Naag-devta faith

Only Faith
On Sunday, May 28th, I reach our Ashram in New York after a long ride from my home in Pennsylvania. Her Holiness Guru Maa was really excited and seemed quite well after suffering from months of heart-related health problems. She quickly tells me that Baba had appeared in our Mandir and left a huge foot-print on the paneled wall behind our main shrine. She was doing Parikrama around the shrine, and had completed sixty parikramas. On the 61st Parikrama, She suddenly sees this foot-print on the wall. She then feels a sudden rush of energy in Her body, and begins to feel much better than She was feeling the prior months. Just to ensure that people do not doubt it, the foot-print was imprinted as if Baba was walking down from the ceiling (like Superman or Spiderman). Besides, the size of the foot-print was big, and Baba had six toes! It was truly remarkable. Guru Maa made five calls to let them know of the miracle. Word spread. Countless devotees started coming to have ‘darshan’ of Baba’s miracle. I was blessed to have gone to the temple on a Sunday to witness it myself. We tried taking pictures, but the quality of the pictures was only fair. It was unbelievable, and yet so many devotees saw it for themselves. What is it? IS their any science which can explain this phenomenon? Is their any common-sense logic to it? There is ONLY one answer to this question, which is ‘FAITH’

My tryst with faith vs. logic and science at Sri Hanuman Mandir began probably almost two decades ago. My father was having serious eye problems with his retinas. His retina was detached probably a dozen times in 10 months. He was fed up with the surgery, and living in fear anticipating the next detachment. He had lost 50-60% vision in the eyes. One of his trips, he was sitting next to the ex-Consul-General of India (Mr. Mehta) who suggested that he gets faith-healing ‘mantras’ from Guru Maa at the Hanuman Mandir. We requested Guru Maa on our next visit, who asked us to bring my father for the entire Ramayana Path in the holy month of Sravan. We did. Guru Maa performed faith healing after the Aarti every evening. And, my father did not have any more retina detachments until he passed away three years ago! Soon I became active in the Mandir, and saw countless devotees being healed by Guru Maa of a variety of common and incurable diseases. Cancer, AIDS, leprosy, mental imbalance etc were cured due to the devotees FAITH in Guru Maa, who in turn, according to Her, was only a medium for Baba to spread FAITH.

Now and again, logic and scientific reasoning takes over my faith, and doubts appear again. We read so many press articles about charlatans doing magic, mass hypnotism etc that doubts do remain in your mind. But, miracles keep on happening and faith is restored. This has kept on happening for a number of years. I could not explain so many miracles.

But they happened. I list a few here:
1. A few times, Guru Maa has displayed the power of Mantra-Shakti, by starting the Hawan fire without using any match-sticks
2. We have seen our Ashram property spared of rainfall while we are doing Hawan, while all the surrounding areas are getting heavy rainfall
3. Early on (even before I began visiting the temple), Guru Maa was known as the snake-charmer. Even now, Naag-devta appears in or around the temple. Everyone knows neither to scare the Naag-Devta nor to be scared of him. Guru Maa offers milk, does pranam, gets the blessings from Naag-devta who quickly disappears after blessing Guru Maa and the Ashram
4. I still remember during one of the 21 days-long Akhand Ramayan Path, a bird came and sat on the window by the main altar and did not move for the entire three weeks! The bird was intently listening to the recitation of the Path.
5. The miracles of the Pichwai and the Chaddar are well-known. I did not have a child for 8 years, and 3 months after the Chaddar came to my home, our baby was conceived! So many have taken the chaddar or pichwai to cure the sick, or have some wish fulfilled and no one has been disappointed
6. Early this year, during the week-long Ramayana Path in Lonavala, while doing Aachmani, the ordinary water became rose-water which all of us could smell and taste!

The list of miracles can go on and on. If you have Faith, you can believe it. You can continually debate between faith and reason, faith and science, faith and logic. As Reinhold Neibuhr said, ‘life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it’ In the end, in my opinion, only faith counts.

D H. Lawrence wrote the following poetry:
This is what I Believe:
That I am I.
That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
That Gods, strange Gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let them come and go.
That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.
There is my creed.

So, what is Faith? According to Guru Maa, Faith is believing in something – it is total surrender with total devotion. She has put Her complete Faith in Baba or Sri Hanumanji! She had put total Faith in Her GuruDev. Her life changed. She moved from a material life to a spiritual life; from a selfish life to a selfless life devoted to make a difference in lives of thousands. Mary Bethune said, ‘without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.’

Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Everyone has faith in God though everyone does not know it. For everyone has faith in himself and that multiplied to the nth degree is God. The sum total of all that lives is God. We may not be God, but we are of God, even as a little drop of water in the ocean.” That God can be any God espoused by any religious philosophy.

I have been fortunate enough to grow into Faith – and now faith is beyond reason for me.