Ramana	Sunyata	Papaji	Bharadwaj	Faqir Baba	Manav Dayal
Nirmala Pandit	Pandit Dayal	Bassi Gulam	Stationmaster	Bhargat Singh	Lakbir Singh
Sita	Shabdanand	Lal Chand	Lahori Pandiji	Ramesh Giri	Asha Thakur

Capt. Lal Chand - The unaware aware Saint
 

Meditation is a state of heightened awareness - a conscious alertness. At times, this awareness can transcend the physical body, leading one to realize: "I am not this body." In such moments, one might even forget the existence of their bodily form. When consciousness merges entirely with itself, "you" might lose awareness of time and space, yet your body continues to function and play its part in the theater of ordinary life.

This was notably the case for Captain Lal Chand during World War II, while he served in the British army. In 1995, I lived for about a year in North India in an Ashram far from the new-age spiritual highways. For the next six years, I returned periodically to this place. Here, I had the opportunity to spend extended periods with people who had each uniquely dedicated their lives to meditation. One of them was Captain Lal Chand, who had fought in World War II on the side of the English while exclusively focusing in meditation on the total liberation of consciousness. He fought valiantly against the Germans, earning a medal for bravery. However, he confesses that he has no recollection of these events. This period of his life was recounted to him by others. His memory is instead filled with experiences of profound bliss in deep meditation. While his body was engaged in battle, his soul seemingly transcended, soaring beyond time and space. It was only later that his Surat, the ultimate soul, re-entered his body, re-connecting him with the temporal and spatial world.

In the conversations I had with him, he claimed that during that period, his consciousness had been so detached from his body that he had no idea what it had been doing during the war. When, after a couple of years, he allowed his consciousness to descend back into his body and the world of the senses, he found himself awarded an English medal for bravery for his war efforts. For nearly three years, he had, like a sleepwalker, been in a state of pure, sleeping awareness on autopilot, while his consciousness was only aware of consciousness itself, like two mirrors reflecting nothing but each other.

Lal Chand's extreme life serves to illustrate just how far consciousness can indeed distance itself from the body. However, Lal Chand, here in Punjab, far from the beaten path, was not an isolated case.

One remarkable thing was that these spiritual elders I met here in Hoshiarpur in 1995—despite the fact that they had, to varying degrees, pulled their consciousness 'up' and out of their bodies—looked astonishingly happy and healthy, just like Lal Chand. Their reflexes were as sharp as those of young people. They were surprising, witty, and full of fluid intelligence.
 
I have truly never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world.

Captain Lal Chand, like many other illustrious souls featured on this site, was a devotee of Baba Faqir. Initially, he established his own small ashram in the deserts of Rajasthan. Later, he moved to Chandigarh, where he ultimately left his body at the age of over 100 in 2019. I captured these photos in 1995. What these images fail to convey is his frequent practice of meditating motionlessly, like a piece of wood, for several hours at a time.