This Indian swami was fascinated by the visitors who started to come to India in the 1960s, convinced it
was inevitable that Eastern wisdom would spread worldwide.
'I saw you people coming in my dreams,' he said, he was only wondering when the Russians would arrive.
Certainly he was
revered by the true sadhus or holy men and he had nothing but scathing denunciations
for the politicians.
He has been
called 'one of the wisest people I ever met' by Jasper, a long time follower. He died in 1987 after finally visiting and spending
7 years in America. He is
buried at Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, India.
He is reputed to have been one of the four spiritual rulers of India and was a 'researcher' loosely attached to
the Divine Life Society in Darjeeling.
When he died he was at least 86 but could easily have been over 100, so supercharged was he with
energy and wisdom.
My latest own best estimate based on research is that he was 102 having been born in 1885.
Link to a short description of Ganesh Baba's life by Peter Meyer.
Ganesh Baba features in the book 'Looking for Kathmandu' by Kozmik Press. which can
be ordered when you click on the book title.
Link to a summary of the philosophy of Ganesh Baba, copied from his notebook in Kashmir, India, in 1968 by David Stuart
Ryan.
These were gathered by American poet Ira Cohen at the Kumbha Mela held at Allahabad in 1977
Beware of the non-psychedelic.
Wise men don't love wise men, wise men love fools. And you are such divine fools.
Anyone who does not do his duty by the mothers will be fucked by the Tantric forces.
Real saints are mad. In fact, there are no saints only sinners. Real saints won't be declared.
One will have to have an uncanny sense of humour. Abandon your languages, especially the French, Dutch and Germans.
Somebody must write a book 'Kings with Straw Mats'.
God is the supreme shopkeeper, his market is infinite.
Kriya Yoga is cosmic communion through cosmic action. Cosmic action is already going on within you.
It is alright to remain a stranger.
The beads of the rosary are inside your own body. God did this in order to impinge the inner rosary.
In Tantra, if one is a meat eater, we give him so much meat he will ask for dal and chapati.
Let philosophies flourish or be demolished.
We must express the dignity of poverty.
Polar switchback: when you reach the highest point of positivity you'll swing back immediately into negativity.
Real yogis sleep by day and fuck the night.
There is food everywhere, I tell you.
Why is the Westerner coming here to dig our dust?
Let one mystery remain.
A non-psychedelic can never enlighten a psychedelic.
I am a Naga hipster, we don't bother with petty formalities.
Whether they give us one blanket or two blankets it doesn't matter, you see we know this body will not last.
Don't count time if you want to evolve; if you count time you will revolve.
Ganes Baba says he studied under Dale Carnegie: he was a great master, greater than those modern Indian phonies. He said, 'Stop fucking, start living'.
On sex: 'We cannot be thunderstruck by these tissues.'
Buck up or fuck up.
Once a psychedelic, always a psychedelic.
Sensation should not affect you but the principle behind the sensation.
Ram is the rest point of the mind or soul, not the man with bow and arrow.
No sucking in our ashram.
If you have to pay five rupees to see Rajneesh, then you can pay five rupees to see my doodoo.
I look upon you as a skeleton, then as a complementary circuit.
The history of India is a continuous stream of high hoax.
'Beware of India' this is my last comment.
Another comment: 'India is OK, beware of Indians'.
The first lesson from India you can learn: We will all die.
I have died four or five times and I am still alive and kicking.
Don't cut the vegetables, make them whole.
We will always fuck the mothers of the spiritual, three orgasms an hour, the older the better.
A fool laughs three times. The first time when others are laughing. The second time when they understand the joke.The third time
when they wonder why they laughed when they didn't understand the joke.
Ganesh Baba on himself: He is not only the goofy Himalayan psychedelic yoga teacher, but he was a student under Einstein, Schrodinger, Jung, Max Planck, not second or third hand but hot hand, asker of the most insidious questions under the sun. Only by
asking the silliest questions can you get the wisest answers.
Ganesh Baba's guru said to Ganesh, 'Sit with your back straight until you drop dead. Then you will be sitting in my lap and I will be sitting in the lap of God.' I believe him and I am still going that way.
Ganesh Baba says all faiths pretend surreptitious knowledge is divine knowledge.
For the true psychedelic the marriage bed becomes the surgical table.
Dharma can fuck everybody. If Dharma can't fuck there will be only goody goodies.
Life is like a fruit. Any place it finds a gradient, that way it will go.
Fuck two hundred Western women and nothing will happen. Fuck one Indian woman and she will suck you through and through.
Beware of Indian women. One fuck will affect your grandmother in heaven.
Bhaktivedanta used to come and take Bhang with me secretly. Now he wants to fuck psychedelics.
I once had eighteen posh theatres, then I went to one of the theatres and I thought it was the bathroom.
On the Nagas: ' We are the oldest monks in the world, no one can compare with us in our phoniness, we will outshout you all the time, we are not ordinary monks but hipster monks.'
Suggested prayer for Ganeshian aspirants: Dear God, if there is a God, please help me, if you can help me.
Ganesh is gnosis.
In our camp food is given only to the starving.Then when you are fed, you are fed up.
Ask your guru. He reads the paper between the lines.
I want to love people at a distance.
A man who does not know grammar cannot know God who is the most refined principle.
Do mirror yoga.
The underbeard is a huge Ganeshian joke.
We wizards want witches to fuck.
The most powerful speaker, if he is not boring, is no speaker, I tell you, a very sweet boring to the centre.
The body will die, the personal psyche will die, the cosmic psyche will die, but the cosmic spirit will never die.
Your women are fucked up so the men are being sucked up. Buck up and pick up.
(Translation: keep your back straight and pick up the cosmic energies)
Reversal of reality is Maya's job. The reversal of that reversal is the guru's job.
You are the nearest to yourself.
Just as strong women want strong men, wicked witches desire great wizards.
Our natural state is eternity.
Without fucking we are fucked up.
Materialism is morbidity.
The soul is the only censor.
People who have not felt God do not know how
cool is his laugh.
What Marx called synthesis, Christ called God.
There is no playboy only dull boy, I tell you. It is a quarter past twelve by my Playboy watch.
We are sun worshippers; we live the simple life. Look, we have just one light and yet see these exhibition
halls!
Live it light. Only a touch. It is all in here.
For simple men God is spirit.
Ganesh Baba says he blew Winston Churchill's mind with slick English on horseback.
Ganesh psychedelic message: Yankee, stop your hanky-panky, don't be so swanky.
You are only mad. He is madder. I am maddest.
I want to forsake myself before the true image and to fuck the mother of the devil if need be.
In Indian poetry you don't have to ask who wrote the poem, it comes in a line.
I don't care what a man does or does not do, as long as he does well.
Remind me to tell you about extra-cerebal nostalgia.
As a wizard I have beaten out your witch. As a baba, I love you.
Bring my saffron robe.Today I will match my colour with everybody. (From Tagore)
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Author of 4 novels, a biography of John Lennon, travel guides to India and America and the 7 volume
sequence 'Poetry from the Seven Worlds'.
Link to more of the poetry of David Stuart Ryan
Link to ordering his books.
How many days since you waited with dawn
For the burnt yellow sun to bring you its warm?
How many days since you sensed the motion
Of the forest with its creatures steadily
Prowling the heavy wet grasses for their prey?
Steam rising from the pool, the crazily
Wooded hills curvaceous as Kathmandu
It is early July now, the summer,
Every bud a flower, every leaf a deep green
Or musted scent, so that you may gaze
Across the valley to see the pink and blue
Before the white house in the nook of hill
In its lush blanket of ripening fruit.
The moon is seen at dawn, gone past full,
Pushing on further exuberances.
The house, as a library in the night,
Casts soft light outwards from its womb-like calm.
When its wood blinds are drawn, then sleep will come.
The trees will wait for the very first light
Before birds rival each other in song.
Not long now, you must rise, go on your way,
Washed in the dew, dreaming of the harvest.
A GIFT OF WORDS FOR A NEW YEAR
Lakes, mountains, trees, grass
Colours, furs, warmth, light
Children, water, laughter, quiet
Streams, leaves, skies, clouds
Thunder and Lightning
Huddled beneath the houses
Rain deluges on the street.
Blue lights in a distant sky
Have become a storm raging
Directly above the passing canels
Out of the darkness in sudden flashes
A face cooly calm
Looks out at the discharging fury
Released in sudden bolts of fire.
There may be safety and comfort
In the haven of the music night
But the downpouring rain allows
No movement. It forces the ears
To hear its beat upon empty streets
See the water of the canal churned
Into a target for the hurtling drops
Of heavy loaded clouds torn
By the electric storm. Thunder
Echoes the street, dazed by rain.
It is safe here, quiet, a shelter
In the open but a haven. Peace,
You may search for that everywhere
Yet possess it all the time. Stop.
Listen to the rain, it is all clear,
Soon you will have to leave
Purged of all the trials you have borne.
The old jazz fans with darting eyes
Announce they have found
No comfort in age, they have not
Seized the hour.
The music of the dance
Sweeps another hall, a church of the moment
Where surprise is the partner of desire.
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My picture of you is beginning to take shape
You are straddling the world - or is it just me?
While I take snapshots of you promiscuously
As if you were some kind of stripper bent on rape
The lines of my picture all point upwards, well past
The moving muscles of your stomach to your hair,
The strands rise and sway like snakes in their lair
Waiting to strike down hard when you let go at last.
From my angle, flat on back, you fill my sight
There is only way to go, upwards, inwards,
Trying to free myself, yourself, the innards
Of being melt, float, race, finally becoming bright.
The one problem with my picture is where to show
The unlocked drama, are the bare walls to be skies
The windows doors? Or is the real world in your eyes?
Greenness laced with the flash of lights that glow.
From Another World
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Colva Beach, Goa, India. A graphic description of three months at Colva by David Stuart Ryan.
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From Toronto Canada, but spends most of his time in London now. A reader at the Troubadour since
the 1970s, published by Slow Dancer Press, UK.
I was out surveying my garden.
Like a deep scratch the sun had cracked the soil;
The string marking off the vegetables drooped;
The little brown fence had fallen;
The tomato plants stood on their lone islands
Shaking in the warm breeze;
The log in the corner had turned orange.
I bent down to listen to the lettuce
(It had been planted for one long week.)
I hear a voice push up. A leaf appeared.
It looked like me. I was very shocked.
I stepped back, drawing to my full height.
He stood there - the same height as me -
But he wasn't me, he was my brother.
Of course, I had no brother, but he stood there.
He had a root-like scar on his forehead.
His eyes were marked by the rivers of the world,
His hands were marked by the deserts of the world.
I said that it had been there for years.
The grey paint was peeling to green.
With light steps we walked over to the door,
He pulled the handle, we passed through.
It was a road I had never been on.
We walked on the backs of a thousand animals;
Trees had the the leaves of a hundred races.
He told me the sky was his friend,
It has passed through his heart innumberable times.
He told me that for weeks on end he had been a house:
The attic room had conversed with the red moon,
But sometimes the top floor had plunged to the basement,
And other times the cold land dust of the basement drifted upstairs.
He told me about the three years he had been a market place
No meat only fish, and vegetables and fruit,
But when he had laid the fish in their neat rows,
They had swam back to the sea;
And when they had stacked the fruit in their symmetrical piles,
They had flown back to their trees.
And before that, he had been a hill in a park,
But people had littered him with silver of their gum wrappers,
And the teeth of the clouds chewed up his greeness.
And what was worse, was night: that was a terrible time for him.
His beard grew roots and pulled his face into the ground:
Dark stars and bright shells circled his eyes.
And we looked at each other, and he told me one more thing:
All he asked was for stillness, and a little love
That shone with one star constant as a blade of grass.
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David Satherley
David Satherley is a Canadian poet from Nova Scotia, with a Scottish ancestry, who occasionally pops over to London and the Troubadour when he is not wandering in the wilds. He is one of the most published small press poets in Canada, probably the most flourishing poetic nation at the moment.
In the woods this morning
I round on a rabbit caught in a trap
We met so quickly it was frightening
His bright clear eyes
Blurring circles in the air.
With this gentle thing
One man's sport
Pulling every which way to be free
As the birds in the trees
Sang themselves blind.
And as I sprang the trap
And he limped off
Into the wooded world of his nature
Something in my being barked
Was ready to give chase
Something in my blood
Shouted for his
And for a split second my animal
Stood before me
In all the layers of evolution
Naked...
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Loris Essary
A Texan who is very involved in the promotion of small presses through his stands at the major book fairs, from the ABA to the London Book Fair to Frankfurt.
The newspaper account does not say
If his last word was 'rosebud'
In my own life, it is October.
How much metaphor that may be
I do not know, just as I am
Uncertain why the answer to the cry of
A starving child is
Most often a bloated belly,
Why a tree is forced
To give up its leaves, stand naked
At the end of the year.
Now, for just a moment,
One of those moments when
A word hands crystalline in the still air, and
I struggle to understand the falsely gentle
Face of the German type
Beneath the uncompromising headline in Stuttgart,
I can believe in a God that saw
At the end that he was once again
The young Charles Foster Kane,
Flying free of a failed, collapsed, corpulent
Down a hill, as great and
White and wonderful as
The beginning of life itself.
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From Switzerland, Ariane spent five years in New York before returning home via London, England where she spent two years devoted to poetry and visits to the Troubadour.
There was a bird
And the bird came to sing
Songs of joy and sadness
Speaking revelations
Of his mission.
There was a bird
And the bird came to sing
Songs of selflessness
And universal consciousness
That were his mission.
There was a bird
And to most he was just exotic
But when he would sing
Crowds would dance
And crowds would trance.
But out there is the eagle
And the eagle's been around
Over many of our lifetimes
But out there is the eagle
And it doesn't want to give up its place.
And the eagle tried to jail the bird
But no bars would hold the bird
So the eagle tried to shoot the bird
But no shots would stop the bird
From fulfilling his mission.
Then one day invisible arrows
From invisible archers
Wounded the bird.
When he left there was lightning.
A great soul had gone home.
And out there still is the eagle
And the eagle's been around
Over many of our lifetimes
And out there still is the eagle
And it doesn't want to give up its place.
And I say from the highest mountain
The free bird is watching us
He knows his songs are around
And he hopes we'll know the day
When we'll all sing them together.
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Cinzia Napoli
An Italian miniaturist painter who studied art in Florence, she now lives in London with her husband and
two young daughters, who have beautiful blue eyes like their mother.
Emotional travel
I saw you waiting on the platform, last night,
I was waiting for a train.
I was looking at you and you were looking at me,
So near, but so far.
My watery eyes were already predicting the future
We looked at each other through the window
And it seemed to me that we could almost communicate.
Then your train moved
And mine moved as well, faster and faster.
Looking at each other through the window
Knowing the inevitable departure.
Near you there was a girl,
Neither sister, nor friend.
I knew who she was
As I knew my new lover sitting near me
But you and I were very sad.
I couldn't cry, you know,
But I would if this could have changed the future.
Your train and my train
Are going faster and faster, further and further.
And I know both of us
Didn't want to think of it happening in this way, but time goes.
I'm looking through the window
But I can't see you anymore.
Midnight, Italy.
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