PROBABILITIES

He acknowledged his spiritual family daily, the kindred spirits he called them, “both here in the world of form, and over there in the afterlife, in other dimensions, on other planes.”  He included the latter because his spiritual family had passed away long ago, most of them.  Two of them were especially helpful to him, not only for their own knowledge, but because they introduced him to so many other spiritual teachers and their knowledge, D.T. Suzuki, J. Krishnamurti, Swami Prabhavananda, and Ram Dass, to name just a few. 

It was a mystery how he came to meet the two, coming out of nowhere as they seemed to do.  The first one he encountered while high on a ladder painting a house.  As he often did while doing physical labor, he was listening to a local educational radio station.  All of a sudden who should come on but philosopher Alan Watts, delivering one of his “talks” on Buddhism. 

He met the other gentleman when a lady living in the apartment downstairs from him stopped him in the hall and offered to lend him a novel she had just read.  She knew he was a would-be novelist, and thought he would enjoy the one she had.  As it happened, the novel was by Christopher Isherwood, who, as it turned out, was a devotee of Vedanta.

There was one question that remained, however.  How did this happen, these two meetings?  There were those who would say that it was blind luck, and others who would hold that it was God’s grace, and still others who would say that he himself brought them to him; he was the one who attracted them.  It was all three, he had to conclude, to say nothing of the probabilities beyond them.