Chapter 3§
Sri Lanka’s Yogic Cave
After reaching Sri Lanka in 1947, Robert Hansen studied with Dayananda Priyadasi, a Singhalese Buddhist who was an acquaintance of the most influential teacher of Robert’s youth. Dayananda was a dynamic teacher of meditation and occultism and a great patriot of the island nation.§
Ceylon, or Sri Lanka, was then in the final stages of a 21-year-long struggle for independence from Great Britain. Times were unsettled. The fiftyish Dayananda, both meditative mystic and charismatic politician, used the situation to train his new protégé in the art of getting positive things done in the world. Within months of his arrival, the American yogi helped found two schools for village children, assisted in reviving the dormant Kandyan dance and introduced the use of power saws to carpenters. These down-to-Earth projects were a part of his training.§
All of this activity was beginning to weigh on Robert. He never forgot his real purpose in coming to Ceylon: to realize God.§
He retreated to a remote cave, vowing to know the Truth. One day he sat so long and still that a python slithered over his legs, an encounter witnessed by his mystic mentor.§
One day my training was completed. My teacher Dayananda flew off to attend a religious conference in Switzerland. I was alone in Ceylon. I thought about the cave again. One of my close Muslim friends, who had Hanuman as his mentor, took me to the caves of Jailani, Kurugala Balandha, Sri Lanka, secluded caves carved in solid rock in a mountainous valley deep in the central jungles of the island. There I met my fifth catalyst on the path of enlightenment.§
The Jailani Caves are 100 miles south and east of Colombo, in remote jungles. It is to this day a holy site, and a gathering place for Sufi mystics. The journey of several days wended through the uninhabited central hills of Ceylon, with its tiny villages and dusty roads. Elephants bathing in the rivers and pulling logs on massive chains out of the forests.§
Jailani caves, Sri Lanka§
They say Mustan never took a bath, but he smelled as sweet as a flower. He was so old; he was so pure. We had a wonderful meeting. When he saw me he said, “I had a dream about you.” Then Mustan pulled a little notebook out of his pocket. He said, “I wrote it down here where I write down all of my dreams.” I said to him, through my friend who translated from Arabic into English, “I had a dream about you, too,” which I had just a few nights before. I had written it down also. I had been trained at that time to write down all my dreams. He said, “My dream was during the last full moon.” We compared dates. We had both written down the same dream at the same time about our meeting together on the inner planes at night while we slept.§
He began giving to me a profound training centered on the conscious use of the third eye. He explained and projected with his mind force the intricate capabilities, development and unfoldment of the faculties of this chakra. Mustan lived in a small cave with a little door on it. One had to walk many steps up the side of a hill to get to it. I lived in a nearby mosque at the foot of the path to his cave.§
At night he took me out and meditated with me on wind-swept hills where yogis used to meditate hundreds of years ago. He made me sit perfectly straight for hours at a time. The wind was blowing hard against my body. It was cold. There, in the dead of night, he would say through my translator, “Did you see this? Did you see that? Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” He was revealing a form of mysticism taught in the Koran. He shared all of this with me. I learned some extremely intricate workings of the third eye and the psychic unfoldment of it through the faculties of the soul. This knowledge has become an extremely useful tool in my work today. I really appreciate my fifth catalyst on the path, Mustan.§
He was an old, old soul, a rare being living a dynamic, spiritual life in that remote jungle. A Muslim saint named Abdul Cadar Duster lived in the caves of Jailani, meditated and had a school of mysticism, hundreds of years ago. These caves were on top of a mountain about a mile from where we lived in the mosque. When penetrating deep into the cave, one can see light in the crevice deep in the center of the mountain. In the mysticism of Islam, this is thought to be a direct route to the inner planes, to Mecca. The caves themselves are situated on a cliff that drops five hundred feet to a tropical jungle below, where wild elephants are often seen. I was taken there by my friend for a series of meditations. As I walked up the rugged dirt path, I realized that this was the cave in which I would one day realize the Self. For no particular reason, I felt it could be done here. It would be done here. That’s how it is before you realize, you think there is something to do or something to get or become.§
We stayed for a few days together, my friend Anbakara and I, sleeping on the stones just outside the cave, since they stayed warm during the night. We meditated long hours, silently penetrating deep into the mind. It was so quiet there. He told me one afternoon that as I sat above the valley in the lotus posture I always use, a large python had crawled over my legs, across my lap and back into the rocks. As the days passed I felt more and more blissful, drawn to the absolute center of myself, as if by a powerful magnet.Ӥ
One morning I awoke and sensed we should leave the caves, that I should return alone to take the final steps. We returned to Colombo, where I completed several tasks for my former teacher, Dayananda, which inwardly freed me. When they were done, I returned by myself to the caves of Jailani. On the way back, I was determined. I vowed not to quit until I had the ultimate unfoldment of this lifetime. I had received outstanding training along the path up to this point. I had learned many things. Always the desire for the realization of the Self, imkaif, was paramount in my mind.§
I was told by my teachers along the way that I had to get the foundation and the understanding of the various inner and outer areas of the mind in order to have strength enough to sustain the reaction to the realization of the Self. Each catalyst up to this point had helped me and introduced me in one way or another to my next teacher. This was not planned. I did not look for another teacher. I expected each teacher to be my last one. In fact, I didn’t even think about it. Our meetings all happened in an easy, natural sequence of events.§
Each teacher had his part in developing the memory faculties, one-pointedness, concentration, stimulating the meditation faculties, the willpower and the cognitive faculties—teaching me to see everything from an inner perspective and looking at the world as if one were the center of the universe.§
There was just one thing lacking, however—and I had to find that myself—the ultimate goal, realization of the Self, God. It was with joy and a burning desire that I walked the ten or twelve miles from the nearest road to the caves of Jailani. I had absolutely no possessions with me. I had given all of my clothing away. I had given all of my money to the villagers along the road. I had nothing. I just went there to be alone.§
I took no food, again vowing to myself, “I am going to fast until I find this realization that I so want and have wanted for such a long time. Now is the time.” When I arrived late that afternoon, Mustan wasn’t there. He had gone away on a pilgrimage. No one was there. There were no pilgrims. I was alone. I walked up and into the cave and began to fast and meditate.§
I went in and in and in and in and then in and in again, and finally I went in and in until awareness became totally aware of itself, kaif, and into the control of the breath until the breath breathed no more, and then in from kaif to ikaif—the most intense possible experience wherein the brink of the absolute is felt—and then into the Self, Parasiva.§
I came out again into the mind. Villagers had seen me on the cliffs from the villages six hundred feet below. They thought I was some sort of holy man and brought food and drinks, all sorts of nice things. We had a big feast. I was hungry. They had come all the way up from the valley. They were so kind.§
After several weeks, I returned to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, a hundred miles away, with another Muslim man who also had come on a pilgrimage from a foreign country. He taught me a wonderful Islamic chant along the way.§
I never saw Mustan again. He had taught me everything I needed to know to complete my training for the realization of the Self during my first series of meetings with him. It was so intense. It was so strong.§
Still immersed in the radiant aftermath of his cave revelations, Robert took to the trail that led back to civilization, back to the capital of Colombo, back to another and lesser reality. This time he settled into the local YMCA, where he got a job teaching hatha yoga to pay for his room. Between worlds, freed from Dayananda, no longer obliged to the dancing mission, he began a new exploration which led him to the temples of the city.§
Part of his training from the Muslim mystics was the use of the third eye, how to see within and without, how to awaken the spiritual vision that all people have but few know how to use. They also connected Robert to inner-plane beings, especially the powerful genie Detaza, who worked with the American Hindu to assist in his mission throughout his life.§
One night, just before sleep, he saw a vision of a tremendous peacock tail. It was fanned open in vivid colors, framing the screen before his eyes. In Hindu mysticism, Lord Murugan, God of spiritual unfoldment, rides on a peacock through the akasha, the inner plane of consciousness inhabited by beings of a very refined vibration.§
Back in the city, nothing looked the same anymore. I was in another dimension. Everything was different. I had lost something: the desire for the realization of the Self. I felt complete. I felt alone. I spent several weeks in Colombo absorbing the darshan, the impact, of the cave experience. It was too vast to be understood, to be grasped by the intellect, so I enjoyed knowing that I knew something I could never adequately explain.§