3. Babaji

My introduction to Babaji was really quite shocking.
It took my paradigm of reality, oh how precious and settled it was,
and shook it around vigorously - like a snowglobe in the hands of an ADHD child.
I'm not sure how to even describe what Babaji truly is.
I guess I would have to say a "higher-dimensional" being, perhaps what is typically viewed as some sort of alien or angel. A universal function of some sort.

Ultimately, after all is said and done, I have come to the conclusion that what we are dealing with here is essentially the same intelligence, the same force as 1. Hermes Thoth as-well as 2. Enoch - Metatron. I went through the progressive phases of my journey with perceived guidance from this "being" wrapped under these different names, consecutively, only to realize at the end it was the same consciousness. I make my case throughout this page, but to understand the full story you will have to visit all three.

I still don't 100% understand what it is that I experienced, but I know for a fact that it was beyond anything I had touched upon in the past, maybe I just need to take some medication..

Things began as I was becoming....
swallowed up by my own misery that is.
Like a flashlight shining into a gloomy cave;
I followed a trail of light which was shone inside
and made my way out of the darkness.
One night, during a difficult period of my life, in-fact,
what you might call rock bottom, "the dark night of the soul,"
I found myself at the gym, going through a grueling leg day.
All of a sudden, as I was wallowing in my misery,
my internal vision was filled with a shimmer of gold.
I sorta - dissociated - into my head.
The color cleared, separating as an image emerged, as though someone were moving from one slide to the next in a well put together presentation.
I was met with this image of a sage-like man, whom was standing at the top of a mountain, surrounded by beautiful scenery, the backdrop of a waterfall and greenery surrounding him.
Just sort of sitting there, staring at me, looking, a feeling of stillness entered as I stared back.
For a moment our eyes met, and I was seen.
And then that was it.
It faded away.

I knew for certain that this was not your typical daydream,
that this was not some fantastical imagery my own mind had created
so that I may disappear for a moment.
There was some other force there with me, I could feel it's "beingness"
and perhaps due to circumstances,
entering what felt to be the most painful period of my life,
it was letting me become aware of its presence.
It felt something was being revealed, that it was time.

I was genuinely about to hit that point where I gave up.
Entering a very dangerous place mentally, it was quite scary.
I had already battled feelings like this since I was a young,
but this was very different.

I
was
slipping

We had entered the shadow realm.
The Bermuda triangle.
No mans land.
Davy jones locker.

I shattered my personal record for most broken state,
it felt that there was no healing here...

The final straw had been placed upon the camels back,
silently, like a cruel punctuation mark.
Vertebrae beginning to fracture,
knees buckling,
a slow, agonizing descent began.

All the king's horses,
and all the king's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

.... however, they must have never tried contacting the Mountain Hermit.
There is a point where you must contact the Sadhu cave wizard.

Six months proceeding this I found myself led to a used bookstore. The circumstances which had brought me there inspired a feeling that there was a reason, a purpose to my visit, one which I would soon discover. I was originally headed to a local meditation event that I had been looking at on my phone late the night before. Unbeknownst to me, after already driving across town, I discovered that it had sold out. I decided to make the best of my already used gasoline and visit the nearest bookstore. Perhaps I was never actually meant to attend, but maybe I'll find a book that's more impactful to me than that event ever would have been. Experimenting with different intuition games like this at the time, I was going to try and allow my internal compass to guide me to new book which I may have not even know I needed to read! I ended up finding one called "Autobiography of a Yogi" which seemed to have a glow to it. Nearby, I found another book titled "Babaji and the 18 Siddha Kriya Yoga tradition." Woah. Just last week I had some random YouTube video pop up in my feed reading an except from a book which described a mans experience of a UFO while in the Himalayas with his guru, whose name I had never heard of before, but was now reading on the cover of a book in my hands. Glancing through the pages, I was struck recognizing similarities to the imagery I had seen in my head at the gym in months prior. I felt a relief that my neuroticism perhaps had a purpose all along. Purchasing and skimming through both books, it was clear that they had a central theme of "evolve mankind through self realization and kriya yoga." Are these the aliens that have been trying to get ahold of me? A bunch of yogis? I had to take it seriously.

There is a portion of the Babaji book which speaks about mantra, how it contains a transformative divine power, or "shakti," which manifests through sound. It talks about the Bija seed sounds, and how "mantra generates creative force and brings one in tune with the divine by principle of sympathetic vibrations." Coincidentally, there was a "kirtan" event taking place at the local yoga studio I had begun to frequent. What do you know, the band performing is literally called "Bijaa," and the event was centered around connecting to the guru. How conveniently strange and timely, obviously I must RSVP. I showed up not knowing what to expect. By the time we were done, I was thoroughly moved, that it felt nothing short of magic. Chanting these foreign Sanskrit words had left me in a state of bliss and allowed me to feel peace for the first time in months, sort of proving, at least from my own subjective first hand experience, that there may be some truth in what is being purported within the Babaji text.

Looking back at my receipt for the event, it seems that the order number was particularly noteworthy....

[47]
edit : Looking at the records it seems I had attended another one of these Bijaa events prior. They didn't perform very often, but I had somehow caught the last one as-well. I remember the night, I was trying to stay sober and sit with my emotions. It was a very difficult time, in-fact, about 3 months prior to the experience I had in the gym.

Excited and wanting to connect further with whatever beings were leading me down this trail, I decided that I was going to pay a visit to my local Self Realization Fellowship's Sunday reading and meditation. The other book I had purchased, Autobiography of a Yogi, describes a journey one man embarked upon bringing these yogic teachings to the west. Paramahansa Yogananda. I didn't read any of it, but I saw that he had developed and entire organization, SRF, which had groups that would meet up weekly to meditate and reflect on his work, even 50+ years after his death, all across the country, including my local city. So, just two days proceeding the kirtan event, I went to continue my investigations and follow the trail. I showed up and was greeted by some wonderfully kind elderly individuals, feeling quite welcomed at the door of an office building which housed their meetings. Moving from the small lobby area to the little reading/meditation room, something that could only house maybe 25-30 people on a skinny day, I was instantly taken aback when I saw a portrait of Babaji front and center.

"Today, in accordance to our regular reading and meditation, we will be holding a special 1 hour commemorative event in honor of the great Mahavatar Babaji."

My mind was blown.
What the .....
I could do nothing but participate in the service with my entire being.
For the first time in my life, obviously having some sort of religious experience,
I then got down on my knees and bowed to the image of a guru.

Little did I know that Mahavatar Babaji is commemorated annually on July 25th. Supposedly this day marks the occasion in 1920 when Babaji visited Paramahansa Yogananda at his home in Kolkata, blessing him before he embarked on his mission to the West to spread the teachings of Kriya Yoga.

In one of the few sources we have on this subject, Babaji revealed to Lahiri Mahasaya - his chosen disciple -

“The Kriya Yoga that I am giving to the world through you in this nineteenth century is a revival of the same science that Krishna gave millenniums ago to Arjuna; and that was later known to Patanjali and Christ, and to St. John, St. Paul, and other disciples.”
(quoted in Autobiography of a Yogi)

“The law of Kriya Yoga is eternal. It is true like mathematics; like the simple rules of addition and subtraction, the law of Kriya can never be destroyed. Burn to ashes all the books on mathematics, the logically-minded will always rediscover such truths; destroy all the sacred books on yoga, its fundamental laws will come out whenever there appears a true yogi who comprises within himself pure devotion and consequently pure knowledge.”

(Sri Ananda Mohan Lahiri, a grandson of Lahiri Mahasaya, quoted in Autobiography of a Yogi)

The ultimate goal, the reason why this divine being has decided to remain in physical form, according to theory, is to assist in humanity's spiritual evolution. A manifestation of the divine, a living Avatar, Babaji is simply incomprehensible to human mind, but is here to help us perhaps begin to try.

It was incredibly confusing as to what was happening at first, but I do believe that, especially seeing the bigger picture now, this seemingly sci-fi story is what I have now become a part of. Far too absurd from the regular paradigm of the world we all grew up with, I'm not really trying to convince anyone else of this. I don't ask or even want you to believe me. I’d much prefer critical eyes. I in no way want to prop myself up on a mystical pedestal and claim all these magical things to garner a sense of authority.

Understand that Babaji means "revered father," and that there are numerous individuals who go by this name in various forms. The highest Babaji on the totem pole, the one which I have been referencing, is referred to specifically as Mahavtar Babaji, or Sri Guru Babaji. This is supposedly the divine avatar from whom the others attempt to emulate and copy. They may be deep devotees or perhaps capitalizing on the built mystical reputation around the name already existent within India.

There is one man alive today which I believe has had experiences with these beings in the Himalayas. His name is Sri Madhukar Nath, and he has two books outlining his journeys.

"Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master: A Yogi’s Autobiography"

"The Journey Continues: A sequel to Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master"

Sri M spent three and a half years traveling and living with a being known as Maheshwarnath Babaji in the Himalayas. He had originally met this individual in a peculiar moment during his childhood. At age nine, he had an encounter with a mysterious man in the backyard of his home in Thiruvananthapuram. A distinguished, youthful-looking stranger with matted hair appeared under a jackfruit tree. Normally stranger danger would be the appropriate response for an adult in nothing but a loincloth standing in your backyard gesturing you towards them, but Sri M for some reason felt no fear. The man asked him if he remembered, to which the 9 year old boy said no, and then he touched his heart and said you will remember soon. This supposedly lit a fire inside of his chest, and in combination with his palpably loving and powerful eyes, began a side quest of spiritual seeking that the young boy would never forget.

At nineteen, driven by this overwhelming urge to seek truth, Sri M left home and traveled to the Himalayas. He wandered extensively, often feeling lost and on the verge of despair, even contemplating suicide. Eventually, however, in a cave near Badrinath (Vyasa Gufa), he encountered a familiar face...

"At that instant, I realized that this was the same person I had met in the backyard of my house, under the jackfruit tree, at age nine. That was it. Even the voice was the same. I had found my guru, my father, my mother, my teacher, all in one. As it turned out, I was not to leave him for the next three and a half years."

The books outline Sri M's journey through the Himalayas during this three and a half year period. All sorts of miracles take place as he is being shown the bigger picture of reality, an entirely new world.

After several years of intense training, Babaji instructed Sri M to leave the Himalayan Hogwarts (even though he wanted to stay there indefinitely) and return to the muggle world to live as a householder. Babaji blessed Sri M, assuring him of continued inner guidance, and then vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared. Sri M returned to normal life, got married and raised a family. He became a teacher, author, and social reformer, founding the Satsang Foundation, the Blossom Foundation and initiating the Walk of Hope from 2015-2016, a peace pilgrimage across India. In 2021 he was awarded the the Padma Bhushan award for "the distinguished service of high order in the field of Spirituality" by the President of India, which is the third-highest civilian award in the Republic of India. It was only in 2008, after receiving the guidance to do so, that he began to write out his books and share these experiences which he held deeply close to his heart for his life, not even confiding in his closest friends.

It has been my dream to meet with this man...

The next year, I attended that same commemorative event.
Having already gone through my kundalini training,
I was now coming back to home base,
where the journey ultimately began.
Not even sure I was going to survive,
I come back into the vaguely familiar room,
and see that image of Babaji on display in the front,
feeling a sense of relief wash over me.
I felt like a soldier whom had gone to war and returned back home.
Half the battle was just initiating contact, developing the connection, figuring out who was knocking.
The other half was my attempts to accurately digest the context of the situation without completely losing my mind, as-well as the intensely spiritually grueling work required to maintain the mission.
Things begin in a manner that was similar to the prior year.
There is a bit of reading on Babaji from the SRF material,
a little bit of meditation, and then we began to hop into a chant.
This one specifically. You could have recorded the room I was in and it would have sounded exactly like this video.

Now, from the man whom I studied, Sri M - it seemed that the true name for Babaji would
Sri Babaji. As we were all chanting this together, I began to slip in Sri before Babaji.
Om Sri Babaji Om
I even began to say "Naga Loka" here and there, I don't necessarily know why or what inspired it but I had begun to enter a flow.
Eventually we come to a moment where we stop chanting. The room is sitting in a silent meditation soaking up all the great energy we just developed as we sung. In this silence, I began to hear a weird noise. You know when a really large vehicle, or someone bumping their subwoofers at a high octave drives past your house/a building you're in and things on the wall begin to shake a little bit? That is what I began to hear. We are in a small little room at the bottom of an office building in the middle of the city, so I wasn't thaaat surprised. I thought a big moving truck was going by or someone upstairs was maybe doing some sort of gymnastics, but the sound wouldn't stop. It was a Sunday and so the building, housing multiple small businesses, was empty. No way that truck, unless it's transporting some sort of bridge or something, is still driving past us... it was unrelenting. The sound began to grow louder and louder, and I realized that nobody around me was hearing it, it sounded like some sort of earthquake. Eventually I began to perceive that this vibrational noise was not sourcing itself from any picture frames jiggling, but instead, was closer to that of a hissing noise.

Once I picked up on what was happening, and that nobody else was experiencing what I was, I tapped into an energy that was incredibly powerful. I couldn't even open my eyes. It felt like if I did, there was going to be a portal in the middle of the room that had opened up with some sort of interdimensional being waving at me. It was overwhelming, and I was just trying to hold on and not freak out any of these kind elderly folk that had brought me into their place of worship. It was a safe container, elevated in consciousness, a platform which allowed for me to step my way up - just briefly popping my head above the clouds to an even more elevated level of consciousness. Any further would have been too much, I wouldn't have been able to digest things or handle it. It was such a direct in the face message. At the end of the day, I was ultimately extreeemely skeptical about the nature of all these things. Once I experienced my own transcendent phenomenon, something which took me years of investigation to get to, I began to realize the legitimacy that had been there the entire time. We weren't playing games and having fun at the level of a goofy 90's movie, we were messing with fire. These mantras had serious effects, it wasn't just words. I had become part of something much larger than myself.

During his time in the Himalayas, Sri M had a profound and mysterious encounter in a cave...

Babaji is described as interacting with a snake-like being whom comes to visit from Naga Loka, Nagaraj. Appearing in an orb of light, a giant serpentine creature left his spherical vehicle and began in a "hissing" conversation with Sri M's guru. Glowing electric blue, as though made of transparent violet glass, with a hood like a cobra, its eyes glowed as it hissed softly.

In the original book I picked up from the thrift store, Babaji was referred to as Nagaraj himself.

Who are the Nagas? According to the Puranas, they are a race that is highly conscious, positioned below Devas and Asuras, but about humans (manashyas). While they do somewhat resemble humans, they are believed to possess snake like characteristics, superhuman abilities if you may, which include heightened perception and mind-reading skills. Nagas are supposedly able to create illusions and even shapeshift in efforts to fool others. By peering into ones mind, they would be able to discern their weaknesses, say for example a fear of monkeys, and turn into a monkey. They are said to be capable of sensing fear by detecting the adrenaline levels of those around them. Nagas are considered amongst the greatest creators that the world has known - renown for their developments in architecture, technology, engineering, medicine, and weapon making. Nagas were once rulers, great Kings and Queens, what happened to them? There were rules - they were not supposed to intermingle with the human race(remind you of anything?).

(on Metatron)
Tishby, The Wisdome of the Zohar, 2.628: “ it is the mystery of the boy who reaches old age and then reverts to his youth as at the beginning.”

Watching "The Cobbler," a movie with Adam Sandler, wondering if it was maybe in some way filled with esoteric kabbala themes, I was led down this trail...

In the Bible, Enoch was a cobbler and the father of Methuselah.

The rabbis of the Talmud explain that Enoch was a shoemaker. They describe how with every stitch he would achieve “spiritual unifications”.

This term, "cobbler" is generally reserved for one who is steeped in the study of authentic Kabbalah and elevates the mundane to a more spiritual plane.

In somewhat antisemitic Christian folklore, the Wandering Jew is a mythical figure, often depicted as a shoemaker or cobbler, cursed to wander the earth eternally until the Second Coming/Apocalypse. He supposedly taunted/mistreated Jesus on the way towards his crucifixion, resulting in a divine curse of perpetual wandering. A mythical immortal man whose legend began to spread in Europe during the 13th century.

"Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." Matthew 16:28 NIV

While Moses descended from heavenly heights with divine wisdom, Enoch worked in the mundane world - stitching sandals while whispering prayers to unite God with the divine presence.

The deeper meaning is that the highest spiritual work happens not through dramatic revelations from above, but through finding the sacred embedded within ordinary, everyday actions. By approaching the world's broken places with devotion - like a cobbler repairing sandals - one can elevate the mundane back to its divine source. Reb Zalman preferred this humble, grassroots spiritual practice over the more hierarchical prophetic tradition, teaching that "the power of the subject is embedded in the object" - meaning divine presence exists within all creation, waiting to be discovered through mindful engagement with the world.

https://www.tikkun.org/reb-zalman-schachter-shalomi-the-holy-cobbler-with-a-secret/

Chiranjeevis
a group of immortals who are believed to remain alive on Earth until the end of the current age known as the Kali Yuga.
combination of chiram, or 'permanent', and jīvi, or 'lived'
https://divinesansar.com/blogs/mythology/the-nine-chiranjeevi-in-hindu-mythology

1. We have also been told that Chanoch had a book, which originated from the same place as that of the generations of Adam. And this book contains the inner secrets of wisdom. He was taken from this earth to become a heavenly angel. Thus, it is written: "And he was not; for Elohim took him" (Beresheet 5:24). He is the youth, THAT IS, HE IS ALWAYS CALLED A YOUTH, as the verse states: "Train up (Heb. chanoch) a child in the way he should go" (Mishlei 22:6), INDICATING THAT CHANOCH IS THE YOUTH BECAUSE HE BECAME MINISTERING LAD TO THE SHECHINAH.

Zohar Bereshit

The Zohar states that the different circumstances that appear to cause death, such as heart failure, cancer, and other attributed causes, are only deceptions employed by Satan to mislead mankind into believing that anything and everything other than itself is responsible for the inevitable death that touches us all. The infinite causes of death exist solely and only because the Angel of Death has penetrated the human body space.

“Death will be swallowed up eternally,” states Isaiah 25:8

The Zohar speaks about the immortality that was achieved on Mount Sinai during the great revelation of Light. The Zohar reveals that Moses never really died. Rabbi Elazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon, quotes a verse from the Book of Isaiah that discusses the reality of immortality at the End of Days, and how man will eventually live forever. The End of Days refers to our current period of time.

In Jewish mysticism, the Lamed Vavniks are 36 righteous people who protect the world from destruction. The term lamed vavnik is Yiddish for "the 36". The Hebrew term for these people is tzadikim nistarim, which means "the Hidden Righteous Ones".

Secret sadhus of the himalayas