100 Paths

I had attended a past-life regression (PLR) workshop with Santosh Joshi in 2023, but had not been able to complete all the meditations on day two of the workshop. This time when he visited Delhi, I was lucky to get the opportunity to finish what I’d started.

There were four meditations planned for the day. Santosh is a well-known PLR therapist from Mumbai and is the author of Many Lives One Soul: Keys to Deeper Secrets. Trained in mechanical engineering, he gave up the structured corporate life and took to creating healing modalities and teaching people about the power of their subconscious mind. I respect him because he really knows his stuff and is non-judgemental.

The first meditation of the day was ‘Meeting the Master’. Lying on a mattress on the floor, the meditation takes you into a deep, relaxed state where you visualise meeting your ‘master’ – or your own higher wisdom, if you wish – and getting advice from them on your life’s purpose and solutions for your present challenges.

I’d done this session previously with Santosh, and back then, I’d ‘met’ Krishna – whom I consider my ishta deva (deity of my heart). So, I completely expected to meet my favourite god this time too.

However, I am in for a surprise. After following Santosh’s instructions, I visualise myself standing in a cave. A fog clears, and a face appears. I thought I would see Krishna but oh! It looks like Jesus!

“Jesus! I didn’t expect to see you!” I exclaim in my head. “It’s been a long time since I even thought about you, dude. What are you here to teach me today?”

“Forgiveness,” says Jesus.

I become sober. I remember all the people in my life who have hurt me, abused me, let me down, betrayed me. I line them up, and go up to each one, forgiving them for the pain they’ve caused me. It is an emotional process to remember all those episodes, and I start to cry (in real life, lying on the mattress). I let them go one by one, but the process feels strained, incomplete.

Jesus appears again. “Hey, what are you doing?” he asks.

I look at him tearfully, “I’m forgiving all the people who’ve hurt me.”

“You’re not supposed to forgive THEM,” he says, “You’re supposed to ask THEM for forgiveness.”

I am flabbergasted. “What are you saying, dude? Ask all those people who have hurt me to forgive me? For what? Am I not the victim?” I ask incredulously.

“They are all the Buddhas in your life who came to teach you about your higher purpose and to lead you to enlightenment. But you did not see their truth. Instead, you held negative thoughts and feelings in your heart towards them – fear, hate, anger, contempt, resentment, spite, suspicion, lack of gratitude for their services to you. You may now ask them for forgiveness for not recognising the Buddha in them.”

I am shellshocked. He is repeating what Niyam said to me last night: every living being is an enlightened master here to wake you up. I turn to the lineup of people who have hurt me, and this time bow to each of them, saying contritely, “Please forgive me for not seeing the Buddha in you and for holding negative thoughts towards you.”

It’s an excruciating process, raw and painful, shredding my ego to smithereens. Then Santosh’s voice rings out to the group: “It feels wonderful. It’s just wonderful.”

Wonderful? It doesn’t feel wonderful. I make an effort to see the wonderfulness of it. I stare at my lineup again with new eyes. I see all the stories of pain flip on the side, rendered toothless. I see beyond the faces and recognise in their eyes an old connection.

All of a sudden, the picture changes. They turn into beings of shining light and disappear. I am left staring at myself at 25 or 26 years old. The one who was wronged. Who was abused. Who was imprisoned inside a golden cage.

I turn on to my left side on the mattress, my face and hair drenched in tears. Am I to forgive the younger me, or to ask her for forgiveness? My body is wracked with sobs. Inside my eyelids, I see a great dark whorl of thoughts and emotions spinning round — all the fear and hate and resentment of my youth, the sense of victimhood, the shame, the disrespect of the self — creating a cascade of causes and effects.

“Why was I made like this?” I beseech Jesus.

He gestures to the dark whorl. It is the cycle of karma, he seems to say. It is what my soul chose for this lifetime.

In 2000, when I was 25 or 26, I had gone on pilgrimage to the Vaishno Devi shrine in the Himalayas. There, after completing the hours-long climb, we waited in queue to enter the cave that housed the shrine. It was raining. While I stood there on the platform, wet and cold, staring at the beautiful valley below on one side, a voice in my head had said to me, “Bure karam bhugatna bahut mushkil hai; aur bure karam mat karo (it is hard enough to pay for one’s past bad karmas; do not create more bad karmas).”

After returning from Vaishno Devi, I gave up eating meat and turned vegetarian in response to the inner voice.

But lying on the mattress on Sunday, the same voice says the same thing again. “Bure karam bhugatna bahut mushkil hai; aur bure karam mat karo (it is hard enough to pay for one’s past bad karmas; do not create more bad karmas).”

Jesus looks at me quietly. Awakening dawns on me. So that’s what the voice meant 24 years ago. I gave up eating meat but that was a very minor sort of ‘bad karma’ compared with the karma I was creating with ‘wrong thoughts’.

“Ask your master what is the purpose of your life,” Santosh says.

Jesus and I look at one another. I already know. I must devote the rest of my life to watching my thoughts — to not think a single negative thought about anyone, for all are Buddhas in my life. Aur bure karam mat karo.

I stop crying, and turn to lie on my back, spent. The meditation ends, Santosh brings us back up and out of the trance. I touch my face and feel my left eye swollen. Later, in the bathroom, I see that I’ve got a huge bump all over my eye as if I’ve punched myself. It’s the same eye that had lost its sight a couple of years ago, most of which was restored by a miraculous surgery. There’s something this eye is repeatedly trying to tell me.

The swelling heals as the day progresses. But I am surprised to see the group photo that Santosh takes of us at lunchtime — I can barely recognise myself. I look like one of my older cousins but I look unlike whatever I thought I look like.

And the day isn’t over yet. We have two more sessions to go, the last of which teaches me another major lesson.

Maybe I’ll write about it another time.