The path of a holy man
GURU JARA
How does a man become a holy man?
Traditionally we are born ones on the basis of merits from past lives.
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What inwardly causes that a man starts out on the path of holy men, the so called Babas?
In India, many saints left their successful civil lives and careers after they realized that years are rolling along without any deeper meaning. While in the Czech Republic, a psychologist would consider them as burnt out or having a midlife crisis, in India they follow the traditional separation from a “matrix” of social life towards spiritual pilgrimage. The motivations of Europeans to do the same step are twofold: an awakening during a grievous crisis or you are born a “freak”. I was the second case.
How or where does a novice look for an opportunity to study?
Guru Jara meditating during a ceremony in his Ashram
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Those, who are interested in me, can email samadhi@guru-jara-samadhi.com to receive further information. And those who are looking for something more exotic, can visit some of the Indian “khumb meelas”. You can find a guru tailored for you at these festivals, sacred baths. It may be one of a hundreds naked nagas, or spiritual celebrities known from books and television. To those interested in tantra of the left hand, I recommend Bengali „mela“ which takes place near the outflow of the river Ganges to the sea, in Sagar near Calcutta every January. I met my guru, Baba, Babaji in the place of the sacred bath in Haridwar as well.
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How long does the study last?
When you find a guru, traditionally you study with him until he dies or until he tells you that your stay with him has come to an end.
Usually it takes many years. You begin as a helper who carries wood, water, cooks, cleans. And your position gradually advances. My way was a little easier because I had brought with me a lot of experience through the many spiritual states I had achieved during previous years. Thanks to it I was able to “commute”, to do a “correspondence course”.
What does a novice have to pass through during the study?
Exercises, rituals, ceremonies. Uncovering the mysteries of body, which in Tantra, unlike other teachings, is a tool, a bridge in discovering the secrets of the universe.
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This is one part, challenging, but not the hardest. The hardest part is the lifestyle. Continual homelessness, pilgrimage without certainties, cold nights under the stars at an altitude of 5000 m alternating with forty degrees heat in the desert. Fortunately, I was well prepared from the times we had lived in similar conditions, in similar austerity with the climbers and mountaineers in the caves of Spain, Italy and France. I spent 300 nights a year on average in the caves and mountains in the outdoors. And while French climbers cursed at how expensive everything was, we were just joking that only a Czechoslovak survives in France with $ 20 a month. We ate twice a day due to the toil if heavy sports, which I have reduced to the standard of one meal a day in recent years.
What does it mean in practice to be a Baba?
One lady told me that she is a grandmother as well so you may want to do an interview with her too … (in Czech the word “baba” is a synonym for grandmother, translator’s note).
In general, Babas are the errant living sadhus, holy men who live out of society.
Analogical is the story of St. Francis and the mendicant monastic orders in Europe before they settled down.
What are the spiritual commitments, the obligations, the possibilities?
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Guru Jara is teaching his students in his Ashram in the Philippines
There are 5 million holy men in India. Every school or sect has different rules. From tying a heavy stone to one´s penis-lingam, to reeling a male’s genitals on a stick, to members of the Shiva Bum Bum group smoking 80 joints of sacred plants a day. Some are in absolute celibate asceticism and they believe that all vaginas-yoni are the same gate of the Great Mother through which we came into the world, so it is not appropriate to penetrate her with a penis. Babas may this perform rituals like Pancha Tattva Ganesha (Ganapati) puja, Chakra puja or Shri Yantra several times a day which may appear to an uninitiated person like a sexual orgy.
My spiritual commitment is to spread the doctrine in an absorbable form in the modernity of the 21st century. My duty is to not to stop and keep going in the direction in which I set out 20 years ago. My possibilities are always in what this way brings to me. This evening in jail is the first meal of the day which is waiting for me in two plastic bags just brought by a deaf-mute Chinese who I cured when he totally collapsed with a nice boy from Bangladesh. In one bag is rice and in the second overcooked vegetables.
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When I look at a dying giant rat near the bars, I´ve got a real tantric „yummy“.
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„Every visible object is seen as divine existence, the true essence of which is primordial light“ says Shri Chakra Sambhara Tantra.
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What entrance exams does a novice have to pass?
With Babas it is the same as with schools. Some of them accept everyone and let them drop off gradually, others are picky. I was recommended to a Baba by Swami Nagananda from southern India after I insistently wanted know where he learned a method of meditation-healing by energy from hands, which he used to save the life of a peasant who was dying from a cobra´s bite. This recommendation, and the fact I met Babaji in northern India when I was almost crawling on the ground with fever (it was malaria or dengue fever), simplified my adoption to study with Baba.
Can women also study and follow the way of so called Babas?
Traditional study with Babas is harder for women. Of course a woman can be a tantric companion, so called mudra, dakini. There is, however, a problem if she wants to become a real Baba – she faces the historical “caste-system“ in which a woman is not considered to be an adept. But there are exceptions to this obstacle, as in the case of one skilled German who lived on an equal footing with the group of siva sadhus. She lived with them in the famous cave above the Nilkanth (Neelkanth) Mahadev Temple in Rishikesh for many years
And what about final exams, are there any? When and where a novice takes the exams and how can he succeed?
The procedure of final exams is not the same as at school. You just have to graduate with the knowledge, personality and acts at a certain level when Babaji acknowledges that you are a Baba. This moment, also for “caste-system“, may never occur, no matter how much you try.
The physically hardest ritual is the nine days of total fasting without any food, water and sleep, when you are constantly connected with spiritual beings, in a state: “Oh, Devi, transform me completely, so there is no difference between you and me.“ Maha Nirvana Tantra. If the ritual fails, around the fifth day the body will totally collapse, which may even lead to death in case the ritual takes place in the mountains.
Guru Jara, why did you set on the path of the Babas, when you had already reached the realization of full Enlightenment and an ancient Egyptian Initiation as well, which are the tops of the two main spiritual paths?
Guru Jara is teaching his students from Japan
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I knew exactly what I wanted to learn from Babaji. I had already concluded searching for Enlightenment and Initiation at the time. I was over collecting the theories about the teachings of the Kabbalah, astrology, feng shui, traditional healing. What I was interested in was what role the physical body has in the process of connection to the spiritual nature of the universe and the existence itself. And if I could lead to the spiritual enlightenment other people, who are not able to perceive primordial, uncreated light, the cosmic vibration, the existence of God, but are able to perceive the experience of the body and they experience it every day.
A tantra-practitioner, connected to the tantric beings like Shakti, can really manage this, and so my training was pointing this way as was my homework and exams.
Which spiritual exercises did you practice while studying under Babaji, which skills did you have to prove in these exercises?
I practiced exercises as a collection and accumulation of substance of uncreated initial light (or vibration) in the “spine”, with a subsequent transfer of this light to the partner by body, lingam, touches, by a crystal. I studied “diagnostic divination” of state of Vasans (hooks, spines), for example from a shape created by the herbs thrown on the chest, or water poured out on the abdomen, when both of them had been energetically charged and “spelled” for many hours. Herbs and water then show the spiritual energetic problems on the body, but they also heal them…
Of course I had to pass the obligatory teaching of traditional rituals and ceremonies, pilgrimages to the spring and outfall of the river Ganga and to the significant Shiva lingams, especially to that in Ujjain, Svayambh.
I had to master the ceremony of the ring of Shri Yantra and I had to lead some of them personally as the main manifestations of the cosmic lingam, when nine prayer candles burn in the circle between dakinis seeking for personification of tantric deities of the highest spheres. The irony is that this is one of the hardest and spiritually, mentally and physically demanding rituals, however, from the outside, to a materialist, it seems like a fulfillment of all sexual dreams about being with many women. The opposite is true. This is an utterly exhausting ceremony, during which it is necessary to be totally concentrated and in which the lingam, yoni, crystals, shells, mandalas are nothing more than a physical manifestation of the initial vibration, the light of which the universe was created, the vibration that somewhere inside you causes you to be alive.
What is the common life of a holy man, a Baba, like?
The basis of Babas’ lives and the lives of their followers is that you live outside of society. As I said at the beginning, you have to be a “freak” for it to be worth it for you. To be a Baba is a lifestyle which is not interesting or very appealing in modernity. However, in return you get the indescribable freedom of the heart and soul with an unceasing ecstatic feeling that life is beautiful. For me personally, tantric studies have changed my life less, because at 18 years of age, my first emigration to Italy, just before Havel’s revolution, forced me to break from the common social connections, ranging from bread and ending with the popular TV series.
Is Tantra a part of this unusual lifestyle?
Tantra is just part of my faith. As was written about me in the US: “Guru Jara´s path is a syncretistic faith combining yoga, tantra, Kabbalah, Buddhism with a form of Christianity and ancient Egyptian teachings together with the studies of time (e.g. astrology) and space (e.g. feng shui), it is here and now of todays man.”
Indeed I believe that all these beliefs and doctrines process the same dough, each with a taste of its own culture. While tantra is excellent in controlling spiritual chakras in the body, the Kabbalah handles the mystic course of connection of these chakras, and Taoism deals with how these chakras and paths, connected together, affect organs in our bodies.
Guru Jara, why did you use the name Guru Anahdan at one time?
Babaji disagreed with the fact that I am surrounded by so many students who live a normal life in a consumarist
society. There are many reasons, but as you suspect the primary are energetic, karmic reasons. It was mainly in the years 2000-2002. So Babaji told me he would still teach me but I should let him die for my students and use the name as a heritage. The conflict started by the anniversary Spiritual Trekking 2000 when I took 20 people from the Czech Republic to the pilgrimage „on the ground“ to India. The whole journey from their home via Iran, Pakistan to India cost them around $ 100 and the pilgrimage was not only beautiful but it culminated with the opening of my first Asian center. And as I said before, Babaji simply disagreed that I was so intensely surrounded by normally living people. But at the time I endeavored to fulfill a dream about transformation of the Earth through the “essence” of a certain percentage of spiritually awakened people which was also spread by people like Mahesh Yogi (a guru to the Beatles) and others. This idea consists in a kind of “syrup“ where several hundred thousand people can transform the whole mankind to the highest degree of living by their enlightenment. In this state wars, crime, famine disappear… With enthusiasm, together with Shri Barbara Dhurga Plaskova and others, I founded the journal Poetrie (Paradise of Etz Tree) followed with a series of religious festivals throughout the Czech Republic, from Opava to Prague, České Budějovice and Karlsbad. Instead of receiving compliments, Babaji criticized me a lot. He believes in karma so much that similar activities seem to him like a pointless waste of time and energy: “Someone is either spiritual or consumer. That’s all!”
After I moved my permanent residence to Asia, our relationship began to settle and Babaji once again become Guru Anahdan and I was Jara, still believing in the transformation of humanity, but realizing the traps of missionary zeal in the consumer world.
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