By the end of the 1960s, Westerners were traveling to India to visit Babuji. Among the first were a group of young Danes, who fell in love with Babuji and who were instrumental in bringing the spiritual practices of Heartfulness to the West. One of these pioneers was THOMAS MOGENSEN, who first visited Shahjahanpur in 1971 with his wife and some friends. Here he shares some personal stories about how he found balance and equilibrium, with some wisdom from Babuji.
Nobody could teach me how to ride a two-wheeler bike. My father, my mother – they all had a go at it. As long as they ran beside me, supporting me with a firm grip on the broomstick mounted behind my saddle, I was all right. As soon as they loosened their grip I lost my balance. It happened over and over again. Letting go, they gave me a slight push into the freedom of biking on my own. I fell and they gave up. I must have been about seven years old.
Then, on a warm sunny summers day, I succeeded in pestering an ice cream out of my mother. The ice cream parlor was not just a short walk away. You had to follow a dirt road, a mere wheel track, all the way through a plantation of pine trees surrounding our summer house to finally reach the small village. The first thing to catch my attention was Martha’s Ice Cream Parlor, a blue painted shack, soda pops, sausages, that sort of thing, and then the ice cream of course.
Anyway, that particular day I jumped my bike, wheeled all the way to Martha’s, had my ice cream and wheeled back home again without fully realizing that I was actually biking. Now, had anybody kept pouncing on me, “You must do this … No, no, not like that,” it would have surely created dislike, resentment, sadness, inferiority feelings, and anger. To ever go near my bike again, I would have had to conquer a samskara as deep as any we toil to get rid of. My interest and curiosity, joy and energetic pedaling would have been blocked from carrying me into the art of mastering my bike. I would have ended up “school tiered,” as we say in Danish. For years!
In school, no one could teach me how to read or write properly. Reading took time. My handwriting was a mess of small and capital letters jumping up and down. The teachers worried, and particularly my father. Seventh grade. Something wrong! Then, one fine afternoon, I returned from school, sat down and wrote my thesis for tomorrow in the orderly handwritten style I still have. A revelation! An angel’s gift right out of the blue. What a profound experience producing even more joyous pedaling into reading a ton of books.
Some weeks before Lalaji’s centenary celebration in 1973, I sat alone on Babuji’s veranda with Lalaji’s book, Truth Eternal, struggling to understand what I was reading. On the verge of giving up, I realized that Babuji had appeared from inside his study, now standing there next to his easy chair watching me. I looked up. With something like disgust he looked at me, then at Lalaji’s book, saying, “This is a very old book. Now he has written some new ones. You should write your own book.”
With the words, “Now he has written some new ones,” he referred not to Lalaji but to himself and his own books, while I dropped Truth Eternal into my lap, leaned back and relaxed just as he, absorbed in his Lalaji, did in his easy chair.
Books are okay, a few inspiring pages on a rainy day, but who wants to become a quotation machine? You know, feed it a question, pull the handle, bing! Right answer, 10 points. Babuji didn’t return to his study to fetch a load of books and throw them into my lap on top of Truth Eternal. He didn’t say, “You must read all these books within half a year, otherwise you will not …” He didn’t say that. He said, “You should write your own book.” He could have said, “You should ride your own bike,” because that was in fact what he did for us youngsters hanging around him on the veranda outside his study in Shahjahanpur.
He urged us to ride our own bikes deep into our own interest and curiosity, our joy and vital pedaling, by his grace turning us into what he still wants all of us to become, whether we are good with books or not. The track is clear, the road ready. “Experience will show,” he said while literally throwing me empty-handed into conducting my very first group meditation during Lalaji’s centenary celebration in Chennai 50 years ago. What an easy and simple way to enjoy the ice creams constantly transmitted to us. “Experience will show.” Close your eyes and open that book. There is not a single word in it. Not even a capital letter. Find your own balance. “Do and feel.” That, to me, is the essence of riding bikes in a natural way.
Find your own balance. “Do
and feel.”
That, to me, is the essence
of riding bikes in a natural way.
Thomas Mogensen
Thomas was one of the first Heartfulness practitioners in the West, visiting Babuji in Shahjahanpur, India, in 1971, where he filmed Babuji for the first time. He has written three books, and his latest, In ... Read More
