Excerpt: Between Dark and Dark by David Lovejoy

{27}

In the Service of the Master My first priority at the beginning of that year was to raise enough interest and money to invite Charanand to Australia to conduct some Knowledge sessions for all the people I was telling about Maharaji. By then I had heard that the Master himself had left India and had visited England and America; I hardly dared hope that he might come to Australia, but getting Charanand to come did not seem impossible.

Actually it would have been impossible if it had been left to my impractical dreams and disreputable way of life. Fortunately some Australians had been travelling in India and found themselves at the Hans Jayanti festival of 1971, to which Maharaji had returned from England with a whole jumbo jet load of western followers. After the festival they hurried back to Oz to spread the word. Carol Page, Faith and Poppy Healy and Julie Collette made a big difference straightaway. Julie came from Melbourne and she went back there to prepare for Charanand as I had been doing in Sydney. I quickly learned from Faith and her sister Poppy that Maharaji's ashrams did not favour the use of psychedelic drugs, that clothes and walls should be white, and that meals were to consist of brown rice and lentils. Carol was more easy-going, but then she was slipping out of the house every night to sleep with her boyfriend.

So the houses in Riley Street became an ashram. I appointed Faith as 'housemother', although nobody had actually appointed me as chief of our little organisation. But as the one with the longest experience of Knowledge and the closest contact with Maharaji my authority was taken for granted. We whitewashed the walls, straightened ourselves up and began holding regular nightly satsang programs.

The satsangs - the word doubled for both the meeting and the talks which could only be given by those who had received Maharaji's Knowledge - were very simple affairs. I would talk, and Faith, sometimes Poppy and Carol, and then our store of qualified speakers was exhausted. We would fill in with devotional songs led by Wendy and by the occasional cassette tape. These were not, as you might suppose, recordings of Maharaji - that was organised much later. No, the recordings which kept us spellbound and entertained were posted to me by Glen and consisted of himself speaking at much bigger meetings in London. They were a brilliant mix of homely metaphor, humour and insight, and were highlights of our evenings.

To my deep regret Chris and Megan shied away from the new order, although in retrospect I can hardly blame them: the ashram discipline was very different from the anything goes head house atmosphere. Most of the Riley Street regulars accepted the changes and looked forward to the arrival of Mahatma Charanand. Wendy and I of course were looking forward to another arrival. In the end the Mahatma came first by about two months. By the beginning of September, 1972 the little group in Sydney and the even smaller one in Melbourne organised by Julie had raised enough money for an air ticket to bring Charanand Ji to Australia. jet-lagged but still beaming. Mahatma Charanand was brought triumphantly to our slum headquarters where a dozen or so seekers immediately implored him for Knowledge.