Why I have the name of a Hindu Goddess
Let me take you back to an ancient era: the summer of 1969. I had dropped out of the world of research and development in Cambridge, MA, where I started as a secretary (typical for a woman with a degree in English back then) and was promoted to editor when I started to rewrite the papers I was typing up for the firm’s brilliant scientists. I planned to head to California to join the flower children when my girlfriend, who had the car in which we were going to drive West, moved in with my ex-boyfriend (and wound up marrying him…talk about karma). After a number of very interesting adventures in Florida, I wound up living with a group of hippies in New Hampshire, and dropping acid for the first time. Then I met a guy at a party who said, “Hey, wanna go meet a saint?” Before taking the LSD and opening up to the Oneness of the universe, I would have said no. But the timing was divinely right.
The next day we drove up the driveway to Ram Dass’s father’s New Hampshire estate. Ram Dass was standing outside, wearing his white robe, barefoot, twirling beads in his hand. I was speechless: I hadn’t smoked or dropped anything, yet I could see light radiating out from him. When he spoke that evening to the dozen or so folks living there, I found myself getting answers to questions I didn’t even know I had. I moved in the next day. Woodstock was happening down the road, but what was happening on the “farm” was pretty remarkable as well.
After that summer I met Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharajji . . . in his picture.
I’d split a tab of acid with an old college friend and gone on an initiatory journey. The next day I was still too high to sleep, and frightened of the astral zones I was being pulled into. I sat in front of the little black-and-white photo of Maharajji that Ram Dass had given me, clutching my wooden mala, and repeated a heartfelt mantra: I’m scared, and you have to help me. Suddenly, there he was, moving within a ball of blue light within the picture. It was only for an instant, but I was reassured by his presence.
Later I got a bigger picture and talked to it all the time. And I would see him there from time to time. Never told a soul. I mean, who talks to pictures?
It was March of 1971 when I finally landed in Bombay (now Mumbai). Three months later I headed north to find Maharajji, but I came down with a bad case of hepatitis (don’t drink the water from village wells). I made it to the Himalayan foothills, where I finally met Maharajji in person at the beginning of September. One of the first things he said to me was, “You used to talk to my picture all the time. You asked many questions.”
A week later he gave me the name Parvati.