My companions and I approached closer to Serpentine
Lane; the vibrations in my upraised hands grew stronger,
more pronounced. As if by a magnet, I was pulled
toward the right side of the road. Reaching the
entrance of a certain house, I was astounded to find
myself transfixed. I knocked at the door in a
state of intense excitement, holding my very breath.
I felt that the successful end had come for my long,
arduous, and certainly unusual quest!
The door was opened by a servant, who told me her
master was at home. He descended the stairway
from the second floor and smiled at me inquiringly.
I hardly knew how to frame my question, at once pertinent
and impertinent.
“Please tell me, sir, if you and your wife have
been expecting a child for about six months?”
“Yes, it is so.” Seeing that I was
a swami, a renunciate attired in the traditional orange
cloth, he added politely, “Pray inform me how
you know my affairs.”
When he heard about Kashi and the promise I had given,
the astonished man believed my story.
“A male child of fair complexion will be born
to you,” I told him. “He will have
a broad face, with a cowlick atop his forehead.
His disposition will be notably spiritual.”
I felt certain that the coming child would bear these
resemblances to Kashi.
Later I visited the child, whose parents had given
him his old name of Kashi. Even in infancy he
was strikingly similar in appearance to my dear Ranchi
student. The child showed me an instantaneous
affection; the attraction of the past awoke with redoubled
intensity.
Years later the teen-age boy wrote me, during my stay
in America. He explained his deep longing to
follow the path of a renunciate. I directed him
to a Himalayan master who, to this day, guides the
reborn Kashi.
{FN28-1} The will, projected from the point between
the eyebrows, is known by yogis as the broadcasting
apparatus of thought. When the feeling is calmly
concentrated on the heart, it acts as a mental radio,
and can receive the messages of others from far or
near. In telepathy the fine vibrations of thoughts
in one person’s mind are transmitted through
the subtle vibrations of astral ether and then through
the grosser earthly ether, creating electrical waves
which, in turn, translate themselves into thought waves
in the mind of the other person.
{FN28-2} Every soul in its pure state is omniscient.
Kashi’s soul remembered all the characteristics
of Kashi, the boy, and therefore mimicked his hoarse
voice in order to stir my recognition.
{FN28-3} Prokash Das is the present director of our
Yogoda Math (hermitage) at Dakshineswar in Bengal.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND I COMPARE SCHOOLS
“Rabindranath Tagore taught us to sing, as a
natural form of self-expression, like the birds.”
Bhola Nath, a bright fourteen-year-old lad at my Ranchi
school, gave me this explanation after I had complimented
him one morning on his melodious outbursts. With
or without provocation, the boy poured forth a tuneful
stream. He had previously attended the famous
Tagore school of “Santiniketan” (Haven
of Peace) at Bolpur.
