 p.m. 
and found Maura chatting with the wife of the first secretary. She greeted 
me and continued talking. I felt like I was bursting with anger and told them 
everything I had gone through to get there. Maura replied that she was no longer affected 
if things did not turn out as she expected. I understood that my mind liked to 
overflow in fantasies and it pained   me to admit the fatality of my worries. I 
had assumed that leaving Maura abandoned would cause her much suffering, and that 
had only been an unreal fantasy in my mind. February 26. Maura and I separated in Delhi after going 
to Jaipur. Our energies did not match and the effect of being together was to decrease 
rather than increase our life force. However, we were great friends and 
very respectful of each other. Now I am in a hotel room in Delhi, where I can hardly breathe after attending a 
typical wedding on the streets of the city. Indian children are beautiful. As a brass band 
brightened up the ceremony in which the groom wore money necklaces and the bejeweled bride 
showed off her classic silk and ornate gown, giant-eyed little girls watched the scene as 
I rejoiced in their innocence. I remembered Estusha and almost felt her beside me watching 
the events. I slept deliciously remembering the images of the wedding. The next day I decided to 
go to Rishikesh to perfect my yoga at Maharishi’s ashram. Arriving at the station, I recognized 
Babaji from Hairalchan. The Sai Baba group in Mexico had given me his address near the 
Himalayas. I inquired about his village, Hairakabhn, and no one could give me details. 
I decided to wait to ask them in Rishikesh. After a month of indecision, I was beginning to 
feel strong, confident and at ease with myself. On the way out of Delhi, a tire went flat 
on the truck. I felt it as a caution signal. We stopped in a small town to get it fixed, 
and while I went to have tea and watch black   and gray birds with orange eyes stealing 
cereal grains from the roadside stalls. At these stalls delicious tea and 
fried flour snacks were being prepared. After six hours of travel heading north, the 
landscape and weather began to change. Cooler and wooded, more humid and lively. Suddenly 
the Ganges appeared. Beautiful in its course, wide and noisy, it accompanied us until we 
reached Hardwar. Many ashramis bordered the river and the light of their lanterns reflected 
deliciously in that sacred water coming from the Himalayas. The energy became intense at times. 
I had detected the vibrational change about 50 kilometers before arriving at Hardwar. It reminded 
me of some areas of the state of Morelos. I had spent the entire journey doing Vipassana, and at 
Hardwar I redoubled the effort. I took a cab to Rishikesh and when I reached the town I realized 
that my sensations had changed. It felt familiar, warm and inspired. A clear sense of 
activation between the eyebrows was   predominant. It seemed that body zones 
reflected the vibrational level of a region and the space between the eyebrows 
seemed to signify a highly evolved energy. February 27. Meditation in Rishikesh is very powerful. The 
city is full of ashrams dedicated to spiritual development and of monks, teachers and 
saints who, with their energy, clean   the atmosphere and produce such clarity in the 
environment that interaction with them produces, in addition to a state of deep calm and peace, 
a contact with very fine mental structures. I found a garden located on the fifth 
floor of a hotel in the center of the   city and there I meditated surrounded by temples, sounds of bells and mantras. Today I could almost 
see the interaction between my energy fields and the organization of the space. I remembered 
that Goenka says that bodily sensations are a result of the contact of the mind with the 
surface of the body. I find this to be true, as long as the body includes the energy fields 
radiating from the materialized organic structure. I have asked many people about the whereabouts of 
the Babaji of Hairakhan, the being young in body, but very old in age, whom I thought I saw 
in a dream during a gathering of saints in Srinagar in early February. No one has 
been able to inform me. I want to stay in the Sivananda ashram in order to check my 
yoga and to be in a religious atmosphere. I had already lived in a Sivananda community 
in the monastery in Cuernavaca. I had learned a lot in that monastery occupied by yoga 
masters, who taught me to manage my body energies through hatha yoga postures and 
I wanted to know the origin of the group. In Cuernavaca I had lived several 
months feeling that the energy of   the group was increasingly tense and 
incoherent. I had always assumed that the feelings of tension came from 
passing difficulties between group   members and that this feeling would be 
absent from the ashram in Rishikesh. A cart pulled by a slow horse and guided by a 
child took me to the ashram after passing through an enchanted city. The river Ganges washed through 
it and the sound of water crashing against stones and forming rapids brightened the atmosphere, 
filling the atmosphere with “watery sparks”. The road narrowed, a wooded mountain on the left,   the valley with Rishikesh and the 
Ganges on the right framed us. We arrived at the site and, in an office 
that looked more like a postal exchange, I was met by a monk. I explained that 
I wished to stay at the ashram and he told me that the secretary was in the meditation 
hall during the performance of a ceremony led by Swami Krishnananda, director of the center 
and secretary of the Divine Life Society. I went to the hall and was introduced to an 
aroma of incense inside a long, high-ceilinged room where an orange-robed being of advanced age 
and impressive presence spoke in English with a Hindu accent. He said that evolution has been 
modifying beings and making them more and more until reaching man with his mind and intellect. 
Evolution has not ended and there must exist, he continued, beings more evolved than man. These 
superhuman beings live and continue to develop. The speech ended with a mantra 
and then an ensemble of zither,   tabla and bells accompanied a woman who, with 
incomparable sweetness, sang prayers and mantras, leaving the atmosphere saturated with 
her mature and spiritual femininity. The walls of the hall were carpeted with sayings 
of Sivananda. Her tomb was at the end of the hall, in a kind of tabernacle illuminated by 
oil lamps, which surely had never been   extinguished. A fire ceremony was performed in 
the tabernacle. It consisted of spinning a cup with a lit fuel. Afterwards, the fire 
was shared by all. A monk would bring it close to each of us and with our hands we 
would touch it and caress our faces with it. I was allowed to enter the tabernacle 
and my sensation was delicious. After the ceremony was over, I spoke to 
the ashram secretary and he asked me for a letter advising of my arrival. I had not sent 
a letter, but without being able to tell him, another monk interrupted us saying that there 
was no problem in admitting me. Everything was so synchronized that ten minutes later, 
two young boys from the ashram guided me to my new home, located in a building of modern 
architecture. As we approached the building, I felt an energy of great tension emanating from 
it. The sensation was similar to that of the ashram in Cuernavaca. I tried to evade the reach 
of that low frequency field, but to no avail. After an unsuccessful meditation for not being 
able to clean the environment, I fell asleep. The next morning, I attended (thirty 
minutes late) the hatha yoga class. It was lousy and the teacher was very careless. From that moment on, an anguish in 
crescendo took hold of me until it became unbearable. I left the ashram very 
depressed towards Rishikesh. I wanted to forget my feelings and find a bank to 
cash some traveler’s checks. In all the   banks I was told that next to the main 
hotel in Rishikesh they could help me. I went there, asked the management 
for the bank and, in a burst of hope,   also asked for Babaji of Hairakhan. The 
clerk looked at me with piercing eyes and told me that he knew the place, but Babaji 
had passed away two weeks ago. Some witnesses had said that he had grown very old and others 
that he had committed suicide. I was petrified. Two weeks earlier, I had finished my 
first Vipassana course in India and   was about to start my second. Could it 
be possible, I wondered at that moment, that Babaji’s death coincided with the talk I had 
with Goenka when I first presented myself to him? Or perhaps the dreams I had during the course 
indicated this death? I was frightened and, at the same time, I did not believe 
the news. How do you know? I questioned   forcefully. Because it appeared in the 
newspaper! was the emphatic answer. I felt very bad again, an enormous 
sadness rose up inside me. I wanted to know more. The son of the hotel 
owner approached me and told me that   Babaji was probably still alive 
and his death was only a fake. Gleeful eyes seemed to look at me from an altar, 
where incense smoked while monks played and chanted mantras. Within minutes of being there, 
I felt that Swami Krishnananda of the Sivananda ashram was right. Evolution must continue and 
Krishna must be a suprahuman being nourished in his consciousness by the devotion of his 
devotees. I was surprised to have such thoughts, but Krishna kept looking at me and his face seemed 
to change depending on the communication between us. The mantras continued with their music, 
while the wedding band led with their melody. The next morning, I decided to go and 
talk to Swami Krishnananda. I was to ask him about my relationship with Goenka and Babaji. A cart pulled by a rough horse took me to 
Sivananda’s ashram. I met the same black-bearded, piercing-eyed swami who had asked that 
I be allowed to stay in the ashram. I mentioned my desire to see Krishnananda 
and he escorted me to a small garden where two dozen devotees were seated next to 
the swami, who was resting in a rocking   chair. His face was kindly and his glasses had 
only one of the lenses translucent; the other, the left one, was opaque. The swami was 
reading some letters and my friend told him that I was from Mexico and had some 
problems to consult him. Krishnananda   saw me and said that he did not want to 
hear any problems. The devotees joined him in his laughter and I imagined a similar 
scene, but with Muktananda as the center. Suddenly, Krishnananda turned to see me and 
asked me what I wanted. I felt a very direct relationship with him. I replied that I wanted to 
be in the Self. He seemed pleased. He turned to my friend and told him that I knew a lot and could 
even teach him some things. I felt very honored. Krishnananda was signing some letters. He asked me 
again: What are you going to do? I told him that I would go to Igatpuri with Goenka, but that I had 
some doubts about it. He laughed and told me that I had chosen well, to go and meditate with Goenka. 
I felt it as a sign and suddenly my doubts were over. If a being like Krishnananda was telling 
me that I had chosen well, he must be right. My friend invited me to his room and to 
lunch. We did the latter in the dining   room. We all kept silent after chanting a 
few mantras, blessing the food. In that room, my friend confessed to me that he was a 
teacher of yoga, religion and philosophy. Sivananda had been his teacher and he had read 
the 300 books written by him, in addition to the complete works of Aurobindo, Hegel, Kant, the 
Vedas, etc. I was impressed by his wisdom and simultaneous naivety. He told me he knew tantra, 
Kundalini, Sufism, philosophy and hatha yoga, and I asked him to explain what Krishnananda had 
wanted to tell me. “I told you that you knew a lot and that your decision to go visit and work 
with Goenka was fine.” I had asked Krishnananda if the Self can be experienced directly or if the 
body is required as an intermediary. I remembered at that moment a devotee of Rajneesh who had 
told me that the body as an intermediary in Goenka’s teaching was unnecessary. My friend 
did not answer me, nor had Krishnananda. I showed my friend my hatha yoga and he was 
pleased with the sequence I used. He told me about the music teacher at the ashram and at that 
moment I felt like staying. Krishnananda had said that after I went to study with Goenka, I should 
come back to him to tell him what I had learned. My friend decided to go swimming in the Ganges 
and I went with him. He took me down a flight of   steps from the ashram to the river bank. A small 
white sandy beach greeted us. To the left, some rocks on which birds stopped to rest, and on which 
the icy current of the Ganges caused small waves, appeared to me as a delightful sight. I undressed 
and entered the Ganges. I could not stand its temperature, I got out and returned to meditate 
on the sandy shore. My friend and other monks had gone into the waters. I meditated deliciously 
and again felt like staying in Rishikesh. I would come to meditate at the Ganges, learn music and 
do hatha yoga. My fantasy was interrupted by the memory of the engagement with Goenka and the 
need to find out the reason and circumstances of Babaji’s passing. My friend had told me that 
he read that Babaji was buried alive for 24 hours to do samadhi and when he was dug up he was 
dead. I was impressed by the description. I imagined that Babaji was able to come out of his 
body and stay alive from an inconceivable plane. I decided to bathe again in the Ganges 
and the icy water activated my body. I meditated on the shore and suddenly felt 
my being expand and float in space. The impression was that of occupying the entire 
sky of Rishikesh, as if the limitations of distance or presence did not exist. Rishikesh 
is a magnificent city, I thought at the time. My friend invited me for tea, but I declined. I 
think I felt bad. I had already noticed a hint of loneliness in him. He had told me that he 
wanted to go to the West to teach and that he was saving money for his trip. He commented 
that in the Sivananda ashram the teachers do not receive money and that traveling to 
the West was beginning to feel sad to him. I left and on the way visited another ashram. Its 
cleanliness and orderliness were impressive. Hatha yoga was being practiced. I asked for reports and 
was told that it was full to bursting. I decided to enter their meditation hall, full of pictures 
describing the different chakras. I concentrated on the space between the eyebrows and immediately 
entered into a state of pleasure and ecstasy. I wondered if that was the right thing to 
do. Goenka seemed to stimulate a certain   feminine state, and here what seemed to be 
described was a masculine force. It seemed to me that I had done enough work with chakra 
activation and that somehow concentrating on just one part of the body, rather than the 
whole body, as in Vipassana, was dangerous. I spoke to the swami in charge of 
the ashram and he invited me to stay,   but I felt bad that I could not decide to do 
so. I headed back to my hotel and passed by a music school. A teacher was playing 
a harp, while a beautiful woman with   green eyes listened to him. Everything 
seemed to invite me to stay, and yet I left. I bought a ticket to Haldwani, Babaji’s 
village, and took the train in his direction. On the way I had to change carriages and it was 
impossible for me to do so. I missed the train and had to sleep in the station, alone, dying 
of cold and fear. At two o’clock in the morning I felt a tremendous urge to leave. All around 
me was fog, cold and steam from the railroad engines. I approached an office and knocked 
on the door. The staff woke up and informed me that in 30 minutes another Haldwani-bound train 
would be passing by. I knew Babaji was calling me, because in India, at two o’clock in 
the morning, that was impossible. The train was packed. I ran to the 
engine and got into it. The driver was shocked and wanted me to get off, but I 
knew that a tremendous force was guiding me   and I convinced him. After ten minutes the 
other driver arrived. After thirty minutes I was having tea with two nice and friendly 
drivers inside their huge machine. In a village I took another train, got into a 
carriage where a mechanic from a nearby village, knowledgeable in English, helped me all the way. 
At the end he wanted me to go with him and asked for my photo. His sadness as he said goodbye 
rubbed off on me. I arrived at the village dead tired and very sad. I found a rickety truck that 
took me to Haldwani. A rickshaw, a three-wheeled bicycle, took me to Babaji’s house. I was 
warmly welcomed. Babaji, I was told, died of a heart attack at 8:30 a.m. on Feb. 15, after being 
down with a cough for three days. I was shocked; the dates coincided with my decision to take 
the satipatthana course and with my own cough, caught by my meditation neighbor. We agreed that 
I would go the next day to visit Babaji’s ashram. I rested and the next day, in a rickshaw, 
I went to catch the truck. We arrived at a square full of vendors and hairdressers sitting 
on the street working with their customers. We waited for an hour and in desperation, I asked 
the rickshaw driver to return to Babaji’s house. Half an hour later everything was arranged and in 
a cab I headed for Dam Site. There, a guide took me to Hairakhan through a gorgeous valley and a 
crystal clear Ganges ledge. We crossed the river twelve times and suddenly, in the distance, 
a 9-domed orange temple appeared magnificent beside the river, in a valley surrounded 
by fresh vegetation and picturesque houses. I felt a very powerful energy. The same I 
had detected in the person who invited me, in Mexico, to come to Hairakhan. Every step and every stone was immersed in 
that magnificent presence. At the ashram, the first thing they told me was to stay a 
few days, that Babaji’s powerful presence was in the atmosphere. I went to a temple 
next to which Babaji’s body was buried. I sat down to meditate and, within seconds, 
my inner feeling was that of being with the center of the source of joy and peace. 
An enormous pleasure filled my body and I remembered that Goenka said that pleasure should 
be experienced with equanimity. I tried to do so, but decided to let myself go. On 
the walls were portraits of Babaji. Some told me that a prophecy foretold the time 
of his death and that Babaji was descended from a Tibetan lama who had been dead for 600 years. The 
meditation was still at the same level of joy. I doubted for a moment if this was just an illusion 
and a voice inside me told me that if it was, to get out of there. The feeling of joy ended at 
that moment and emptiness appeared in its place. I asked Babaji to come back and he did.   I decided to stay for a few days. On the way out 
of the temple I told the head swami and he agreed. March 10. I left all my luggage in Haldwani and 
arrived in Hairakhan with what I have on: a sweater and a jacket. Now I will try what it 
is like to live with the bare minimum. I loved the possibility. I am writing by the river, 
barefoot and in lotus position. I feel like I am finally in my real home. All around me, the 
Himalayas loom, full of lush trees. To my left, the temple of the nine orange domes 
and beyond that the ashram with the   temple next to Babaji’s body. The sound of 
the river sparkles full of joy and all the time I am in contact with my true Self in 
total fullness and oneness with the rest. A swami told me that Babaji was always in 
simultaneous contact with his subconscious, his conscious and his supraconscious, full of 
permanent joy. I do not doubt it because if what I feel is her presence, she is all joy and unity. 
Above all, she reminds me of my inner state when I dedicate myself to meditate and do yoga without 
any teacher and in a direct contact with my Self. This is what it feels like here, but from the very 
first moment and with a sustained experience of contact. I confess that when my guide returned 
to Dam Site, I had the impulse to follow him because I felt I was betraying Goenka by staying 
here. Now I feel that Goenka never understood me. That what I felt and wanted to share with 
him was this state and that from “here” I write and think. Goenka considered me a kind 
of intellectual lost in a mind removed from experience. That is how he made me feel when 
I met him at the desert retreat in Rajasthan. Babaji’s energy guided me to this place to 
meet him again and to get out of the absurd mistake I was in with Goenka. Vipassana 
is a beautiful technique, but the direct contact with the Self is even greater. My 
friend, the swami of the Sivananda ashram, wanted me to see it this way when he told 
me that he was a brahman and that, as such, he received the light of God directly. 
The energy of this place is very similar   to that of San Jose del Pacifico, in Oaxaca, 
or Puerto Escondido in the same state. Mexico is divine and the energetic similarity of 
a place as powerful as Hairakhan and Oaxaca confirms to me that it is in Mexico where 
the contact is made, even without wanting it, without swamis or meditation techniques, 
but simply in daily life. Blessed Mexico, I greet you from here, the most powerful place in 
India, the valley of Hairakhan in the Himalayas. I asked the reason for Babaji’s death. All 
the devotees with whom I spoke told me that he had taken for himself the karma of the 
whole world and his body did not resist any more. He died on February 14 and not on 
the 15th, as I had been told in Haldwani. I still feel that here is a great and 
beautiful presence guiding me to myself. I sat down to dinner and a couple sat next to 
me. Both beautiful and old devotees of Babaji. We recognized each other as Jews and in the middle 
of the conversation I told them about the message I received on the plane when I arrived in India, 
about visiting the Babaji of Srinagar. She looked at me with sparkling eyes and told me it was 
Laxman Jhu. He gave me his address in Srinagar. He is the representative and main teacher of 
Kashmir Shaivism. My impression knew no bounds. I had come to see Babaji to receive this news which 
I considered wonderful. I thanked God and Babaji. I felt that he was a true friend and teacher and 
I thanked myself for having decided to come in spite of so many trials and setbacks. I start 
preparing my trip to Srinagar trusting in God. Part of the night was spent in the Babaji temple. 
When the cold became unbearable, I went to bed in a communal dormitory, accompanied by dozens of 
women, children and men devotees of Babaji and pilgrims from Hairakhan. I could hardly sleep. 
The next morning I went to meditate by the river. March 4. I am still in Hairakhan. I was about to leave 
in a truck, but I returned commanded by a powerful voice inside me. This place is very 
strange. There are some Italians living here, they wear black and smoke hashish every evening 
by the river. The sky is dressed in orange and whitish clouds rise from everywhere while 
the smoke of the pipes comes out of a small   balcony next to a pyramidal house. An Italian, 
with the face of a Chinese Mandarin and always holding a trident in his right hand, is 
the leader. He said his name is Kali,   the name Babaji gave him and he 
represents the God of death, darkness. These devotees are convinced that a 
great catastrophe is coming and they   talk about God being dark because 
he absorbs everything. I see them with a feeling of fear and contempt. It 
seems to me that they are playing games,   although when I see their faces I am frightened 
by their expressions. I am disappointed in Babaji’s teachings. They are even more 
simplistic than Goenka’s and, moreover, associated with very suspicious power handles. 
I think I will leave the place tomorrow morning. Ninety percent of the women in the ashram 
have shaved the hair off their heads; they   look like Egyptian priestesses. The nine domes 
of the Hairakhan temple continue to impress me, as does the river in which everyone 
bathes twice a day, at 4 a.m. and 6 p.m. March 5. Although his teachings still seem too simple to 
me, Babaji’s presence is that of my own Self, that which is the same for everyone 
and which is found deep within each   one of us. It is indescribable in its sweetness, love and capacity for infinite renewal. It is 
the Ein Sof, the primordial emanation of God. Babaji found it and from there comes its 
great power. Without fondons and his trident full of snakes, the representative 
of death has just announced that all   night long there will be repetition of 
mantras at the fire altar by the river. Tomorrow, March 6, Babaji’s apparition is 
celebrated in the cave guarded by Prem Baba, an old man who discovered 
Babaji and accompanied him   until his death. Mount Kailash looms to the 
left of the cave and Mount Sideshvara to the right. The latter is the mountain of the 
goddess of all sidhis, the psychic powers. In the morning, after a delightful sleep, I 
decided to go to one of the huts nestled in the valley between the streams to drink chai, the 
sweet and bitter Hindu tea. I saw Prem Baba and a group of people walking in the direction of 
Mount Sideshvara. Something told me to follow them. It was the same voice that had brought me 
to Hairakhan and that had prompted me yesterday to get off the truck that was taking me to 
Haldwani to get away from Babaji’s ashram. I ran until I caught up with the group. 
Three women, an Italian Kali follower, a German woman with a beautiful body, and a 
Lithuanian woman were with Prem Baba and an American. I asked them where they were going and 
they told me they would climb the Mount of Powers. The climb was quite an ordeal. We were in the 
Himalayas and after an hour of traversing ravines, raised fields of wheat planted in horizontal 
terraces ripped out of the mountain, we came to some huts where women and girls were 
working. They poured water for Prem Baba and then for the others. Baba took out his pipe, filled 
it with hashish and began to smoke. Everyone participated while I watched. I had decided to 
keep doing Vipassana throughout the climb and smoking marijuana did not affect me at all. Baba 
started chanting and the Italian woman joined in. We continued the climb and another hour passed. 
Every 15 minutes we rested and Baba smoked with everyone else. Suddenly, already very high, a 
rustic construction appeared. Rock walls formed it and on one side was a buried trident. 
Prem Baba explained something in Bindu, which the Italian translated. The 
five of us who had accompanied Baba   had been chosen for an initiation 
ceremony to acquire the sidhis. We each took off our shoes and 
entered the building while Baba   pronounced mantras and slapped us on the back. We continued the climb, especially 
after the ceremony. The summit   looked near. We reached it and another 
construction welcomed us. Also of rocks, but much more elaborate. In its center was 
a place to build a fire and bells hung from   a roller. What looked like swords 
were stuck inside the construction. Baba lit a fire, incense, and then 
handed out candles, two to each of   us. We lit them and were each subjected to 
another ceremony that I cannot describe, but in which our eyebrows were covered 
with ashes and our spines were activated. Again they smoked after a meal of 
cookies, tangerines and spring water. I decided to join them and smoked a puff of the 
herb. I observed its effects and realized that its intensity and characteristics were child’s 
play compared to the effect of meditation. It gave me great pleasure to check it out and to 
know that I had found something so superior. I felt sorry for Prem Baba and the Italian girl. 
They seemed to be in great need of the herb. We started down the mountain. I had 
smoked so little that the effects   soon wore off and I stayed in Vipassana 
as I ran down the mountain on the trails that other hikers had blazed in the past. 
I felt superbly good and full of vitality. We reached the base of the mountain within 
an hour and, at a village of several huts,   we stopped. Prem Baba was greeted like 
an important personage. He was offered tea and yogurt. Then each of us received the same. The owner of the houses sat next to Baba and 
also smoked marijuana from his personal pipe. Calves and dogs, along with some buffaloes, 
accompanied us mooing and barking from their respective places. The sun was setting behind 
the Hairakhan mountains and the ashram could be seen in the distance. I imagined the life of these 
people, carefree and full of hashish ceremonies. I felt a tremendous strength 
at the top of the Sideshvara. Arabian melodies were playing 
on a radio, while the children   of the village looked at us with those big 
eyes, characteristic of Indian children. After lunch, we crossed some 
wheat fields and reached the   valley. I felt calm and watched my emotions. At the ashram I met the American. He was 
feeling very bad. We discussed what had happened and I told him that he 
should not smoke marijuana. He   didn’t need it and it seemed to hurt him. He 
appreciated the advice and agreed with it. I walked down to the creeks to meditate. I sat on 
a sand slope with the nine domes in front of me and began to feel sick. A woman had sat near my 
spot and I had seen her out of the corner of my eye. I stood up and realized that the atmosphere 
smelled of incense. I looked for the woman, but could not find her. I crossed the valley 
and began to climb the steps leading up to   the ashram. Almost arriving at the top, 
I met the same woman. I felt very strange that she was there and, for an instant, 
I thought she was a psychic apparition. I dismissed the idea, although 
now, sitting in the temple writing,   I realize that the woman’s 
presence was truly strange. I feel uneasy. I don’t know if having 
smoked, even a single puff of weed, brought me to a state of unnecessary openness, 
or if Baba’s initiation has the immediate effect of provoking a feeling of inner fire that 
is very difficult to bear. I don’t know, I’ll have to wait and see what 
will happen in the next few days. I have been living with only one change of clothes 
(the one I am wearing) and I have realized that it is possible to survive without possessions. 
I am very glad to know and experience it. March 6. I meditate by a natural pool next to the 
mountain. To my right is the ashram and to my left is Sideshvara, the mountain of powers. I 
feel a decrease in my willpower. I don’t know if it is an effect of what happened yesterday or the 
short time I was able to sleep in the Yarnal room, the devotional work. One thing for sure: there are 
two paths of development, one leading to love and one leading to power. The latter does not interest 
me at all. I saw immense powers with Pachita and I saw the path to love, not her miraculous healing 
work. I saw immense powers in Don Lucro and I could see a spiral of increasing power that took 
hold of him and led him to suffering. I remember exactly the same thing happened with Babaji. 
He died of a heart attack at the age of 32, totally alone and in a condition of terrible 
fear. His followers say that, like Christ, he absorbed the suffering of the whole Universe 
and that led him to death. I believe that he could not find the clamor and instead replaced it 
with powerful energetic management. I see it in myself when I remember how I lived in Mexico 
feeling areas of suffering that I tried to transform through meditation, but that little 
by little led me to a state of great despair. It also seems to me that there is a direct 
feeling of pure existence. When you experience it, you feel that you are in touch with yourself at 
the closest and purest level of selfhood. When one cannot bear to be anywhere else but there, and 
this implies isolating oneself from the world, shutting oneself in a cave, not seeing others, not 
giving love but remaining in that contact but not sharing it, giving it or teaching it, one is in 
grave danger. I know that this individual contact is not private. When it is achieved, something 
happens to the base of the consciousness: it is nourished, enlarged and cared for, there is no 
doubt about that. But that is not enough. It would be better to have this contact in every situation. 
To be with God in the middle of the market, as a Hasid or a Sufi would say. Vipassana would seem to 
be an adequate technique to achieve this as long as it is not limited to one area of experience 
and is accompanied by the state of consciousness described above. It would be something like 
incorporating wholeness while maintaining a base of love, without shying away from contact 
with the world or confrontation with its reality. Today we celebrate Babaji’s appearance in his 
legendary cave. Cave in which Prem Baba lives and in which I was able to meditate, experiencing 
immense power. I hear the bells and drums announcing a ceremony and I don’t know if I should 
leave here or stay one or two more days. All my clothes are in Haldwani and I am afraid that if 
I leave today no one will give them to me and I will be stranded between two impossibilities. For 
the time being, I feel like going back to Goenka, although the fear of doing so has not 
disappeared. I owe him an explanation and   an article for the institute he wants to build 
and for which I was invited to participate. Yesterday evening, stammering, 
Yamal told me how he met Babaji   and the devotion he feels for him to the 
point of considering him God almighty. I was fascinated by his simplicity and his 
ability to love a human being with such intensity and absence of doubt. I wish 
I could have that heart and humility. I asked him about the Italians and their devotion 
to Kali. Yamal told me something that reminded me of Pachita. She said that every being, regardless 
of status, level and color, seeks God. Yamal told me that God-Babaji is neither bad nor good. 
He simply loves all his creation equally. Italians feel that love and acceptance, 
and therefore they are attracted to Babaji. I decided to leave Hairakhan. I began 
to plan how to do it while meditating   by the river. In the distance I could see 
the Sideshvara and, closer, the 9 orange domes. Three people were walking from the domes 
towards the ashram. One of them was Svasteji, one of Babaji’s closest devotees. He looks 
like Gurdjieff with a big white mustache. He was a psychic and a seer. He had told 
me that he would go to South India,   return to Hairakhan and when I turned 42 
I would become a leader of my country. I have a feeling I will return 
as Svasteji predicted, but later,   I thought as I saw him approaching. I am realizing that here, with Babaji, everything 
is woven together in a much more apparent web than anywhere else I have ever known. I mean 
synchronicity is absolute in Hairakhan. After some hesitation, I was finally convinced 
that it was best to leave Hairakhan. I had loved the place and I was grateful to Babaji 
for bringing me back in touch with myself, but I couldn’t stand the Italians’ 
marijuana or their insistence on death. I had learned a lot and will always 
remember the meditations by the river   and the communal work that consisted of 
building borders and dams with rocks, while repeating the mantra “Om Naman Shivaya.” 
I started walking in the direction of Dain Site, breathing the fresh morning air and feeling 
the crystal clear water of the river. On the way out I was accompanied by a very 
special gentleman. We talked about Sufism, Goenka, Laxman Jhu. He knew all of them and 
told me that he looked favorably on my trip to the south. It seemed to me that he was sending 
me a message. I told him that in Mexico I had been told that I would have three teachers. The first 
would teach me to purify my body and mind. Now I know it is Goenka. The second would teach me 
how to handle nature. I know Babaji is part of that teaching. The Sideshvara initiation was in 
that sense. The problem is that, without Babaji, his ashram is in a very strong process of tension 
and change, and I would not want to participate as an innocent observer and not knowing the 
influences that would affect me. I feel that Prem Baba introduced me to power. I don’t know 
why, but I have experienced this feeling of inner fire and total synchronization before. 
It was given to me by Pachita, Don Lucio and the Indians of Nepopualco. Especially the latter 
wanted to introduce me to contact with spiritual entities and initiated me into it. I also remember 
a curandera, Doña Jose, in Ciudad Netzahualcóyotl, who did the same. I was triggered by this 
feeling. I don’t like it, at least I don’t like to be invaded by it. I like to observe it like the 
breath or the landscape, to incorporate it into my consciousness, to reach Unity, because this is 
the path of Unity. I am just understanding it. Babaji taught me this, to observe everything 
by keeping myself in a state of inspiration and love. Now I believe that Sai Baba will 
teach me to handle nature as it is predicted. He will teach me to incorporate 
Prem Baba’s initiation. I am at Dam Site waiting for the truck to take 
me to Haldwani. I bathed in the river after eating a delicious meal. All the food in India 
is delicious, and the Indians are beautiful, but too interested in things and money. A gentleman, 
owner of two mills moved by the river current, is standing next to me asking me about each 
and every one of my belongings. And, in truth, it is difficult to be next to him. I 
have great faith that the third master,   Laxman Jhu, will lead me to be 
real, just as he led Muktananda. I had read that one of Muktananda’s 
teachers was precisely Laxman Jhu. With Goenka I feel that I must 
finish my commitment. Therefore,   I am preparing to go with him, but 
I know it will be for a short time. A cab took me to Haldwani. A dog that in Hairakhan 
followed me everywhere chased the cab for 15 minutes. I felt a great pain and sadness. I was 
leaving a very strange place, full of contrasts and mysteries, and that dog seemed to tell me to 
reconsider, not to leave. Finally he gave up the chase and I felt relieved, although I still 
felt that immense power full of inner fire. At Haldwani, Babaji’s guesthouse received me 
with love. I bathed, washed my clothes and, thinking that I was going to see Goenka, I 
felt repulsion and fear. He had tested me to the extreme of Sideshvara and something 
in me no longer wanted to go on. I thought of Rishikesh and the possibility of 
doing raja yoga, and I calmed down. What I learned in Hairakhan was 
what Yogiji told me when I arrived:   “There is subconsciousness, consciousness 
and supra-consciousness! Babaji was on all three levels simultaneously.” Synchronicity 
does not imply that a human being is God, it simply means that his level of contact with 
reality occurs at the source of events. His mind organizes space and anyone who has a relationship 
with that space will feel a divine consciousness guiding his steps and working miracles. That 
is what Babaji seemed to do. The ability to be in that state depends on the expansion of the 
conscious field to all levels and qualities; it implies a simultaneous access to all realities. 
Compared to Vipassana, there seems to be a more satisfying and profound human condition in which 
contact with the Self is direct, without any effort or technique. That is what Babaji taught 
me, reminding me of what I had almost forgotten. I was told this by a very powerful 
yogi sitting next to me, late in the   temple. He told me that it all depended on 
what I had. His head, completely shaved, gave him an almost terrible appearance. His 
features were very similar to those of the   main artist of the Apocalypse. Contact with 
God is direct. One’s self is the reflection. Magnificent people inhabit Hairakhan. One of 
them is Brami, a Jewish woman with the wisdom of a thousand suns, always remembering God as 
the first cause, always with the magnificence of life. She had spent a month living in 
Babaji’s cave accompanied by Prem Baba. The latter is a character out of a 
novel. Old, totally white bearded,   strong nose and lips, jaw stamped 
in steel. Heavy marijuana smoker, accompanied by his infusion with mantras and 
invocations. Prem Baba was always accompanied by a small trumpet, which he would blow 
whenever he remembered his beloved Babaji. At Hairakhan I also met a very interesting couple. 
He was a former physiology graduate student, which he had decided to leave to go and 
live in India. For the past ten years,   he had lived in this country most 
of the time, as a sadhu, that is, a perennial traveler without any possession 
and maintained by the people of India, for whom the sadhu is a saint whom one 
is obliged to care for and protect. Svasteji, the old Gurdjieff look-alike, with a 
large white moustache and Turkish features. Author of 62 volumes on the Vedas and Babaji. Reader 
of the palms of the hands, purest visionary. Yamal, my roommate, absolute devotee of Babaji, 
beautiful in his innocence as a child. He had decided to join Babaji by abandoning his wife 
to follow him. Was it true that the young man, who appeared in a cave 50 years after the 
disappearance of the old Babaji of Hairakhan, was really the saintly and rejuvenated Babaji, or 
rather, was he a CIA agent? Babaji was said to be hundreds of years old and his body had been 
rejuvenated after disappearing 50 years ago. Prem Baba had found this Babaji in the same 
cave that now served as his living quarters. Where could Yamal consider the alternative of an 
American spy for the young sadhu? I don’t know, but this is what he confessed to me the night he 
told me the story of his relationship with Babaji. It is evening at Babaji’s guesthouse in Haldwani. 
I did hatha yoga on the rooftop, admiring the cultivated fields of this city of ploughmen of 
the earth. With the fiery feeling coming over me, I asked I Ching about the possibility of going 
with Goenka or doing raja and hatha yoga in Rishikesh. Goenka, he replied, implies entering 
public life, from which I am exempted as long as I work hard at developing my consciousness. 
Rishikesh is that work. Goenka is external, while Rishikesh is internal. Goenka is 
the world, while Rishikesh is the inner experience. The caretaker of the guesthouse, an 
extraordinarily attentive young man, suggested I spend the night here before deciding. I listened 
to him and meditated in Babaji’s altar room. Now, in my room, I remember all 
the characters I met at Hairakhan. I left Haldwani at 7 am, after a dream 
in which I recognized the reason for my restlessness in having to decide between 
going to Igatpuri with Goenka or to Rishikesh to do raja yoga. In my dream appeared the first 
laboratory that I directed and that was built according to my specifications at the Anahuac 
University. Five years after it was built, I abandoned it to go study in New 
York. Goenka seemed to represent a   new opportunity to create a laboratory, and 
the possibility of going to Rishikesh, a trip equal to the one to New York. I was reassured 
to recognize the workings of my unconscious. A ricksha took me to the truck station. 
There was a collective cab heading for   Delhi. Going to Delhi meant traveling 
in the direction of Goenka’s ashram. I became restless and decided to take it. After 
all, I had come to India to work with Goenka. The cab refused to offer its services. I went to 
the truck station. One was going to Delhi at 8 a.m., another, a few meters behind, to Rishikesh, 
also at 8 a.m. I was struck by the similarity. I decided to go to Delhi and got on the truck. It 
started and I felt too. Everyone had told me not to go with Goenka, that it was conscience, 
and now I was betraying my own conscience. As I left the station, the truck stopped and 
I decided to get off and get into the other   one heading for Rishikesh. The driver of the 
truck told me that this one, the one I was in, I had taken thinking it was going to Delhi, 
was the one to Rishikesh. I could only laugh. India had decided for me and I could not 
refuse. All my doubts were dispelled. On the way, I meditated. I had discovered that 
Goenka’s technique, together with Babaji’s state of consciousness, produced magnificent 
results. I went through my body bathing   it in the consciousness of the Self and I felt 
better and better. Suddenly, my whole body became a unit and in that instant I understood that the 
surface of my body was an interaction of fields. What Goenka called the surface of the body, 
considering it as the external mind, was the place in space where the neuronal field and the 
quantum field established a coherent interaction. I admired and loved Goenka to the extreme. I 
decided to change my itinerary and, at the next truck stop, I asked for the change to Delhi. 
I tried to get off, but the driver stopped me. I felt I had started a pattern. India 
had already taught me the consequences of altering a newly initiated 
pattern. So I decided to continue. In India, traveling by third-class truck, as I had 
become accustomed to doing, is quite an adventure. People pile on top of each other, people scream, 
children cry, and every intersection with a railroad track means a 25 to 30 minute stop. 
The fields are bathed in bright sunshine. The villages have their cupular temples surrounded by 
yellow flowers that abound at this time of year. With two hours to go, the truck stopped and I 
took the opportunity to write this. I have been feeling the effects of Prem Baba’s initiation 
as an opening to the fields of others. This was already happening to me in Mexico and I 
never liked it. Vipassana, on the contrary, would seem to have a certain kind of protection. 
The body is kept clean and the path that the consciousness takes through its structure protects 
it from external influences foreign to its ideal state of functioning. Presumably Vipassana also 
leads to the experience of the state of others, but surely without pain. Every time 
I think about it and see its results, I like Vipassana more and more. Something 
happened with the truck engine. People are waiting for it to be fixed, but there 
is an atmosphere of growing restlessness. Buffaloes pulling carts full of cane 
crops cross the road along with bicycles,   three-wheelers and trucks. The 
latter honk their horns continuously, announcing their approach in an exaggerated 
manner, perhaps because the Hindu is always floating in the midst of his innocent 
and uninhibited childlike sensations. After the truck ride, I arrived in Rishikesh. 
I found the city extraordinarily inspiring, but the hotel felt very bad. I am getting used to 
the simplicity and innocence of the Hindu people, and a hotel for tourists upsets all my processes. I remembered, during the trip, a very strange 
scene from Hairakhan. In the middle of the songs, a gentleman of Swiss origin, with 
big mustaches, appeared dressed in a   striped suit of all colors and a silver and 
gold crown, and began to dance. His dance, calm but sinuous, impressed me. I asked and 
was told that Babaji had given him such a job and called him the Joker of Hairakhan. 
Each member of the ashram was a totally   individualized character. Babaji did not 
have a single, standardized formula for everyone. Everyone got what was due to him 
and no one else. Goenka, on the contrary, is totally fixed and unchanging. His technique 
is precise, clear, standardized and rigid. In Mexico, before coming to India, I had been 
given a message. I would go, the oracle said, to work on what the father and mother had 
spoiled. I believe that the recovery of   my being in Hairakhan was related to 
the rescue of my father. My mother I will rescue when I feel that there is no 
difference between playing and working. When I first visited Rishikesh, a raja and 
hatha yoga ashram built on a mountain beside the Ganges caught my attention. I visited 
and was invited to stay. I decided to do so after Hairakhan. Now I am here, receiving 
yoga lessons from Patanjali. The admirable sage of antiquity always amazed me when 
I first studied him through his sutras. I feel that this ashram is a familiar place. Here 
we do talk about higher dimensions and work with chakric levels, activating them to reach the 
interaction with God, the Self or Purusha. I am glad to be here, but I still feel 
guilty with Goenka. At the ashram I met an Israeli couple who want to take a 
Vipassana course. They asked my opinion and I couldn’t tell them anything. Just 
that they should try it for themselves. They told me about Israel, about the tension in 
its atmosphere, but also about its mysticism and kabbalah, and I felt that I was talking to people 
very close to me. They promised to give me the addresses of the Hasidic and Kabbalistic centers 
in Israel. I love the idea of visiting them. People start talking about Goenka 
as a Buddha, and maybe he is,   but for me he represents the greatest fear 
in the world because of his absence of God. March 10. I met Shri 108 Brabmarshi Swami Yogeshwaranand 
Sarswati ji Maharaj. He conveyed to me a sense of order, peace and contact with the 
Self very similar to that of Shri Shri   1008 Shri Bhagwan Herakhan Wale Baba, 
i.e. Babaji. The names are impressive, and the number 108 for one and 1008 for the other 
indicate an esoteric resemblance that I am unable to clarify. The fact that their energies are 
so similar and close to what I have experienced as a Being fills me with confidence and joy. 
It is a confirmation of a path and its goal, and an assurance of the existence of a 
clear, deep and very high point of reference. I live in Rishikesh, in Maharaji’s ashram. The 
atmosphere is clean and free. At six o’clock in the morning I meditate, then do hatha yoga, 
and the process is repeated in the evening. At noon I go to bathe in the Ganges and meditate, 
listening to the birds as they cool themselves in the water. In front of me, on the other bank, 
a multitude of ashrams with wide steps leading down to the river receive pilgrims from all over 
India. Chants, mantras, bells are heard and the whole atmosphere of Rishikesh is enriched with 
spiritual vibration and collective meditation, which here, as perhaps nowhere else in the 
world, has so much attraction and beauty. Today I visited the Sivananda ashram and 
was reintroduced to Swami Krishnananda’s morning talk. I asked him about the goal of 
Buddhism and he replied that it aspires and leads to total liberation and immortality. 
Obviously, I was referring to Goenka. I still have many doubts about whether or 
not to rejoin his group and structure. In the evening yoga class, a mosquito 
bit me on the right side of my neck and,   in the next posture, I hurt that part of my body. I felt it was a signal to return to Goenka. The 
reasons for the connection are too complicated to verbalize. I say this because my relationship 
with the animals is becoming a very complicated psychic exchange full of meanings. Two days 
ago, in meditation, a train of thought led me to visualize a dog barking, and a dog 
started barking ten seconds after the image. Since I have so much trouble making decisions,   after the sprained neck and mosquito bites, 
I decided to consult the psychic pendulum and the I Ching. Both agreed that it was time 
to go back. However, I am still hesitant. The swami of this ashram gave a wonderful 
explanation about meditation practice. He spoke of the supraconscious state and the need for 
mental purification to achieve it. Purification is achieved by meditating and letting unconscious 
contents come to the surface of consciousness. The method is very similar to Goenka’s, 
but without the emphasis on the need to   maintain constant observation of bodily 
sensations. In fact, it is more Zen-like. Patanjali, the author and originator of yoga, is 
the legendary authority in this raja yoga ashram, and Maharaji is the central figure. 
Photographs of the latter present   him as a personage of great power and 
authority. In person, he exudes that power, but softens it with affection and 
humor. He is natural and unassuming. I really enjoyed meeting him, especially because 
it was totally unexpected. From seeing him so much in photographs, I had thought he had already 
passed away. And suddenly, as I climbed the stairs next to the meditation hall, I found him 
with his disciples, talking to them from a bed on which he was resting on the roof of the meditation 
building. The cool wind and birdsong framed that picture of light and serenity. His disciples 
and I simply stood in silence, admiring the beauty of that singular scene, though repeated 
thousands of times throughout human history. I was invited to sit down and I felt 
that something took my problems,   doubts and concerns and cleansed me of those 
worries. I had no doubt it was him and marveled at the wonder. Again I remembered myself with the 
capacity to Be and was saddened to have lost it. Today I visited my friend Swami 
Burdimman of the Sivananda ashram.   I found him asleep in his bunk and 
he inspired me with tenderness, but at the same time pity. He told me 
about his years with Sivananda and the   things he taught him. My feeling of pity 
was heightened because I felt that somehow, after so many years of discipline, this swami 
had become stuck somewhere in his development. He told me that gurus often cannot solve a problem 
and send their disciples to solve it with other teachers. I felt that I had come to Maharaji’s 
ashram to solve a problem left by my mother, who, when she became ill, subjected me to the 
condition of taking care of her for three years, with a complete sacrifice of my childish 
games and my ability to enjoy life. From that time on, life was divided into work 
and play, and when someone forced me to do some work under pressure, I immediately rebelled or 
lost myself in unbearable anguish and tried to find some terrible disease for the one causing 
the pressure. My mother had cancer of the brain, for which she underwent surgery, living three 
years in an unbearably painful situation. When I lived through the experience 
of being forced to stay by her side,   I never imagined that the situation would undergo 
a transference that would haunt me even in India, 24 years later. Goenka had placed herself 
in my mother’s position, transferring to me the obligation to stay for three weeks 
meditating twelve hours a day. Therefore, Goenka must have been ill and I had no choice 
but to seek out and identify his illness. When I lay in my bed at night, 
after taking care of my mother,   I created a fantasy about her death in which I 
appeared as her murderer. It was a Greek tragedy, complete with amphitheater. Now I had also 
had the fantasy that Goenka would die, relieving me of the need to return to her side 
to do research in Vipassana. Because of all this, I was hesitant to return to Goenka, but at 
the same time it appealed to me because it meant the possibility of resolving 
that trauma of my early adolescence. Maharaji’s ashram was the ideal place, the 
antecedent of resolution because of his restful work, so close to play, that the dichotomy began 
to disappear in a climate of inner satisfaction. The strange thing was that, as I 
came to feel that satisfaction,   the desire to go with Goenka would appear, and 
the pendulum and the I Ching would agree with the impulse. It had happened to me before that, upon 
encountering a situation of happiness or pleasure, I would end it at the very instant the 
sensation began to bloom. I had come to think that I was punishing myself, although 
I was also ingratiating myself by noticing that my behavior revealed an impulse to 
develop and a desire not to stagnate. I had also recently understood that not 
accepting a pleasurable situation as the end of the road was a sign of a discipline of 
liberation and non-dependence on the sensorially transient and temporary. Something similar was 
happening to me now. The moment this ashram began to acquire a beauty and to give me peace and 
tranquility, my desire to leave it appeared. It is evening and I have just 
returned from the Sivananda ashram,   where I heard Swami Krishnananda’s Sunday 
talk. It was raining as the old man spoke about our obligation to the Universe. 
Seven swamis in orange robes and patient shaven heads were sitting in front of him, 
and next to me another monk seemed to be   in great pain, judging by the 
facial expressions he was making. I noticed a dark atmosphere despite the 
illumination of the meditation hall, with the statue of Sivananda at one end 
of it, his tomb and the dozens of famous   phrases dictated by the author of more than 300 
books. There was something dark floating in the atmosphere and the monk’s grimaces corresponded 
to the oscillations of “that” which can only be felt when one abandons the concrete sensory 
and enters the field of subtle energies. Krishnananda’s speech only heightened the 
sensation, while the whole of Rishikesh   shook with lightning and thunder. After 
he spoke, the ashram’s Hindu music group played a melody and I began to do Vipassana, 
trying to relieve the tension. Suddenly, I understood that my only alternative was inner 
freedom, that I could not submit to anyone’s will, be it Goenka or Metatron, that my salvation 
was myself and that I owed nothing to anyone. Even meditation as a technique belonged to me. I 
had been doing Vipassana unknowingly for years, but in reverse to Goenka. Whenever I felt 
a tense environment or a painful feeling, I tried to resolve it on the subtle plane before 
the energy invaded my body. I considered the bodily sensation produced by a subtle 
energetic change of the quantum field as the loss of a battle, as a 
failure in the purification process. Goenka, on the other hand, stimulated bodily 
sensations as a means of establishing a contact with the mind because, according to his 
teachings, a direct contact with the mind is not possible. In reality, the impossibility 
is his and certainly that of many other people, but it cannot and should not be considered 
universal. I understood the reason for my   doubts about Goenka and decided 
to become independent of him, whatever it took. I was not going to let him use 
me, nor was I going to allow myself to submit to a situation of contact with an absurd 
emptiness through a bodily intermediary. “The connection to God is direct,” I told myself,   and I was very relieved to respect my 
beliefs and my level of development. “No more doubts about myself!”, I 
repeated to myself over and over again. For the first time in months, I felt 
whole and not torn by the need to make   a decision between two alternatives. I had 
come to myself again, and I would not allow anything or anyone to affect me by cowardly 
striking me in my contact with my essence. March 13. I am still in Rishikesh and my capacity for 
wonder has returned. It turns out that Maharaji, who looks like a man of no more than 65, is 98. 
His mind is clear and his face has no wrinkles, his hands and legs are those of a teenager, 
and his continuous smiling makes him look like an optimistic and still young human 
being. But he is almost a century old! Baba Muktananda was his pupil and he has surely met 
the great Indian saints of the present century. In the afternoons, from 4 to 5 pm, you can 
visit him in his house located above the meditation hall. In his presence, 
the wind smells of incense and one   could almost say that it passes 
through him without touching him, such is his transparency! Today I asked him 
about the Self, whether or not it is individual, and he replied in Hindi (which someone 
translated into English) that the Self   is like space. It never changes and is found 
day and night with the same presence and state. I also asked him about meditation without object 
of concentration, without mantra, without body, and he answered me that, being the Self without 
form and without concrete attributes, the best and most direct way to learn to experience it 
was precisely that: meditation without object. Swami Muktananda Saraswati, his favorite 
student and the director of this ashram, is a person of admirable seriousness and 
modesty. He lent me an article written by him where he describes something I have always 
wanted to understand: the patterns of the Self, the total synchronicity coming from 
an unconscious but real repertoire. Muktananda calls it chitta (the fundamental 
or essential substance of the psyche), following the tradition of Pantajali; in 
his article he describes its attributes as independent of the mind, but 
with a total influence on the ego,   to whom it presents messages during dreams and 
directs in synchronistic events. Obviously, this is what I expected from India: a 
profound knowledge of the mind and the Self. I don’t know why I am so amazed to 
have found it here (I find that I   easily lose faith and don’t appreciate what 
is presented to me). To have, for example, the opportunity to speak with a being like 
Maharaji is a blessing that no one can evaluate. I am visiting the library of the Sivananda ashram 
daily. The place is like a sacred temple. Images of Sivananda, Ramana Maharshi, Ramakrishna and 
other saints hang from columns surrounding a marble courtyard in which central inlays form 
a flower that spreads in all directions. The rarest collections of works on mystics, religion, 
yoga, Hinduism, etc., are in this blessed library. I descend the steps of Maharaji’s ashram 
and walk along the Ganges until I reach the residence of the Divine Life Society, 
Sivananda’s ashram. An even longer and steeper staircase than my ashram leads me to 
the library and Sivananda’s meditation hall, always smelling of fresh incense. After 
reading Aurobindo, I enter the meditation hall and approach Sivananda’s tomb, where the 
energy is absolutely self-centered, flourishing, optimistic, divine. I stay there for a few 
minutes and then go for a swim in the Ganges. Every day, hundreds of pilgrims come 
to Rishikesh. Special boats take them   to the other side of the river, where 
most of the ashrams are. I see them when they go and when they return, 
and the difference is remarkable:   from worried or excited or hurried faces on 
the way there, to relaxed bodies, smiling and faith-filled eyes on the way back. They make 
me love India and its concern for the spirit. Dozens of horse-drawn carts await the pilgrims,   and sometimes the horses are parked side by side 
as if repeating the same animal-like figure. I love this place that makes me feel so at 
home. I love the sadhus in orange robes,   long beards and intense gaze, inspired 
by the adventure of life and the cp. I love the Himalayas and the Ganges 
winding through its hills and mountains,   ringing a thousand bells and casting aromas of 
deep moisture, nest of birds and fish, treasure of India. I understand why pilgrims approach the 
river reverently, take the liquid in their hands and bathe their heads and shoulders with it. 
They drink it as if their fatigued body could   be transformed into a sparkling waterfall and the 
sound of a bubbling river among rocks and rapids. I understand how a 98 year old man, like Maharaji,   can stay young in this sacred mountain 
air and energizing atmosphere. I finished an article for Goenka, and Muktananda 
seemed to guess it, because he had someone deliver his article to me when I was already free from 
mine. He reminds me a lot of Mauricio Rusek, an excellent physiologist, always restless and 
curious, permanently invaded by new cognitions. This swami, with gigantic glasses, totally 
white hair and strong body, coated in orange, also looks like a physiologist, but of the spirit, 
of the mind, of the ego, of chitta and yoga. March 16. At 4 p.m. I attended Maharaji’s meeting. He 
looked radiant, and his energy was focused and joyful. I was feeling good too. I had spoken to 
“mother,” a 75-year-old old lady, also a swami, who had given me advice and encouraged me to 
visit Jerusalem and revere my Jewish roots. Maharaji asked if any of the darshan (meeting) 
attendees knew Israel. Obviously, I considered his question synchronistic. Minutes earlier, 
the mother had reminded me of the country in the Bible, and now Maharaji was doing the same. 
When someone told him that I had lived in Israel, the yogi’s eyes brightened even more. He 
seemed to be playing with a new discovery, a magnificent cognition, and now he saw 
an opportunity to satisfy his curiosity. He sat down on the couch that served as his 
seat, and his attitude of awakened curiosity and excitement delighted me. I was already 
complaining about my age and the change in motivation from my younger years, and here was a 
centenarian as excited and aware as a teenager. Maharaji asked a question in Hindi that was 
translated for me: Where was Mohammed born? Was it near where Christ was born? Is Jerusalem 
near Mecca? I nodded to the questions. Mohamed and Christ were born near each other, 
and I guessed that Maharaji’s cognition   related to the power of certain planetary 
centers to activate the birth of avatars. Maharaji seemed exhilarated by the 
confirmations of his assumptions. I, in turn, asked him if he would be willing 
to meditate with me. He laughed and said that surely what I wanted was an injection of 
knowledge, and that I had better go to Srinagar, to the meditation camp he and his people 
were planning to hold. I was saddened. It would have been great to intertwine our 
minds in a private meditation session. Swami Muktananda, accompanied by an elderly 
engineer whom the ashram had invited to design a temple, came over later. They spoke in 
Hindi, but their laughter and joy infected me, and I felt I was witnessing a scene from any 
era, where a gathering of highly evolved human beings shared their joy of life. Only 
one sentence was spoken in English: “Liberation is a state of mind, not a place in 
space.” The ashram stove is a burning log inside a hole covered by a thin metal plate. Chapati, 
Indian tortillas much like Mexican tortillas, are cooked there. A squatting man prepares 
the dough and places it on the griddle,   while another man turns the tortillas 
at almost isochronous intervals. We students sit outside the kitchen, in a long, 
narrow hallway, adopting yoga postures. Some meditate before eating, others run their hands 
over the food as if to energize it. I got into the habit in Hairakhan of passing food between 
my eyebrows as a sign of belonging to God. An Italian girl taught me this. She would first 
touch the earth and then the space between   the eyebrows. She said she asked permission 
from the mother and then from the father. I am so fascinated by fire that I try to 
sit in front of the kitchen door to watch   the flames. Today, as I watched them, I decided 
that they defy gravity in their crazy motion and soaring synergy. They could, instead of heading 
vertically upward, travel downward or sideways, but no: they always soar in the opposite 
direction to the gravitational pull. If a human body could imbibe a vibration similar 
to that of fire, it could fly. In fact, Patañjali, in one of his sutras, speaks of 
the technique of flying and mentions the aspirant’s need to identify with space, to 
become space, so as to walk in the heavens. The ashram is full of flowers, and the 
raja yoga practiced by Maharaji and his disciples has trained them in a path 
of continuous internal investigation, free of structures. I say this because no 
one here is concerned with regulations, except the most indispensable ones. Rather, the 
emphasis is on being as authentic as possible. It is not that there is an awareness of the 
need to be authentic, but that one simply is. Thus, Maharaji, in the middle of an interview, 
can pick up a newspaper and start reading if he wishes, or simply lie down on his couch and 
close his eyes without worrying about poses, interviewers or schedules. Muktananda, in the 
evening meditation sessions, manifests the same nonchalance with regard to formalities, although 
during the meditation hour no one moves an inch. Raja yoga is not a single, fixed 
technique. I realize more and more   that it is a whole system with hundreds 
of forms, modifications and additions, and that one experiments according to one’s needs. 
So Maharaji every day makes different comments about how to activate one chakra or another, and 
always refers to different and new techniques. Muktananda fixes his gaze on each of the students 
at the beginning of the meditation session. When he does this with me, my experience is that of a 
tunnel through which our energy passes. When the tunnel disappears and the swami fixes his gaze 
on another student, the floor of the meditation hall oscillates, before my astonished 
eyes, as if it were made of a gelatinous substance. I cannot yet explain 
the reason for this phenomenon,   although it is definitely related to 
the visual fixation with Muktananda. Goats, monkeys, donkeys, cats, cows, sheep,   elephants… All animals are friendly 
in India. And no wonder: they are loved, pampered and nobody dares to kill them. 
I have seen sadhus who live on alms get   rid of a potato and a carrot that someone gives 
them to give to a cow in the middle of the road. It is night at the ashram and the 
nearly full moon is reflected in the   waters of the Ganges. The ashram’s 
symmetrical buildings and manicured gardens surround the meditation hall-Maharaji’s 
residence-situated on the roof of the ashram. I am engaged in playing a wooden 
baroque flute with incantation tones,   savoring the coolness of the atmosphere 
and wondering if, at last, I am going to stay here or continue my quest. I am interested in 
meeting Kirpal Singh and his sound yoga technique, Surat Shabd Yoga. I would also be interested 
in meeting another teacher of Baba Muktananda, Laxman Jhu, in Kashmir, and I would 
like to greet Sai Baba in South India. March 17. “Work on what has been spoiled,” 
I Ching replied when I asked if I should go back to Goenka. “He does 
not serve kings or princes. His goals   are higher,” said the last line of 
the hexagram, and I was satisfied. The very intensive yoga at the ashram is giving 
me back pains, and the lack of protein has me in a state of permanent hunger that is not calmed 
by anything. Every time I practice Vipassana it is as if I open a river of memories from 
the very distant past. The mixture of hunger, pains and memories have me in a deplorable 
state. To top it all off, today is a national event and leaving the ashram means being 
subjected to the throwing of colored water, chasing and playing games with the 
children and youth of Rishikesh. I miss my Estusha, I feel her distant, subjected 
to strange influences, and I can’t stand it. Anyway, I am a total mess. I am amazed at 
my contrast to the previous day. I am able to go from peace and clarity to confusion in a few 
hours. Could it be because my ascendant is Gemini? I met the work of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. 
He resembles Ramana Maharshi in his emphasis on the I, the self, the Self. But in this, 
Vipassana seems to me an ideal combination: to observe everything, to be the transcendent 
witness but in the Self, knowing that God is what one is, that behind all appearance is the 
eternal, the Observer. The witness of every act, of every sensation, of every state of 
mind, of thought, of feeling. The unique, indivisible witness, totally united to itself in 
love and Being, in contact with the essence of the self. Vipassana and Self, thus united, form 
a beautiful, sublime, magnificent combination. Today is Sunday, I knew this because when I 
went to meditate at six o’clock in the morning, I found the meditation hall closed. I 
meditated in the garden, remembering   Sri Nisargadatta and his emphasis 
on the I Am as the ultimate reality. At lunch I continued to observe. A little old 
sadhu with a white beard and big whiskers, brown as India and serene in his old age, sat 
at one end of the corridor where we were all eating. I watched my movements, the taste of 
the food, my reactions as I brought a morsel to my mouth, my swallowing, my stomach sensations, 
the thoughts that crossed my mind during the act, the beauty of a child, the majesty of the old 
sadhu. I also observed a French woman sitting to my left, pure sensuality. My emotion at the 
thought of her body, all seen from the witness, observing everything, but knowing that 
the Self exists. Not only becoming,   but both: Being and becoming, becoming and Being. As I bathed in the Ganges, I thought of Estusha. 
She had taught me to distinguish the drops of water as pearly diamonds illuminated by 
the sun in their play with the precious   liquid. I imitated her, taking some water 
in my palms and throwing it into the air. A sadhu approached me. He lived in a nearby cave 
and invited me to visit his house. Dug into the rock and lined with a layer of cement, it seemed 
too small to house an adult; however, he told me, sometimes as many as three companions 
would come to sleep with him. His body was   slender and his beautiful beard filled his 
chest, proud of his libertarian condition. “In summer I live here,” he continued 
to tell me, “but in winter I go south, because Rishikesh is filled with a 
freezing wind that paralyzes the chest.” “I haven’t eaten today,” he told me shortly, 
“but I don’t care. The temporary is unreal, including the body. Near here there are 
some waterfalls in which one can bathe,   it is delightful to plunge into them.” I offered him the two rupees I had brought, but 
he refused to accept them. At last he took them, but with a gesture of contempt he threw 
them on the floor of his stony abode.   “Money is the most unreal thing,” 
he said after his august gesture. I took my leave feeling envious and 
thinking of all my dependencies and   possessions. I thought I could live as a sadhu, but, since I do not, I cannot say that 
I could. I rather think I could not. I met a Spanish boy who had 
just arrived in Rishikesh.   He liked to dress in orange and was 
extraordinarily naive and innocent. The Himalayas were surrounded by a milky white 
light. It was not known whether it was caused by windblown sand, dust, or simply a mist from the 
evaporation of the waters of the Ganges. “It looks like a vision from a dream,” the Spaniard told me. 
We both commented that we felt immense fatigue, perhaps caused by that same mist. “You can 
hardly breathe, ¡recontra!” my friend continued, “not even in Delhi, where I went without 
food for four days, did I feel this humid.   That’s why the people here look so peaceful and 
spiritual. I laughed and said goodbye to him. Certainly something huge. I walked past the 
meditation hall, laughing in the company of some visitors. I decided to meditate in 
the garden facing the Ganges and with   the shrine hall at my back. I rediscovered Zen 
meditation. With eyes closed and without object, just being there. With Maura I had 
discussed the value of Zen and we   had come to the conclusion that it is the 
queen of meditations, the most natural, the deepest, the one that leads to contact 
with oneself. When I finished meditating, I felt reborn and optimistic. I ran to my room 
and wrote to Goenka telling her that the Self gives the state and the Self blackens with the 
becoming. The letter meant a clear farewell. At the end I thanked her for her interest and for 
teaching me to observe. I lay down and scoured my mind for objections to the letter. I felt a bit 
of dread. I had just ended the possibility of building a research laboratory in India with 
all that that could entail: travel, money, interesting people, high-level work, publications, 
but at the same time, loss of myself. I consulted Ching and he told me the same thing 
I had thought. Goenka was the key representative, the one who was building a new society, 
but my relationship with him would end up   in a prison strange to me and 
located in unknown countries. I decided to meditate again. I went to the   mountain and tried unsuccessfully. 
I could not concentrate on anything. I thought that before everything was 
very clear and now it had become too   complex. It was a matter of being on a 
transcendent level, without judgment, considering anything as worthy and 
representative of the totality of the Universe. During dinner, Swami Mukitananda invited me 
and Miguel, the other Mexican in the ashram, to prepare a Mexican meal. We agreed 
amidst joyful comments and healthy sincerity. I loved the naturalness of the 
locals. Nothing compared to the seriousness and stiffness of Goenka’s disciples. I was 
glad I had written the farewell letter. It told me to go to the Sivananda ashram to 
hear Swami Krishnananda’s discourse. I had already listened to him on two occasions. The 
first time, when I first arrived in Rishikesh, I found him talking about evolution and the 
possible real existence of beings more evolved than humans. The second time he spoke about human 
duties. On this third occasion, the subject was meditation and its modes. Krishnananda stated that 
since every object contains the whole universe in itself and is in contact with the rest, forming 
a unity, then anything can be the object of meditation. I thought that was true, but the 
best was the Self as the motive for meditation. The meeting hall of the Sivananda 
ashram was packed. Krishnananda,   totally bald and surrounded by his orange robes, was speaking in front of a dozen beings 
like him, shaven and orange-clad swamis, and all the rest of us, some Westerners and some 
Hindus, were listening to him with great interest. I seemed to be aboard a flying saucer 
listening to the captain of the ship,   a majestically intense, present and fierce 
extraterrestrial being. Every sentence was of total reality and firmness. Something 
in Krishnananda materialized his speech. His most remarkable characteristic 
was the reality of his concepts. At the end, the ashram’s music master 
sang and we all accompanied him in chorus, followed by a ceremony of mantric 
recitation and fire handling. It reminded me of the monastery in Cuernavaca. I 
had lived there for a few months, learning yoga and the handling of quartz crystals to strengthen 
meditation. I remembered the ceremonies almost identical to those here, but with the addition 
of quartz crystal handling. I still had mine; it had proven to be an amplifier of consciousness 
and a tool to help one stay centered. A giant moon lit my way back to the ashram. 
I felt I loved India. The Ganges below, to my left, reflected the light of 
the ashrams on the shore and the moon,   while the outlines of the Himalayas appeared 
as if silhouetted against a dark gray sky. I felt at home and a crystalline joy filled me. 
I thanked God for restoring me to my condition of freedom and for the dependence Goenka exercised 
on me. “She is a reflection of my father,” I said to myself as I reached my room. I remembered 
my priority anxiety and my inability to cope with it. Several scenes flashed in my mind. In 
all of them, my father was subtly threatening me and I was not standing up to him. He humiliated 
me. The last time he threatened me with revenge. The apartment in which I lived and 
which belonged to the family, I,   instead of giving him the keys right then 
and there and ending the manipulation game, submitted to his threats. He had raised 
his voice during the meal and that was   his fight. I lamented my cowardice and tried 
to justify it as respect, but I could not. My daughter, 13, spoke to me as an equal, 
and I, 38, did not dare to do the same with my father. Goenka was, then, the perfect 
substitute and my farewell was, perhaps, a response of courage to myself and 
my own pacie. The price, however,   was terrible. Of course, the technique centered 
on bodily sensations was suffocating because of its limitation and concreteness, but 
that could have been tried to be modified. Now it was too late. I was simultaneously happy 
and worried. Finally, a delicious sleep came over me and I lay down to sleep, remembering that I 
was in India and in Rishikesh, the city of saints. After ten minutes I woke up with a start. 
Krishnananda had spoken in his sermon exactly what I was concerned about, the necessity or absence of 
using objects as the subject of meditations and, if so, which objects. His answer was 
that since the whole Universe is a unity and any object is intimately linked with the 
rest, then any object is worthy to become the subject of meditation. I think I said this 
before, but I don’t mind repeating that, while this is true, the best subject is the Self. 
Maharaj had also considered it so. He had told me that concentration on objects, witnessing 
or observing them did not lead to knowledge. If objects are related, all the more so are 
Minds, and this sermon proves it, I thought with admiration. Something in me was recovering 
and I was entering again into knowledge. Krishnananda had detected my preoccupation 
with meditating with or without objects, or I had detected his preoccupation, or 
the preoccupation was in the atmosphere, I don’t know. The fact is that the synchronicity 
was clear in his case and I liked it very much. March 19. I woke up feeling reborn and in less than 
ten seconds I started missing Estusha and feeling guilty with Goenka. Damn! I thought in 
amazement, I can never keep well and besides, my stomach hurts, I like Nicolle’s 
body and I’m wasting my time in India. I headed to the meditation hall. Nicolle invited me to bathe in the Ganges 
with her. Scorpio, Sagittarius ascendant, sensual thighs. The Sagittarius ascendant 
always possesses sensual thighs. It is fascinating the relationship of astrology to 
body shape. I sat down to meditate after the bath and regained contact with myself, direct, 
without bodily intermediaries, without Goenkas, Buddhas or Maharajis, “babajis”. I was very happy. In the afternoon I talked with Manaraji. According 
to him, the ego is never lost and neither are the impressions of yesterday, the impulses 
of the past, the sanskaras. I asked him if the body stores them and he replied that 
two bodily centers are the seat of memory: the heart and the brain. The Self is 
related to the body and the body is   the way to the Self. It is not a model of 
the Self, it is only closely related to it. After darshan I went to the city. I was in a bad 
mood and the hustle and bustle of India only added to it. This is a very noisy country. Bicycles 
with loaded men, trucks, cows, carts with horses, all honking horns, bells, shouting. I stayed in 
the middle and felt reborn, strong, masculine. I thought that the path must be dictated by 
my inner self. Hopefully I will find it. March 22. I dreamt that I was in Mexico and I was 
getting ready to go to India. I was hurrying, arranging my papers and suddenly I realized that I 
had only one copy of my birth certificate. Rather, the last copy had been left in a bureaucratic 
office. I would get desperate and finally go to the office to ask for a receipt. They spelled 
it wrong and my time was getting shorter. It was minutes before the plane was due to leave. I 
had left Estusha with a friend and I felt guilty. I woke up remembering Freud and Patanjali and 
their insistence on using dreams as a means of self-knowledge. In this case, the interpretation 
was simple: I was nationless, I wanted to leave my adopted homeland, and the only thing holding 
me back was a red tape. I was abandoning Estusha. In the morning I decided to go to 
the Ganges to meditate and bathe. I   had seen a bank on the other side of the 
ashram that promised silence and peace. I took the boat and again felt the delight of 
traveling on the Ganges. I hesitate to describe it, it is a mixture of freedom, peace colored by 
a thrill of inspiration. I walked along the dunes, skipping stones and admiring the Himalayas 
and the movement of the Ganges, placid,   almost undisturbed, fresh and totally green. I found a beach with a small slope 
that served as a seat for meditation.   I had obtained the commentaries to the 
Patanjali sutras, written by Taimni, and a book by Hanion about the fourth dimension. 
The meditation session with Maharaji at the ashram across the river started at 4 o’clock and it was 
11 o’clock. I had five hours to explore: total solitude and the most spiritually paradisiacal 
surroundings. Rishikesh, the city of saints, stared at me to my left; dozens of ashrams 
radiated their precious energy in the atmosphere, the Ganges cooled the atmosphere and the 
sun fell on the fine sand that supported me. I sat in lotus position and decided to start 
with a Zen session. I looked in front of me and concentrated on my breathing and the here and 
now. Small waves, almost millimeter-sized, were forming in front of me. They washed over the sand, 
leaving a pattern that could very well represent the brain structure, rigid like the beach; 
and the other, ductile, mobile, transparent. I remembered Samyana’s technique and his 
insistence on the maintenance of attention and the dissolution of the self within the object of 
observation. I imposed myself to apply it to the water-beach interaction. The waves kept forming 
relentlessly and at almost isochronous intervals. Sometimes they seemed to end up in the same place, 
but closer observation showed slight changes of orientation. The water suddenly became a bright 
line at the exact point of crest formation. The transparency disappeared at the climax of the 
interface, just as it probably did between the neural field and space. At a certain moment 
of their interaction, the transparency of both had to be undone to give place to a geometrical 
structure, probably energetic, of the observable. Looking, the bright lines were the reflection 
of the sun. Neither water nor sand could   produce them. It was an external energy, all 
thinking to achieve the adamantine reflection. I thought of an analogy. The living brain 
produced a neural field resulting from all the interactions between nerve cells and then 
hypersubtle energetic irradiation that penetrated space. Space itself was unthinkable, but it 
existed, omnipresent and all-encompassing; there was also an energetic structure, the quantum 
field, which penetrated it in all its possible dimensions. The interaction between the quantum 
field and the neuronal field occurred with an optimal and congruent formula at certain levels 
that determined the appearance of geometries. The adamantine line between the Ganges and 
the sand could be considered as a model of the zones of congruence of interaction between the 
neural and quantum fields. For this interaction to excel in its optimal zones, a sun similar to the 
one illuminating the Ganges was necessary. But what is that? I continued to observe. I was 
the one watching; from a supernatural self, monstrously unthinkable for the tiny 
wave, for the sand and for the sun itself. The sun was another energetic structure, 
the same one that activated the interaction between the neuronal and quantum fields. 
Nothing else needed to be invented, it was there, all pervasive, common from the 
unconscious bright line to my perception of it. Therefore, the sun and its energy, plus the two 
fields, could be represented with the model I perceived. However, this was too simple. It 
was necessary to think of a subjective sun, an inner light similar to the outer 
one in its power of illumination,   and that perhaps was the 
Pure Self, the very essence. The small waves broke and began to modify 
the structure of the sand. A faint,   but clear verification had formed, and there 
the little waves broke more frequently. A memory had formed in the structure, equal to 
that which could be formed by the sustained   use of certain brain circuits, and which could 
“determine more probable zones of activation in the interaction between neuronal and quantum 
field. My attention had been strengthened, I would not know what to do 
with Samyana on some waves,   but the mind could store so much knowledge. 
I loved the place and congratulated myself for doing what I was doing: the sun, the 
sand, the icy water, the cool breeze, India. When a small wave broke, it not only 
affirmed the structure of the sandy slope, but also changed the surface of the 
liquid and its depth. The slope,   in interaction with the water, created 
ripples of astonishing complexity in the liquid. These radiated from the point of 
contact and advanced in all directions. Of course! I exclaimed enthusiastically, the 
interaction between neural and quantum fields affects both fields. Therefore, on the one hand 
one can perceive, but also on the other hand, the perceived is affected and, if a subject 
were to place himself within reach of the   alteration produced by my field, it 
would also affect his experience. Again, I saw myself observing. Everything 
happening at my feet was being observed by myself, and I was the one transforming 
the wave and the slope and the   energy of the sun and the concentric 
waves on the surface of the Ganges, all into the image I saw. Could I 
find a model of myself out there? I thought of my hypothesis of the Central 
Processor, a hypothetical homunculus, a colossal structure of transformation of any energetic 
structure into sensory quality. The central processor was in charge of focusing an aspect 
of the interaction of fields and transforming it into light, color, living image with a specific 
quality. I was the central processor of the waves? who was the central processor of my consciousness? 
I could see myself seeing, I could observe my mind at any instant and at any level of its activity, 
but that did not answer the question: who or what was this witnessing I of the mind and who was, 
in reality, the one witnessing to the Ganges? Suddenly, a yellow flower floating in the 
stream passed in front of me. The Hindu   loved the Ganges and threw flowers at it. I 
laughed: whose model was that flower…? I stopped asking myself questions. I closed 
my eyes and concentrated on the space.   Not on its structure, not on its fields, 
not on its content, but on space itself. The Tibetans considered space as 
perfection of the mind because it was,   in its essence, totally unconditioned and 
all-pervasive. If a mind meditated in space, it was said that it would acquire its 
natural character of total fluidity.   A difficult meditation, but 
delightful when achieved. When I finished, I bathed in the icy water. I returned to the ashram at 3 p.m. and 
rested to write down my experience. At 4 o’clock I went to see Maharaji, who 
was preparing a new edition of one of   his books. He seemed totally focused on the 
process of choosing figures while some of us, sitting on the floor, watched his 
total naturalness and humility. He   looked like a grandfather smiling at 
every moment and happy to be alive. In the evening meditation, my mind wandered. I 
felt I detected the state of mind of a Japanese boy sitting behind me. I remembered the 
Ganges and the radiating of waves from any interaction. I began to feel very bad, 
scattered, lacking support; I went to sleep. I could not sleep. I sat in meditation position 
and applied Vipassana to the region of my head. I felt the neural activity like a raging sea. I 
contemplated it, amazed that I could feel my own brain activity. The sequence of sensations 
was soaring. I felt that I existed inside, but I held my ground. It was a miracle to 
be able to do what I was doing and, besides, it would surely lead me to concentrate with 
myself and thus end the terrible feeling of dispersion. The swell continued relentlessly 
and at a very high frequency. Suddenly, what was almost a tactile sensation deep 
in the brain mass was transformed into an image. It was as if the activity had 
reached a threshold, which, once crossed, underwent a change of quality. Or perhaps it 
was as if the observation of brain activity had shifted one step lower. I don’t 
know, I just experienced a change of   quality and rejoiced. Really, I thought 
at the time: that’s why I came to India, to be able to penetrate inside myself and directly 
study phenomena like the one I was experiencing. I missed Goenka and wondered if I had 
not made a mistake in abandoning him. I remembered his emphasis on bodily sensations and   his adamant refusal to use any other 
level of activity. I reassured myself. Swami Muktananda had discussed the 
Upanishads before beginning the   meditation session. According to them, 
there are four levels of consciousness: waking, dreaming, dreaming without 
any content, and superconsciousness. Contentless sleep is union without 
dichotomies, without opposites,   without specific or differentiated experiences. 
In this consciousness, he maintained dreams, but at the same time he saw them from wakefulness, 
as if the Observer remained present all the time. Goenka had mentioned that Vipassana practice   led to experiencing wakefulness during 
sleep. I had been happy to hear that, but the actual experience did not appeal to 
me. It was too much wakefulness for my taste. March 24. What is the path: witnessing or merging with 
experience? Vipassana or samadhi? In Vipassana one observes, according to Buddha, from the various 
states of mind, emotions, thoughts to (according to Buddha and Goenka) bodily sensations. One 
remains in a state of independence, observing without being affected by experiences. In samadhi, 
the self is lost and the only thing that remains is the object of observation, with no Observer. It 
is, according to Pantajali’s yoga, a contact with reality. It is curious that Goenka, who affirms 
that there is no Observer, uses witnessing in Vipassana, while Patanjali, for whom there is, 
uses the fusion of samadhi. I went to consult with Swami Muktananda. I am becoming more and more fond 
of him and trust him. He told me that both melting and witnessing offered glimpses of the state 
of liberation, but that it was not possible to attain it through experiences. He even doubted 
that it could be attained before bodily death. I wanted to go and consult with Swamji 
Krishnananda as well, but my sandals broke and I had to go to downtown Rishikesh to buy new 
ones. The city movement, the noise of the horns, the vendors, the oriental music, the horses, the 
sadhus, the beggars, the world outside the ashram, upset me. I was frightened. I was wondering about 
conscious conditions that seemed unrelated to the fast-paced life of the world. It was as 
if I came out of one portion of the mind, restful and contemplative, and suddenly 
found myself in the midst of another portion, accelerated, chaotic, alive 
with a thundering intensity. I went to the Sivananda library. In yoga, 
different types of samadhis are described. First, samadhis with coarse objects and then with 
more and more subtle ones. There comes a time when it is possible to concentrate in space. Its 
energetic structure is so similar to the mind that the latter encounters a mirror of itself. When 
the subtlety of the object is sufficient and the meditator really merges into it, joy appears as 
a sudden condition apparently independent of the object, but surely caused by the closeness of the 
mind to its own nature. Patanjali (according to Muktananda) describes a samadhi on the sensation 
of bliss. This latter meditation leads towards contact with the Self. When this is realized, 
then one can do samadhi on the Self and that comes much closer to the goal of yoga, which is to 
remain pure and unmodified in one’s real nature, objectless and unaltered in the mind. 
In this samadhi Buddhism and Hinduism, Vedanta and Mahamudra are unified, because here 
the only thing that exists is the Self. Of course, a Buddhist would tell me that Gautama himself 
would be offended to read what I wrote, because he judged the Self as non-existent. I 
would reply that he considered it non-existent for whoever needed non-existence and existent for 
whoever the existence of the Self was necessary. The Buddha’s actual thought is not clear about 
the existence or non-existence of the Self, although his emphasis on the observation 
of any content and some references to   discourses seem to refer to the condition of 
existence of “something” that remains cut off. Anyway, the truth is that I am not yet ready to 
go into the crossroads of mysticism, although I must confess that my thinking is inclined, in a 
powerful way, to keep busy with these questions. Reviewing my own physiological ideas and their 
relation to reality, I find them extremely accurate. According to them, consciousness 
is the product of the interaction of two fields. When the neural field reaches a certain 
threshold, it contacts an ever-existing reality that is experienced as Being; this explains 
the contact with Sri Aurobindo’s supermind. Yesterday afternoon I enjoyed a unique spectacle, 
a condition of happiness provoked by what I saw, which I can only compare with some 
supreme instants in meditation. I   saw the Maharaji doing yoga with his 
98 years on his back. I saw his effort, the joy and happiness of his being, and the 
image of that centenarian man living his body like a child will never be forgotten. I thank 
God for allowing me to witness this prodigy. I took advantage of an hour’s break 
at the ashram to meditate alone in the   meditation hall. On the walls were graphic 
representations of each of the chakras and several photographs of Maharaji stared 
back at me. I sat in the middle, closed   my eyes and saw the figure of Maharaji 
reclining on his resting couch. I felt myself in total clarity. I could almost touch 
myself. The purity of the contact was incredible; I could meditate on my Self, see it, introduce 
myself to it, know its relations, origin, its independence from the body. I felt liberated 
and strong, I felt that nothing could obscure my contact with my Self. I woke up feeling the master 
of the world. I had introjected Maharaji and the result was that feeling of total strength and 
freedom, and that direct knowledge of myself. I had gotten some treatises on Tibetan 
Buddhism from the Sivananda ashram and I really wanted to consult them. I found 
the tantric symbology, the mandalas, the symbolic deities, all of Tibet fascinating. I remembered that in a few days I would 
have to decide whether to go to Dharamsala, to meet the lamas, or to Bangalore, to meet 
Sai Baba. I looked for a book on Sai Baba and began to leaf through it. Immediately I 
started to feel sick. The book talked about Baba as if he was God and he himself, in 
his messages, said that about himself. I remembered a meeting in Tepozotlán, in a center 
dedicated to Sai Baba. I saw the decorations, the photographs, the devotion to Baba, the sand 
that they kept because Baba had walked on it, and the hair that Baba had left them and that they 
kept inside a container. I was not capable of that devotion. I remembered that in Haifa someone had 
said that Sai Baba was a homosexual and evoked the anger I felt when I heard that. I closed the 
book feeling worse. It was almost 4 o’clock in the afternoon and Maharaji would be almost ready for 
evening darshan. I hurried and as I reached the ashram, my feeling of uneasiness increased. I was 
a Jew and could not accept God in a concrete way. As usual, Maharaji was half reclining on 
his divan with a smile on his lips. One of the ashram children approached 
him and offered him some flowers. It was hatha yoga that helped me recover. 
Standing on my head, the outlook no longer looked so hopeless. After all, Sai Baba had the 
right to say whatever he wanted. In the evening, Muktananda talked about the differences between 
samadhi and witnessing, stimulated by the question I had posed. When samadhi becomes about the Self 
or Atman and witnessing is also about the Self, the individual Observer (in both cases) 
merges into the universal consciousness. However, the swami continued, no two people 
experience the same thing and, if they do, it is because the sect or metaphysical 
school to which they belong encourages them   to do so. Educated in London, Swami 
Muktananda was fluent in English. As he went on in his speech, he would speed 
up the pace of the words as if he did not have time to express all that he was thinking. On 
this occasion too, he did so and I felt that the reply he had given at the beginning needed 
no further comment. It was perfect and clear. What he kept saying now was that relativism in 
mysticism was total. Something in me reacted. I did not like the concept of total relativism 
in mystical experiences. It seemed to me that there are clear and common degrees or levels of 
consciousness and what Muktananda was saying was that the reality of states of consciousness 
was totally subjective. A Vedantist, the swami continued, would feel that at 
the highest point of his development, the   universal consciousness is indissolubly merged. 
A yogi of the Patanjali tradition would find his self appearing as separate and above nature. 
A Tibetan Buddhist would experience spiritual sounds to the most transcendent sound, sign 
and signal of a more universal reality. Something reminded me of Pachita. When she 
was preparing to perform a psychic operation, she would go into a trance so that her body 
would be occupied and managed by Cuauhtémoc, a disembodied being, a spiritual entity who 
performed miracles through Pachita’s body. She had told me that she felt Cuauhtémoc’s presence when 
a very special sound appeared in one of her ears. The decision about going south or north 
also came up in that moment of evocation   of Pachita. In Delhi, Kirpa Singh had an 
ashram where he taught how to perceive the divine sound current. Perhaps what Pachita 
heard was the sound that Singh called divine. I was pleased to find such unexpected meaning in 
the desire to know Singh’s technique. After all, I said to myself in the evening, after meditation,   at Haidakhan. Suasteji told me he would 
go south and perhaps he was right. Before I fell asleep I understood why 
Muktananda’s subjective relativism did not appeal to me. In my physiological ideas there 
were exact and congruent levels of interaction between fields. At those levels were activated 
what I called “orbitals of consciousness”, which were the same for everyone and had a 
real and objective existence. The swami’s consideration of spiritual relativism was against 
my ideas and that made me react negatively. Relativism leads to the proliferation 
of differences, I kept thinking, stimulated by a memory. On a visit to 
the United States I had gone to dinner   at a restaurant that offered 300 or 
more varieties of sandwiches. The proliferation of diversities is infinite, 
but to a certain extent, overwhelming. I kept thinking. Then I realized I was too 
sleepy and my mind began to short-circuit, triggering memories by simple analogy. What does it mean to stay in Rishikesh? Today I met a holy man. He has lived for 20 
years in a cave on the banks of the Ganges. I meditated at his feet and he showered me with 
blessings. I will describe the experience later. Then I went to Sivananda’s meditation 
hall, the one that smelled of incense. I approached Sivananda’s tomb and felt a 
magnificent presence, full of goodness and light. I stayed there for a few minutes until I 
felt that my whole being had absorbed that energy. I went to sit in my place. On the 
way, and while walking from my ashram, I had been listening to a melody coming 
from the other bank of the Ganges that   saturated the whole atmosphere of Rishikesh. It 
repeated isochronic, soft…. Om Namaha Shivaya, the mantra of Muktananda of Ganeshpuri, the 
same of Babaji of Hairakhan and of millions of Hindus. In the meditation hall someone was 
playing the organ and also chanting mantras. Rishikesh had restored my self-confidence and 
my ability to transcend. It was as if Goenka had cleansed me leaving me empty, Babaji had filled me 
with the Self and Maharaji and Rishikesh had given me the strength to stay within myself and find the 
right way to continue my spiritual development. Now, for the last two days, 
I was feeling a call to go   to another part of India. I did 
not know whether north or south. The meditation hall was filling up.   We were all waiting for Swami Krishnananda. 
I had learned to respect his presence; his intellect and demeanor were of impressive 
strength and dignity. At last he appeared, and one of his young adepts knelt down in front of 
him and touched his foot. Krishnananda laughingly scolded him. In 15 or 20 minutes he would have 
to give a message to his ashram community. Shaven monks, Western enthusiasts, visitors from 
India and all over the world would hear him. His voice would be recorded and then his words 
would be transcribed and made into prayers, pamphlets, magazines, books. He knew this 
and, in an attitude of total concentration, he sat in front of the community. I could 
see him asking for clarity and breathing.   His field was tense and strong, he seemed to 
probe everyone’s mind for some common problem, some development that was on the 
frontier of human consciousness. I felt the impersonal consciousness waiting 
to be stimulated one step further. It was as if the planetary knowledge had life and there,   in that ashram, Krishnananda was exploring the 
last frontier, trying to feed it with coherence, trying to reorganize it so that 
it would continue to advance. He was writhing, scratching his head. 
One of his assistants was repeating an internal mantra and seemed to be on the verge 
of madness. I was struck by his total lack of peace. He seemed to live on a razor’s edge and 
to be, at every instant, about to slip from it. Finally Krishnananda rested, he put his hands 
together at the level of his eyebrows in a quick, almost anonymous gesture, trying not to be seen,   but without success. He seemed to thank 
someone for having given him the inspiration. He spoke, again, of what interested me most, 
the meaning of samadhi. I had been so intrigued by that concept the last few days that I was 
hardly surprised to hear him talk about it. However, it was no coincidence. This was the 
second time Krishnananda had spoken about what I was thinking. The synchronicity was perfect. I 
had come to the conclusion that meditation should have as its object of concentration the last 
point of development or whatever was closest to the spirit. Thus, space was a good candidate 
for it, although the best was the Self itself, without intermediaries or approximate models. Krishnananda said that samadhi should be done 
on that which satisfies all the intellectual, religious, rational, emotional, etc., needs of the 
meditator. I loved the conclusion and liked the continued reference to Patanjali, the originator 
of yoga and the one who first spoke of samadhi as a technique. Samadhi is communion without ego. 
Total fusion of the Observer with the observed, a union that, when realized with God, brings 
as a consequence universal self-knowledge. I remembered what had happened 
to me in the afternoon: Walter,   the veteran disciple of Maharaji, told me of the 
existence of a great saint in Rishikesh. He lives, he told me, on a ledge on the bank of 
the Ganges. He has his cave there. Go   and see him! I was neither slow nor lazy, 
so I took a boat and set out to meet Baba. I found him sitting under a 
rock with some of his followers. His white hair and beard welcomed me, 
his face was one of total placidity and peace. I greeted him and he returned 
my greeting with a look that pierced me. I sat down and closed my eyes. A cool 
breeze blew and brought the damp smell of   the Ganges. My mind was melting into itself 
and suddenly I found myself experiencing a sense of unobstructed bliss. I thought 
I had just understood the difference   between seedless and seeded samadhi, and that 
what I had just experienced was the former. I continued meditating and 
the feeling of joy, freedom,   freshness and calm continued. Every now and 
then someone would ask Baba a question and he would answer in such a calm and soothing 
voice that instead of distracting me,   it made me go deeper into my bliss. It 
was wonderful, natural and beautiful. For more than an hour I remained in that state,   thanking God and Baba for their blessings, and 
satisfied that I did not speak or understand what was being said around me. I heard the 
birds and the sound of the river water, the wind caressed me and the feeling 
of joy became more and more intense. Finally I got up and said goodbye. I approached a beach located a short 
distance from Baba’s cave and sat down to meditate. The joy continued. It was 
pure, without object, without measure, without external condition. It simply was. I opened my eyes. The water and its evening 
sparkles amazed me. I did samyama (samadhi) on its surface and it seemed infinite in 
its waves, reflections, changes of density,   movements, interactions between waves. I 
thought I could stay there all my life, it was timeless, infinite, full of grace. I turned to see the Himalayas 
and their majesty filled me even more. Everything was beautiful 
and everything was bathed in light. I returned to the ashram after bathing 
in the icy water of the Ganges. I was no longer affected by its coldness. 
It was delicious and refreshing. I remained in bliss all day and 
at every moment I thanked Baba. Now, as I write this in my room, at midnight, 
I still feel that unconditional happiness that seems to spring from an infinite source 
uncovered by Baba. May everyone feel this peace, may beings be saturated with it and may 
love circulate in our planetary house. Krishnananda had stopped speaking and the music 
master of the Sivananda ashram prepared to play a spiritual song. One of his disciples 
sang with that tonality and oscillation of the voice that makes Hindu sacred music 
an example of inspiration and beauty. The same art form said that everything in 
reality is vibratory and oscillates in   the same way as the female voice singing. 
I closed my eyes and continued to feel that delicious joy soaking me and filling every 
pore of my being. Again I thanked Baba. I remembered that when I returned 
to my ashram after visiting Baba,   I met an elderly sadhu. He was 
carrying a staff ending in a trident, and with a snake-shaped wood coiled around 
the entire length of the piece. It reminded me of the representation of Kali in Babaji’s 
ashram at Hairakhan in the person of that Italian resembling a Chinese mandarin. This 
sadhu seemed to represent the same thing. He called out to me. He was smoking 
hashish from a pipe similar to that   of Prera Baba. He offered it to me. I 
refused and he insisted. A soldier was smoking hashish with great concentration. I 
turned to look at the soldier and we smiled at each other. The sadhu again insisted that 
I smoke. I walked away after refusing again. The moment I stopped, a passing truck on 
the road knocked over the sadhu’s trident. I walked away thinking that it 
had been a test of what Prem Baba   stood for. I felt very good that 
I had passed it without blemish. I seem not to belong to that group of 
beings, despite Krishnananda’s personal opinion when he congratulated me for wanting 
to go to Igatpuri. Now, Krishnananda himself clarified to me the reason for the despair and 
disenchantment when I finished the Goenka courses. Man must seek the transcendent, 
the religious, Krishnananda said,   and I never agreed with anyone more. I dreamt that I was traveling in an airplane 
with the Dalai Lama and another monk. They were sitting in the front left seat and 
I was sitting in the back seat. The plane was trying to land but ran into an 
iron gate and crashed. Obviously,   I decided not to go to Dharamsala. The dawn was 
cloudy and halfway through the morning meditation, the roar of lightning and the tinkling 
of raindrops refreshed our spirits. At   6:30 in the morning, Rishikesh was bathed in 
celestial water and the scent of the earth embraced us as we left the meditation hall. 
I remembered times gone by in Tepoztlán. March 27. I am preparing to travel to 
Delhi. Leaving Rishikesh is like leaving paradise. I am sure I will return. The day dawned as if it was the first day 
of creation. After meditation and yoga, I went to see Swami Krishnananda. I found him 
signing letters and beside himself. I asked him the essential difference between witnessing 
and samadhi, and he would not answer me.   I left feeling very bad. I met my friend, the 
philosopher swami, and told him I should go see his daughters. He told me he had more important 
things to do. He had two, one 12 and one 6, and he didn’t seem to care about having 
such disciples. I went to the library and   learned that another of his students, swami 
Vishnu Devananda, liked to fly in a monoplane through the areas of greatest tension 
carrying flowers and messages of peace. I had met Vishnu’s disciples and from what 
I knew of him, his attitude was suicidal. I left the library and entered Krishnananda’s 
meditation hall. I sat meditating in the tabernacle next to his baba, closed my eyes 
and concentrated. Immediately an energy similar to that of Hairakhan’s Babaji 
enveloped me. Its quality was similar,   but more mature, more constant, with 
greater wisdom. I let go and waves of ecstasy filled me. My mind and body seemed to 
be immersed in an ocean of eternal and infinite peace. There was nothing but light and Grace, 
bliss, delight, spirit, selfhood bathed in joy. It was incredible, it was more than I could 
imagine. I absorbed that energy, I kept it in myself and suddenly I knew that I had to give 
it, to radiate it and that I was a channel, a kind of antenna that received and emitted. I did 
it. I visualized my daughter and I radiated it, I did the same with my family, with parts 
of my being, with my house in Mexico, with my friends and with whoever needed 
that blessing that Sivananda was giving me. The grace went through me. An 8 year old girl was 
his translator and we all laughed at her grace and perfect English accent. I felt at home, seeing 
myself in delicious taste and trying to remember who Baba looked like. I knew someone with an 
uncanny resemblance or perhaps I had dreamed it. I left there feeling reborn. I arrived at 
the ashram and went up to see Maharaji. I met him with his usual smile. He was carrying 
my quartz crystal and I had set out to convince Maharaji to try it. In Mexico he had used it 
to activate and stimulate extraocular vision. When I lived at the Sivananda monastery 
in Cuernavaca, I learned to meditate with crystals. Something in the quartz amplified 
the mind and allowed for deeper meditation. I thought it was a kind of consciousness 
amplifier and probably a chakra stimulator. I told Maharaji about the extraocular vision in 
the case of Maria, a little girl who was watching a TV program blindfolded when she came in contact 
with a quartz crystal, her extraocular perception became clearer and more focused. Children who 
learned to see with their eyes blindfolded perfected their art when they interacted with 
quartz crystals. Maharaji laughed. He told me that in Rishikesh there had lived a motorcyclist 
who liked to ride on the street blindfolded. On the other hand, he continued, one does not need 
crystals to do what I was talking about. The use of crystals and their effect, he continued, is not 
known to me. Physical science is open to study it, I can only say that if you use the crystal 
instead of your heart, you will end up with   crystal and no heart. I really liked what I 
was hearing. I had wanted to encourage the use of crystals by asking Maharaji to try it and his 
response was one of total respect for the human. Then he said that I should 
meditate on the things I   heard in satsang (evening meetings with Maharaji). I had told one of the girls who took care 
of Maharaji how good I felt in Rishikesh. I loved that girl, dark, direct, uninhibited 
and totally sincere and open in her movements, words and emotions. She, in turn, had told 
Maharaji how well Rishikesh suited me. “Of course you feel good here,” she said alluding 
to my comment, “Rishikesh is a place full of blessings, its atmosphere is saturated with 
spirituality. If you didn’t feel good here, nowhere would you feel good; we are the ones 
responsible.” It was absolutely true. When I went to visit Baba, I took advantage 
of the translator girl’s presence to   ask him about the meditation technique 
used by the saint. He asked, in turn, if I wished to know the meditation technique. 
“I want to know your meditation technique,” I told him. Baba laughed like a naughty child and 
said something that the translator relayed to me, “Baba doesn’t know how he meditates!” Behind 
Baba sat another girl. I had seen that, as she said goodbye to the saint, she had become angry 
that he had not looked her straight in the eye. I wondered why Rishikesh felt so 
wonderful, but surely only Rishikesh does. March 28. Again, when I am about to make a change, 
I am filled with fear, I get paralyzed, I feel that my life is going to end, that my mind 
will be destroyed, that there is no light in the firmament of my spirit. It is terrible, especially 
because it is something new, it did not happen to me before and now it is happening in relation 
to my decisions. I had decided to go to Delhi, take a course with Kirpal Singh and then go to 
Varanasi to finish in Nepal. Now, after a night full of blessings and a morning meditation in 
total contact with the Self, I began to doubt: why am I leaving here if in Rishikesh I 
have found peace and the Grace of the Self? I am on a night train on my way to Delhi 
with two friends with more than twelve   years of spiritual experiences traveling 
all over the world, she a wild horse tamer. I had a hard time getting out of Rishikesh. I 
went up to say goodbye to Maharaji and did not dare to go in to see him because he was 
alone. I went to the Sivananda ashram to meditate in the tabernacle. As I sat in the 
corner of the altar, a voice asked me why I was leaving. I tried to explain, but could 
not find a reason of sufficient weight. Then he told me that it was all right, as long 
as I came back. I hesitated about whether   the source of the voice was Sivananda or some 
level of my own mind. Then I let myself go, but the previous day did not happen. I remembered 
something I had read about Tibetan Buddhism. In it there are practices that promise to generate 
autonomous minds from one’s own. They call it: generation of deities. In Mexico, this type of 
“work” is very common. I asked myself if I was really interested in studying these kinds of 
questions. I was working with thread bracelets on a small home-made loom. I sat next to 
her. She was teaching the other Mexican, Miguel, how to make bracelets. I loved 
the work. Victoria (that was the girl’s name) explained that, by making bracelets, 
she had paid her way through the Orient. She recounted her adventures and the faith she 
had acquired in times of greatest need. Always, she said firmly, one always 
gets the help one needs. As we chatted and I, too, learned to weave 
bracelets, I heard the sound of the Hindu drum, the tabla, to my right. I wanted very much 
to stay in Rishikesh, to play the tabla, to be in contact with these people, Krishnananda, 
the libraries, the Ganges, the ashrams. It was almost 4 o’clock and I hurried to my 
ashram. It was time for darshan with Maharaji. I arrived and found the terrace full of people 
and Maharaji, as always, lying on his throne. I sat leaning against a pillar and Maharaji 
made fun of my fatness. “It’s going to take you years to become a yogi,” he said. He asked 
me about my plans and upon hearing that I was leaving and that I planned to explore Tibetan 
Buddhism and Kashmir Shaivism, he told me that at the end of all those isms I would come back 
to him; that what I needed was to know the   ultimate level of reality. To know it directly, he 
stressed, to know whether or not it is sentient, whether it has attributes, whether it moves. I 
asked him about why sometimes one felt far away and sometimes close and in touch with oneself. He 
laughed, “Who gets in touch with oneself?” I was speechless. Of course it was an absurd question. 
“What perchance are there two atmans (self, selves)?” he asked me, laughing with 
his good-natured grandfatherly grace. I laughed too, but inside I began 
to wonder if I should not call the   whole thing off and stay with Maharaji. “What are the attributes of the 
ultimate reality?” I asked him,   feeling my heart go out at the 
question. Maharaji became serious, he knew how important what was 
happening to me at that moment was. “It has no attribute whatsoever,” he replied 
firmly. “Matter is moved by Him, but He is motionless.” “Seek,” he said with an earnestness 
and power that pierced me completely, “seek that which is at the end of matter, the ultimate 
reality, that which gives life to the rest. The intellect, human consciousness, is only a 
mirror of that ultimate reality. Experience it in yourself.” An inspired silence followed Maharaji’s 
words. He turned to look at me and I felt him reproach my sudden abandonment. I felt his love. 
He asked me if I had learned anything new in that ashram. I did not know what to answer. I only said 
that I had learned the basics of the appearance of the divine light, the one that allows one 
to see, and I had remembered what it is. “I have been working on it for 75 years,” 
Maharaji replied, “and you think you can do it in three weeks. Go see your Laxman 
Jhu in Srinagar, your Tibetan Buddhism, and when you want to learn how to maintain joy 
and the Self, come back to me.” I was impressed. I should have told him that what I had really 
learned was to have met him, but, as usual, it didn’t occur to me until several hours later, that 
the real novel knowledge was his very presence. Nor did I tell him that three days earlier, in 
solitary meditation, I had seen him within myself and he had guided me into an encounter with a 
reality of absolute sameness and unending joy. Walter caught my attention. It was already 
after 5 o’clock in the afternoon and we had to leave. We were going to ride the 
train to Delhi, the same train that,   stopped for more than two hours in 
Hardwar, is allowing me to write this. March 29. We arrived in Delhi at 7 am, after a difficult 
night. I had not been able to sleep, especially after a talk with Walter. He had told me about his 
meeting with Maharaji after years of a feverish search that had left him with almost no strength 
to go on living. He had been to Nepal, Pakistan, Turkey… searching, always searching. Finally, 
he had arrived in India and, when he asked at a tourist office for a place where holy men 
lived, they had mentioned Hardwar. From there, someone had taken him to Rishikesh, directly 
to Maharaji’s ashram. On seeing him, he knew that he was his teacher. For five years he lived 
in Rishikesh learning raja yoga from the elderly yogi. Now he was preparing to return to the United 
States, his home country, and then return to Rishikesh to spend another five years at the side 
of his centenarian master. Walter told me about Maharaji’s worldwide graces and the protection 
and synchronicity that always occurred in them. In the evening, as the train moved forward 
and stopped dozens and dozens of times at as many stations, I thought of myself and my poor 
capacity for surrender. I was searching too, but I seemed to have come to the somewhat stable 
conclusion that I must find my teacher and guide within myself. In fact, every time I set my mind 
to it and let go of illusions and dependencies, I heard the voice of myself telling me what 
to do and showing me the way. When the voice was authentic and I managed to differentiate it 
from my conditioning and introjected entities, and followed its advice, the world showed 
me its synchronistic patterns with pristine and unquestionable clarity. I did not know it at the time, but later that 
day, I was to have a clear demonstration of the non-existences of control over 
the world. Arriving at the station, I went to inquire about the direction of 
travel to Varanasi and Bangalore. Varanasi was a possibility I had planned. Something 
told me that I would learn a lot there. Bangalore meant Sai Baba and, since I had 
wanted the possibility of going to see him, I was astonished to inquire about the duration 
of the trip to that destination. The train to Bangalore had already left and the train to 
Varanasi would leave in 30 minutes. I felt like leaving at once, but restrained myself. 
I had to get a visa for Nepal and pick up my mail at the Mexican embassy in Delhi. 
Besides, I wanted to meet Kirpal Singh. I said goodbye to Walter and Cindy, feeling 
strong and grateful to them and knowing that I would see them again someday. The day before I had 
martyred my mind with fears about the future and the future was here and all my fears were false. 
In Rishikesh I had felt unable to travel by train, to return to a city, to go on living, 
and lo and behold, I had just traveled, I was in Delhi and about to be left alone, 
and, in spite of it all, I felt great. I felt Delhi again with the same energy, 
presence and vibes as Mexico City on a Sunday. I ran into the street feeling that 
I had been reborn, that I was a man again thanks to Maharaji and that I was master 
and master of the present thanks to Goenka. I went to the Mexican embassy. I felt it as my 
home. Then I went to breakfast after a walk to an imposing temple, similar to the Taj Mahal, 
in front of the embassy. It was the tomb of an emperor. I was amazed at its might and the 
reason for its construction. I met a thin man who approached me and began to tell me that 
he was a professional jockey. When he found   out I was from Mexico, he got excited. His 
dream was to go to Mexico to race horses at the racetrack. He made me accompany him to the 
racetrack in Delhi and showed me the stables, the stables built by the English and the 
magnificent racehorses, Indian, Arabian, purebred, with lustrous hair and powerful 
looks. The emperor’s temple, the racehorses, the power of strength and royal blood filled me. 
It seemed to me that it all contained a message. I asked him about his hometown and he told me that 
he came from Madras, very close to Bangalore, that he knew Sai Baba; that the climate of Bangalore 
was mild, in short, that I should go there. I felt uncomfortable, everything was 
clear except some crushing vibrations   from the jockey that drowned me. I asked 
for his date of birth and it turned out to be a cancer of June 28. I knew the 
reason for my drowning and said goodbye feeling like I was freeing myself from an 
old yoke. My ex-wife was a Cancer and all the women I have fallen in love with have 
been Cancers. The relationship with water   signs was one of great closeness and 
love followed by paralysis and death. Sai Baba was Scorpio, almost Sagittarius, like me,   but Scorpio. Again I was amazed at myself 
for my tendency to fall into astrological thoughts. I have always held them in high esteem 
for their wisdom, but they have also held me back, made me superstitious and limited in my 
ability to transcend. Lately I rejected any allusion to astrology, but at the same 
time it continued to attract and influence me. I went to the Nepalese embassy. I found it on a 
tree-lined corner in one of Delhi’s most elegant neighborhoods. Its oriental-Chinese architecture 
enchanted me. At the entrance there were some Rajneesh followers. His energy pierced me, it 
was wonderfully alive, like a silver bell. God, the astrological thought took over my mind 
again. Rajneesh was Sagittarius, December 11, one day before my birth date. Perhaps it was my 
destiny to join Rajneesh’s movement and live my own nature in it. I saw the embassy building 
again and thought maybe the energy was coming from there. I told myself that if I received 
such a powerful signal from Rajneesh again, I would go to look for him in the United 
States or visit his ashram in India. In Jaipur, another of Rajneesh’s disciples had enchanted me 
with his life force, he was perhaps the person I had felt most identified with in India and now 
these people, also from Rajneesh…. It was too complex to think of changing everything 
for an impression that could be wrong. I entered the embassy. I was enchanted by 
the atmosphere and remembered that I had written a book about a mountain, the Nanga 
Parbat, which was in Nepal. How magnificent it would be (I said to myself with enthusiasm) 
to know the place I had imagined and to verify its reality! I asked and was told that yes, 
Nanda Parbat (not Nanga) existed in Nepal. They arranged my visa almost immediately and 
asked me to pick it up the next day. I asked for an advance and they agreed to give it to me 
the same day, which was a feat and a magnificent sign. In India I had understood that once a 
pattern is initiated, it builds and manifests itself as long as it is not betrayed. It was 
a magnificent teaching of which I had almost constant evidence. On the occasions when I had 
broken a pattern, the consequences were terrible, until another one was built. Obviously, part 
of what happened with patterns was purely psychological and subjective, but there was an 
undoubted part of objective reality that did not depend on the personal mind. It was like 
making or not making contact with fluidity. When the contact was made, everything followed a 
synchronistic course. When the contact was broken, it took time and a lot of personal power to 
establish a fluidity contact with another synchronistic level. It was as if the world were 
constructed by homogeneous spheres of events. When contact was not possible and one remained at 
the interface between two mantras, two spheres, levels or patterns, the suffering 
was horrible. One pattern or the   other was calm, a destiny in fluid 
unfolding. One interface was fear. I left the Nepalese embassy ready to find 
my way through an uphill and winding road to the outskirts of the suburbs of 
Delhi, where their ashram was located. I arrived at a series of buildings located in the 
middle of the suburb, forming an integral part of the town. I was a little afraid of the unexpected. 
I asked the driver to wait for me and entered. I was immediately approached by a man who took me 
to a courtyard covered with colorful blankets, where a crowd of Hindus was crowded together. 
He took me by the hand and led me into the courtyard. He told me that the master was there. 
We saw each other. He looked to me like a Sufi with his white beard, his magnificent turban, 
his face of a thousand mysteries. He seemed to recognize me. He came up to me and hugged me, 
telling me I was welcome. I felt blessed. I looked into his eyes and was amazed by his 
radiance. He almost glowed, as if an inner light was shining into his eyes. There was a 
sense of familiarity, protection and love. A photographer began to take pictures. The master 
looked at me and I felt total joy and tranquility. Afterwards I was able to talk to him. 
The saintly Kirpal Singh, his father, had died a few years ago and now he, called 
Darsham Singh, was taking his place, leading one of the most original spiritual movements on 
the planet. He asked me how I meditated and I told him that I first cleansed my body with Vipassana 
and then I did raja yoga activating my third eye and seeing the divine light to finally concentrate 
on the Self and enrich myself with its presence. He smiled, I felt I was in front of 
a sheik in the middle of the desert   with an oasis in the background. It was 
Arabia, it was the thousand and one nights, it was the most overflowing fantasy, 
Sufi mysticism, Muslim poetry. He invited me to visit the ashram as 
many days as I wanted and to talk to   him. He told me that he would teach 
me to detect the conora current and that she would guide me from plane 
to plane towards my Opium Self. I was offered tea, sweets, cookies amidst smiles 
that I kept seeing as coming from the Sahara, from a sand dune in the middle of a starry night,   from the clear moon through a palm tree. From 
Islam and its mysterious and inspiring life. I said goodbye. I had to find accommodation in 
Delhi. I found a place for tourists in front of the truck station. I packed my things and went on 
a tour of Delhi. I felt that nothing was random, that synchronicity was absolute and I felt 
very good about myself. Darsham Singh probably received all his visitors in the same way, 
but for me it had been a blessing to meet him. I was very happy and looking forward to hearing 
Indian music. I looked around and saw a library. It was five minutes before closing time. I browsed 
through a few rows of books, one of them caught my eye, I picked it up and opened it. The title 
of the page referred to the internal sounds associated with the activation of the chakras. 
It was incredible, a few hours ago I had met the leader of yoga shabd and now a book was beginning 
to explain to me the meaning of the chakras. The library contained thousands of volumes and 
I had found the right one. The book dealt with many subjects and I had opened it at exactly 
the right place. I was not allowed to read any further. I quickly jotted down three syllables: 
lam, vam and ram, the main syllables associated with chakra activation and left as the library was 
being closed. I thanked the bust of a poet for his blessing and felt like listening to Hindu music 
again. On the basement of the library I found a poster announcing a concert of Hindu dance and 
music to be held that same day a block away from the library and in 60 minutes. I couldn’t 
help but laugh. I made my way to the venue and sat down in a delightfully appointed auditorium. 
The first part was played by a woman portraying the lover in search of her love and all the 
vicissitudes surrounding her quest. The second part was a delight of sounds of tablas, zithers, 
flutes, all without a hint of artificiality, totally sincere, herself, in real contact 
with the musicians and with her being. I thanked God for the opportunity to see true art. In the evening, a three-wheeled 
cart with a bicycle, the gardens on a moonless night filled me with pleasure. After a terrible crowding in one of the suburbs, 
in total contrast to the placidity of the squares and gardens, which made me think that 
India was not Capricorn, but Leo (again astrological thinking: India’s independence 
is August 15), we arrived at my hotel. Small rooms surrounded a garden where Italians,   Spaniards and a Mexican were chatting 
happily. They were smoking marijuana. Later I learned that the place was full of 
heroin addicts, mostly of Italian origin. I took the mattress out of my room and 
set it up in the garden. I lay down on   it and fell asleep watching a 
little frog hunting insects. March 30. I woke up at 6 a.m. feeling the 
delight of the closeness of the grass and the freshness of 
the Indian dawn in Delhi. Suddenly a feeling came over 
me! Should I go to see Sai Baba? I tried to push it out of my mind, did yoga, 
meditated, but the feeling persisted. I cast the I Ching and it warned me that going to Sai 
Baba was only to cheat me of an awakening too hasty and full of dependencies. I felt sad, 
I knew that the I Ching was right, but at the same time something in me wanted to confirm that 
Sai Baba was a man of God and not God, and that it was possible to be in communion with him, 
without getting lost in a terrible dependence. I went to breakfast at the truck station after 
washing my clothes and I knew that I could not fight against sadness because of what the 
I Ching had told me. The oracle was right, I realized; however, it was hard for myself 
to want to find a real teacher or at least a real friend. I wanted to go to Sai Baba, my 
heart demanded it, but my mind forbade it. I toured with Goenka. If I did not start observing 
my own process, I would come out of the conflict between my heart and my thinking and end up 
depressed. I felt I was very fragile. I could be attending to Grace and the next moment the 
martyrdom of indecision. I could feel liberated and independent and any doubt would lead me to 
orphanhood, abandonment, sadness and the death of my Being. It was again, I kept thinking, the 
death of my mother and the search for her soul. It was horrible and I could not observe it. I 
tried again, I remembered everything Goenka taught me. The possibility of observing any process, 
the possibility of being beyond mental contents, the possibility of being in observation 
in a place without end and without border. I began to see myself in the conflict from a 
place where there was nothing but selfhood and   me. Suddenly, I could place myself there and 
everything made sense. I was in the infinite, in the calm seeing my mind and its 
processes as something worth witnessing,   but unaffected by its changes. I felt 
free and independent and remembered Swami Krishnananda’s admonition that Buddhism 
led to total liberation and immortality. I felt like going back to Goenka. I saw 
the date on my watch and remembered that in two more weeks I would start a Vipassana 
course in Dharmasala. It would be great to go and deepen in Vipassana, I thought 
for a moment. That would allow me to   free myself from the identifications 
with the oscillations of my mind. I remembered that Maru, a friend from Mexico,   had told me that I had a lot of Gemini in 
me and that this was related to my changes. I stopped the astrological thinking. Again I was 
falling into the clutches of that structure. I remembered Goenka again and his emphasis 
on the impossibility of observing thought directly and therefore the need to do so through 
bodily sensations. I found it illuminating. I was walking out of the station and 
suddenly I also observed myself thinking   about Goenka and Vipassana and sensations. 
I realized that when I was observing, I was taking myself away from the experience 
and observing myself away, and I thought that this was not a proper way to behave. There 
was something beyond observing and beyond identifying. The question was not whether it was 
better to be the rain or to observe the rain, but how to be in Being beyond witnessing and 
beyond samadhi. Observing was magnificent, it helped to achieve the state of Being, but 
when this was achieved there was no longer any need for method. “The net is used for 
fishing, but once having caught the fish, the net should no longer be used.” I decided to 
go and see Darsham Singh. I took a rickshaw and headed for his ashram. I went straight to the 
meditation hall. I sat down and noticed two people there using strange supports that allowed 
them to rest their arms and cover their ears with their thumbs. I imitated them and instantly heard 
the sound of my blood circulating. Perhaps, I said to myself, this was the method for approaching 
the sound current: concentrate attention on that sound. So I did. 20 minutes later I began to be 
filled with Grace and joy. This technique was delightful. I decided to ask Darsham Singh 
if the method I had intuited was correct. March 31. Should I initiate with Darsham Singh? Should I go to see Sai Baba, to Bangalore, 
should I go to Varanasi? I asked again. I was given an appointment to see 
Darsham Singh in the afternoon.   He told me I would see him in a small 
garden next to the ashram dining hall. At last, Carolina, Darsham’s closest disciple, 
told me that the master was waiting for me. We had eaten two hours earlier and I had 
not felt at ease. I was worried about the danger of falling into a particular 
technique. It was true that I had felt   very good meditating on what seemed to be 
Singh’s technique, but it was also true that the technique depended on internal 
sensory activity, and that frightened me. I had already suffered the consequences of 
restricting myself to the use of a rigid technique under Goenka, and I did 
not want to repeat the experience. Carolina led me to the master’s room. We 
climbed a flight of stairs that seemed to   end in a crystal blue sky. Darsham Singh 
was reading, sitting in an armchair in a white-painted room with white curtains. There was 
an atmosphere of calm and concentration. I sat in an armchair next to the master and he continued 
reading. I closed my eyes and began to meditate. Finally, I heard Singh’s voice asking me what I 
was looking for. I told him my doubts, he asked me about my religion. I told him that I was Jewish 
and believed in one God without form, color or limitation. I mentioned to him that the use of 
a light or sound concerned me and that I felt it limited. I remembered Maharaji’s admonition 
telling me to look for the origin of the rest. Darsham looked into my eyes and something 
seemed to frighten him. He covered his face with his hands, as if my state of doubt 
and discomfort made him uncomfortable.   I told him to excuse me if I asked him too many 
questions. He replied that I should not worry, that it was fine and advised me to read an article 
comparing his technique with mine. He mentioned (no longer covering his face) that there would 
be an initiation to which I was invited. There, he said, my doubts would be resolved; in the 
meantime, he advised me to concentrate on the third eye and repeat the name of my God. 
We said goodbye and I received an invitation to return to discuss the relationship 
between Kabbalah and shabd meditation. A disciple of Singh took me to the library and 
showed me the Kabbalah treatises, bibles, Talmud and books on Kashmir. Since I had already read 
the Kabbalah books, I took the book about Jesus and another one by Darsham Singh. Tea was brought 
to me and I sat on the floor in the Hindu way. I learned that according to the author of the 
penultimate book, Jesus died at the crucifixion. Alive he was relieved of his wounds along with 
his mother Mary and Thomas left Israel for India to search for the 10 lost tribes of Israel, those 
who had settled in Kashmir and northern Pakistan. The book mentioned Srinagar, Leh and all the 
places I had decided to visit as areas where Jesus lived and where the descendants of the 
10 tribes live today. He also mentioned that the tomb of Moses is in those parts. I got 
excited. I remembered that the I Ching had predicted that I would get excited about Delhi. 
I read on and each line confirmed more and more that something I had deeply desired, the meeting 
with the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, was about to happen. It was wonderful 
and I thanked God for His blessings. Tired from reading, I went to meditate. I 
did not feel what I had felt the day before, I could not concentrate; my thoughts 
were on Kashmir and Srinagar. In the afternoon I was invited to a meeting 
of Singh’s disciples and initiates. After two days of living with them, I realized something 
that made me very sad. They seemed to be totally dependent on their master, did nothing without 
consulting him and looked dull and lifeless when he was absent. On the other hand, if he 
appeared, they were immediately transformed. I went to my hotel and in the morning woke 
up in a sweat. I had fought hard not to be dependent on someone, but lo and behold, 
again, someone was pulling me toward that dependency. I began to feel confused. I 
did not want to lose touch with myself, but I was about to. I asked my unconscious 
through the I Ching and the psychic pendulum, and the answer was clear: I had to go 
to Varanasi and the sooner the better. I went to the train station, where I found 
a ticket and some disciples of Rajneesh. I asked them about Varanasi and they told me 
that there were only Hindus in the ashram, but that they accepted visitors. I decided 
to go ahead with my plan to go to Varanasi. Finally, I got settled on the train and prepared 
to spend the next 18 hours in a crowded, oven-heated, second-class carriage. I did 
Vipassana meditation most of the way. I arrived in Varanasi feeling great. It had 
been a retreat of sorts and the meditation had led me to observe areas of my mind that had 
never shown themselves to my awareness before. I got off the train and something told 
me that my stay in that city would be a   failure. I felt it so clearly that I 
was about to take a train to Madras, in the south, but I stopped. It was 
too much to travel: 48 hours by train. I went into Varanasi. I went in search of some 
friends that I did not find and then I ended up in a hotel that looked more like 
an English house of the last century,   with balconies and ironwork finished with details. I left my things and went to tour the city. I was 
shocked by its filth and the total agglomeration. It was Sunday and the streets looked like 
a carnival. I walked towards the Ganges to see if the famous temples and the atmosphere of 
spirituality would refresh me. I encountered more dirt, stained glass, temples, rituals. I only saw 
one person meditating. The rest looked like total abandonment and the impression was that of a 
set of deaths in a row, one after another. I took a boat and my impression softened. I saw the 
crematoriums and people looking for things in the river, maybe teeth. I was frightened, I could not 
stand the atmosphere around the funeral pyres. The boat left me on the shore and, almost 
desperate, I wandered through dirty,   smelly and trashy alleys, but incredibly 
picturesque. It looked like and was the Orinoco in every sense of the word. Amidst the chaos, one 
soon came across temples and places of worship, trees whose roots had been converted into altars. 
It caught my attention. All twisted and battered, the ritualization of the spirit 
emerged. As I walked, vendors of   all species approached me. I felt attacked, 
overwhelmed by what no longer made sense. I wanted to leave Varanasi, I felt it 
was a kind of punishment for having   walked away from Goenka and Darsham 
Singh, for having left Rishikesh. Every time I approached what seemed like a place of 
inner bliss, something made me turn away from there and look again. It was no longer 
possible to keep doing the same thing. April 2. I am still feeling very bad. Only 
yoga and meditation save me from falling into total depression. I miss 
someone and I don’t know who. Yesterday I ran into some Israeli friends I met in 
Rishikesh. I was very happy to see them. Arriving at my hotel I found it without 
power. That meant a night without a fan and, with the temperature in 
Varanasi, that meant insomnia. My friends had taken a Vipassana 
course and looked very happy. I   felt strange to hear about it. I 
woke up better despite the heat. Before sunrise I headed for the Ganges. 
Today is the first day of the Hindu year. Hundreds of people were bathing 
and performing ablutions saluting the   sun. I rented a boat and floated for two 
hours in the sacred water of the river, watching the incessant and overwhelming movement 
of the people of Varanasi. I returned to my hotel and on the way found the national 
headquarters of the Theosophical Society. I still felt unwell, and as I entered the 
centuries-old buildings of the Society and saw old men working there, I felt that 
I had arrived a century late in India. In the library I found a very rare volume by 
Ramana Maharshi. Reading it, I felt again that I wished I had come to India when Maharshi 
was still alive. The old man in the library recommended me to visit Maharshi’s ashram near 
Madras. I felt that this was a wonderful idea and that perhaps the reason I came 
to Varanasi was to go to Madras. I dismissed the idea and read on. Maharshi was 
one of the most enlightened and clearest in India. He told me that I was right not to introduce 
myself to shabd, that self-realization does not imply dependence on the internal or external 
sensory. I thanked him very much for confirming and supporting my innermost thoughts, and I 
began to feel that, once again, I had placed myself on the plane of synchronicity and that 
all was well from that moment on. And so it was. In the afternoon I met a teacher of 
Indian classical music and together   we played some ragas, he on his zither and 
I on a tabla I had bought the day before. He invited me to stay and study with 
him, and when I told him I was Mexican, he mentioned Maura, who had been with him 
for some time. I remembered that Maura had told me something about an Indian music 
teacher and I was amazed to be with him. We had been playing for hours in a room that 
belonged to a silk and cloth factory. The floor, covered by a white mattress, had 
supported us while he had been   introduced to his zither and I had been 
accompanying him with my tabla. Another tabla player joined us and I felt 
that this was my world. I remembered   the depression of the afternoon and was 
amazed at the contrasting way I felt now. Walking to my hotel, at night, amidst 
carts, buffalo, bicycles and a crowd, I was struck by a photograph of a very 
strange being in a store. I asked the   owner if it was his guru and he replied that 
yes, he had recently turned 150 years old. In the evening I packed my things because 
the next day I would travel to Nepal. April 3. I am at the border with Nepal. I am having great 
difficulty staying focused on the Self and I am increasingly certain that I was drugged in 
Varanasi. I was offered various substances, but all I remember of the experience is 
an intense euphoria and then a feeling of weakness. I am very angry with India 
and I feel that being about to penetrate Nepal is like a contemptuous response to 
the country that I have loved so much and that has taught me so much, and then treating 
me like a manipulable object through drugs. In my weakened state I have asked for help from a 
yoga teacher, now deceased, whom I truly came to love. Her name was Nenató and her spirit lives on 
with the same light and beauty that she manifested when she occupied her body. Nenató dear, I asked 
her, you who inspired me to come to this country, why don’t you help me through this difficult 
time? I did yoga in my hotel room and then meditated. Goenka appeared in my mind. She was 
complaining about my absence from Igatpuri. The drive from Varanasi to the border was filled 
with the atmosphere of the West. A tourist truck took me and 30 other Westerners through hot, dry 
fields in which, from time to time, small ponds appeared within which dark, giant buffaloes 
cooled their colossal corporeal envelopes. One of these lagoons caught my attention 
because on its surface floated water lilies   and violet flowers, and a buffalo crossed 
this paradise like some kind of exotic icebreaker. Its slowness and the movement of 
the lilies as it passed by appealed to me. The heat in northern India is starting to become 
unbearable. I hope Nepal is cooler than this hell. On the other hand, my mind does not rest for a 
single moment. It analyzes everything and, on the way, got into a discussion with itself about 
the origin of its contents. I was going through the Mahamudra and its technique of observing the 
mind as a mirror in which contents are reflected. It is fascinating when it is possible to separate 
the content from the reflection while remaining aware of the quality of the mental mirror. It 
is like realizing the “true nature of the mind in its fundamental purity” and the “experience as 
oscillation or alteration of the smooth and pure surface of the mind.” Too bad Goenka insists 
that observation must be made through the intermediate use of bodily sensations. I do not 
understand why he denies the possibility of direct observation of mental contents and thoughts, as 
Mahamudra and Tibetan Buddhism advise. For me, Goenka’s denial and his very powerful 
insistence on the impossibility of the mind being able to observe its abstract 
contents has kept me from what could have been a very productive relationship. Even 
as I write this, I feel very sad about it. For five of the nine hours of 
the trip from Varanasi to Nepal,   I devoted myself to observing my thoughts, 
emotions and the impact of sensory impressions on the mirror of my mind. A fellow Spaniard 
in the truck related a similar experience to me while on patrol in the Spanish Sahara 
during his military service. For 18 months he devoted himself to observing his mind as the 
desert enveloped him in a fiery atmosphere. I am starting to feel very lonely, in a 
deadly battle to stay optimistic and in the present. Crossing the border between 
India and Nepal, I thought I was going to find a paradise and obviously I did 
not. The only noticeable change was the appearance of some Coca-Cola ads, less 
crowding and some brown, slant-eyed faces. I thought I felt some vibrational difference, 
an internal sensation of greater softness, but so slight that I could not differentiate 
it as objective. Suddenly I realized once again that there is no condition of fundamental change 
that does not originate from within. Where I go, I always take myself, and if I am unable 
to change, nothing in the external will offer me a substitute for my own mind. This 
lesson, so constantly echoing, came back to my consciousness with such clarity and force 
that I was plunged into emptiness. In fact, I began to feel that I was only a worthless 
being, incapable of keeping myself alive, confident and optimistic. A being who had 
wasted himself in absurd mental dispersion and, now, the only thing that existed was 
a pain sustained by a void of death. Something in my mind exploded and I was filled 
with terror. Nothing existed and nothing was real except pain and a hollow rottenness, a terror with 
no end, a condition of non-existence of goals, meanings and valid reasons to exist. I remembered 
Estusha and my despair at not having her around, Goenka as my most recent failure, Maharaji, 
Babaji, Muktananda, Darsham Singh. The sense of fear was expanding and I felt I 
was reaching the bottom of the most intolerable experience I have ever endured in my entire life. 
I was sitting in a boiling truck whose roof seemed to have been crushed. Behind me, someone was 
smoking marijuana and to my left, two Nepalese were arguing in a tone of voice that pierced me. 
I ran through all the control techniques I know and resolved to repeat a mantra, focus on it and 
not let any other content penetrate my mind…. Om namah shivaya, Om namah shivaya, Om namah 
shivaya, Om namah shivaya, Om namah shivaya. After twenty minutes of a life and death battle,   I began to feel localized in the highest 
part of my skull. There was nothing else but the mantra and the feeling of being 
located there, at the top of my head. I looked around. The Nepalese were still arguing 
and, although the heat was still very high, the landscape seemed to be starting 
to cool down by the appearance here   and there of some leafy trees next to thatched 
houses. We crossed a plain of dark earth and, from time to time, a riverbed painted 
the land with reflections of sky. The vibrational softness I had thought I 
felt as I entered Nepal had transformed into strength and an energetic envelope 
of immense power penetrated me. The only thing holding me within that gelatinous mass 
of energy was the mantra. For hours I kept repeating it as the heat didn’t agree with me. 
I am feeling in a total absence of knowledge. June 21. I got a telegram yesterday letting me know that my brother Jerry sent me the ticket to 
Mexico and money. Praise the Lord! Today I tried to fix a missing entry 
in my passport, but was unsuccessful. I left the ashram for a small 
village located on a mountain,   14 kilometers from Rishikesh. 
It was horrible, especially because I traveled with the Aries woman, an 
adept of Rajneesh, who was very neurotic. I am very happy, but at the same time nervous. 
I still wonder if I should go to Israel. I am learning the yoga technique in the 
Sivananda ashram. I am taught by one of the disciples of the strictest yoga master in India, 
who follows the tradition of his guru. Iyengar yoga impresses me with its clarity and strength. 
It activates the feeling of Being in a direct way. I like Sivananda’s ashram. It is full of 
life and spontaneity, unlike my ashram, which is looking more and more like an asylum 
for the elderly and the mentally retarded. June 22. It must already be Cancer, because you can feel 
the excitement of kinship and affiliation floating in the humid atmosphere of late July. Rishikesh 
remains submerged in mist and everything gets wet. During yoga I realized that I am accepting 
that this reality of the environment is real, and it is scary to realize that 
I can be destroyed or uplifted,   depending on the atmosphere, society, 
culture and group in which I live immersed. It is terrible. It would be 
better to be independent of the field. Another thing I realized is that I have 
devalued myself, I don’t appreciate myself, I don’t appreciate what I do. I have punished 
myself, and the background of my indecision about going to Israel is because I feel that 
the opportunity is undeserved and, in addition, I am afraid of finding there what I really 
want, because if I found it I would have to change my life completely. It is unbelievable that 
there is such a sad mixture of self-devaluation, self-punishment, fear of change and true 
masochism in me. It explains, however, all that I have suffered in India. 
Now all that is left for me is the   possibility of starting a life kinder 
to myself and more loving to others. In my thinking, the fear of returning to Mexico 
and facing horrible loneliness triggered the cognition that the conflict between Israel and 
Mexico is just a pretext, a façade for something deeper and more terrible: my real confrontation 
with life. I miss terribly the master’s degree in development that I started in Mexico and I try 
to imagine what would happen if I tried to restart it. That scares me too. I am like a little child, 
unable to fix my life on my own. I need a mother, a community to take care of me and protect me, 
and at the same time, I reject protection. Again, I see in me one of the laws of my species: 
“what is denied is what is wanted”. When one talks about independence and defends it with a too 
exaggerated nonsense, it is because deep down one is dependent. Everything has its opposite and 
it manifests itself subtly when, not being in need of it, it is verbalized. This is also what 
happens to Muktananda. “He has an absolute need for external control because his mind is totally 
out of control.” This law is fascinating because of its complexity and subtlety, and because it is 
so general. This I already knew and had forgotten. It is like my need to ask the I Ching or, also, 
that of seeking the protection of psychics. Here, in this ashram, the morning 
yoga teacher was born on July   1 and offered to help me in my decision 
about Israel. Again it is my dependence. I leave Mexico to become independent 
and fall into horrible dependencies. I reject Goenka for fear of dependency and instead 
I am not uncomfortable doing it with this yoga teacher. It is all this that I have to change 
and what I saw as a perspective in my mastery, but I was very afraid. How a person as 
evolved as me was going to start a mastery? My ego has hurt me a lot. I would like to solve 
all these problems and not forget them. I love psychology because it studies and faces all this 
that happens to me. A beautiful perspective is to enter a non-institutional growth group. 
More spontaneous and deeper, not bioenergetic and reichian, deeper and serious, but without 
external rules that distort everything. I feel that there is still hope for me and it will 
be a matter of finding someone to work with. What does the I Ching say? The I Ching tells me that I should 
return to Mexico as soon as possible. I became terribly desperate. I went to 
inquire about the schedule of trains   and trucks traveling to Delhi and did not dare to buy a ticket. A terrible force stopped me 
and prevented me from leaving Rishikesh. I am getting scared by the bizarre levels 
with which I interact. It would seem that an energy has been awakened within me 
that I do not know and cannot handle. June 24. I am undergoing many changes. I 
feel that each instant is a life and I understand the reincarnational 
process as the steps from one instant   of life to the next. The same karmic laws 
are given for one day as for a millennium. In the morning I decided to go to Delhi. I was 
feeling strong and optimistic. I said goodbye to a Japanese friend I met at the ashram and 
went to my room. I packed and almost as I left I asked the I Ching about what I 
was doing. He answered me like this: Kou – Going to the meeting. 
Darkness, after being eliminated,   penetrates stealthily. There is a 
temptation to fall into darkness, but circumstances prevent it. 
It is impossible to do so. Obviously, I was alarmed, but 
I continued with my purpose to   reach Delhi to leave India as soon as possible. I arrived in Hardwar at 11 am, after 
saying goodbye to my friends. I noticed that I am closer to my feelings and clearer in my 
emotions. I was very pleased with the discovery. Between Rishikesh and Hardwar I 
felt full of light, while the bus   carrying me and six other people 
crossed forests and countryside. In Hardwar I began to understand the 
admonition of the I Ching. A sinister darkness infiltrated my body. When I wanted to 
get on the truck that would take me to Delhi, all I managed to do was to enter a violent 
agglomeration of people struggling to get an   available seat. The heat, the shouting and the 
banging filled me with intense disgust towards the Hindu people. I got off and waited for 
the next truck. Ten minutes before it arrived, I consulted the I Ching. I asked him if 
I should go on to Delhi. He answered me: Tun- Retreat. I must turn back before it is too late. I saw 
the truck that could take me to Delhi and, again, the same agglomeration as in the other one. 
The latter made me decide to heed the I Ching. I took the truck back to Rishikesh. I 
arrived exhausted. The whole day was spent doing Vipassana at the Sivananda 
ashram until I managed to recover. Arriving at my ashram, I asked the I Ching 
again if my return was fortunate. He replied: Ch’ien- The creative one. Maximum light and luck. Sun- The penetrating one, the gentle one. Never had my relationship with the I Ching 
been so clear. The readings had not only matched my states, but had predicted 
future situations with uncanny accuracy. I went to see my Japanese friend. I found him 
in a music session totally depressed. He told me that he did not know the cause of his state. I 
suggested to him to do a reading in the I Ching. He asked what was wrong. He answered: K’un – Oppression. Sung – Conflict. Earlier she had mentioned to me that both her 
culture and her family in Japan were too rigid and structured. I told him that perhaps his 
problem was coming out of a repressive past. According to the I Ching, his conflict 
had to do with letting go of his past. I felt invaded by a tense, painful and 
powerful energy and, simultaneously, in touch with an impressive 
intuitive and synchronistic level. I asked the I Ching: It answered me: Kuan- Contemplation. I- Increment. He told me that I should be deep 
enough not to feel superficially,   but to go to the meaning and basis of what 
I feel. He told me that I should have faith. In the evening I went to listen 
to Krishnananda from Rishikesh.   He spoke precisely about what happens to the 
spiritual seeker in moments of total crisis: about his need to remain serene, to have faith 
and to know that the Universe is perfect. He spoke of the need to perform any action in a 
total way and not in a partial or divided way. I am back in the India I admire and love. I 
notice enormous changes in me. More humble, compassionate and humane than before. 
Suffering has its uses after all! June 28. I am in the Sivananda ashram. One morning, 
three days ago, I reached the bottom of my despair and pain. I woke up without faith or 
hope. In meditation I gave myself to God and decided to do His will. Two hours later, an 
enormous impulse took me to the street and, in a horse-drawn cart, I saw a swami approaching. 
He called out to me that I was welcome. I had heard the same words from the spirit of 
Sivananda during a graveside meditation   the day before. I told the swami that I 
wished to live in Sivananda’s ashram and, without further delay, he arranged 
my entrance and assigned me a room. In the afternoon, an Aries boy, a 
philosophy student, arrived carrying   a treatise on Wittgenstein. I was very 
glad to see him. We became friends and he turned out to be an expert in Hindu 
astrology. Today, in the company of my   roommate and a monk from the ashram, we went 
to the Shiva temple in the Himalayas. It is called Neelakanta. We climbed a mountain for 
hours amidst fresh, clean, lush vegetation. Arriving at the temple, I realized that Shiva 
represented me and I understood the advice of the astrologer from Rishikesh 
about going to him for help. According to Hindu mythology, a time came when 
the divine nectar ran out. The gods gathered to stir the ocean of the cosmos to create more 
nectar. This was created, but mixed with poison. Shiva took the poison and deposited 
it in his throat, thus purifying the nectar. The Arunachala of Tiruvannamalai was also 
Shiva’s place, and there he appeared as a pillar of fire (the sivalingam). 
Sivananda also represents Shiva. At Neelakanta, I felt a sublime presence 
destroying my impurities (Shiva is the destroyer of death.) I performed magnificent rituals and 
my respect for the Hindu pantheon increased. On my way back to Sivananda’s ashram, 
I met Usha, a beautiful woman,   who took me to Sivananda’s former home. 
I meditated in the same room he used for his meditation. She spoke to me and told me 
that he was the spiritual father, that he would protect and help me. I cried throughout 
the meditation and thanked him for his love. In the evening, a monk took me to the 
person in charge of arranging passport   and document problems for foreign visitors to 
the ashram. He offered to solve my problems. I know that Sivananda is alive. I needed to get 
out of the other ashram. He drove me almost to ruin and despair by his lifelessness. Now 
I know that one of the reasons for coming   to India was to learn detachment. I am 
no longer afraid to go to Israel and I would not be worried about leaving Unam 
either. Thank God, I am a little freer. July 4. I am on a Pan Am Jumbo 747, departing for 
Mexico. The last few days I lived in Aurobindo’s ashram in Delhi. In the mornings, the song of 
hundreds of birds brightened my awakening and, after three days, the nights became a delight. 
Especially the last night in India. My heart remained active all night, filling me 
with joy, my astral heart, of course. It was like a farewell and the one in charge 
of offering it was Aurobindo and the Mother. I feel I cannot predict what I will find in 
Mexico. The only thing I know for sure is that I will not put up with repetitions or useless 
struggles. I have decided to be very careful, to separate special moments for spiritual practice 
from the rest of the vigil. It is all or nothing! I feel that having survived these six months in 
India is an incredible feat. I feel stronger, cleaner and happier than ever. Clearer and more 
mature with myself, though still unable to unify myself with a specific task, mission or work. 
I have learned to be more real and sincere. Through Aurobindo’s teachings, I met a yogi 
who taught me to have patience, the same patience that another master from the Sivananda 
ashram advised me to have in spiritual life. I learned from him that one must incorporate all 
worlds into one’s being. When I arrived in Delhi, I found a letter from Rabbi Mishkin urging me 
to go to Israel and another from my daughter, informing me that she was totally disillusioned 
and disappointed in me. For the first time in my life, I was able to get angry with Estusha, 
because, while it is true that she has every reason to be disappointed in me, at the same time 
I know that she sought that disappointment. She needed to get out of the conflict of missing me 
so much and the best thing was disappointment. In India I learned to recognize that everything 
that happens to us is our own creation and decision, although it usually comes from 
levels inaccessible to consciousness. I have known as never before. Necessity, fear, 
abandonment, madness and cowardice circled me like sinister birds in search of food. 
Sai Baba, Krishnananda, Bada para, Goenka, Niketan of Rishikesh, Sivananda and Aurobindo all 
cooperated to take me to the bottom of myself. Yesterday, a professional flutist told me that   what I learned in India would 
gradually show itself in Mexico. Nothing is random. I approach 
the West and, little by little,   the external begins to manifest itself. I am 
weak and the state of goodness in which I was is beginning to dilute and tends to disappear. 
The struggle begins again. The only thing that can sustain me is to give love and to be kind and 
compassionate in every occasion and opportunity.