On The Road To Heaven's Door: An Encounter with the Ultimate Reality

In the mid-1970s, during the hippie counterculture revolution, the author embarks on a spiritual journey from Istanbul to India along the hippie trail, and then from India to Southeast Asia and the Far East. While in South India, he is initiated into Hatha Yoga by the late Swami Gitananda, which changes his life forever. Shortly afterwards, he begins to experience supernatural powers—known as Siddhis in yoga—with premonitory dreams, past-life experiences, visions of goddesses, and out-of-body experiences in supra mundane worlds. Traveling back and forth between India and the West, he deepens his yoga practice through advanced lessons with Swami Vishnudevananda at Sivananda Ashram in the Laurentians, north of Montreal, and, later on, with an Indian yogi named Ambu, from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, India who becomes his guide in interpreting his extraordinary experiences. After more than 20 years of unrelenting practice, in 1997, the author has a profound and mystical experience of Nirvikalpa Samadhi—an experience of the Eternal Self—which is recounted in vivid detail. This is a true story of self-realization.