Baba Muktananda ~ Part I

Swami Muktananda was affectionately known by all as simply Baba. He travelled from India to make his first World Tour of Australia, The United States and Europe in 1970. In that time of social and political upheaval his message of discovering one’s own inner wealth was particularly captivating. “Look inside for happiness. Honour your Self. Love your Self. God dwells within you as you”

Baba’s teachings were refreshingly radical to the many people exploring meaning through anti-war demonstrations, mind altering drugs, women’s liberation, love-ins and dropping out of conventional materialistic pursuits.

Ram Das, formerly Professor Richard Alpert and known for his psychodelic research at Harvard University, described Muktananda as a ‘saint’, as someone who delivered a ‘natural high’. He was the antithesis of an austere ascetic. He offered an appealing alternative for a generation of disenchanted materialists in the West.

Baba spoke in Hindi, his words translated into English, yet his communication was beyond language and culture. Audiences experienced his profoundly beautiful blissful energy and were enchanted by his warmth, his mischievous humour and the joyful spontaneity that informed every gesture. Baba was a perfect manifestation of his Sanskrit name, Muktananda, meaning the ‘bliss of freedom’.

He returned to India in November 1970 to the small Ashram presented to him by his own Guru, Bhagwan Nityananda, renowned as an eccentric ascetic yogi who seldom spoke and lived in simplicity in the nearby village of Ganeshpuri.

Baba met Nityananda as a young boy. He then left home to wander throughout India, took initiation as a monk and became Swami Muktananda. He studied yoga, Ayurvedic medicine, Indian martial Arts, Vedic scriptures and learned from many great yogis and saints. Meeting Nityananda again years later he received a powerful spiritual transmission. This precipitated an intensive nine years of profound meditation practice, culminating in Nityananda advising students “Muktananda has become enlightened, he is liberated”. Prior to his own passing in l961 Bhagwan Nityananda encouraged his disciple to live nearby and predicted that his spiritual accomplishment and influence would spread very wide in the future.