PB stated to me that he had very advanced psychic powers in his young days, and that he loved the world of psychic phenomena. He had a choice to make between developing into a world-famous psychic or giving up his powers in the pursuit of spiritual development. He said that this was the hardest choice he ever had to make in his life, because he loved the psychic world. He made the choice after a dark time of being wracked with indecision, and his psychic abilities were taken from him in the space of a week.
Now, there seems to be some disagreement about whether or not as a sage, PB possessed psychic abilities. I think the question arises because strange things did happen around him from time to time, and some of these could be described as being psychic phenomena. But, I think there is a real difference between PB the developing psychic, and PB the sage. The distinction is that in his first stage, PB the psychic consciously worked to manipulate psychic energies to bring about his desired aims. In his later stage of life, PB became a powerhouse of spiritual energy, and radiated subtle energies that sometimes worked amazing effects. However, in my view, PB did not consciously work with or manipulate these energies, but allowed the outcomes to happen without his conscious manipulation. When we had our conversation on this topic, I asked him whether or not he got his powers back after his spiritual ascent; and he said yes, but in a different way. He no longer consciously worked with and used the energy but allowed it to flow through and use him. It is I think a real distinction. He was like a lightning rod for subtle energies, in that he attracted them just by being himself, and as far as I could see, he left them alone and left the results up to karma.
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The sense that he was transparent and that I could look through him. He wasn’t solid somehow; he didn’t have concreteness. He didn’t seem to have the same kind of mass. A different kind of mass than your basic person. More like a kind of texture. It was such a singular moment of meeting him. Just having that encounter does sit in my memory someplace, the possibilities for humanness. I don’t think I’ve met anyone like that before. Anyone who had that attenuated sense.
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In my interview, PB said to me, “You’ve had a glimpse, and then you will…and then you will…and then you will…and one day it will be the light of your very own Overself.” It felt he was taking me into a trance, the way he used that rhythmic phrasing. And then you will….And then you will…. Everything was completely still; I’d never felt such stillness in my life. It was profound. It was riveting. I didn’t have the ability to think.
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I do know that when people get together to talk about him there’s a special atmosphere that arises, that is not like anything else I know. This sounds very fantasy-land, but I do feel he is present. Seeing him in the flesh was one thing―a great privilege―but I think that his presence is even more intensely there through his work. He’s out of the body; but he is around. I feel his presence every day. Especially when people are talking together about him; it’s as though he’s right here with us.
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I had a huge spiritual awakening when reading A Search in Secret Egypt—an experience of my true being; that was long before I met him. Later PB told me, well, yes, that the purpose of his books is to initiate people into what he would call a glimpse, which is now referred to in California as awakening. You have a glimpse and then you know what the goal is; you have a way to orient yourself for the rest of your life. It’s available to everybody.
My visits to him weren’t always easy. The second time I saw him I remember being visited by a tremendous amount of shame and self-rejection. This is just part of the long process of seeing the ego and its mistakes for what they are. Being with him was like walking into the fire.
Visiting him [mostly] created peace and ease; I wasn’t motivated by strategy of any kind. What went on with him is really transmission. We talked about weather, politics, Switzerland, but in fact there was a huge amount of transmission going on.
A high point for me occurred when PB invited me for tea in a restaurant. We talked about trivia―politics, etc.―and in the course of it felt a kind of uncontrollable magnetic pull to look up into his eyes. I was brought up to think this is rude, but I couldn’t help myself; I just had to look up at him. When I looked at his eyes, I felt like one does when you look at the sun and the retina is traumatized. It was like an electric shock went through me. And then I had to look away and pretend that nothing was wrong. I thought there was something wrong with me―I was going crazy. So we continued our conversation and I looked at the flowers, the tea, and then I would be drawn back to look at him and when I would look at his eyes, again I would have this experience of shock. It went on six or seven times. After this I was definitely not the same. I think this is what is called transmission. This is transmission squared. It was another way of him sharing his information.
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Anthony—and he spent a lot of time with PB—mentioned that PB used to withdraw his whole physical body. He’d be sitting with him and then he would become more and more translucent and finally disappear. And then he would remanifest. Tony mentioned this kind of casually. He would be cutting PB’s hair, cutting, cutting, and then look down and there would be no head. And then he would come back again.
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To be in his presence was to be in unconditional love. I wouldn’t really call it love, it’s much more like a kind of enthusiastic acceptance of everything. You could encompass war and death. Whatever happened, it could be embraced with this feeling of acceptance. That is a totally fearless state. To be in his presence was to experience that directly. He had given me the experience of unconditional love; that is enough. Now the ball is in my court, to live out of the knowledge of that experience.
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In his presence you feel your capacity for innate freedom. Freedom from fear of our separateness. You feel your own expansive reality. It’s hard to talk about.
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My recall is of a very gentle person, yet a very powerful person at the same time. He was gracious and warm and quite lovely. We walked with PB around the lake. We had asked if he would meditate with us and he said no, he doesn’t meditate with people, but we preceded to sit on a park bench and sat silently for a long time.
At the time I wasn’t very Buddhist-oriented. He took me over to this painting of the Buddha and asked me to describe to him the two eyes of the Buddha. And I just went What? I said one is looking inward, the other outward. And he gave a little nod of acknowledgement and that was it! Now I’m very Buddhist-oriented.
It’s so hard to talk about PB: the love, the energy, the generosity of spirit….We did sit quietly with him a number of times, wherever there was a park bench or a lull in his place….The translucency of his skin, the clarity of what one would call the aura, the lucidity around him, the purity of his gaze, the unhurried of fullness of everything he did… [Looking back] It’s huge, absolutely gigantic that PB, not only his works and the vast imprint that his writings have made on my life, but the meetings…. If the experience of mind transmission fits my experience, then that happened. Very much to be treasured. I was in the presence of a great one. It’s so beyond words; I just don’t have the words but my understanding of the quest, my path, my view of life is forever altered. The gentleness and the power, that combination of utter gentleness and whatever that power is, there’s this quiet energy that is so powerful, of another world, another plane.
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I don’t remember exactly what led up to this, but he was sitting in a chair and I was on the floor and I was looking up at him, and I felt how much I was standing in my own way, how much I wanted to be a certain way for him, but coming up against my psyche. And I said something like, “PB, I’m sorry—it’s just the way I am.” I was crying. And he just looked at me in a compassionate way, but we didn’t talk about it. But then, thirty years later I’m reading The Notebooks, and I come across this passage: “’This is the way I am,’ is a sign of somebody ready for the short path.” An acceptance of the limitations of the ego, instead of trying to make it the means for achieving the Overself. Wow, PB actually wrote that incident down, and made it into a little teaching. I guess I was ready for the short path when I read that passage! As I was leaving, his parting words were, “You’ll experience the Overself when you die.” At the time I thought, well, ok, but I want the Overself now. I’d go on a protest: What do you want? When do you want it? Now! More recently I realized, no, he means when I die, surrender. It made me feel like [teary], at least he saw it as enough of a possibility that he would say that to me. He recognized I had fumbling sincerity. The proof will be in the pudding, as it were. I was touched very deeply by it.
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Years before I met PB this happened. I wrote a letter to PB asking if I could visit. While Tony was with PB I had this dream. I was in a white gossamer gown and I flew over the world to Switzerland. And I hovered over this apartment. In the apartment Anthony and PB were talking. I remember that in the apartment there was an orange rug, and orange chairs. And the very next day I ran into X, who had visited PB’s apartment. I told him about the dream and described the apartment and asked if in fact that’s what PB’s apartment looks like. And X said, yes, that’s exactly what his apartment looks like. So, in my dream I astral-traveled to PB, right. After Anthony returned he grabbed me after meditation and said “I have a message for you from PB.” PB told me to be more patient, hopeful, and to continue my inner life.
[When I finally met him] I told him I appreciated the message he had sent to me through Anthony several years ago. And then he smiled. And when he smiled it was like there were rays coming out of his mouth; it was so beautiful. And I relaxed.I told him that I would get very depressed when the sun went down, and he said, “Just listen to your Overself, and you’ll never feel lonely again.” At some point the conversation just stopped and we meditated. I have no idea how long. When it was over, I was just enveloped in silence. And peace. And light. It was incredible. It was very profound. It was total peace. I wasn’t sure how I could drive; I was so gone. It was beautiful. I was very fortunate. That’s it. I felt that this experience with PB was something to fulfill: to find that silence in myself. This has been my quest, the path that I’ve been on all my life. PB kick-started it, in a sense. He got me going, starting with that message he sent me. PB gave me silence and light. It was incredible.
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PB told me: “You were given a certain amount of experience from the past, and now the rest of this incarnation you have to improve your character and slowly overcome your fear [re an experience of the demon on the threshold] so that you can enter the portal to the higher world.”
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I was so nervous; I couldn’t believe I was going to meet this sage. My heart was pounding, I was just a wreck. I walked across the threshold and it was like I walked into a void of silence. It was so intense. Everything stopped. My body stopped; I wasn’t nervous. It wasn’t like I was dissociated. It was a tomb of silence. We sat on the couch and honestly, I don’t remember a thing he said to me. I was so completely in this place of silence. Then the interview was over and I remember somehow gliding towards the threshold in this place of complete silence and walked out over the threshold and was hit. You know those images of Lady Macbeth rubbing her hands? That’s what it was like for me. I felt all of this stuff from my past–not all of it was dirty. I didn’t know what to do. It brings tears to my eyes thinking about it. It took me weeks to come back into something normal. It was a psychic cleansing. It was a little frightening. Back then “silence” wasn’t how I thought of the quest. It was studying, meditating. So that experience of silence was so unexpected. I didn’t know how to understand it at the time. It’s almost like there wasn’t room for any personal self.
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I remember quaking on the porch as I knocked at the door to go in. I remember feeling neutral, no bhakti feelings.
[Negativity followed an experience of grace before meeting PB]. I asked him if the negativity had always been there or if it had just come in. He said no, it had always been there. It was because I had had the experience that I then had a place to stand so that I could see all of the darkness and awful stuff―those are my words!―that is there in the ego. Grace can come sometimes as a result of past karma and sometimes it’s freely given as a new thing when somebody’s in crisis. We went out into the backyard and were quiet, in meditation, for about 15 minutes. As I was leaving he said, “Don’t worry too much.”In seeing Shankaracharya my feelings were dramatically involved; and my feelings were not involved with seeing PB. It felt more impersonal–in a good sense. It’s foundational.