I landed safely back in India, was picked up by my brothers and came back home to Vrindavan. When I say back home, I mean the Ashram. You all know how the Ashram looks like today, ten years later, with two stories, painted and with marble floor and beautiful rooms. In that time everything was much simpler and very plain. There was the building of the cave and a few ground floor rooms of the main building with a big common restroom. Everything was raw, without any plaster or paint. There was a lawn and where there is now a marble way from the gate to the main building was only sand and earth. Cows walked around freely on the whole Ashram area.
We three brothers lived here at the Ashram, a little bit at the outer part of Vrindavan, together with a number of students who had come to learn about scriptures and spirituality. My parents and my sister still lived in the house where we children had grown up, in the middle of the town of Vrindavan. They slept there and the three of us brothers at the Ashram but we had made it our habit to have breakfast at the Ashram and dinner always together with the family in our old home.
So we were there, everybody sitting together and I told them of all the impressions from my first trip to Europe. I showed them the things I had brought, made gifts and was talking a lot with them. After my stories of the west and descriptions of Indian culture there, we also came to talk about plans for the next time as I was only going to stay in Vrindavan for one week. After that I would be in Rajasthan for a program that we fixed right after I had come out of the cave.
I could obviously not be sitting around at leisure in Vrindavan. I was the oldest son of the family and with my father already retired, I had the responsibility to earn money and take care of my siblings, parents and the students living at the Ashram. I was the one to earn for the family and I did not mind. I am anyway not a lazy person and would not have liked to sit around and do nothing while the others took care of the Ashram and everything going on there.
Then however again the question came: what exactly should I do? Should I just go on doing whatever I had done my whole life long? Being a guru, preaching and giving initiations? Well, I had not learnt plumbing but preaching, so I knew this was the way that I would go. As I mentioned before, I had a very religious mind-set and did my rituals and prayers with my full heart and belief. Somewhere inside of me however there was a voice that said ‘But you are not higher or better than all those people who are called your disciples!’
I knew that for all those people who practically worshipped me and listened to my lectures in awe as if God himself was talking, I was now even another step higher. I was ‘foreign-return’, a guru who is not only popular in India but all over the world. I was more valuable, more important, like an imported make-up box, made in France, is more valuable than any Indian make-up box could ever be. In their opinion I had climbed another step higher above them.
And while I was looking forward to the lectures and preaching about God, the scriptures and how you can live your life in accordance to all virtues mentioned there, I had in my mind that something needed to change.
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This is such a nice description of the Ashram 10 years ago! I remember how it looked like when I visited you in 2007 and it is so different now! I am amazed by all the work you have done and the changes that happened! You must be so proud thinking of that time and comparing it to what is now.
0E”like an imported make-up box” hahahhaha 🙂 nice said! and the price is double when become popular outside HOME 🙂 hahahaa ! i really love the way you describe things and how you make them seen from different sides, like really simply talking about “HIGH” things :))) love your way of talking and putting words together 🙂 love your simplicity!!! 🙂 no one is higher, we all are equal!!!!!! no matter what!
Thank you Inese. Love
Preaching is in your blood, it is your heritage you might say and a person does not turn away from his heritage from one day to another. It is normal that it took years of process for you to turn away from being a guru. I can see in my own inner processes how much it costs only to let go of my children and see how they become independent and don’t need me and my motherly services anymore. How much strength it must have cost you to turn down the expectations of your disciples who thought they needed you, who saw you like a father, too!