My Maharishi – My Fondest Memory

My Maharishi – My Fondest Memory

[00:45] Beautiful

Jai Guru Deva. This is my podcast, The Vedic Worldview, and I’m Thom Knoles, the creator of it. Thank you for listening.

Sometimes I’m asked, “What are your memories of your teacher?” My teacher was His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. To me, for me, the greatest teacher of all time. However, I grant that he came from a long, long tradition of great masters, whom I didn’t meet physically in the flesh, molecule to molecule, although I do feel like I meet them in consciousness all the time.

But with him, I spent more than a quarter of a century in close contact, and I have legion memories of interactions with him. And so sometimes people say to me, “What was the most enlightening, what was the most, the deepest impression, the greatest impression that you ever got from Maharishi? What is it that you really take with you as an impression of him?”

And my answer is going to be either hilarious to you or it’s going to be perplexing to you, but I’ll give it some explanation so it’s not so perplexing. It was what I heard him say more often than I heard him say anything else, which was, “No.”

It wasn’t when he said, “Very good,” or when he said, “Beautiful.” Sometimes I would describe something, and I would say I was trying out a description of, perhaps an explanation of how I could explain to my students higher consciousness states and how they worked, and at the end of my description, he would say, “Beautiful.”

Or I would describe to him how I was going to achieve a particular thing, and he might say, “Very good.”

[03:04] An Excursion in Switzerland

But the most common thing I ever heard him say was the word no, and no to me meant “you’re about to get the real way of thinking about this.”

So for me to hear that word no, I was never crestfallen when I heard it. It just suddenly knocked all the boundaries off of me because it meant I was just about to hear the Unified Field consciousness view of my little universe and how things should go.

So I’ll give you an example. We had to go to Basel, I believe it was Basel, in India, and I’m sorry, in Switzerland, to renew his visa and his Indian passport because his visa… Actually, I’m going to start that story over again, and we won’t even need to edit it because it’s kind of fun to see me have to reverse course here.

It was his passport that was expiring, his Indian passport, which had his visa in it for Switzerland. And we were in Switzerland, and we needed to go to the Swiss place where the Indian consulate was, and we took a train ride. And he had to come in person, as you have to do when you get a passport. In those days, you had to show up in person.

And so I was accompanying him, and we arrived in Basel, I believe it was, and in those days, no cell phones, no navigation, no, none of this. All you ever had was maps, and the way you worked a map, for those of you who’ve never seen one, it’s a piece of paper, and it has on it imprinted a reasonable facsimile of what is on the ground if you’re looking from a thousand feet up and looking down at the Earth, what it is you’re seeing. And so then, you know the cardinal directions, north and east and south and west, and you have to adjust that piece of paper to match the directions you’re facing.

So he and I got off the train, and I was trying to figure out how to get to this Indian consulate where his passport would be renewed so that his visa in Switzerland could continue to be valid, because he intended to stay in Switzerland for an indefinite period of time.

[05:50] Lost in Basel

These were the Swiss years of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which was about a nine year period of time, the Swiss years, and he headquartered himself there. And so we got off, and I was supposed to be the guide. Maharishi was with me, and I was protecting him and making sure that we went to the right place.

And we walked a few streets away from the beautiful train station, and I was doing the map like this and looking up and trying to see where the Sun was so I could figure out which way was north, south, east, or west. It was afternoon, probably about two, and the Sun was slightly less than straight up at a zenith, so I figured west is over there, and that means north is up there, and that means we have to go this way on the map. It was elaborate.

We thought it was sophisticated, compared with days before that when they didn’t have maps. And I couldn’t speak the local language of Swiss German, and there were relatively few English speakers around in those days in that particular city.

And as we were going, I walked, and then I got to a certain point, and I said to Maharishi, “Maharishi, we’re lost.”

And he said, “No.” I loved hearing that word no, because whatever came next after no was going to be the answer. It was going to be the thing.

He said, the word ji in Hindi means dear, and he said, “Thom ji, everything that we need to know,” he always used the inclusive words we, “everything that we need to know is right here within sight. All the hints that are going to take us in the right direction are right here in sight. You can put away the map.”

[07:53] Found in Basel

So I put away the map, folded it up, stuck it in my back pocket. Standing there on a street corner, it was an intersection, I looked over and off in the distance, way off in the distance, gazing all around, taking in all the perceptible cues. I could see the letter A sticking out on a sign, way off in the distance. I could just see the letter A. And I thought, A, and for some reason, A attracted me.

So I said, “Let’s cross the street here. We’ll push the button and wait for the pedestrian cross… we’ll cross the street here.” We crossed the street, and then I saw I. I A. I A, ia.

I crossed the street. We went down a little bit further, and then the D appeared, dia. And that could be anything, right? It could be Spanish for day, but dia appeared. And we walked a little further and I had it, the N appeared, ndia. And I walked a little further and it said India, and then of, and then Consulate, Consulate of India.

And he was right. He wasn’t looking at the A, or looking for anything. He was just showing me to have confidence in my perceptual acuity and my capacity to stitch clues together. 

And all I needed was one fragment of an A, and that was enough, in response to, as a result of him saying, “No. No. Everything that you need is within view. Everything that you need is already right here. Anything that you need to know, there is the beginning of that thing right here within your perceptual range. You need to de-excite and allow yourself to take in what it is you’re perceiving.”

[10:13] Waiting Consciousness State is Good

And to me, that little “No” no to me always meant, “You’re going down a wrong track, let’s go down the right track now.” I loved hearing no from him, and I heard it thousands of times.

“Maharishi, it’s time for us to get up and go to the lecture. There are 10,000 people waiting.”

“No. Let them wait. They’re all exchanging phone numbers, and meeting and greeting each other.”

“Maharishi, the lecture was supposed to start 10 minutes ago.”

“No. Let them enjoy each other’s presence for a little while. They’re exchanging phone numbers. They’re making possibilities for dates and meetings and luncheons and things, and when we arrive, all of that will come to an end. Let them enjoy themselves for a little longer.”

So, quarter past the time it was supposed to start, 15 minutes late, I came in, “Maharishi, everyone’s waiting.”

“Good. Waiting consciousness state is good.”

“Shouldn’t we be going in there now?”

“No.” And then he waited two or three beats. “Now we’ll go.” And so then the timing was perfect. And he had no compunction about coming into a meeting, even up to 20 minutes late, even up to an hour late.

So my favorite experience and my most fond memory of Maharishi was seeing his face when he would say, “No,” because to me it didn’t mean, “You lose and I win.” What it meant was, “You’re about to hear what the Universe is thinking.” I loved it.

Jai Guru Deva.