A Disciple's Journal: In the Company of Swami Ashokananda Read online

  Buddha’s Birthday, June 18, 1950

  I have never seen the altar more beautiful, or Swami more beautiful. I was overwhelmed that I was alive, that this beauty existed, and that I was my particular self to see it just as I saw it. Buddha surely was there and because of that it was so extraordinary. I was seeing something of him.

  Later I spent the afternoon in the Temple, reading Swami Vivekananda and meditating. My mind is calming down now, and I feel like the fish swimming in blissful waters.

  June 19, 1950

  Swami explained to me at length why it is that one should meditate on God with form and how one can realize the Absolute through form. I cannot remember his exact words, but this is the way I understood it:

  All form is God. He is incarnated in everything. But it is because one associates some forms with ugliness or grossness that we cannot see Him there. It is our own minds that obstruct and distort the view. The thief is also God, but to meditate upon him would have disastrous results because of all the other associations we make.

  Meditation on a pure and subtle form, such as the Ishta [Chosen Ideal], is an approach to the Absolute; if one meditates on such a sublime form, one will be able to see through it to the Absolute as it really is.

  Then he said another reason for my meditating on the Ishta was that my emotions had to go somewhere. “You love your husband, you love your sisters, and so on, but you are like a flowing stream. They will say, ‘Stay here; we want you.’ And you will say, ‘Oh, you want me? Then I will stay.’ The stream will become a pool of stagnant water. You must keep flowing toward the ocean. It is because streams flow toward the ocean that they are fresh and good. I am telling you only because you would not understand and would get impatient. It isn’t really necessary to know.”

  ____

  The substance of my meditation was settled, but there was something called “initiation” in which one receives from the teacher a mantra—a word or group of words that one is supposed to repeat and which is an all-important step in spiritual life. Initiation is like taking a first sacred vow; it commits both guru and disciple, not with mere words but with a sort of ignition spark that jumps from the teacher and awakens, as though with a touch, something deep within the disciple. In return, the teacher takes a good deal of garbage from the disciple’s mind. The greater the power of the teacher, the more garbage passes over to him or to her.

  When I heard about this, it did not seem to me to be a fair exchange—an incomparable treasure for a heap of bad karma—but the giving of initiation is an act of grace, and grace has nothing to do with fairness or with justice, or, for that matter, with exchange.

  I had also heard that initiation constituted the “second birth”—that is, the birth of the soul into spiritual life. I did not know if I had been really initiated or not, and I did not like to ask. I thought that I had probably not been. I had gathered that the procedure involved a small ceremony before the altar in the auditorium. The disciple was forewarned, wore clean clothes, and offered flowers. There was a lot of excitement about it, as though a new era had begun in the disciple’s long—lifetimes long—spiritual evolution. Nothing like a ceremony had happened to me. Although I was practicing meditation, I was not initiated, not born yet, perhaps not yet spiritually worthy of birth.

  Then one day in August of 1950, when I was sitting in Swami’s office, he said: “Go and wash your hands and rinse your mouth.” When I returned, he gave me two mantras, and I knew that I had been initiated. Just like that.

  My journal the following year reveals another kind of spiritual instruction from Swami Ashokananda. While instruction in meditation and the giving of a mantra lie at the core of spiritual guidance, there is a lot more to spiritual life than meditation and the repetition of one’s mantra, or japa. Presumably, the rest will come of its own accord, fueled by the living treasure that one has received and that one keeps alive and aflame by practice. Slowly that flame will change one’s entire outlook on and reaction to the world. It will also change one’s features, the sound of one’s voice, the look in one’s eyes, and the way people respond to one’s presence in their lives.

  In India, where often the disciple never again sees the initiating teacher, the age-old traditions of the country support and guide him or her. The entire continent is geared to a spiritual life, and there is no one who does not sympathize with what a spiritual aspirant is trying to do. There is no strong current opposing a newborn seeker.

  In the West, on the other hand, a spiritual tradition does not permeate the air, the water, and the dust. It is not as natural to the people as breathing, or as expected as the next beat of a heart. The only place in the West where one can learn the ways of spiritual living and devote oneself to adapting to those ways is in the company of the holy—preferably, if one is so lucky, in the company of the teacher himself, or herself, who knows one’s quirks inside and out. The teacher takes the place of a millennia-old culture of spiritual thinking and living, of spiritual being.

  I had a great deal to learn, a great deal to change within myself. Aside from teaching me how to meditate, Swami Ashokananda taught me how to think and act and be. It was a secondary instruction, but it was no less important than the primary one. Fortunately, I never thought otherwise; and although I often resisted Swami Ashokananda’s guiding hand, I never for a moment regretted having come under it.

  Thus, my journal in 1951 tells largely of Swami’s “secondary” instruction, his day-to-day bolstering of my strengths and his squashing of my weaknesses—sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a wallop, but mostly just by his presence and example.

  January 14, 1951

  Swami: Do not be small. If there are torrents of rain, one must be ready with a large vessel. Open your heart; then when the Ishta comes you will be ready. Be big. Write every day. Dash off articles. Lazy bone!

  Me: I always think I will do that next week or tomorrow.

  Swami (smiling): Do it today. Why don’t you write stories? Write stories of incidents in the lives of Swamiji [as Swami Vivekananda is familiarly called] or Sri Ramakrishna. Make them come to life. Can you do that?

  Me (dubiously): Yes . . .

  January 28, 1951

  Swami: Everything is steeped in sweetness, as in syrup. It is everywhere permeating everything. You should all be sitting in front of Sri Ramakrishna—then you will get this, not sitting here [with him in the back office]. The veil of time hides Eternity.

  March 1951

  Swami came downstairs late in the evening, about ten. He looked tousled, as though he had been asleep. His hair stood up in a tuft in front. Kathleen, Jo, Mara, and I were in the back office. I was editing a lecture of his and asked him if a certain Sanskrit phrase meant “suddenly free.” This started a most wonderful talk about freedom, only a little of which I can remember. It was as though he had come down expressly to say these things to us and needed only an opening.

  At the end he said, “That is what all of you should be—suddenly free. But you don’t want it; you like your misery. All of you here have freedom. I can see that Sri Ramakrishna is carrying you, but you like to be miserable. You are like tadpoles in a pool wagging your tails. If God should suddenly take the rags of your personality from you, you would run after Him to grab them back. The least little thing that the ordinary worldly person would take in his stride, you make a terrible fuss over. None of you has any problems. God has made it easy for you. Someday you will look back and see there was all happiness here.”

  Swami was radiant during all this. There was much more that I have not remembered, but the general purport was that God is very close if we would but give Him a chance and not cling to our “rags of personality” or “wag our tails” like tadpoles that do not want to become frogs.

  Another time that spring he said, “Sri Ramakrishna is willing and anxious to push you all to the top, to give you the highest. I know this for certain.”

>   One should be able to live a spiritual life anywhere, under any circumstances. If one does so, one will not only satisfy one’s own spiritual longing but also bring peace and harmony into the lives of all those with whom one comes in contact. That is the theory, and I believe it is valid. I also believe that one has to be a realized soul to start with if such a life is going to work. In my case it didn’t work. I found it impossible to swim with a whole heart on the surface of the ocean and, at the same time, to swim down with all my might into the ocean’s infinite depths.

  My soul was crying. Perhaps the human soul is always crying for God, but when that cry is conscious and unceasing, there is no way that one can attend to anything else. I knew without any doubt that I needed to plunge headlong into a spiritual life. I knew that that was not an easy thing and that I needed spiritual direction, and I knew that my spiritual teacher was in San Francisco.

  After much discussion, Jackson and I came to the conclusion that our different goals and different ways of life were harmfully pulling against each other and that however painful a break between us might be, to separate was the only way either of us could survive. We had both tried to compromise, but a life of compromise was not what either of us wanted. And so, in mid-July of 1951 and in the friendliest of ways, we agreed to live apart. I returned to San Francisco permanently. We said it was a trial separation, but I think we both knew it would be forever.

  On August 1 of that year I moved into an apartment two and a half blocks from the Temple. I had determined, with Swami’s consent, to try to be a Vedantist, living as best I could in accord with Vedantic ideals, practicing renunciation, meditation, and the rest of it. There was no other life I wanted. But I cannot say that the plunge was not a shock. I remember well the first time I returned from an excursion downtown to what was now my home neighborhood. I came by bus, not by the family limousine, and alighting in that unfamiliar and, in those days, lower middle-class district of the city, I wondered with dismay what I was doing there. Then I walked up a hill to the small house where, second-floor rear, I had an apartment to my liking and where I was starting the spiritual life that I had longed for. Dismay vanished.

  It was a nice enough apartment. There was a living room that looked out onto an untended garden and a line of drying underclothes, a large kitchen I could dance in during moments of joy, a bedroom that I turned into a shrine, and a small breakfast-laundry room off the kitchen that I turned into a bedroom. I furnished the rooms with pieces I had brought from New York and with odds and ends from my family’s home, which I robbed of what I needed. All in all, except for the occasional wood louse and the noise that arose during the night from the landlady’s quarters below, it was a comfortable and, I thought, attractive place to live. Even my two sisters liked it, though when I first pointed out the house to my sister Leila, she exclaimed, “Oh, my God, you can’t live there.” My brother was equally affronted.

  To be sure, it was a glaring change from the East Side of Manhattan where Jackson and I had lived in an apartment building equipped with a doorman and an elevator boy (and definitely no lice). If at times I felt displaced in my top rear flat on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, I reminded myself of why I was there, and any threatening depression lifted.

  As I remember it, several years passed before I got down to serious work. Meanwhile, I tried to follow a schedule of studying Indian history and philosophy and of writing, meditating, and attending Swami’s lectures and classes. I had an appointment with him not every two weeks but every day at one o’clock.

  After about a month of this, one of the old-time students told me that I really shouldn’t come to the Temple every day—the implication was that Swami did not like my coming so often and that she was conveying his wishes to me. But had he not told me to come every day? I wasn’t sure. So the following day I went downtown on a shopping spree (a habit I had not yet dispensed with), and the day thereafter I was still in a quandary of indecision. Should I go to the Temple at one o’clock or not? The best thing do to at such times, of course, is to pray for a definite sign, some spectacular happening that clearly says yes or no. No such sign was forthcoming; so I thought, I will go downtown. Just then the ceiling light in my shrine room exploded. Clearly, I should not go downtown. So, it being nearly one o’clock, I hurried to the Temple.

  “Where were you yesterday?” Swami demanded.

  “I thought I shouldn’t come so often,” I said, or perhaps whispered.

  “Who told you that?”

  I told him who had told me, and he looked thunderous. “Do you do what I tell you or what others tell you? Don’t listen to other people!”

  Well, that was definite. I now knew that he expected me every day at one o’clock, and after that I never missed the appointment, until, in a few months, there stopped being a regular time for me to see him. Almost always, I was either inside the Temple or less than three blocks away in my apartment.

  My daily routine started with my rising at 7:00 a.m.—for me an unthinkably early hour. I showered, meditated, had breakfast, and then sat at my desk to study Indian history. All I remember of this endeavor is my charts of the early Aryan tribes that inhabited North India thousands of years (estimates vary) before Christ. These tribes, from which the Vedas—the world’s earliest scriptures—arose, were, to my mind, an unruly bunch. They split up, intermarried, joined forces, had offshoots, and altogether complicated themselves beyond all orderly reckoning. After struggling with them for two hours, I turned to the six systems of Indian philosophy, which in their own way were no less complex. After an hour or so of skullbreaking study, I had lunch and walked to the Temple for my appointment with Swami.

  In the afternoons I tried to write, sitting at my desk with cotton wool for a brain. No ideas came, let alone words in which to couch them. I wrote in longhand on large, wide-ruled, spiral-bound notebooks and rarely filled a page a day. Now and then a wood louse would distractingly crawl across the paper, coming from where I did not know. I would kill it.

  Swami Ashokananda had told me to write sketches of the swamis (his contemporaries) who had briefly visited the Society since my permanent return to San Francisco. This was a project that had a particularly paralyzing effect upon my mind, and, as will come clear later, never fully rose from the ground.

  When I first returned to San Francisco, there were wonderful gatherings in the Temple, initially only after the Wednesday night lectures and Friday night classes, but later almost every evening. Five or six of us, sometimes nine or ten of us, would congregate in the “back office” (next to Swami’s office), which was where all the business of the Society took place. There was a large desk and, next to it, Swami’s chair. Other than that, the room contained a number of straight-backed, wide-seated wooden chairs lining two walls and three small tables for typing. One of these was used by Miriam Kennedy, who kept the Society’s books (before finding Vedanta, Miriam had been personal secretary to a big-shot movie producer in Hollywood, so she knew her way around).

  In the evenings, we would sit in the straight-backed chairs, sometimes two to a chair, and Swami would talk to us more often than not of spiritual things, his face glowing. It was also a time for scolding. Invariably someone would say something that revealed to him some quirk of character, and, if he saw fit, he would take that opportunity to tear the unfortunate—or fortunate—person to shreds. For the most part, though, he spoke to us in reply to a remark or a question that poked the overflowing beehive of his spiritual knowledge: he spoke of God; of philosophy; of the great saints, ancient and modern; of Vedanta; of the place of Vedanta in the modern world; of anything that rose in his mind. We sat spellbound for hours.

  Anyone was welcome to those gatherings, but only relatively few students came. For some the talk was too intense; others could not bear to witness the scoldings that could erupt at any moment, and still others somehow felt uncomfortable or out of place. I was told by the old-timers that a devotee
from out of town who seldom came to the Temple had once fallen off her chair in a faint when Swami said that most of us would spend this life working out our karma.

  One never knew what would unnerve some students. Well aware of this, Swami would temper his talk in the presence of those who were not seasoned. He would, for instance, speak in detail about the preparation of Indian food, the beauty of the flowering trees in Bengal, or the current political scene in the West. Whatever he spoke of had about it the nimbus of spirituality, but it was not always the naked thing. At any time, however, there would come invaluable observation or advice.

  Those were blissful days, but from time to time they were also difficult. I wrote the following entry in my journal a little more than two months after my break with my old life. This and many other private conversations were held in Swami’s office.

  September 27, 1951

  Swami: Have you been happy? Do you feel that you will want to continue this kind of life, or is it too soon to tell?

  Me: I think I like it.

  Swami: Have you felt despondent?

  Me: No.

  Swami: Well, that is very good.

  Me: But I have felt that if you did not come back at all, I would not stay here. (Swami had been to Tahoe for four days in August.)

  Swami: What nonsense! Why do you think that?