Back among the masses! Advaitadas asked me the other day whether I'd be ending my Internet mauna anytime soon. I realize it's been some 40 days since my last communications. The bulk of the audience here has read my note on going totally off the grid for a bit over the month. My plan was to vanish somewhere to the more isolated and less inhabited areas of the dhama for an intense month of bhajana. Yet a man only proposes, and often it so happens that the cosmic management has something else in store.

My plans to vanish got twice delayed. The first delay was with Franz, who came over and with whom we spent a wonderful, even if short, time touring the dhama and meeting mahatmas. I had determined to leave on the morning after I went to see Franz off to Vrindavana. However,the evening brought me together with Madhusudana Dasji from the U.K. — one of Babaji Maharaja's earliest disciples from the West — along with his family and friends, whom I ended up taking onto Giriraja parikrama. Babaji Maharaja introduced me to Madhusudana, "Here is your old friend, Madhavananda! (Even if we had never met.) First he made publicity all over world, and now he has become a babaji!" — with a big smile on his face. Not that I'd have become one in form, but I suppose my lifestyle bears some semblance to that of a vairagi.

The day after wasn't good for parikrama, so we ended up for a date on the day after that. And then, just two days before Niyama-seva was to start, I was to finally vanish into my long awaited solitude. It was only with the boundless kripa of Radharani that a wonderful mahatma appeared at my door in the morning prior to my departure — without any particular reason aside a strange spark of inspiration that led him to leave his morning duties and come over to my house. This babaji told me exactly all that I realized I needed to hear to get my devotions into proper order. (More reflections on my inner evolutions at a later date.)

Sri Anonymous Das Babaji Maharaja is his name, a mahatma of Advaita-parivara in the lineage descending through Siddha Sri Manohara Das Babaji Maharaja of Govinda-kunda. Despite his young apparance, Baba is at the ripe age of 61 years, having lived three decades of bhajana in Vraja and Bengal. After a wonderful discussion, Baba told me he has a free room at his kutir at which I was welcome to live in and do bhajana. In the next two hours, I had carried all my belongings (which fortunately isn't that much) over to his place and settled down.

The subsequent month has been one of intense teaching, service and inner growth. Time is a bit on a short supply, but there is much to be shared, much that I wish to share as a matter of sharing with everyone the revitalizing rasayana elixir of sadhu-sanga in which the currents of divine love surge with fierce power, infusing the worldly domain with power of upliftment from a world beyond.

I will be getting back to my pending correspondence over the next week or so, bear with the delays of this wretch.