Mary W. - Los Angeles, CA, USA

For a number of years, I worked as a tutor for the Rawat children, particularly in the area of math. One day, I was working with the youngest son on formulas. The boy was a picture of someone whose politeness was at war with a strong desire to be almost anywhere else. I had seen this as a challenge and had brought out my best tricks to bring the relationship of rate, time, and distance alive. I thought it was just beginning to work when Maharaji came into the room to greet his son and asked what he was working on. The boy’s grimace as he pointed to “r x t = d” effectively shattered my illusions of success, but I was totally unprepared for the father’s response: “Well, that isn’t true.” What followed was a lively and humorous presentation of how the relationship of time and distance changed in space. One glance at my young student’s dancing eyes let me know that I was witnessing an uncommon art—one bored young boy felt the glee of his father’s support and the fascination with a story that was rich with questioning long held precepts and with venturing into the unknown. It seemed that he might even be following the lesson in Einstein’s physics better than I, though I am sure I was equally interested. Five minutes later, the dreaded moment arrived when I would have to go back to the now disgraced formula that still needed to be dutifully applied to the next six exercises. But before I could decide an approach to take, I noticed that one previously reluctant youngster was effortlessly plowing through his homework. He was the master of his rearranged world, resistance on recess. What a distance had been traveled in that ten minutes!

— Mary W.
Los Angeles, CA, USA