Нети, нети

Neti, Neti — Sanskrit for not this, not this — is the answer the tradition gives when asked what the Divine is: not any single thing you can point to, because pointing at one thing always leaves something out. The author borrows the phrase for a different problem. He has been asked, many times, to write about Bābājī, and every time he has said he cannot. This essay is him trying anyway, and admitting where the words give out.

What is inside

There is no chapter structure — it is a single continuous essay, written in the first person, moving between three threads: how the author came to India, what he has observed of Bābājī’s person and manner, and what Bābājī actually said to him, quoted directly near the end.

The essay opens with the author’s own arrival: reading Paramahaṁsa Yogānanda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, giving notice at the law school where he taught, and flying to India within four months. He describes his first sight of the āśram at Haiḍākhāṇ — the temples rising from the golden slope of Mount Kailāsa, a white-domed temple at the top of a long staircase — and the words a devotee said as he arrived: “Baba is coming.”

The connection to Autobiography of a Yogi

This is one of the more direct bridges on this shelf between the Western reader’s likely starting point — Yogānanda’s book — and the Haiḍākhāṇ tradition. The author describes reading of “Mahāvatār Bābājī, the deathless guru, the Yogi-Christ of India,” in Yogānanda’s own words, and being moved to search for him. What follows is an account of what he found when he did: not an argument that the two are the same, simply a description of a person met in the flesh.

What the essay actually describes

Most of the piece is physical observation, offered almost as evidence rather than devotion — an attempt to set down what cannot otherwise be captured. The author writes of Bābājī’s fragrance lingering in a room for six months after he stayed there; of cosmic marks that appeared on the soles of his feet, identified one by one — the Sanskrit OM, a trident, a lotus, the crescent moon; of an occasion when a downpour drenched everyone present except Bābājī himself, standing in the open rain untouched. He describes Bābājī’s face changing “like a kaleidoscope” between forms recognisable to different devotees — Śiva to one, Hanumān to another, the author’s own mother to him — and states plainly that he does not know what to make of this, only that he saw it.

Near the close, the essay quotes Bābājī directly, in the first person, on what it means that he is “everywhere — in your every breath”: a short passage on unity, harmony and faith that reads as close as this piece comes to Bābājī’s teaching stated outright, rather than observed.

Who wrote it

The author is not named. The book identifies them only as “a devotee of Shrī Babaji,” writing from personal experience some two years after their first meeting — internal evidence in the essay places that meeting around 1970, in the earliest period of the 1970–1984 ministry, when the author describes Bābājī as still largely silent, sitting for hours in meditative trance.

What you are actually reading

• This is a collected item — found freely circulating within the Haidakhan tradition, not translated or authored by this library. If you hold rights to it, please write to us.
• It is offered as a single PDF and as a web reading edition side by side.

If you are deciding where to start

Read this if you came to Bābājī through Autobiography of a Yogi and want a first-hand account of what it was actually like to go and find him — written close enough to the events, and honestly enough about their author’s own uncertainty, that it reads as testimony rather than hagiography.

Read something more structured first if you want an overview before a personal account — the essay assumes no context and gives none; it is one person’s experience, offered exactly as it was written.