Chapter 1§
The Golden Visitor
The first mystical experience that I can remember was as a baby lying in my crib. It had little bars up so you couldn’t fall out. All of a sudden, I was conscious of a tall, full-grown man standing over me in a serene pale yellow robe. Then I became fully conscious of being this full-grown man looking down upon this little baby. Then I was conscious as the baby again, looking up into the face of this great soul. And then I was the tall person. Then I was the little baby looking at the tall person. It went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. I realized that the tall man in the pale yellow robe was the body of my soul. I realized that as I continued maturing spiritually, the soul body would finally fully inhabit the physical body.§
While still in his crib, the infant Gurudeva had a vision of his own spiritual future, seeing himself fully evolved, in a golden body of light.§
The infant who had this vision, Robert Walter Hansen, was born at the Fabiola Hospital in Oakland, California, on January 5, 1927, to Walter and Alberta Nield Hansen and raised with his younger sister, Carol, in a cabin on the secluded, forested shores of Fallen Leaf Lake, near Lake Tahoe, California. Walter, a taciturn man, was a native Californian whose parents were both from Denmark and Alberta was born in Kansas of an English-born father. That Robert’s infancy began so remarkably becomes unremarkable as the life of this great being unfolds, filled as it was with profound experiences and life-transforming adventures.§