Two
New York. I had forgotten how beautifully worn out this city looks.
Rusty fire escapes on bare facades. Pale colors, advertisements taped together.
Like a pair of totally threadbare shoes that shuffle so nicely you never want
to get rid of them. The scene in the East Village, where we live for four days
behind exactly such a fire escape, fits that description exactly. Baggy
T-shirts, shoelaces untied, sneakers with holes in them, our neighbor sitting
on the stone stairs in front of his house in the sun. Nobody cares.
The first time I was here, more than thirty years ago, I had decided to
leave the Divine Light Mission of guru Maharaj ji. I was stopping over on a
flight back home to Amsterdam from Denver, where I had maintained contact for
the guru with his ashrams in Europe and Australia at his ‘International
Headquarters’. In the five previous years, when I was his follower, I would
never have even thought about making a tourist trip like that. Because the
visible world around us is nothing but ‘maya’, Maharaj ji taught[1].
Illusion. False temptation for the seeker of enlightenment. Only the truly
enlightened one could handle it and was allowed to play with it. That’s why
guru Maharaj ji could enjoy himself in his mansion on the hills of Malibu
Beach, with a Maserati Convertible, a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, a Cadillac
Seville and a Mercedes SEL all sitting in the garage. And could dream about his
own Grumman Gulfstream 12-person jet, his biggest desire then. I knew the
brochures that were passed around within the Divine Light Mission with a
whispered explanation of the divine play of the guru. After all, as ‘Jesus
returned’, the earth and everything on it was his. It was the true devotees’
honor to be able to deliver it to him. Sometimes literally, like when the
German ‘general secretary’, head of the national branch of the Divine Light
Mission, flew to London with a hundred thousand German marks taped to his body,
to complete the deal of the guru’s new Rolls Royce.
But a good follower kept far from material things and other illusions
that could drive him off the path to enlightenment. For that same reason I had
seen next to nothing of the United States in the year and a half that I lived
in Denver and worked at the IHQ. And what I did see, I experienced with a face
turned away, so to speak. An attitude that had unexpected results, by the way.
While before that, floating around the Vondelpark, I had no idea how I’d ever
connect with the world of offices, jobs and making money, and didn’t really
want to either. But as it turned out, with my face turned away, I could do
almost anything in that exact same world. In the more than three years before I
got the phone call to come to Denver, I established junk collecting services in
four Dutch cities, along with sorting businesses, wholesale to processors of
rags and used metals and retailing the usable stuff in our own shops. Where in
the previous, normal life I found my job as a nurse’s aid utterly overpaid, as
a follower of Maharaj ji I generated cash flow that supported the divine play
of the guru in such a way that his ‘international president’ called me to his
IHQ.
[1] At that time the name for Prem Pal
Singh Rawat, born in 1957 in Hardwar, India. By now Maharaj ji seeks publicity
as Prem Rawat, with the support of the organisation Elan Vital.