When Vyakulata left New Zealand after some years to live in New York, she left behind her bright yellow car and kindly invited us to use it whenever the need arose. One day I drove her car out along the southern motorway to perform as a clown at a kids’ birthday party in south Auckland, decked out in voluminous clown trousers, big shoes, red nose—the works!

Halfway to my destination, I was suddenly overwhelmed by sleep. I tried singing, putting my head out the window, shouting my name, anything to stay awake. Then I crashed, driving at 90 kilometres per hour, head-on into a concrete bridge column! The engine was pushed up into the passenger seat, the wheels were shorn off, everything was concertina’d into a crumpled wreckage. Fast asleep, helpless and with seat belt on, I was awoken by a tremendous bang on impact, and saw only whirling sky and flying glass.

Miraculously I was completely untouched—not a scratch or even a bruise. Ambulances came, police came, tow trucks came—everyone was astonished that I was alive, and even more so that I had emerged so totally unscathed.

Curiously, each time I passed this spot over the next few weeks—pointing out to my passengers the yellow splashes of wreckage still dotting the roadside—I could feel a force pulling me, as though down a dark tunnel, into the same place. Later Guru said that it was a hostile force that had attacked me, but that I had felt the arms of the Supreme around me and survived.

On my round-the-world trip, I left Australia on a Russian passenger ship from Sydney to the Panama Canal. 

I went into the chess room on the ship; I used to play chess a lot. I saw this man playing chess by himself. And I said, “Can I play?” He said, “Yes, please sit down.” He was from England and he was going back to England on this boat. He told me that he had a Master in Thailand for 6 or 7 years and his Master told him to return to England because he could not teach him anymore. You can imagine that during my trip I had spoken to many people about meditation, I had tried meditation, but nothing ever really clicked.

When this man spoke to me, I asked him, “What’s the purpose of meditation?” He said, “To know who you are, to realise your true self, to realise God,” and for some reason, this time it made total sense, total sense. We played chess—one game—and I thanked him. It was about 1:00 in the morning on the ship. I went up to this very small deck; it was deck F.

Interviewer: Recently, I've been watching the video that you have made on the meeting of Guru and President Mikhail Gorbachev, which took place in 1997. There was another part of this video after the meeting when Guru was gathering with the disciples and discussing this meeting. Guru seems to be so excited about that meeting, because it seems like Guru was really setting Gorbachev apart from all other politicians and prominent people that he communicated with in his lifetime. Could you please comment on this relationship of Guru with Gorbachev?

Mridanga: Well, I would have to agree. I've never seen Guru so happy than when talking about President Gorbachev. I mean, to me, I never see Gorbachev as a politician. Of course, he is. But Guru held him as someone much, much, much higher.

Guru said that he had a connection with President Gorbachev previously and that Gorbachev was a very, very special soul brought down for a special reason.

Even if you look historically just at what Gorbachev did, okay, we all know that. But I don't think I've ever met a politician that's been as receptive to Guru. I mean, it's almost like Gorbachev recognized Guru, his height somewhat, and Gorbachev just happened to be a politician.

On the 2nd day of the first time I saw Guru, Guru was talking to us about the importance of being clean and taking a proper shower, for the girls to have long hair and the boys to have short hair and shaved faces. He explained to us that the importance of having the clean-shaven face is that it’s easier to see the light of the soul being expressed through our face. When the soul is bringing its light into us, it is through the face and through our eyes that it shines most.

I wasn’t totally convinced with what Guru had said and I wanted to show him how spiritual I was. I raised my hand to ask him a question and he called on me immediately. Before I opened my mouth, I noticed that Guru was looking at me in a peculiar way. His eyes shifted to the side and there was a smile on his face.

I asked him, “If Christ had long hair and a beard, why can’t I have my long hair and beard?”

Guru remained quiet for a few moments, again with his eyes shifting to the side. The expression on his face was not something I had seen previously. It was totally new to me. His reply was, “If Christ the Saviour comes to me with his long hair and beard, I run to him and kiss the dust of his feet. But when I see you coming with your long hair and beard, I run as far away from you as I can.”

I can tell you the outer circumstances about how I came to the path. At the time, I was studying music, studying grand piano. I just got the feeling that I should learn to meditate because that would help me with my piano performance. This was in 1982. It was my final year of music study. I got the feeling that I should find somewhere to learn to meditate, I should look in the newspaper and that there would be an advertisement for meditation classes.

So, I looked in the paper and there were two advertisements for meditation groups. One of the groups was much closer to my house and it was called the Sri Chinmoy Centre, which I had never heard of. But because it was close to me, that's the one I went to. The disciples later told me that they only ever placed one advertisement in the newspaper. That was the only time they ever put an advertisement in the newspaper. That was the day I got the idea that I must look in the newspaper to find an advertisement.

So, I was coming to meditation classes for nearly six months. I was not looking for a Guru or a spiritual master or a spiritual path. It never occurred to me that these things were important. But I was enjoying coming to the Centre and I was enjoying reading Guru's writings and listening to Guru’s music. More and more, this was becoming a very important part of my life.

One year, I got very sick during the New York City Marathon. I took some aspirin along the way, thinking that it would help my sore muscles, but it actually caused a real problem in my stomach. It unfortunately started a chain reaction that started to break down my intestines.

When I ran through Central Park, I saw a disciple-friend of mine who is my coach. He was very frightened when he saw me; I had no colour in my face. And then someone I knew from the United Nations saw me just before the finish line and they had the same reaction.

When I crossed the finish line, immediately two people came up to me and said, “Are you okay? Why don't you come with us?” They took me to an emergency tent and gave me something to drink, and I got a hot chocolate. My stomach started to knot up very painfully. This was happening every five to eight minutes in a very intense way. I went to the bathroom, and it was blood. So, they immediately put me in an ambulance to take me to the hospital. By the time I got to the hospital, I was in extreme pain. I couldn't drink anything because that made it worse.

In the school where I was, there was one seeker who meditated on Guru’s Transcendental photograph. He was not yet a disciple, but a seeker. He was in another class, but I went with the girls from his class on vacation – not vacation, but more like a school where you learned how to cook, how to do the things that girls did, such as sewing. They saw me, and they said, oh, we have one boy in our class and he is exactly like you, you have to meet him. They told him the same thing, but he was a seeker and he was not interested in getting to know a girl. 

But then, a few weeks later, I was in the same room as he was. Somehow Guru managed it so that everybody else was out of the room except the two of us. We realised that we must be the ones who were exactly "the same", even though we had absolutely nothing in common. We were actually very different, but the other schoolgirls felt something was the same inside us.

I’ll tell you a funny story. Guru had two monkeys, Jadhu and Madhu. There was a little monkey house off Guru’s porch at his house where the monkeys lived. My first job in the morning was to feed the monkeys. Each morning I would bring the food into the monkey’s house. They would come down and sit on my shoulder and they would sort of pick at the plate – it was a tin from Annam Brahma – and take what they liked. Guru would ask me if they ate.

One day, Guru told me to sing to the monkeys. I am a terrible singer. I don’t sing on key and I’ve been asked not to sing The Invocation because it puts everybody off. So I sang “Never Say No” to the monkeys. Guru would be sitting on the porch a lot of times, resting, looking out on the street. He had a couch there that he would rest on. 

After about a month of singing “Never Say No,” Guru said, “Change the song.” So I sang “I dearly love my India and I dearly love my America.” And that one went on; but one is hard to sing, I love it, but I do not think I sing it right, ever.

I became a disciple in 1975. I heard that Carlos Santana was going to be playing a concert at this Unitarian church; I was very excited because I knew he meditated. I went over a couple of hours early and I was sitting in the front row, but nothing was happening.

So I asked the person at the church when the meditation was going to be. He said, “Don’t worry, it’s definitely happening. But first we have a few children who will do piano and violin recitations.” And for the next hour and a half, I was sitting in the front row watching the children play their music.

Anyway, they finally showed up and there was a tremendous meditation. It was not an electric concert; it was a meditation with acoustic music. I had a really powerful inner experience. I felt that I was floating. I was having a kind of out-of-body experience. I had never experienced anything of that kind, and I was extremely enchanted by the experience.

Whenever I remember how I first came to Guru, I get very emotional.

I was in high school. I was maybe 16 or 17 years old, and at the time I had recently moved from the island of Maui in Hawaii to Puerto Rico. When I was about 16, I started to have some inner spiritual yearnings and some spiritual experiences. No one, in my circle of friends in the school that I was going to, shared these kinds of experiences.  

So, I started going to bookstores and looking for spiritual books. One of the very first ones I was fortunate enough to get was a book on yoga, a general book of yoga. It was not Guru’s book. I began reading about yoga and spiritual life. I started practicing the physical exercises of yoga and some basic concentration exercises on my own because no one that I knew in Puerto Rico was doing anything like this. Then I started buying other books and reading on Zen Buddhism and Hinduism and some other paths, but there was one message that kept coming out to me from each of these books. That message that these books were, these teachings, were talking about was higher worlds, higher levels of consciousness, how to achieve real inner peace. But they always said that if you want to achieve this, you need a teacher, you need a Master to guide you.