Yogis, Destiny and the Wheel of Time K.N. Rao Contents • Preface • Preface to the Second Edition • Chapter 1 That Great Guru • Chapter 2 A Profile of Guru's Life • Chapter 3 Prabhu Bejoy Krishna Goswami • Chapter 4 I Meet My Guru • Chapter 5 Awakened Kundalini • Chapter 6 Astrological Instruction • Chapter 7 Pre-destination: The Negative Side • Chapter 8 Rokadia Hanuman Baba • Chapter 9 My Jyotish Guru-I • Chapter 10 My Jyotish Guru-II • Chapter 11 Pre-destination and Divine Bliss • Chapter 12 Nagari Das Baba • Chapter 13 Ranga Avadhoot • Chapter 14 The Religion of Yogis • Chapter 15 Caution and Warning • Chapter 16 Ecstacies Spring from Fire-I • Chapter 17 Ecstacies Spring from Fire-II • Chapter 18 Ecstacies Spring from Fire-III • Chapter 19 Ecstacies Spring from Fire-IV • Chapter 20 Ecstacies Spring from Fire-V • Chapter 21 Ecstacies Spring from Fire-VI • Chapter 22 The Seers • Chapter 23 Astrology, when it is an Illumination • Chapter 24 Memory Glows • Chapter 25 Why Astrology at All? • Chapter 26 Poetical Guidance • Chapter 27 Bliss and Confusion Dedication My mother, K. Sarasvani Devi, my adi guru, who taught me astrology and showed me the true meaning of spiritual life. To my father, K. Rama Rao who inspired in all his children love for literature and healthy agnosticism. To my mantra Guru, Swami Paramananda Saraswati who taught me lessons through his inspiration and drew my attention to the universal religion of Yogis. To my Jyotish Guru, Yogi Bhaskaranandji, who convinced me that astrology was not fortune- telling, but that it peeps into the divinity of life. To Swami Moorkhanandji, who talked me out of my decision to give up astrology and argued that I should concentrate on the academic beauty of this subject. To Mouni Baba of Ujjain, who asked me to predict less and write more. To my brothers, sisters and their families, who witnessed some of the incidents mentioned in the book and helped me put them into proper sequence. Acknowledgements • I must thank my younger brothers, K.Vikram Rao and his wife, Dr. Mrs. K Sudha Rao; and K. Subhas Rao and his wife K. Vijaylakshmi for reading the manuscript from beginning to end and offering very constructive suggestions. • Shri Rajeev Jhanji, who gave me his computer to produce the remaining part of the book so fast and gave me telephonic instructions when I had some difficulties with the computer. • Shri Vinay Aditya, whose excellence of English has always helped me rewrite some sentences. • Ms. Heide Fiechter of Switzerland, who spent a week in February 1995 on my manuscript. Also Ms. Monika Mcclain of Seattle, a Vedic astrologer of USA with experience of editing books professionally, edited the manuscript. Both Monica and Heide said that a book about yogis, no longer living, inspired them, but my experiences with living Yogis was the proof of my truthfulness and fire of spiritual conviction. • To Leona Reugg for helping me revise the second edition. • All those readers of the Astrological Magazine, in which some of the pieces were serialised, by writing to me and telling me that these have been the best ever articles to have appeared in the magazine. They are in the hundreds and I thank them all. • My students of astrology who read the articles and tested the astrological principles given here and there, showing the promise of spirituality in a horoscope. About The Author Rao has seen ordinary looking men and women evolve spiritually and has met great yogis, many of them still living. He writes about them, and talks about them. But he is famous as an astrologer. He learnt astrology from his mother and the art of writing, from his father, K. Rama Rao, who was a famous Indian journalist in English language between 1930 and 1960. Rao's mantra Guru was a Bengali from eastern India. His Jyotish Guru was a Gujarati from western India. Himself, a south Indian, brought up in northern India, he is an Indian in the truest sense of the term with no parochialism, casteism, regionalism or the other types of narrowness usually associated with people all over the world. It is why he does not confine his account of spiritual experiences to one narrow region of India. His book on Devaraha Hans Baba, is a critical recording of the miracles he had witnessed for thirty six days continuously in 1994. He has the courage of conviction to write about living yogis with as much enthusiasm, as about those, who are no more with us. He narrates part of his long spiritual quest, which makes him say repeatedly in conversations that a life without spirituality is an animal life only. It is on the insistence of his friends that Rao decided to write out only a few of his own personal experiences about the undying spiritual heritage of India, here in this book. It is a first-hand account all through. In his book, Astrology, Destiny and the Wheel of Time which has by now been acclaimed as the best book to have come on Vedic astrology in English, the author has given enough hints about how lucky he had been from the childhood, when he saw from closest quarters great saints and yogis like Ma Anandmoyee, whom he served as a boy in sub-teens; how the great Neem Karoli Baba was a regular visitor to Nazarbagh, Lucknow, where he was brought up. Rao has done more original and fundamental researches in Vedic astrology in the last two decades and published them, than any other living contemporary of his. He is neither a translator of the classics of Vedic astrology nor a mere compiler, as most of the other writers, tend to be. It is not unusual for an Indian to meet great yogis and fakirs almost all his life. India is a land of spiritual giants. K.N. Rao has been luckier than most Indians in this respect, as his great Guru Swami Paramanand Saraswati had told him, one year after his initiation, on April 24, 1962, that where ever he went he would meet great yogis. He is one of the few who can give absolutely first hand account of what he saw, when, alone in the company of those yogis and, also describe his own spiritual experiences. Yet, as instructed by his Guru, he has restrained from narrating his own experiences and, has confined himself, mostly to others'. A great Guru forbids his disciple to discuss his own great spiritual experiences. This book is different from any other book on spiritual phenomena in many ways: there is the splendour, grace, kindness and extraordinary powers of the yogi; there is that inscrutable harshness of the yogi, behind which remains the concealed story of his kindness, which the devotee may either not realise or, realise when it is too late. A yogi once beat a very poor man with a baton, till he bled. Few days after, he prospered. The yogi had destroyed all his misfortunes. Such inscrutable acts of yogis are well understood by Indian villagers, while the urbanite judges the yogi with his own hypocritical parameters. It is not unusual in Indian families to talk of yogis among ancestors. In the case of K.N. Rao, both from his paternal and maternal side there have been yogis who gave up everything material and lived on madhukari (the rule imposed on a celibate disciple that he would get alms from one house only each day for certain number of years, and if refused in the very first house, he would have to remain hungry the whole day). One of Rao's uncles is a great yogi in Chitrakoot, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, while the other is in Kalahasti, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The famous Jillallmudi Ma of Guntur of Andhra, who had thousands of followers and died recently was the cousin of Rao and she herself had told him that after fulfilling his astrological mission he too would have to take to a life of complete renunciation. Rao who learnt astrology with his mother, K. Sarasvani Devi, was inspired more by his Yogi Guru, Bhaskaranandaji, to look into the spiritual depths of a horoscope first. He taught him certain secrets which he has been asked not to reveal much, except referring to them here and there. It is what Rao has done in this book. During his under-graduate and post-graduate days, Rao had come under an intense spell of Marx and Freud. He accepted the socialism of Acharya Narendra Dev, whom he even now regards as the greatest agnostic guru, he has met in his life. It took him away for some years from the childhood experiences with yogis and, from the spiritual tradition of his mother. He spent his days questioning spiritual phenomena. But God was kind to him. Between 1959 and 1961 when he was at Allahabad, he had such rare spiritual experiences that he found it difficult to accept Freud or Marx, as anything other than geniuses, who had only a partial, distorted and fragmented view of the baser side of human life. From there, it had been for him long and agonising retracing of his traditional spiritual roots. He spent some time in Sevagram, at Wardha with Mahatma Gandhi and, felt that the Mahatma was a truly spiritual person but, with a clearly defined political mission. It is why he does not include Mahatma Gandhi in his list of yogis or mahatmas here. Rao's transformation began when he was transferred to Shillong in January 1962, where he met his mantra Guru, Swami Paramanand Saraswati, who not merely spiritualised his life but also rekindled his interest in astrology.