Of Scorpions, Tigers & Snakes -- and Trust in God

  Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, India
Friday, January 18, 2008

Tonight was a special night for me. It had the quiet, informal feel of a relaxed family night at the ashram. Baba had been traveling since Jan. 5th and had an intense, very productive program schedule the entire time. When I arrived this evening at the apartment, he was tired and ready to relax rather than get to work.

ShantiMaa and I sat on chairs next to the wall facing him,

Essence of ShantiMaa

while Baba sat on her bed (her bedroom doubles as the living/receiving room). As Baba relaxed more through the evening, he gradually reclined on her pillows, with the large painting of Baba Lokenath and pictures of other saints on the same wall next to the bed looking down on him.

ShantiMaa and BantiMaa

He began telling story after story after story of their life in Bageshwar, at the tiny ashram/temple he built there for Baba Lokenath, 1980-85, in the foothills of the Himalayas. KrishnapriyaMa was on the phone in the back room for a lot of the evening, but she joined in from time to time with her stories.

The Bageshwar temple and ashram is on top of a mountain in the foothills of the Himalayas. The mountain rises above the village of Bageshwar, a small Himalayan hamlet, but the mountain itself is completely unpopulated.

Baba: There was nothing there when we lived there for 4-5 years. It was all forest. Totally wild. Snakes everywhere. Tigers, full grown ones, were all over the mountain. No one dared come up or go down the mountain after dark because of all the tigers. Even today, the tigers come with their cubs and sun themselves on the little area out in front of the temple. Hyenas were always digging up the potatoes we planted in the garden.

And the scorpions, the scorpions, for the entire 4 or 5 years that we lived there, were like ants, armies of ants. They were everywhere, large ones, small ones, hundreds and hundreds of them. I could be sitting here, and right next to me, less than a foot away, they would be crawling in lines alongside of me. Not one, not two, not three or four, but hundreds of them. They were crawling on the walls, on the floors, on the ceilings, dropping down on your head, in the cabinets, in your clothes and blanket, every nook and cranny.

Maa: One time when Baba was offering ararti, a huge one fell right on his head. Plop! Directly on top of his head! He didn't flinch. He kept right on with the ararti, offering the lamp at the altar. Then after he finished the ararti, he shook it out of his hair. It was so big.
Baba: Those big ones were so poisonous...if they bit you, you were dead. But they were everywhere. One time ShantiMa went to lift up a bowl and forgot to look first. She just reached in and took it from the shelf. There was a huge scorpion sitting right there. On another night when Maa was sleeping and it was very cold, she had covered herself with a blanket. Something kept crawling up her leg toward her hip. She kept brushing it back, three, four, five times, thinking it was something smaller, before she realized it was a huge scorpion.

Me: Were you ever bitten, in all those 4-5 years.?

Baba: Just a few times, by the little ones. It would hurt for about 10 minutes, we would cry, but it would be over soon. But never by the larger, much more deadly ones.

Maa: We would put kerosene oil on a sting and the pain would be gone in about 10 minutes. Then it would be like an ant bite.

Maa: We used to cut their pincher tips off. It wouldn't be good to kill them, so we did that to keep them from stinging.

Me: How on earth could you stand it?

Baba: We knew that we were there by Baba Lokenath's grace. If anything was going to hurt us or kill us, whether it was a scorpion, or a snake or a tiger, it couldn't do it without Baba's permission. So we felt safe. We knew we were protected. Nobody, no thing had any power to seriously hurt us, however much they might want to.

---

Baba: Once a group of hooligans from the village below decided they would rob us. Everyone in the village came to visit us, the wealthiest ones as well, always came for our Sunday kirtan/satsang (chanting/time together focused on the Divine company.) So this group young men thought we must have a lot of money when we didn't have anything. They planned their nonsense ahead of time. They would come after dark, break in, kill all 3 of us, find the money and be off with it. (Our door was just pieces of old wooden shutters nailed together, the slightest kick could have broken it down.) There were 5 of them that hatched the plan.

On that night, they all got a little drunk, gathered up their iron rods and set out on their mission, climbing the steep trail to the ashram. These were boys that had grown up in this village. They knew the area like the back of their hand, every tree and blade of grass, every turn of every trail.

Halfway up the mountain, they came to this fork in the trail and took the one that they knew led to the ashram, but it just led them back to the fork again. They repeated this again and again, for over two hours. Eventually, they started to get nervous. They stopped to talk it over. They could see the two lights burning at the top at the ashram. They knew the way, but for the life of them they always ended up in the same spot. They got spooked. They began to feel that the torches were eyes watching them. Finally they concluded that maybe this Baba up there has some special powers, some special Divine protection, and we better not mess with him. They decided it was much safer to give up their plan and go home.

The next day, they were all sitting around talking about what happened, how strange it was to know the way so well and not to be able to find it. A rickshaw driver who knew them and who loved me very much, overheard the whole conversation. He came to me and told him the whole story.

I was asleep that night. All of this was going on and I didn't know any of it. We were all just asleep. Yet we were totally protected. We didn't have to do anything. When you have given your life to the Divine, when your absolute trust the Divine, there is a level of protection there. Nothing can harm you. That is the power of God.
---

Baba: We didn't have any water, no conveniences.

Me: How did you survive without water? Did you have to cart it up yourself?

Baba: Each day about 20 of the village children would come up the mountain and bring us a bottle of water. We would pour it into a bucket, and it was enough for us to survive on. We were fine.

We didn't have a bathroom. There was no electricity. One time, KrishnapriyaMaa went out to go to the bathroom. It was dark and coming back, she reached for the door before she realized there was a huge snake completely wrapped around the handle.

Baba: I had a place where I went to the bathroom. It was very private, on the side of a cliff. I would hold onto a rock ledge. Every day, I held the rock and I was comfortable. But I didn't realize that each day the rock was getting looser. One day, it just fell off, and I went tumbling down the 600 foot cliff. Somehow, part of the way down, a bush caught me. The bush held my weight, so I didn't go crashing all the way down to the boulders below. I would have been dead without that bush, or if it hadn't been able to hold my weight. I had a large open gash on my arm, but it was nothing to what could have happened.
---

Bright Light, Bright Smile

ShantiMaa (Krisnapriya's mother) chimes in with excitement, speaking in Bengali, telling about one of her encounters with a tiger. Baba translates and adds some commentary in the process: One time ShantiMaa was standing at the gate of the temple grounds, and a huge tiger came, chasing a little puppy. Now any tiger can catch a puppy in short order. But this puppy came onto the ashram grounds. The tiger followed it, but Baba Lokenath has promised that anyone who takes shelter under him, whatever the danger, will be safe, so there was no way the tiger could hurt this little puppy. Here is this little dog who starts WALKING in a circle around the ashram grounds. Here is ShantiMa, little ShantiMaa, standing at the gate, not 5 feet from this massive, fully grown tiger, who is now WALKING behind the dog on the temple grounds, following him, but not eating, not attacking him. No tiger just walks a few feet behind a walking dog! No dog walks with a tiger walking behind him. Any dog would be frozen in terror, absolutely still, unable to walk at all.

And here is ShantiMaa! The tiger could just has easily have turned and eaten her as the dog, but it never makes a move for her. When ShantiMaa calls out, "Tiger" to KrishnapriyaMaa, who is inside the ashram, Krishnapriya comes running to the door. But before she can get there, the tiger leaps over the gate and down the mountain into the forest. All Krishapriya sees is the full length of his long tail just as he disappears.

Our Two Maa's Together

---

KrishnapriyaMaa: It was so, so cold at Bageshwar. This is the Himalayas. The cold was so bitter, so intense, we were all freezing. We are sleeping on the concrete floor. One night it was ice cold and very late. Baba was in the other room.

Suddenly, I hear the most unnatural sound, a very loud, unearthly horrifying pop - like nothing I have ever heard before or since - right where ShantiMaa is lying next to me. When I look over at ShantiMa, her head has totally turned around, 180 degrees. She is lying on her back, but her face is facing straight down into the floor. Her body is as solid as a rock. I scream for Baba, who comes running in.

Baba: I have never seen a body like that. There is no way it is even physically possible for the head to turn like that and be in that position. She had no pulse. No breath whatever was coming from her nose or mouth. There was not an iota of life left in her body that I could detect. And every muscle felt frozen, absolutely solid. I didn't know what to do.

All I had was the name of Baba Lokenath, so I began to chant Baba's name, calling on his Presence, while moving my hand slowly back and forth over her entire body, about an inch above it, from head to foot. Chanting, Chanting, Chanting "Baba Lokenath".

What else could I do? Maa is crying, praying next to me. After about 30 minutes ShantiMaa started to faintly breathe. Her muscles began to soften again. Gradually, gradually her neck relaxed and she was able to move it back into a normal position.

Baba: What is the lesson in all of this? When we love the Divine with all of our heart, when we give ourselves to the Divine and to its service, when we take absolute refuge in the Divine, when we completely trust the Divine, we have nothing to fear. We are surrounded by protection, whatever dangers are all around us. Nothing can touch us, nothing can happen to us until and unless the Divine gives its consent.

Each one of us, me, KrishnapriyaMaa, ShantiMaa, we are alive today, here talking to you today, only because of Baba Lokenath, his love and protection. Our very existence, every breath we take is a gift from him. Every day we lived in Bageshwar proved that to us. It defies all logic that any of us would be alive today, living in that temple without heat, without water, with only a few blankets to see us through those icy Himalayan winters. But here we are, knowing every day is a gift from God, every breath is a gift from God. This isn't just a theory. We lived the miracle of it. And these are just some of the stories. We could tell you many, many more.

That every breath you take is a direct gift from God is no less true for you than it is for us. We just lived closer to that living reality. It may feel more real and immediate to us than it does to you, but it is no less true for you.