I have always thought that following a guru in this day and age was rather foolish, an abdication of personal responsibility. My opinion did not change on Lopez Island, where some of the leftover people from the Antelope Ranch debacle went to live. Corrupt and unprincipled gurus abound, who needs them?
Then I met Mohanji. I thought we were going to have someone come set up a fire walk, and instead Mohanji came to share Agnihotra with us. I still have no desire to be someone’s disciple or to search out gurus, but I learned a lot spending time with this man. He genuinely exemplifies the qualities a guru is supposed to have. He is spiritually dedicated to his work and is a man of powerful humility and compassion.
Mohanji has an effective teaching style, which I watched in action in our group conversations at the Diamond J Ranch in the mornings before our CCT teacher trainings. I loved his way of correcting anyone who quit paying attention, the approach Gia calls Guru Smackdown.
He has a way of posing questions to make people think similar to the training I received from my father. However, unlike my father, Mohanji generally had one specific answer in mind that would be the only acceptable reply. I strongly suspect he sometimes would change that in mid-stream just to keep people off balance so new ideas could enter more easily.
But what puzzled me the most was his dedication to the Agnihotra ceremony itself. He will be the first to say that once you reach a certain level you do not even need it, but he completely shapes his life around this ceremony.
What can be accomplished by burning cow dung and ghee (clarified butter) at sunrise and sunset while chanting Sanskrit mantras that cannot be accomplished by meditation or other methods? Yet he is adamant that this ceremony is essential.
After attending his ceremonies I definitely felt their deep power. In fact, I could feel them even when I was not physically present for them and absorbed in other activities.
Some of the answer began to emerge at Yellowstone when we went to the edge of the caldera, our potential supervolcano lying in wait, and he performed a major healing fire ceremony there. Despite the lack of discipline in our group during the ceremony, it was still a potent ceremony nonetheless.
Discipline is a necessity for spiritual development or for mastery of anything really. As an artist this necessity is ever present for me. In jewelry designing I often work directly in wax with an alcohol lamp and dental tools, working with the cooling cycle after leaving the flame with the tool. This is a demanding technique few use, preferring the less precise but far easier electric wax pens.
Watching Mohanji tend the cow dung and ghee fire during his ceremonies reminded me of the jewelry work I have done with wax. After enough years of practice it becomes an effortless rhythm, and he certainly had mastered that rhythm with his fires. A couple of other people had their own fires and they lacked his degree of grace in handling the fire.
Tending the fire requires physical engagement with the process. It also requires an alert attentiveness. The mind is further engaged with the Sanskrit mantras. In my experience the mind definitely needs to be focused properly to keep it from causing trouble.
His explanations of the Sanskrit mantras also showed the emotional component of the process. They had a loving, compassionate, and sharing quality to them that surely would engage the emotions as one chanted the mantras.
The entire ceremonial process was intended as a spiritual practice, so the spiritual nature was fundamentally involved. Combining physical, mental, emotional, and mental energies into one precise endeavor is a powerful process indeed.
I see why he would immediately reject the idea that one could work with him by doing meditation instead of the fire ceremony at the specified sunrise and sunset times.
But however powerful it is to engage physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energies simultaneously, it is still a long slow process. I do not have thirty years to spend following that particular path, which is easily what it could take.
So the question that lingers for me is how I use what I have seen on my own path. How do I achieve that singular alignment of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy in such a potent form? I have components of it from my art work and healing energy work but they are not integrated in that manner.
Just being in Mohanji’s prescence changed me. I found myself less resistant to changes I find unwelcome, such as the recent foolish destruction of some wonderful old trees because they cause a few snowdrifts in winter.
Likewise, seeing how he works with the Agnihotra ceremony also changed me. The process continues to work through me, so I am waiting to see what crystallizes from the time I spent with him combined with the CCT teacher explorations of healing energy at the ranch.
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This blog is all about living creatively in Montana. Please add your responses and insights with comments at the end of the posts.
