Baba Who?

Five Fingers Not the Same

Baba Who?

Baba Mucktananda

  I woke up in a tangle of wet bed sheets with the afternoon sun shining on my face and the telephone ringing.  My head was in a fog and I found myself too weak to get out of bed to answer the phone.  I grabbed the cord, dragged the phone, crashing off the shelf, toward the bed and answered.

  “Where are you? We were worried when you didn’t come to work this morning or call...what’s up?”  I gathered my thoughts, explained I was sick and would call back...I hung up and tried to figure out where Saturday and Sunday went.

  I began to remember waking up sweating, waking up into bizarre dreams, dreaming, calling out, trying to get up, wandering around my small apartment, lost. I began to realize that I had been in a fevered delirium for almost two days.  When I got the yellow fever shot they had mentioned that I might experience a mild fever, what they didn’t tell me is that I also might get a very realistic sample of what getting yellow fever would be like....minus the dying.

Ram Dass aka Dr. Richard Alpert

  As I showered and came back into reality one thing became clear...I definitely was going to India...this was real and now I better figure out when, how and why.  Around the same time a name started coming to mind, Mucktananda.  I wasn’t sure what it meant, or where I had heard the name, but I began feeling that it was somehow connected to the insistent voice I heard saying “come here” a few weeks earlier.  I began going through books where I might have seen the name and finally found it in a book by Ram Dass.  Ram Dass began his life as Richard Alpert...later Dr. Richard Alpert, a psychology professor at Harvard where he did LSD experiments with Timothy Leary, went to India to try to figure out what it all meant, found his guru and became Ram Dass a spiritual teacher and author. In one of his books he mentions another guru who he visited on one of his later journeys to India...Baba Mucktananda. Baba who? I knew that he was a guru, a teacher, and that Ram Dass had some amazing experiences with him... and that’s all I knew about him. I didn’t know if he had a western following, if I could find him or if I’d be welcomed if I did.  I did know that eventually that’s exactly where my journey would take me.