You may recall from my last posting that after leaving my deeply fulfilling career as PA to the CEO of IOU Solutions, I maxed my credit card and headed off to India... to see if I could find out if I could find out what was missing from my life.

India was a place of eternal mystery, and not just obvious mysteries like who bombed Bombay and who cut Calcutta. Why there are so many people in India was a mystery too, until I realised it is because there are so many parents there.

To get away from the crowds I journeyed aboard a Krishna Blue flight to the Himalayas. I found them exceedingly high, and the snow surprisingly cold. But my life was saved when I entered the ashram of a great holy man called Kea.

Kea had come to India from a faraway place called Akron, and had been a holy man for many blue moons. I later learned that Akron is in the United States, so it seems that holy men can come from anywhere. Kea had studied philosophy at university, although he did not proceed to graduation.

Instead he moved to India, where his growing reputation as a spiritual teacher attracted devotees from Europe, the United States and Canada and many other places, to live in his ashram. He personally gave them their own devotee names, such as Flookey, Krappar and Dregge. My own given name was Blandie. I later realised our names were taken from a Danish online dating site. My master is renowned for his playful sense of humour, most often manifested in his high-pitched signature giggle.

One thing that appeared to attract many of the devotees was that Kea preached that sex was a very good thing. He himself permitted selected devotees to join him nightly in his suite, but being a woman I was not to be chosen.

This did not mean that we could not all sit listening at his feet in his gilded hall. I learned that darshan is when a guru talks for several hours and Americans sit and listen. I always enjoyed it, even if the floor was cold marble and gave me piles, which was ironic as somehow I had already contracted dysentery from the ashram’s organic vegetarian bistro. It was also a bit difficult that Kea never permitted any windows to be opened, saying he wanted to keep the pollution of the world out, and he had flatulent episodes quite a bit, especially after a big lentil lunch.

The key to Kea’s teaching was what he called “the inner shelf”. At first I thought he just had some sort of mild speech impediment, and meant “inner self”, which is the kind of thing most gurus tend to go on about. But in his case, he really did mean the inner shelf. It took me a long time to comprehend this mystery, but then what could you expect from a novice?