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Life went on. I forgot all about Krishna. I am an ordinary conditioned soul. In the Summer of 1969 we moved even further Upstate in New York to a village named Whitehall. Before moving we went to a house nearby and a girl had the album Hair which had the chanting of Hare Krishna on it. I listened to it and she told me it was somehow about God. I wanted to listen more but we never went back to their house and I forgot about it after a while. Then George Harrison’s hit song “My Sweet Lord” came out and again someone told me the words in the background were about God. John Lennon had Krishna in his song and Ringo Starr too. One day I met some devotees in my home town. They had sikhas and were travelling in a car. They invited me to go with them and I wanted to but I was only around ten so I could not go.

I was sitting in class one day in sixth grade I believe listening to the teacher, bored, when all of a sudden I saw a face materialize in front of me, floating in the air as if in a cloud. A dark skin man was there and he asked me if I could see him. I said yes. I did not realize no one else in the class could. Some of the students were making noises when I started talking to him. He told me he was my guru. I asked him what a guru was and he said he was my eternal spiritual master. I asked him what that meant and he told me to ask the teacher, but he was coming to me in such a way because he wanted me to always know that he was my guru, in case there would be any doubt about it in the future, and this was before Gour Govinda Maharaja had even joined ISKCON. He told me to get a good look and his face and remember him. I also heard his accent. I don’t remember whether he called me Adikavi dasa or not?

After this happened he faded away. I looked around and the class room was all silent and looking at me. “Very funny” said one of the students. I explained to them what happened. The teacher said he was going to send me to the principal’s office to get me in trouble if I did not recant what I said had happened. I said it wasn’t my fault it was my guru’s. Then he asked me the guru’s name so he could get the guru in trouble. I laughed because I did not know the guru’s name and there was no way he could get the guru in trouble. He asked me how I could not know my own eternal spiritual master’s name and I told him it was because he did not tell me his name. He asked why I did not ask and I said, “You heard the conversation, I didn’t ask him!”. He decided not to send me to the principal’s office I think he called him first and so I remained in class, happy that I had a guru.

After my guru left the planet a similar thing happened. One day I was with my friend who was fixing a floor and my guru appeared again. I had a conversation with him, I don’t remember about what, and after he left my friend asked who I was speaking to. He knew me very well and had never seen me speaking to someone before that he could not see. When I told him it was my guru who had left the planet already he said, “You mean a ghost?!” and started yelling for me to get out of there. I said no, he is not a ghost, he is a spiritual master. Those are the only two times thus far I have experienced my guru appearing before me in that way.