If Truth Be Told: A Monk's Memoir Read Online Free Page A

you.'
    'No, you must meet my mother, please. She really wants to see you. She prays to you every day.'
    But he, the foremost yogi, disappeared.
    I woke up my mother.
    'Lord Shiva came, Lord Shiva came! I asked him to wait for you but he didn't.'
    Then I began crying. 'I asked him to wait. I wanted you to see him. He was so beautiful. God was here, Mummy, Lord Shiva was here.'
    She sought to pacify me but the more she tried, the louder I cried. I couldn't bear for her to be excluded from my dream, not belong to a place where God and I existed but she didn’t. I could not imagine a life without my mother.
    'Stop crying, son,' she said lovingly. 'I'll pray to Lord Shiva to wait for me the next time.'
    'Was it real? Did he really come? Are dreams real, Mummy?'
    'Yes, of course it was real.'
    Even though I was barely eight summers old at the time, I still remember how I had felt that night. I couldn't go back to sleep, not because my mind had any questions but because I was already in a state of deep tranquility—beyond sleep. Such was the touch of Shiva. I started to lose the sense of my individual self and felt I was becoming one with the vast and silent ocean that looked up at the endless sky. There were no boundaries and no resistance, only the expanse of blue ocean and sky, only peace, light and joy. My young body of a few years had just discovered my million-year-old soul.
     

     
    A couple of years went by. Ten now, I had stopped reading comics and moved on to books. On the outside, I was mostly happy but, deep within, I craved to see God again, not in a dream but in full consciousness. I found myself deeply restless. I didn't just want to know more about him; I wanted to know him because I believed only he could answer the questions that dogged me constantly: Why was the world the way it was, and why was I the way I was? Why was it that some people lived in big houses while others slept on the road? Why did people fall ill and die?
    Neither my friends nor my elders could hold a reasoned conversation with me, much less address these questions. Nearly a year passed as I searched in vain for answers. I finally turned to numerology, astrology and other esoteric disciplines, hoping they would bring me the clarity I sought. My mother knew a learned Brahmin, Pandit Suresh Sharma, who agreed to teach me astrology. From him, I understood the significance of the planets and planetary positions. He taught me how to draw the charts, how to normalize zodiac signs based on longitude and latitude and so on.
    I studied all the major classical and contemporary works on astrology. These books had explanations and even remarkable insights for me, but no answers. I had read that the sages—authors of the classical astrological texts—had received divine knowledge by way of divination. Clearly, they must have had a way to receive and interpret that knowledge. Why did the Divine talk to them and not to me? The seers who wrote marvellous works of great profundity and foresight had something in common: living in secluded spots in mountains and forests, they chanted Vedic hymns and meditated on God. I couldn't go and live in the woods but I could sit still and try to meditate on God, I thought. I began meditating at every available opportunity even though I had no real guidance or practical understanding of meditation. My method at the time was to sit still and chant ‘Om’. That’s what I did. Whenever I had an hour to spare, I meditated.
    A subtle change did start to come about. I often found myself at the intersection of time where the lines between the past, present and future blurred. It was like déjà vu bu t with one difference: I could see what the next moment would hold. Just as a flash of lightning illuminates the dark sky for a moment and you see everything around you in its full glory, these flashes of intuition revealed to me information about the person sitting before me that I simply didn’t know.
    Sometimes, visitors would