Foreword

My first experience of Swami Prakashananda was in 1977 at Swami Muktananda's ashram in Ganeshpuri, India. He was a spectacularly fascinating-looking human being. His clothes appeared plain and simple in contrast to the richness of his Divine depth. His eyes were magnified by his thick glasses into beams of light. A subtle light appeared to be streaming off his round, succulent body as he seemed to almost float over the ground. I did not know what his name was, but it was obvious to me he was a holy man. There were a few people walking with him and I was so attracted by this radiant being that I just began to walk along also.

After a while the small group settled around him in an informal way on a porch. I could not get over how radiant his body appeared. It actually seemed to glow. As he talked and shared the most engaging stories through a translator, his presence filled the room with a simple, all-encompassing love. I felt I was in the presence of the Divine mother. My being felt as if it were in a womb of love. My whole organism felt nourished in a uniquely total way. This spiritual feast went on for hours. So began my relationship with the great being called Swami Prakashananda Saraswati. It would be an understatement to say I was inspired.

Over the years, I had opportunities to spend more time with him. He was an ardent devotee of the Divine Mother and the love that emanated from him only hinted at the degree to which he had merged with the Goddess and become the Divine Mother disguised in the form of a man.

In the background was his devotion to Dattatreya, an incarnation combining Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma, who is the primordial embodiment of the Guru Principle. His devotion to Dattatreya was so great that a tree trunk with three separate trees growing out of it (symbolizing the three aspects of Dattatreya) even grew in his Sapta Shringh ashram. A small temple to Dattatreya was built by Prakashananda in honor of this special tree.

Swami Prakashananda, although often appearing to worship an external form, lived in the conscious awareness of a jnani. A jnani is one whose awareness goes beyond the illusion of all form (however Divine), spiritual visions, and even the highly esteemed vision of the Blue Pearl. Swami Prakashananda was established in the noncausal joy of the nondual awareness of the "great nothingness.” It was this profound level of consciousness that gave spiritual power to Swami Prakashananda's mystical simplicity, his overwhelming radiation of love, and his immunity to the attractions of power, money, and sex. He was directly experiencing and expressing the eternal, divine wealth of God.

Although he fiercely followed his own teaching of the inner Guru as the ultimate guru, the third part of his spiritual background came from his love of his physical guru, Swami Muktananda.

He often jokingly referred to himself as an "agaram bagaram" (hodgepodge) swami. The sound of these words, like many of his humorous yet pointed stories, is quite descriptive of how his life was lived. Prakashananda was free from worldly entanglements, yet played fully and humorously in the world in his own independent, iconoclastic way. In the Jewish tradition, he would be compared to a hidden Tzaddik. He refused to take the position of a guru, yet served as a “guru uncle," or what I would call a spiritual mentor, to thousands of spiritually hungry humans ranging from indigenous Indian children to sophisticated Western professionals. He was the respected guru uncle to many Indian holy men and sadhus in Maharashtra state.

After leaving Sapta Shringh mountain where he had lived for 27 years in a 9' X 9' X 9' room, Swami Prakashananda led a physically and socially simple life in a humble two-room dwelling where a devotee invited him to live in Nasik. As an “agaram bagaram” swami, he consistently remained immune to the temptations of power, riches, and sex that seem to infect and bring down so many present-day spiritual teachers. Prakashananda shared almost all of what was offered to him with the financially poor children and adults who visited his ashram.

Unencumbered by large organizations and worldly temptations, he was free to express the play of the inner Divine light which shone so radiantly through every aspect of his life. It led him to feed the God in everyone, both physically and spiritually. This manifested in a program which cared for the financially disadvantaged children in the Sapta Shringh area. The children who lived in his humble ashram, along with many of the children of the area, were fed on a daily basis. This program has been active more than thirty years.

He was the embodiment of what he taught. The guru exists within you. Follow this inner direction and do not get stuck in the enmeshment of spiritual organizations, spiritual formulas, or belief systems that do not always encourage and allow a person to follow the inner guidance of the Guru Tattva, the formless, inner guru. The noncausal joy of the inner guru always seemed to bubble through him with a mischievous, humorous radiance that would spontaneously evoke the heart to smile.

Although liberated, he maintained a continual spiritual vigilance. Near the end of my time with him, Prakashananda graced me with one whole day alone with him and his translator, traveling around Bombay. As we experienced the shakti manifesting as the myriad faces of humanity in the city, he compassionately explained to me the subtleties of liberation and the necessity of maintaining spiritual vigilance until leaving the body.

Swamiji was a master of being in the world, but not of it. With the tenderness of a mother's love for a newborn, he carefully instructed me how to live in that same way. In his inimical, serious, yet humorous way, he was able to use our adventure in Bombay as a vehicle to communicate the subtleties of playing in the awareness of the simultaneously nondual/dual world. Always giving and glowing, Swami Prakashananda Saraswati was a saint who greeted all with love and the joy of honoring the Divine in them.

One of the special qualities of this biography written by Harihar, the name given by Prakashananda to Titus Foster, who lived as his disciple at Sapta Shringh and in his humble two-room ashram in Nasik for eight years. Because of Harihar's long-term service to Prakashananda, he is able to communicate in this biography his first-hand knowledge and experience of his teachings and stories in a way that brings Prakashananda's shakti right through the pages. The delightful, personal narrative and the well-chosen use of Prakashananda's love and wisdom stories bring to us the essence of the Prakashananda experience. It is an experience and awareness worth knowing and treasuring.

Gabriel Cousens, M.D.