Folco Terzani, "A piedi nudi sulla terra"

“Values depend on the point of view. For example, for the mass media, for the public, a sahdu is ruined, he is a poor fellow because he renounces attachments, houses, things. Whereas a sahdu, a fakir, thinks that those who remain in samsara are ruined. They are the ones who give up knowledge, the dimension of greatness that can be god, to get lost in material histories in illusion”.

When it comes to quests, searches, one immediately thinks of the Holy Grail and Frodo who must destroy the ring of evil, but there is also another type of search, the inner one, of the man who lives in a perpetual call to transcendence.

Folco Terzani, son of Titian, in “Barefoot on the earth”, tells us of the restlessness that led him to meet, in his pilgrimages, a man devoted to this kind of research, the sahdu Baba Cesare. Terziani meets Baba Cesare in India, the chosen place of spiritual research. For Hindus, transcendence is, indeed, immanence, since all is god and to know god is to realize his being all things. Curiously, however, Baba Cesare is not Indian but Italian, the son of an accountant. He has abandoned his wife, a series of more or less loved companions, and some never forgotten children. His path is typical of the sahdu, from worldly life to ascetic life, from family to renunciation. Renunciation that it is the equivalent of research.

“If you are in renunciation, you renounce all social values, you put everything on the same level: gold, diamonds, a stone, a horse, a leaf, everything is part of the planet’s composition, isn’t it? Of which we too are a part. We are all specks that make up the planet. It’s not a theory, it’s just like that. We must be aware of who we really are. As soon as you don’t give social values to things, you realize that everything is the creation of the creator.”

Only through the renunciation of any material goods — even hair if it becomes an object of curiosity and symbol of status — as well as any emotional attachment, can the ascetic refine his inner search, to understand God, to grasp his concept, to thanks him for having created us, above all to serve him. As soon as he wakes up, the sahdu greets the sun and recognizes god, makes him the puja, the ritual offering, the ceremony. By anointing Shiva’s lingam with ghee, offering him a jasmine necklace, keeping the dhuni, the sacred fire, lit with sterile and blessed ash, he gives substance to god, materializes him in the stone, in the idol, in the object.

Not counting the charlatans, there are all kinds of ascetics in India, from the aghori who live in crematoria, drink urine from skulls and taste human flesh, to the fakirs, the Muslim sahdus, to those who always go naked, to those who use the phallus as an instrument, to those who always keep one arm raised until it atrophies, to those who sleep standing up. More generally, a sahdu is a barefoot man, who lives on simplicity, on the only things he really possesses, his body and his mind, and is ready to give up even those. The body must be mortified in its needs and so is the heart, if you really want to find union with God.

“Mortification of the flesh is liberation from the ego. You mortify this ego, you carry it in the rain or you don’t care about yourself and what can happen to you, because you are part of the whole. So you have a broader idea, which comes from losing your identity, from going beyond the attachments of the ego. Because what is the ego? The ego is what gives you fears, isn’t it? “I’m afraid?”. If you are not there, what are you afraid of? You are a zombie, and a zombie is afraid of nothing. He is not afraid of being destroyed, of no longer being “I”, of disappearing, that is, of dying. “Let me die!” The point is the liberation of the self, in the name of god. And if you succeed and are no longer there as a separate entity, then you are beyond life and death. You are the All, and the All is neither born nor dies.”

Baba Cesare is a saint, but of special Indian holiness; he is not for the western world. Baba Cesare goes in and out of jail, he comes from the post beat generation, freak, psychedelic culture. He is one of the hippies who left home and family in the 1970s and set off overland, without a passport, to India, convinced that they were part of a movement whose essence was peace and love. Once they reached their destination, they wandered around the ashrams, inevitably ending up crowding the beaches of Goa, in what today we would call rave parties, parties where people danced, practiced free love, smoked chillum, took acid and more or less hard drugs.

“Try this, try the other, try peyote, mescaline, weed, mushrooms, scorpion venom and learn about nature, about what grows on the planet, right? Eating doesn’t just mean feeding the physical part, it also means feeding the mind with knowledge. […] It is from beginning of the planet that humanity discovered plants, what was nourishment, what was medicine, what gave a particular effect.”

Even in this there are those who stop high and those who go further, continuing the research, using drugs as an experience to overcome sensory boundaries, to expand them, to feel part of nature, in communion with the universe and with God. From the meeting with Baba Cesare and with many other sahdu, Folco Terzani draws an unprecedented teaching of life, an experience that only India and its spirituality can offer.

“I rediscovered the beauty of the elements — water, earth, fire, air. I felt happy walking the earth, bathing in the cold rivers of the Himalayas, crouching by the flames of a fire, breathing space.”