The room I do my practice in is built in a certain way. They created a crossroad inside the cremation area, and the center of the crossroad is in the center of this room. And that makes it mystically very powerful.

In India it is believed that in the crossroad many-many powerful forces live, Shakti is there.

Crossroad inside the cremation area is unheard of. We have it here. So the room seems very different. And I’ve been doing my practice for more than fifteen years now in that room.

Nobody exactly knows why this house was built inside the cremation area. I think it was deliberately made by kings. And I’d like to say that they built this house for me only because nobody lived in it before. One king tried – the last king – but he got seriously ill and had to leave the place.

That’s why we were able to purchase this property cheaply. I think it was a good decision – or maybe it was destined. I am feeling happy here. To find a better place than this in my opinion was not possible for me or to anyone. We got the place so big that I don’t feel like going out. If I was living in a smaller place without garden then I had to go out even to take a walk. Now I don’t have to go anywhere for anything. It looks like destiny to me.

There are one hundred and eight doors in this house. Usually doors are an expensive affair so they are trying to make minimum doors in India. But that house was built by a king so he could afford it. But I think they must be having a certain idea to build this – because this was the center of the cremation area, also in the center of parikrama. Maybe there is a mystery about it.

And the house is twenty-one meter by twenty-one meter. That is also a mystical number. Eighty-four meters. They say that eighty-four thousand births you have to go through before attaining liberation of becoming a human being. So this number – eighty-four – also represents that.

I had some big photos of Lahiri Mahasaya in the inside room and in this one also, and always something happened. The glass broke or it fell down. I tried it more than ten-fifteen times but every time something happened with it. Then I stopped doing it. You will not see any photograph of Lahiri Mahasaya in here – even though I have a great respect for him. Maybe because it is smashan and his photo cannot survive here. In smashan different energy is at work. Not everybody can live in smashan, not every photo can hang on the wall there.