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CHAPTER
NINE
After leaving Herakhan, we reached Hong Kong on time. But a few hours before we were due to leave for China, as I
was boarding a bus to go do some last minute shopping, my purse was
razored open and its contents were removed.
The thief even cut across my thumbnail—not my thumb, just the
nail—without my realizing it while it was happening!
I lost not only my money, but my passport.
So we had to go to the American Embassy and get a new passport for
me. Then I needed new entry
papers into Hong Kong from Bangkok to prove that I was in Hong Kong
legally. We had to wait a day
to get new entrance papers because it was a national holiday of some sort
in Hong Kong (or maybe it was a national holiday in Bangkok).
The police were very careful to explain to me that many people swam
to Hong Kong from mainland China to try to leave the communist regime, so
proper entrance papers were imperative.
Of course, they weren't swimming from
Bangkok to Hong Kong to go into
mainland communist China, as Louis and I wanted to do, but in any case, a
couple of days were spent in Hong Kong waiting for the bureaucracy to
function and for our travel agent's representative to convince the Chinese
government to relax its rules and allow us to take our tour after all.
The Chinese government finally relented and agreed that Louis and I
could go on our tour, but it would have to be a student tour instead of a
Grade A tour and it was three days shorter.
I was thankful that all of the money that we'd spent on our travel
arrangements wasn't completely lost because some thief decided to pick my
purse. So we went into China,
and several weeks later, we finished our trip and returned to Los Angeles.
At the beginning of the Spring semester, I picked up the reins of
my teaching again, and several weeks passed.
I applied to take a semester's leave the next Fall at no pay so
that I would have time to work on some writing, and also have time to go
back to India in June and spend some more time there at the ashram.
One day, I woke up and thought I was about to die.
I was in intense pain. My
chest was just in flames. I
couldn't breathe. Every time
I tried to take a breath, the pain stabbed through me even worse.
I was actually afraid to stay home alone and, anyhow, I had three
classes waiting for me. So I
went to school and started to teach my eight o'clock class.
But my arm and chest were in such pain that I truly feared I was
having a heart attack.
I didn't really believe I was having a heart attack, for how can
you have a heart attack that goes on and on and on and on?
I imagined that a person having something wrong with his heart
would become unconscious or at least become incapable of moving.
I wasn't. I could walk
up and down the halls.
So I excused the class early and went back to my office, where I did some
connected breathing and tried to Rebirth away whatever the negative was
that was coming up.
So at nine o'clock, I went back to the classroom and started to
teach my nine o'clock class. But
the pain got even worse and I let my class go.
The pain got so bad that I phoned home hoping to
find Louis, and that he could come to school and drive me home.
I was genuinely afraid that I might pass out from the pain, so I
didn't think it would be wise or safe for me to be driving.
But I couldn't locate him. Finally,
the pain stopped getting any worse—it was just at what felt like the max
constantly. So, after my hour's
break (which was spent talking about health and death benefits with an
insurance broker who nabbed me in my office), I taught my eleven o'clock
class, and then, at noon, slowly and carefully drove home.
I found that I couldn't do anything, even open my mail, so I spent
the rest of the day lying in bed, aching, being interrupted by one person
after another. In late
afternoon, I was visited by Joe Moriarty and then, early that evening, my
old student assistant, Pat Dillon, came by from out of town with a friend,
and I came downstairs to talk with them.
But my chest was still hurting too much for me to try to pay
attention to them, and I was explaining that to him when the phone rang.
It was the phone call telling me that Babaji had just died of a
heart attack.
I hung up and said to Pat and his friend, "Babaji just died."
Pat shrugged and said, "I don't know the man, sorry."
I didn't want to try to explain and I didn't want to carry on a
conversation, so I finally ended up asking them, please, to leave. They were just leaving when Louis showed up.
I told him that Babaji had died.
At least his reaction was one of dumbfounded dismay.
Strangely, the pain in my
chest totally disappeared the instant that I was told on the phone that
Babaji had died. I felt
profound sadness, almost uncontrollable grief.
But physical pain was no longer present. It disappeared in that instant when my heart broke.
Anyhow, Pat and his friend left, and Louis and I spent the night
crying and talking about Babaji, wondering how He could be gone.
I spent the next day (my day with no classes) talking with
Rebirthers all over the world, crying constantly.
The next morning I had to go to school to teach my classes.
I tried to teach, but I couldn't stop crying.
So, I dismissed my first class after five minutes, telling my class
that a very dear friend had just died and I was sorry but I really couldn't
handle a class.
I went back to my office
for the rest of that hour, then I went to teach my next class.
But the same thing happened: I couldn't stop crying, and I found
that I couldn't keep my mind on what I was teaching, that I didn't want
to. So again, I dismissed the
class. I spent the rest of
that hour and my next hour, my office hour, in my office with the door
closed, crying, hoping that I would be able to meet with my eleven o'clock
class and carry out my teaching duties.
But, the same thing happened, and so, after dismissing my class, I
left the college.
I got into my car and started to drive home.
I got to within about five blocks of my house when I realized that
I was almost completely out of gas. So,
I drove up into a Union 76 station on Beverly Boulevard and turned off my
engine, pulled out the key to give it to the station attendant, and in
that instant, started crying again.
Suddenly I heard two loud claps.
I startled and looked, and there was a man standing by my car
window, in a Union 76 station attendant outfit, but he had the face of
Babaji! He looked exactly like Babaji: the same eyes and cheeks and
complexion! I kept staring at
the face in front of me, as the tears continued to spill down my face.
I was confused and almost frightened.
I assumed that my grief had so addled my brain that I was
hallucinating, thinking I was actually seeing Babaji's face in front of
me. I kept watching, seeing the lips move. Finally, I realized the man was saying something, and I
managed to listen and registered "keys."
So I gave him the keys, and he went back and unlocked the gas cap,
put the hose into the tank to fill it, and then came back to the window,
and said, "And so you've been to China?" (And, by the way, he pronounced
it "Sheen.")
I said, "Yes, but how do you know?"
What made him think I'd been to China?
I checked to try to figure it out, but I wasn't wearing anything
Chinese, not even any jewelry from China.
I couldn't understand it at all.
He smiled and started to talk to me, but as I looked at his face, I
could not hear a single word he said.
I could only examine his face.
The eyes, the nose and the mouth and the contours and the color of
the skin, everything—all the same!
So far as I could tell, it was Babaji in front of me.
At this point, I started to get almost afraid that I truly was
losing my mind. I still hadn't
heard a word he was saying, but he finally finished talking, and then went
and opened up the hood and checked the oil.
I put my head down, looking down into my lap again, and once again,
tears overwhelmed me.
Just as the weeping started, again, I heard somebody clap his
hands, twice!
Again, I startled and I looked up, and there the attendant was at
the car window with my keys in his hand, ready to hand them back to me.
I mustered my courage to try to test reality and said, "Excuse me,
did you ask if I'd been to China?"
And he said, "Yes."
And I said, "How did you know?
I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you said before."
And again he talked for a few minutes, but once again I didn't hear
a single sound! I just was
lost in the amazement of this face, this beloved face, being there in
front of me.
Somehow or other, the rest of the gas-purchasing transaction was
carried out. I came home and
spent the rest of the day crying and wondering in mystified amazement over
how a station attendant at a Union 76 gas station on Beverly Boulevard in
Los Angeles could be Babaji three days after Babaji died.
It wasn't just the attendant's looks that struck me—it was the
double set of hand claps and the remark about China.
Ordinarily station attendants don't clap their hands at me to get
my attention. They may knock
on the window or clear their throats, but to slap their hands together and
make two very loud claps is surprising, very unusual.
Also, why on earth would a Union 76 attendant ask me about China?
But there it was. That's what happened: the Union 76 attendant did clap his hands and he did
talk about China. That was
the last subject I talked about with Babaji, that last day I was at the
ashram, the day which had started with his clapping his hands at me,
twice, two different times.
After some time, I realized, "Babaji is comforting me. He's letting me know that He is still alive, that I will see
Him in various places. I didn't
need to have visions of Him before, but now that He's dead, what a
comfort, what a joy it is to have Him appear."
The next day, I needed to go to a bank, and I stood in a short line
behind an Indian woman who was wearing a sari.
For no reason, she turned around and said to me, "The teaching is
always patience."
I thought, "How amazing. That's
exactly what that old Indian woman said to me in Pallea when we were
boarding the bus to go back to Herakhan!"
Again, I felt as if Babaji were comforting me.
Through that day and the next, I received lots and lots of phone
calls from people all over the world asking me if I knew that Babaji had
died, sharing with me their grief and their reactions.
Through it all, almost all the time, I was sobbing, with the
exception of those few minutes standing in line at the bank.
Most of the time, the entire week following the 14th of February, I
spent crying.
By the end of the week, on Sunday, I thought that I couldn't stand
the emotional pain any longer. As
I reflected, I realized that almost every day for most of the intervening
50 years since my father had died, I had thought of him and ached for him.
I love him immensely. A
part of me almost seemed to believe that so long as I remembered each day
to think about him and keep him in my mind, he was indeed still alive.
So all these years I'd been torturing myself with my grief for my
father.
Now, I had an additional measure of grief for Babaji! And I truly thought I couldn't stand anymore, I believed I
would die from so much pain.
Before more happened, though, I wanted people to know about the
strange coincidences with the man at the Union 76 station and the woman in
the bank. So I decided I
would sit down and tell the story of what had happened all week, and I
spent approximately an hour dictating a cassette tape that Evelyn Freedman
later transcribed. If you
want to read exactly what I said that day, you will find it in
Appendix A. This
chapter has already described these events, so forgive the repetition.
All sorts of questions raced through my mind, all stemming from the
affirmations "My
Thought Creates a Perfect Universe"
and "Nothing
Happens to Me Without My Consent."
What could I possibly have learned from Babaji's death.
If my thought is creative, why had I killed Him?
As I finished taping my last sentence describing the strange events
that had happened through that week since Valentine's Day, suddenly all my
grief disappeared and the weeping stopped!
I had a clear insight: Babaji had died so that I would finally let
go my extended grieving for my long-dead father.
I felt relief and I felt hope.
I found myself almost believing that Babaji would come back, just
as He had promised. I put the tape in a pile of cassettes waiting to be transcribed, washed the dried tears off my face, and went back to my ordinary life.
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