The years from 1985 to 1988 were spent in a partial belief of the existence of God, and I ventured to adopt a few practices that would strengthen a spiritual experience. But nothing at all happened and my doubts again became stronger. It was in 1988 that I befriended a liberal atheist, who though born a Christian, was not a practicing Christian. Being of an amicable type and of a somewhat generous nature, he had undertaken to encourage some people who badly needed his moral support. He had even taken a little bit of their financial burden upon himself and aided them monetarily. This friend was a bulwark to me over a period of many years in times of my most intense crises, and seeing him to be quite an honorable person despite being an atheist, and since my own inclinations were that way too, I was quite sceptical of the existence of the so-called supernatural phenomena and of God. By and large I fully trusted the methods of science which bases its nourishment on rationalism and empiricism, although by that time I had an incipient doubt that our senses cannot be totally trusted. I had experienced certain states that the doctors to whom I ventured to relate had labelled hallucinatory. So I was not too sure about the one hundred percent reliability of my own senses of perception.
It was largely in this state of unbelief that I spent the years from 1988 to 1998. In 1999 I again had a set of experiences that could be called strange, and from then on till about 2003, I was in a vascillating state of mind. All the while after my marriage in 1996, my wife had remained an ardent devotee of Shirdi Sai Baba (a Saint of India who seemed to have encouraged all religions), and true to my form, I used to make fun of her beliefs. Nor was I a believer in astrology nor in any of the ritualistic practices of my religion. However from around 2001, I started reading the biography of Shirdi Sai Baba. The first reading left me rather unimpressed, but I gradually found a need in me to bow down to his image that was there in the room which was placed there by my wife.
In the year 2003, my sister-in-law happened to visit an astrologer in Bangalore who reputedly gave her quite an accurate reading of her circumstances. By that time, my curiosities in the occult had been sufficiently aroused to prompt me enough to test him out. So I made my wife consult him with her birth charts only to assess for my own curiosity how much these people could divine out of a person's birth chart.
I was quite surprised that the astrologer just by seeing her birth chart told that she was married to a man who was the only son to his parents (true) and whose other sibling was a sister (true). He also told my wife that my sister lived far away in another country (true) and that she had a daughter and a son (true). He further told her the nature and the temperment of my father quite accurately. He further told her that we were living on a premises that we owned and not rented (true). He also told her that she had no children (true). With him predicting so many thing so accurately without ever having met her before, I was quite impressed.
With experiences like these I found my faith in the occult becoming stronger and stronger.
(To be continued ...)
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