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The following morning I sought out Behari Pundit, my Sanskrit professor at Scottish Church College. "Sir, you have told me of your friendship with a great disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya. Please give me his address." "You mean Ram Gopal Muzumdar. I call him the 'sleepless saint. He is always awake in an ecstatic consciousness. His home is at Ranbajpur, near Tarakeswar."
I thanked the pundit, and entrained immediately for Tarakeswar. I hoped to silence my misgivings by wringing a sanction from the "sleepless saint" to engage myself in lonely Himalayan meditation. Behari's friend, I heard, had received illumination after many years of KRIYA YOGA practice in isolated caves. At Tarakeswar I approached a famous shrine.
On the seventh day I found a herb materialized in my hand! I made a brew from the leaves, and gave it to your uncle. His disease vanished at once, and has never reappeared." I entered the sacred Tarakeswar shrine; the altar contains nothing but a round stone. Its circumference, beginningless and endless, makes it aptly significant of the Infinite.
Hindus regard it with the same veneration that Catholics give to the Lourdes sanctuary in France. Innumerable healing miracles have occurred at Tarakeswar, including one for a member of my family. "I sat in the temple there for a week," my eldest aunt once told me. "Observing a complete fast, I prayed for the recovery of your Uncle Sarada from a chronic malady.
After touching the saint's feet, I sauntered into the jungle, making my way through its tropical tangle until I reached Tarakeswar. There I made a second pilgrimage to the famous shrine, and prostrated myself fully before the altar. The round stone enlarged before my inner vision until it became the cosmical spheres, ring within ring, zone after zone, all dowered with divinity.
Then they were much fewer, but then even more than now the town was a centre of the Vishnoo-worship of Jagganath, second only to that of Pooree in all India. Not far off, and now connected with the port by railway, is the foul shrine of Tarakeswar, which attracts thousands of pilgrims, many of them widows, who measure the road with their prostrate bodies dripping from the bath.
"Yoga, through which divinity is found within, is doubtless the highest road: so Lahiri Mahasaya has told us. But discovering the Lord within, we soon perceive Him without. Holy shrines at Tarakeswar and elsewhere are rightly venerated as nuclear centers of spiritual power." The saint's censorious attitude vanished; his eyes became compassionately soft. He patted my shoulder.
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