Visa Jump – The Power of Love

On the surface, this posting is about our making a visa jump to Thailand but really it’s about much more than that. It’s about the power of love.

One of the restrictions that the Indian government places on tourists is that they can not stay in India longer than 180 days. If you want to stay in India longer than this, you need to leave India, even if only for one day, and then return, thereby enabling you to stay for another 180 days. This is called making a visa jump. When the time approaches for us all to make our visa jumps, Swami Kaleshawar sets aside a few weeks for everyone to travel to wherever they need to go. Most people at the ashram go to nearby countries, but some return home to see their families and friends. Swami is extremely careful to protect everyone at the ashram so certain countries, like Sri Lanka and Nepal, are off-limits due to political unrest. That leaves only a few other options; Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand.

Tara and I were faced with a huge problem that we had no idea how to solve. In order to complete the University year, we’d have to make two visa jumps, each after 180 days, but we had no money to travel anywhere. Forget the second visa jump. We’d deal with that when the time came. First we had to figure out how to make the first one or else we’d have to leave India at the end of our first 180 days.

There had been a flurry of donations via PayPal to our India fund when we first announced it on our website. We arrived in India with enough money to last four months, maybe five if we were extremely frugal. We’d economized in every way possible, reducing our expenditures down to the bare necessities.

There’s a laundry service at the ashram that only costs 14 rupees (30 cents) per item but to save money we washed all our laundry in a plastic bucket in our bathroom. As the months passed, the donations coming in had dwindled to a trickle and now we were down to less than $100 with six more months of the university to go and two visa jumps required. It didn’t look good.

Swami was going to England, Germany and the United States to teach during the visa break and many of our friends at the ashram were planning on flying to California to attend the events in Joshua Tree and Santa Cruz. We still had our return tickets to America but, if we used them for our visa jump, it was extremely doubtful that we’d be able to afford new round-trip tickets to return to India to complete the second half of the University. Acyually using our return tickets to the States for one of our required visa jumps would have been a good idea because our return ticket expires after one year and that year is up a month before the university year ends. Needless to say, the final month of the university would be very important due to exams, Guru Purnima, and Swami’s conclusion to our training. We checked to see if we could pay more to extend the ticket but the airline said it wasn’t possible. Plus, even if we used it, we had no way to get back to India. What to do?

If we didn’t make a visa jump to somewhere nearby and inexpensive, we’d have to drop out of the University and not complete our training. We had absolutely no idea how we were going to solve this problem, so we placed it at the feet of the Divine and prayed. If we were meant to complete our year of training in soul healing then somehow a solution would be provided.

When the visa break began, our friends began to leave. Day by day, the ashram became quieter. After about a week, almost all the students had left, leaving only a few of us along with the Indian staff. The apartment building we live in seemed vacant. We enjoyed the silence and spent our days reading spiritual books that we’d been too busy to read during the routine of daily classes.



As the days passed, Tara and I wondered how we were going to be able to somehow make our visa jumps to the nearest and cheapest country to travel to. We kept checking airfares and decided that Thailand was our best bet. Hong Kong was out of the question. It was too far away and too expensive. Singapore, where most of our friends went, was also too expensive. One of the advantages of Singapore is excellent shopping, which is very attractive when you’ve been living in a remote rural Indian village, but we had no money for shopping and hotels in Singapore are more expensive. Thailand, on the other hand, was the cheapest to fly to and hotels there were much cheaper.

We knew, regardless of how it happened, that we had to make a visa jump so we made reservations for the very end of the visa jump period, hoping that we’d somehow be able to pay for the tickets when the deadline came. We kept checking our PayPal balance, hoping that some new donations had come in. Nothing arrived. As the days clicked by, it looked more and more doubtful that it was going to come together. We prepared for the worst by telling ourselves that if we had to drop out of the University, at least we’d been blessed to have six beautiful months learning profound spiritual knowledge that we’d carry with us forever. We tried not to think about what we’d miss if we had to leave without completing the University.

Tara and I had been in similar situations before. During the years we traveled with our Tibetan master, Dzogchen Khenpo Choga Rinpoche, we were frequently faced with apparently insurmountable obstacles. Serving as Khenpo Choga’s attendants and traveling with practically no money, while setting up hundreds of teaching events, was one of the most rewarding periods of our lives. The greatest gift that we received from this experience was that of gaining unshakable trust.

When you can’t eat because you only have enough money to buy gas to drive to the next town and you aren’t even sure about that, you can only rely on one thing. Trust.

Christ said,

“Take no heed for the body,
what ye shall eat,
what ye shall wear.
Bread, the men of the world seek after;
Seek ye the Kingdom of God,
And all these things will be added unto you.”

Throughout the years, Tara and I had discovered over and over again that when we were faced with a huge challenge, where no solution seemed possible, if we remained calm and trusted in the Divine, somehow what we needed was always provided. Khenpo Choga had told us that once you devote yourself to serving Buddha you will never go hungry. In all the time we served Khenpo Choga, we always had at least one meal a day. Now Tara and I saw our window of opportunity to make a visa jump slipping away. The day came when we had to pay for our tickets and we couldn’t pay for them so we lost those reservations. The prospects for making our visa jump and finishing the school year was looking pretty dismal. We began to think of packing up our belongings and making arrangements to return to the States.

It was a poignant time. We were the last students left at the ashram. We realized how much we would miss the ashram that we’d grown to love so much. We’d miss the beautiful mountain, where in ancient times thousands of rishis meditated in secret caves, the gardens full of blooming tropical flowers and the Shirdi Sai Baba and Jesus temples. Most of all, we’d miss the new friends from around the world with whom we had been blessed to learn divine knowledge from a living saint. We thought of all these things, stayed calm and held firm in our trust in the Divine.

Just as we reached the final deadline for buying our tickets, our dear friends in New York who had purchased our round-trip tickets to India, emailed to say that they had deposited $600 in our PayPal account, just the amount we needed for two tickets to Bangkok. Tara jumped for joy. We thanked God not only for the solution but also for the challenge. We’ve found that times like this test our faith and that repeated tests over time build up our trust to the point where it is unshakable. We also thanked God for true friends who are there when you most need them. These friends who paid not only for our round-trip to tickets to India but also now for our tickets to Thailand are people who during my years of teaching Transcendental Meditation were my dearest, closest friends. They were my spiritual brother and sister and I’m the godfather of their son. It has been 23 years since I left the TM organization and a lot has happened since then. Life has changed in many ways and far too long has passed since I last saw these dear friends but the love that binds us on the deepest level hasn’t changed. In addition, to this validation of the eternal nature of love and true friendship, I received a donation of $200 for our visa jump from my 11th grade English teacher who I hadn’t seen or talked to in 40 years. That was another lesson to never doubt the power of love.

When Sri Kaleshwar came to California and performed a fire puja on a mountaintop in Malibu shortly before we came to India, he said that he’d noticed in his travels that few westerners have many really good friends. Tara and I know without a shadow of a doubt that we are in India only because of our friends and the blessings of the Divine. We thank God for their friendship and pray that we can fully utilize this wonderful opportunity to become pure channels of divine love in order to heal souls and help to alleviate suffering in the world. What we’re learning in India is that all healing is accomplished through love. God is love. We do not do the healing. Our job is to purify our self so that God’s love can flow through us. God’s grace is always available. We only need to open our hearts to receive it.