When Vivek attended the Oneness University (nearby Chennai), little did he know that many unforseen events would occur years into the future, from his visit to the humble university abode, much of what was still under construction. Our photograph here is Oxford University, circa 1900. In a story that truly comes from the Mists of Maya, Vivek is having lunch in South Africa, years later, in the Magaliesburg Mountains, that a girl, highly psychic and daughter of an Indigo lady, would recognise him from a past life he had lived as a professor at Oxford University! Viv takes up the story:
Just before I left South Africa early in 2003, I received a call from an Indonesian-origin friend called Roy Littlesun. Roy was on his second visit to South Africa to pray for the land and its peoples. He had spent many years with the Hopi Indian tribe in the Southern United States and was given honorary Hopi status, hence his name.
He invited me and a friend, Ingrid Groen, to spend a day with him in the Magaliesburg Mountains, where he was staying on a farm owned by an Afrikaner family called the Cronjes. The Cronjes had converted their old farm into a sanctuary for black people and their families suffering from AIDS.
They invited victims of the disease to build their neat iron and wood homes in a corner of the farm demarcated into plots and a network of roads. Each family housed there was given a plot on which they were taught to grow fruit and vegetables organically. The Cronjes had converted the nearby farm sheds and barns into clinics and a hospice for terminally ill AIDS sufferers.
To sanctify that land and everybody on it, Roy Littlesun had dug a huge pit on a hillock overlooking the farm in which he created a North American Indian medicine wheel with a perpetually-burning log fire. He took Ingrid and me to see the fire that was continually fed with logs from dead acacia trees on the property. He asked us to join him in a prayer that ended with the three of us and one of the five Cronje girls who had come up to call us taking puffs from Roy’s ceremonial peace pipe filled with rare herbs from the Black Hills of South Dakota.
After the ceremony, the four of us went to join the Cronje family for lunch in a beautiful, old peach orchard. There was a weather-beaten, long deal table in the shade of the peach trees and the Cronjes were seated and waiting for us. As we walked up to the table around which the father, his wife and four other daughters sat, Moira, his wife, greeted me first.
“Good to see you again, Viv”, she said.
I did not recognise her but thought we might have met somewhere previously, so I asked.
“Yes”, she replied. “We’ve met before but not in this lifetime. I knew you in an English incarnation.”
Seeing the puzzled look on my face, she explained that she was an “Indigo” person as were her four daughters. Indigo people are reputed to be extraordinarily psychic. Clairvoyance and mental telepathy came naturally to mother and all four daughters.
Lunch consisted of hot home-baked bread, butter, cheese, Karroo olives, pickled onions and wine. While Gerhard, the father, broke the bread and his girls passed platters of bread and cheese around, I noticed that one of the girls was in deep conversation with her mother Moira. Both kept glancing at me.
Then Moira said, “Viv, my daughter wants to tell you something. Would you mind if she tells you in front of everybody here?”
I had never seen the pretty girl before and so I said she could go right ahead.
“I know you well from another life in England in the previous century, Sir”, she said. “You were my history professor at Oxford University until 1917, when you were called away to the Great War because they were running short of officers.
“You died on a battlefield while saving the life of your batman not long afterwards. You were given a major bravery award and your picture was in all the papers. We held a memorial ceremony for you at our College.”
I was more bemused than intrigued. There was no way of checking if what she said was true or just a young girl’s rampant imagination. Gerhard said grace and we turned to our food, but Moira said that her daughter was not finished.
She went on to say that I would be leaving South Africa within days for a holy place in the east. I would stay there for many years to meditate and research, she said. Then, towards the end of this life, I would write a major work that would cause much controversy. I asked what the work would be about.
“I see you constantly writing in a room filled with shelves of books. Eventually you would write the real history of mankind and everything that has been taught up to the publishing of your book would be called to question.
“I see a great storm of protest as well as praise. In the end you would be vindicated, for new research would start and the re-writing of ancient history and pre-history would begin along the lines of your findings. You’ll be dead by then, but you would have set the ball rolling.”
Except for Ingrid Groen, who had accompanied me to Magaliesburg to inspect the hospice, nobody else knew that I was leaving in days for India. Up to that minute, Ingrid had been with me and had not spoken to anybody except to greet Roy and the girl who came to call us to lunch.
Although the pre-history of mankind and this planet earth has always been my abiding interest, in the great silence and solitude in which I found myself in rural India I soon forgot about the Indigo girl’s prediction. Too many other things clamoured for attention at the time. I was to recall the incident only three years later, in late 2005, when I was regressed to a previous English life by the talented Pietermaritzburg clairvoyant, Shireen Singh, at the Oneness University near Varadapaliyam on the Andhra Pradesh coast on the Bay of Bengal. The regression confirmed the Indigo girl’s story about my having been her history professor in an earlier lifetime.
Road to the Magaliesburg Mountains
FULL PETROL TANK
When I drove out of the farm with Ingrid in the front passenger seat later that afternoon, the fuel gauge on the dashboard indicated that there was very little petrol left after the long drive from Sandton. It was my habit to keep the petrol tank always full and so I topped up each evening before going home. On the previous day I had been so busy attending to last-minute details that I had forgotten to top up.
Struggling to find Ingrid’s address in the morning, I had forgotten all about filling up the fuel tank. Now, on our way back to Johannesburg, the needle was almost touching the reserve mark. It would be even less by the time we reached the first petrol station some thirty kilometres on the road back to Sandton. After that I kept glancing at the gauge, worried that we would run out of fuel before we reached the filling station. I decided to top up the tank when we got there, for I still had to take Ingrid home before going to my own townhouse in Centurion.
I was also concerned about money, for I had bought a large amount US dollars from my bank two days previously and had very little South African currency left for the two days I still had to stay in the country before departing for India. This called for careful spending between then and my departure. I was not keen to leave the country with a bank overdraft.
When we arrived at the petrol station, I gave the attendant my keys and asked him to fill up my fuel tank. He came back after a few minutes to say that the tank was already full. I insisted that he was making a mistake, for I had been watching the fuel gauge like a hawk since we left the farm. It had been on the red reserve mark for the past few kilometres. The attendant insisted that the tank was filled to the brim.
“The petrol is even spilling out of the cap and onto the side of your car”, he said.
I got out to see for myself after telling Ingrid that it was impossible for the tank to be full. Not only had it been on the red reserve mark, I knew that I had forgotten to top up the previous day and was too rushed that morning to pick up Ingrid to think of filling up. Ingrid also got out of the car and we both went to the side that has the petrol filler cap. We could see that fuel had spilled out of the tank onto the side of the car. I popped the cover open and unlocked the cap. The level was right up to the top. Ingrid and I were perplexed. We had both watched the petrol gauge after we left the farm. Not knowing how far we had to go to the petrol station, we had been anxious until it came into view.
Giving the attendant a tip for cleaning the windscreen, I started the car and we continued on our journey. We could speak of nothing else but the miraculously filled fuel tank. The previous day, I had been on the point of calling Roy to decline his invitation because of my imminent departure for India. Then Ingrid had called me, for Roy had told her that I was also coming and she asked if I could give her a lift. It was important for her to go because she had promised to publicise the AIDS settlement among her contacts in medical circles in Johannesburg. It was expected that I would write about the Cronje’s farm even after I had left for India, so our day trip to Magaliesburg had been a charitable mission for both of us. I had to take a circuitous route to pick up Ingrid and quite forgot to look at my fuel gauge.
On the drive back to Sandton, I recounted a story well known among Sai devotees in Natal of the Pietermaritzburg devotee who used his private motor vehicle as a taxi to ferry aged people to a local Sai centre for Thursday bhajan meetings at his own expense. That was a time of petrol rationing in the country and motorists were only allowed a strictly limited monthly ration. The Good Samaritan often had to rely on “donations” of petrol syphoned from well-wishers cars to do his voluntary rounds. One Thursday, he had to make a particularly long trip to a distant suburb when his fuel gauge was already on the red mark. The old folk he was helping simply had to go home, so he pressed on with a prayer on his lips.
siphoning petrol during rationing
The old couple planned to ask a neighbour for a donation of fuel, which they did when they arrived at their destination. Armed with a jerry can of petrol the neighbours had syphoned from their vehicle, the Good Samaritan opened the petrol filler cap of his car. He was astounded to find that it had been mysteriously filled to the brim and was actually spilling over, exactly as mine had done.
Both Ingrid and I were almost moved to tears when we realised that the Avatar of Kali Yuga had been our invisible companion on our charitable mission to Magaliesburg. Once again, it was tangible proof of His omniscience as well as omnipotence.
Sai Baba with car
I did not know it then, but that esoteric presence and constant Divine help was to become an integral part of my life in the years to come.
Om Nama Shivaya,
Om Sai Ram
VivekAnanda Naicker
Walkerville, Gauteng,
Republic of South Africa