Ecstasy

‘The body will go but remember, the soul will eternally cry delight.’ Dying, Gopal, or Ram Das Baba to his devotees, leaves his disciple and closest companion with the essence of his spiritual knowledge. It is the ultimate truth that a lifetime of seeking has revealed to him, made him a Paramahamsa, the most highly evolved of all sadhus. Ecstasy is a story about the making of a mystic and his astonishing experiences on the spiritual path in an age that dismisses divine visions as hallucinations, and the desire for a union with God as a symptom of mental illness. It is also the story of the rare relationship between two very different men brought together by a fateful meeting. The older man, steeped in the mystical mood of complete surrender and devotion, becomes the unlikely guru of the younger, who has grown up on a diet of Western rationalism and the belief that man is the master of his own fate. The guru opens for his disciple a window to the soul, and in the process triggers a difficult private battle—between reason and emotion, faith and logic; the spirit of submission that is the hallmark of bhakti and the militancy of religious pride. Sudhir Kakar, the best-selling author of The Ascetic of Desire, a novel about sex and sexuality, has written a richly layered and revelatory book about the other great theme of humankind: religion.