The Close Escape – All His Grace

This incidence happened a few months before the Art of Living Foundation’s Silver Jubilee
Celebrations and here is the recap…

Looking back at the last few days in my life, I wonder if I’m still alive or this is just a dream I am still
sailing through. One fine weekday morning I had peacefully felt asleep in my car returning from an

overnight trip to Bawa’s place, expecting to be working quietly in the office within a couple of hours.
And imagine my confusion when I woke up to find myself boarding a brain scan table in an operation
theatre of a hospital! It took me some time to believe what had happened. We had come out alive
from a high-speed expressway crash in which our car had run bang into a toll plaza with speeds
nothing less than 100, kissing a Scorpio(car) stationary in the toll lane which in turn had transferred
the impact into the Accord standing in front of it. More stunning was the fact that I had jumped from
the back seat onto the front wind shield breaking it apart, rebounding heavily on top of the front seat
occupants with a slam. No wonder the cop who came to meet us in the hospital first checked if I could
correctly read the number of fingers he’d raised to check if I was still sane in my brain!

But a scene of a car pulling into a toll plaza full-speed and then suddenly dropping from 100+ to 0
seemed a bit difficult for me to image and I let go of that effort ever since. If someone inside the toll
plaza had got to witness our crash, I would consider the chap real lucky, not for watching such a
spectacular crash, but for being alive and not hit by us! But the miracle of the whole stunt was that all
throughout this feat I never felt a pinch of pain or trauma. No, no, I’m not claiming that am a superman
or a yoga master with a slick body to withstand all this pain & shock ,it’s just that I was sleeping all the
way through until I had comfortably landed in my hospital bed. I don’t know if it was because of the
heavy dose of painkiller injections which they had administered on me.I never experienced any pain
till leaving the hospital. And after the healing touch by Bawa the next day, I always felt as perfect as a
healthy athlete and as peaceful and happy as a saint even after coming home and getting off the pain
killers.

Time for some thought pondering ….

My mom used to scold me over my late morning sleeping habits everyday but this is what I got to hear
from Bawa when he visited us in the hospital,“Hey Sandy, how come you kept sleeping when you got
to experience such a crash once in your life time?” This made me feel proud of my sleeping first time
in my life;-) Then Bawa asked me which girl I was flirting with when I got hit in my eye so badly and
now it’s become a common question in office too as I refuse to repeat the same old story every time a
friend passes by and checks out the special effects which have sprung up in my left eye. When Bawa
was seeing us off, I jumped out of my bed to accompany him till the door and he shot back forcing me
to lie down in the bed joking that I had to ensure I used the bed good enough for all the money that I’d
paid for it. And then he gave me the healing touch on my forehead and I don’t know for how many
hours I slept happily and peacefully there after!

And I’m so dumb that it took me a couple of days and many friends’ remarks to realize that it was He
who had saved me from this ‘impossible-to-escape-alive’ kind of accident. I can bet that after taking a
look at the torn down car, no one would dare to say that the persons inside might have walked out of
this wreck alive, that too on their own feet. The definition of “Divine grace” as found on wikipedia says
“it is believed by Christians to be the sovereign favour of God exercised in the bestowment of
blessings upon those who have no merit in them.” I don’t know what’s in my account of merit but now
I have 100% faith that it was grace and only grace that saved me. Till the date I was not quite
comfortable with the matters of faith probably as a side effect of reading too many sci-fi books on
U.F.O.s and extraterrestrial life outside planet in my school days, but after getting this new lease of
life, a new-born beam of faith has landed into my heart. In one of Guruji’s talk, he says that a Guru’s
love for his devotee is hundred times more than a mother’s love for her child. Whenever I used to
listen to this, I never used to understand its meaning. I just used to wave off my ignorance thinking
that I don’t have the level to understand such hi-fi knowledge. And after hitting the car windshield with
head and living to tell the tale despite breaking it, I think my brains have got a bit wiser now. I have
experienced what a Guru’s love for His devotee is in this whole drama of car-crashing. I completely
owe this new birth of mine to the grace of my Master H. H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji. My faith in God n
my Master has multiplied manifold after this incidence.

I remember just a week before this expressway stunt happened, I was talking in a YES!+ introductory
seminar that we had arranged in a girls hostel of a medical college. As all the girls watched in rapt
attention, I was boldly announcing to them that after attending the YES!+ course, I was ready to take
on any challenge in the world with full confidence. Very little did I know at that time that how true my
sentence was.It is amazing to see how Guru gives strength to his devotee’s words. A day after
completing the first YES!+ course, I lost my wallet while freaking out in a theatre with the new YES!+
friends and the teacher. Then a month back I had lost my mobile while on a late night intro talk spree
on a college campus. And now I had to witness the loss my best girl friend,my little metal silver Alto! I
used to love her eternally for her sheer power and reliability and for the unlimited freedom she offered
me every time I rested in it. Besides she was blessed with the touch of feet by some of the most holy
people walking on planet right now,Rishi Nityapragyaji, my role model on the path Dineshji and the
one and only impeccable Bawa.

After all these losses I have come to understand that such material loss is nothing as compared to the
importance of love that we share in our life with the people around us. Also I have learnt that during
all these potentially troublesome times I was deep rooted in service activities of AOL, that alone gave
me enough strength to fly through all these shocking losses like a cloud with an uninterrupted smile
on the face. It could be something as preliminary as spending a weekend evening setting up the YES!
+ course or even coordinating the development efforts of the silver jubilee web portal, but now I have
come to experience that doing service gives you enormous strength in addition to the unmatched
satisfaction which you get in doing it. And I found that every time the loss was handled smoothly by
Guruji without making me go through any kind of inconveniences or trauma. Man if you’ve read this
far and haven’t done the Art of Living course, I recommend you run and do it as soon as possible…
The grace which follows in life comes in handy while dealing with stunt like these

Jai Gurudev!.

Sandesh Sawant