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CHAPTER 6
 

THE TURNING POINT

MIRACLES AND SUCH

        Wondering how he would react, I unilaterally decided to attend the next yagna.

        When I entered the first class cabin on the flight to Hong Kong the swami’s face lit up and he said, "Ram, Ram, Hong Kong too?"

        " Hong Kong too, Swamiji," I replied. "This Vedanta is good stuff."

        As I turned toward my seat a stream of energy passed from his to my brow chakra and catapulted me out of the body into deep meditation.  I staggered to my seat, delicious waves of bliss bubbling up from the depths.

        High above the body high above the earth, I spent the next five hours lost in ecstasy pondering the mystery of inner flight and observing the lustrous beauty all around: the wonderful construction of the wing and its rows of perfectly spaced rivets, the marvel of the tray table, the rich weave of the seat fabric, the luminosity hidden in the hearts of the passengers, the isness of everything.

        I did not ask for permission to come because I did not want him to see me as a needy devotee.  I saw him roll his eyes when they moused into his room with personal problems. "Should I sell my house, Swamiji?  Should I quit my job?"  Charming displays of innocent devotion perhaps, but ultimately futile because spirituality, as taught by His Holiness, was self-empowerment.  Besides, I had been to Hong Kong dozens of times.

        Or it may have been an autonomy issue.         An incident in San Francisco a couple of days after we met sheds light on my psychology.  When he was chanting several repetitions of a mantra during an evening meditation, I experienced an incredible supercharge of power and intense pressure inside the body as if the top of my head were about to be blown open.  The discomfort forced me to make my way out of the room, disturbing the gathering.  Once outside, the energy dissolved into the star filled firmament and I felt better.

        The next minute I was back, drawn like a moth to the flame, upsetting the meditators, trying to get comfortable, but the claustrophobia returned in spades and, unable to help myself, I left again.

          When I returned and appeared in the doorway a second time, I heard the Swami's angry voice, "What is the idea!"

          I left, full of shame.

          I think it was just my ego’s reaction to my strong feelings for him.  The ego, which had never seen me love in this pure way, could not bear it and forced me out.  When it calmed down the heart regained control and allowed me to return, only to have ego assert itself and eject me once again.  What a peculiar tug-of-war!  For the ego love meant fear of control by the love object, hence its value for independence. 

          A few weeks before, innocently asked how many devotees he had, he looked at the questioner as if she were mad and, in a voice verging on contempt said, "None!  You can not be devoted to me.  I am nothing.  If you are a devotee, you are a devotee of Truth.  Truth is the guru."  Part of me liked that idea because surrendering to a principle seemed less challenging than surrendering to a person.  But then, in the highest sense the God and the Word of God are one, so consulting him about my future would have been tantamount to consulting Truth.

          Probably the doubt about who was in charge of my life stemmed from the wealth of conflicting feelings occasioned by our extraordinary relationship.  For example, at times I felt he was my spiritual father, at others, my mother.  Sometimes I saw him as my son, an inappropriate and difficult feeling reinforced by a past life vision.  Not long after we met I realized that a womanly part of me loved him with passion, a shocking discovery!  Tender, almost matronly feelings I had never known in the presence of a man began to surface, enriching my experience immeasurably.

          As that aspect of our relationship unfolded, even my appearance became more feminine.  At first I chalked it up to unisex, the idea of gender blending that was all the rage at the time, but when I read the biography of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa which chronicled a phase of the great mahatma’s life during which his identification with the Divine had him dressing and behaving like a woman I realized that the feeling was nothing to worry about.    

          Feminine energies come to the fore as the path approaches the Source because the mind is surrendering to God.  Christianity projects a male Divinity and devotees, regardless of gender, often conceive of themselves as brides of Christ.  Similarly, in India holy men wearing shawls in the manner of women to symbolize marriage and submission to God is not uncommon.

        Had I wanted to step off the deep end, I could have joined a Vaishnavite Hindu sect called the Shakti-Bhavas, "those who have a deep and passionate feeling for the Divine Mother."  Devotees engage in worship of Radha, the consort of Krsna, one of the many popular symbols of Divine Love.  I found the following passage in book entitled, “Krsna, The Divine Lover” describing their peculiar style of worship

        "This sect is in favor with those with an effeminate turn of mind.  The faith of members of this order focuses on Radha, consort of Shri Krsna.  They declare themselves to be her female companions with the idea of paying homage to and establishing identity with her, even taking on the manner of speech, gait, gestures and dress of women.  At monthly intervals, in the manner of menstruating women, they put on red-colored clothes as if affected by menstruation and pass three days in this state.  After the period of ‘menstruation’ is over, they take a ceremonial purificatory bath.  In the manner of married women anxious to be physically united with their husbands as enjoined in the scriptures, they take to themselves on the forth night a painting of Shri Krsna and stretch themselves into an erotic pose.  Raising both legs, they utter "ahs" and "oohs," adopt women-like coy manners, and cry aloud: "Ah, Krsna, I die!  Oh, Krsna, I die!"  Through practices like these they believe that they earn great merit and please the Lord by engaging themselves the whole night."

        Fear I would run off and join the Shakti-Bhavas must have caused the Swami to reprimand me in public when I was sitting with the women in a meditation one day.  "Never forget that you're a man!" he shouted as I moved to the men's section. 

        Seriously, the most common feeling that surfaced was brotherly, in the manner of Krishna and Arjuna two of India 's most revered spiritual giants and lifelong friends, one a realized soul, the other a seeker of truth.  Krishna imparted enlightenment to Arjuna during a great civil war.

        I will not claim I would not have liked a ‘personal’ relationship with the Swami, but personal relationships were impossible because, rightly or wrongly, he did not think of himself as person.  Or, if he did, he loved humanity in general, not human beings specifically - except perhaps temporarily.  As he surprisingly admitted in a rare moment “I don’t do well, one on one.”

        In any case, our ‘relationship,’ like many, perhaps most relationships often seemed little more than a communication between me and my projections.  And eventually the whole ‘relationship’ idea turned out to be a wash, because in the end there was simply no difference between us.

        Finally, troubling myself about the decision to go to Hong Kong was pointless because swami or not, I had permission - from the Lord within struggling to free itself from the burden of my ignorance.  It knew more surely than I that liberation depended on this animate swami.  That I had not quite realized I was the Lord was the problem, although the following experience seemed to suggest I was.

        One day, just before we left for Hawaii , I was sitting on my bed in the afternoon totally absorbed in the deep and perfect peace of the inner Self, suffused in light, full of energy, every cell pregnant with bliss, when the body disappeared!  Not a problem during sleep, but definitely peculiar in the waking state.  I was bodiless for a few moments and suddenly...I was no longer there!

        Absurd, of course, for how did I know I was not there unless I was there?  But it was absolutely true, the person I thought I was had been automatically supplanted by a bodiless mindless ‘I’ and this ‘I’ was living without taking a single breath!  Because I did not have senses or a mind, I could not see or hear anything specific, but I could ‘see’ myself as endless light and ‘hear’ myself as silence without limit.

        How long this non-experience, which was to become increasingly frequent as my practice progressed, lasted, I cannot say.   Perhaps a few seconds, maybe minutes, but when the familiar ‘I’ reappeared I thought it must be enlightenment.  The fruit was the knowledge that ‘I’ was beyond everything: me, my guru, and the teachings.  Although I was not quite there yet, I understood that nothing in the world, not even dismissal by my teacher, who was the only love object in my life, could change me.

        The experience generated an indescribable feeling of otherness.  When I got to Hong Kong and took a visa picture in a sit-down four-for-a-dollar booth on the docks near the Star Ferry I was startled - the unearthly eyes were seeing... but seeing nothing!  There was nobody home!

        I showed it to a devotee who became visibly agitated.

        "What's the matter?" I said.

        "This is scary, Ram.  This is scary.  Who are you?"

        She clammed up and avoided me from then on, as if she had just viewed a “ten most wanted” flyer in the post office.  From that I learned not to share my inner stuff.  No matter how ‘spiritual’ or ‘close’ they are, those who have not experienced Emptiness never understand.

        We deplaned at Guam and sat in the departure lounge with the Swami during refueling.  Though we had been together every day for a month, he had never asked a personal question.  Surprisingly, he inquired about my profession.

        "Business, Swamiji," I said, a little ashamed.

        "Nothing wrong with business, Ram," he said.  “It is a noble occupation.  Someone has to create wealth for the society.  If it were not for business men there would be no Mission .  Besides it got you here.  It is all a matter of how you think.  If you are only in it for the money, then it is not good.  But if you do it as a service, for your spiritual growth, it is as good as any spiritual practice.  Do not look down on it."

        "As spiritual practice, Swamiji?"

        "Yes, definitely.  Spirituality is not about what you do.  We have great saints who were butchers, weavers, kings, even prostitutes.  It is not what you do, but the state of mind in which you do it.  You cannot always help your karma, but you can change your attitude.  If you dedicate your work to the Higher and work dispassionately it will purify you as surely as meditation or any other practice."

        During a break in the conversation a cockroach the size of a small mouse came ambling across the floor and stopped in front of the Swami, his antennae waving.

        "He wants darshan," I said.

        The Swami laughed.

        Shanti, who had been silent throughout, asked what attitude she should take toward sex.

        "You cannot stop it all at once," he said.  “The tendencies are too strong.  It will disturb the mind if you try to control it completely.  At this stage you need to sin intelligently, use your discrimination, and keep practicing your spirituality.  Eventually you will find that you start to feel good inside and the craving for sex will dry up.  If you rely on it for pleasure you will not taste the great bliss of the Self.  At some point you have to let it go.  That is the goal."

        As we re-boarded I marveled at the concept of intelligent sinning.  It made perfect sense.  Why stress yourself repressing natural urges?  And why go hog wild indulging them?  What a perfectly wonderful idea. 

        A wealthy Indian stock broker, the yagna sponser, and a handful of smiling devotees met us in the terminal, garlanded the Swami, and whisked us off to Hong Kong Island in a black Mercedes limousine.  I was determined to take care of Shanti since it was her first time out of the country and asked to be let down on the street but the Swami had a word with the organizers and after they installed him in a high rise flat we were taken to a Sikh temple and given rooms there.  The hotel in which the talks took place was the same hotel where a scant three years before I had spent many weekends sinning unintelligently with my Filipino girlfriend. 

        By this time my meditation had stabilized and I no longer passed in and out of the God state but, with the Swami’s help, dove ever deeper.  I eagerly attended every function, sat up front, stayed tuned in, and watched with fascination the unfolding of each and every petal of the divine lotus. 

          One morning during Upanishad class I smelled a fragrance so subtle I nearly swooned.  At first I thought one of the Indian women in the class was wearing a potent and exotic perfume, but the aroma continued as I walked back to the temple along a busy smoggy roadway.  The next day I heard celestial music, choirs of angels, welling up from within as wave upon wave of tingly blissful energy washed over the body.

          During the question session I told the Swami what had happened.

          "It is a good sign, Ram.  The mind is becoming subtle.  Our yoga literature extensively documents these experiences.  In themselves miraculous experiences are nothing, just temporary psychic phenomena, but this shows that you are on the right track.  You must go beyond to the Source."

          That the mind, which is opposed to self-awareness on principle, was starting to think spiritually was the real miracle.  One day I noticed that I was starting to love Shanti in a less than platonic way.  The feelings would not go no matter how hard I tried to ignore them, so I decided get into them and see what they were really all about.  And within minutes, at the end of a particularly juicy sequence of emotion-inspired thinking, the mind, with great confidence, said, "It is nothing, you are not the body.  It is the Self you love.”  And the lust dried up immediately. 

        When I mentioned this to the Swami he gave me a little speech.  “Good,” he said with characteristic enthusiasm, “the mind is coming around.  You must continue to meditate on the teachings so that they become your own.  The experience of the Self is natural, nothing special, but the power to bring it into the thick of life is rare.  These teachings retrain the mind and wean it from its unholy alliance with the ego by teaching it to think independently…from the Self’s point of view.” 

          “Our work is showing the mind how to solve its own problems.  The spiritual science is a based on reality, not the false reality the mind is caught up in.  Problems are there because the mind is thinking unrealistically.  It wants things to be as it wants them to be, not as they are.  So it is always angry, frustrated, disappointed, dejected.  But if it learns to think from a different premise, from the Self's point of view, it will eventually come to know the Self and its problems will vanish.  This is not brainwashing because the Self is the truth.  It is Reality."

          "Most people do a little scripture study, listen to a few lectures, chant some mantras, and when they do not get immediate results move on to something else, another teaching, another guru.  The secret is in sticking to one path, going into it deeply, hearing the same ideas over and over from different perspectives at different times, comparing them to your experience.  It is boring but it is the only way.  I spent seven years with my guru.  After six months I knew all the ideas, but this was not enough.  The mind had to be retrained, so I stayed on for seven years."

          This subtle non-event, a small but important victory, meant the retraining had begun.  Eventually, like the oroboros, the mind would consume itself as quickly as it grew.  In the meantime the miracles continued.

          Hong Kong was a watershed for Shanti who was having serious doubts about following the Swami.  One night we talked about her concerns.  I encouraged her to soldier on and offered to loan her the money to get to India .  The next day after morning class the sponsor informed us we had been invited by the Swami to the afternoon satsang at his apartment.

          No experience in this world, including the joy of sex, can compare to the darshan of a mahatma in transcendental ecstasy.  When we entered the atmosphere was electric and the Swami was sitting ramrod straight on a sofa next to a picture window with a spectacular view of Hong Kong Harbor .  Surrounded by a blinding white aura, his eyes glowing coals, his powerful voice cut the silence like a scythe, every word forceful, precise, eloquent, and soaked in love.  “The Self alone is real,” he was saying as we entered, “This world is only apparent.”

          I had the sense that we were participating in an event of great significance.  He motioned us up to the high-energy zone and the devotees made room.  When he had completed the teaching someone asked a question.  He thought for a minute and said,  "Suppose Ram here and Shanti were having a conversation last night and he said to her....at this point he repeated enough of the conversation verbatim to let us know that he had obviously ‘been there’ even though in terms of physical reality he was five miles away when the conversation took place!  Then without batting an eye he went on to weave the conversation into the answer. The ego did not enjoy contemplating the consequences of this event because it meant there was nowhere to hide.  Were all its wicked little thoughts and greedy emotions as accessible?

          Feeling that he would scold me for mentioning it, since miracle talk was completely discouraged, I did not ask him about it, not that such things can be adequately explained anyway.  Perhaps these powers had been so much a part of his life for so long he did not think them extraordinary.    

THE OXYGEN BOTTLE

          The Swami was a heart patient, having suffered a heart attack several years before.  In fact a few years later he would undergo triple by-pass surgery in Houston after a second attack.  For years doctors advised him to take it easy, an option not in the cards for a man with a world to enlighten.  And, true to form, he would eventually die with his boots on croaking out the teachings.

        Little wonder his health was poor.  By the time we met he had been teaching non-stop for over twenty-five years, a dawn till midnight schedule three-hundred sixty five days a year with no breaks except the day or two for travel between venues.  He personally answered all mail, devoting the hours between three and five in the morning to the task.  I have no idea how big the Mission was, certainly thousands, but, in spite of its relatively loose organization there was much to do on a mundane level and the Swami, like a CEO, kept it all together.  His schedule of international travel, fixed a year and a half in advance, involved hopping from city to city, country to country, every ten days.  Though taking steps to correct it when I met him, his diet consisted of spicy food and milky sweet tea.  He suffered diabetes, snorted large quantities of snuff, religiously avoided exercise and talked eight or ten hours a day.   With relish he often described the body as ‘a stinking bucket of feces and urine, food for worms.’  That he nearly made eighty was a tribute to the grace of God and the wonders of medical science.

        A couple of days before the flight to Bombay he called me into his room.  I touched his feet, and was offered a chair.  Though I had not discussed my plans he said, "You'll be going on to India , Ram?"

        "Yes, Swamiji, if that's all right with you," I replied.

        "Well, you've come this far.  It would be a shame to quit now."

        "It's been very good, Swamiji, much more than I ever expected.  I think I've got the idea but need more practice.  I was in India before and had many interesting experiences but I really didn't know what was going on.  It was hit and miss.  I needed a comprehensive system like the Vedanta to bring it all together. "

        "Yes," he said and fell silent.

         I felt something momentous about to happen.

        "You know I have a heart condition, Ram?

        "Yes, Swamiji, the devotees speak of it often."

        He picked up a small green oxygen bottle and looked at it bemusedly. "Sometimes I don't get enough oxygen and swoon.  So the doctors have given me this bottle.  Needless to say I can't be carrying it all the time, so I need someone to carry it.  When it looks like I'm going to pass out, give it to me.  If I'm already unconscious put this piece of plastic in my mouth and open the valve.  You probably won't have to use it, but it's a precaution.  Do you understand?"

        "How much do I give you," I said.

        "I don't know," he replied.  "Use your own judgment."

        I didn’t like the idea of taking responsibility for him but didn’t say anything. 

        "Is it too much responsibility for you, Ram?" he said with a touch of sarcasm.

        “Are you worried I might die on you?”

        "I think I can manage Swamiji,” I said. “After all it's only the body." 

        He laughed.

        My newfound ‘little duty,’ as they say in India the spiritual equivalent of winning the lottery.  I had been granted virtually constant access to a great mahatma, the effect of which was that I became privy to every thought and feeling, every fluctuation in his energy, an invaluable development because the more closely I was attuned to his ‘equipment,’ as he liked to call it, the faster I evolved.

        My new job also highlighted the fact that he might drop dead any moment and leave my longing for freedom unfulfilled.  And it made me realize that my uncontrollable and misdirected passion for experience was really an unbounded desire to know who I was.  As a consequence, I became even more of a fanatic for enlightenment.  Fully owning this desire fixed me firmly on the path, an arrow flying to the mark.

        About a year later, just before the end of my discipleship, I was hovering around the Swami burning with such intensity that he turned around, though otherwise engaged.

        "What is it Ram?" he said irritably.

        "What's what, Swamiji?" I said, unaware of my desire.

        He seemed perplexed, realized what was going on and, and with a look of genuine amazement, said, "I've never seen anyone with such desire."  Perhaps it reminded him of himself at that age.

       

HIS HOLINESS

          It would be impossible to describe my feelings of excitement and promise as the jet touched down on the tarmac at Bombay International.  The last time around, standing on the deck of the geriatric ship from Mombassa as it limped into the harbor, I was just a romantic hippie in search of adventure, inspired by the fateful words of the granola girl from the Holy Man Jam.   This time I was blessed with the company of a mahatma and a clear idea of what I was seeking.

          We entered the terminus, the Swami in front, Shanti and I behind, the oxygen bottle at the ready.  Across the room behind the glass, a large crowd of devotees, garlands in hand, waited eagerly for the Swami to clear customs.

          I noticed two officials coming straight towards the Swami, certain they were about to nab a rich export-guru trying to sneak through with a cornucopia of watches, cameras, gold, and transistors.  In fact he was only packing silks and scripture.  As they approached he turned his head and I distinctly saw a beam of energy, like a ray of light, pass from his mind into theirs!  They went blank, stopped, looked around, could not remember what they were about to do, turned and walked leisurely back into the office.  The Swami, indifferent as ever, passed though the doors into the embrace of the devotees who saluted and garlanded him as they sang traditional Sanskrit verses in praise of the Guru. 

          On our way to the ashram we passed through one of the worst tin and burlap slums in India and I was amazed that our entourage of late-model automobiles with prosperous people chanting the name of God did not attract more attention.  In the Wes one might expect a poverty stricken malcontent to hurl a rock through a windshield in such a situation but nothing happened.  At one point during a traffic jam a beggar put his hand though an open window but ambled off indifferently when his desire was unfulfilled.  Some seemed to enjoy the chant.  At an intersection a young boy danced to the music and a turbanned man with a monkey on his shoulder smiled.

          Situated in a park like atmosphere near a lake amid rolling hills, the ashram nestles among tall trees behind a small hill near a man-made lake.  It is endowed with generous walkways and well-tended gardens and was capable of housing perhaps a hundred and fifty students.  In addition to two three storey dorms, there is a dining hall, a lecture hall, the Swami's small three room ‘hut,’ a bookstore, and a couple of other buildings.  On top of a hill commanding excellent views sits a stunning white marble Shiva temple.

          Except for a skeleton crew, the ashram was deserted.  Evidently a number of rich devotees, not expecting him to live, withdrew their support when he suffered his first heart attack, canceling all programs.  But he surprised them, rising like the phoenix full of messianic zeal, jetting off around the world in search of greener pastures.  Within a year the ashram would be fully functioning, hosting a two-year residential program of Vedic studies taught by his number one disciple.

          I was given a room shaded by a huge mango tree in one of the dormitories along the perimeter.  It sported barred windows and was furnished with a none-too-comfortable bed, table, chair, and mosquito net.  Mercifully it sported the most indispensable fixture in Asia - a ceiling fan.  I soon discovered that keeping small articles on the sill was pointless because groups of monkeys periodically swept through the ashram, lifting everything in sight.  One of the boys told me the monkey was called "hari, “the thief” which is also one of the most common names of God, the inner monkey whose transcendent love steals the heart.

          Life in the Swami's entourage rolled along as if on greased wheels.  A second morning class and devotional items, temple worship, chanting, and other small rituals were added to the program.  For example, we all ate in silence after chanting the fifteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu “bible,” a moving ritual.

          The Swami had obviously been holding back on tour, accepting the West’s reluctance to venerate holy men by presenting himself as a scholarly lecturer on Indian philosophy.  He had even cut his long hair.  He was actually a duck out of water, experimenting with a strange and threatening idea: you are fine as you are; there is nothing to obtain here on earth.  Occasionally he met with hostility and disrespect.  But India does God like the Japanese do cars and the French do food.  The first time around I had my glimpses, but this time I witnessed the world's spiritual superpower in all its glory.

          Too high to sleep much, I awoke at dawn to a misty ancient Indian morning.  I bathed, put on my dhoti and tilak, grabbed my shawl and walked up the path to the Swami's hut, an unpretentious three room bungalow with terrazzo floors and grilled windows where a single light emanating from his bedroom spread an unearthly calm.  I stood in the garden, enchanted by the fragrance of the plumerias, telling the beads, waiting for him to emerge.

          In twenty minutes he appeared in the doorway in freshly-pressed silks, mala (rosary) in hand, obviously absorbed in his inner state, wavy crystalline lines of light emating from his body.  The handful of devotees who were hanging around came forward, offered flowers, touched his feet, and withdrew without speaking a word.  We fell in line behind him, joined by other sleepy devotees converging on the temple as he walked slowly through the gardens occasionally muttering the Lord's name.

          Mounting the long steep stairway, the Swami stopped frequently to catch his breath and look out over the tops of the palms at the lake in the distance where the first rays of morning light were reflecting.  I could see he was visibly moved by Mother India and the prospect of meditation in his own temple after a long visit to the land of the heathens.  He sighed deeply and held out his hand to the morning as if greeting an old friend, Lord's name on his lips, "Narayana, Narayana."

          The smell of jasmine saturating the air and oil lamps flickering in the sanctuary, a brahmin priest naked from the waist up and wearing the sacred thread was chanting in Sanskrit from the Shiva Purana, an ancient devotional work.  The Swami walked slowly to the altar and gracefully prostrated before the gleaming white marble form of a smiling Shiva in meditation pose.  "It is the not the statue to which we bow," he often said, "but to That which it symbolizes."                    

          We circumambulated the altar and sat on the immaculate marble floor, the Swami taking his seat on a platform at the side of the temple where the sun's rays would shortly come to warm him.  Waiting until everyone settled in, he said a few words about meditation and led us into the cave of the Heart.  A deep peace enveloped the room as forty bodies sat motionless, the silence broken only by the cawing of crows and an occasional horn from a nearby road.

          Tears of devotion trickled down my face when I realized that I had discovered a non-dogmatic religion with a sense of reverence.  Coming from a country where churches are easily confused with dental clinics and devotional music is accompanied by electric guitars, I was overjoyed to discover true sanctity.  It was now perfectly clear why the swami was called ‘His Holiness.’

          After meditation we silently walked down the hill to the kitchen to take tea before the Upanishad class.  No one spoke.  Each was absorbed in his or her inner world.

 

THE POPE OF INDIA

          India is time warp.  Invariably the modern filter dissolves and you are transported back to a simpler time.  If you walk into a twelve hundred year old temple and witness the ancient rituals, you quickly understand that nothing, including dress and hairstyles, has changed in hundreds, probably thousands, of years!  In contrast to ours, which indiscriminately discards everything good and bad after a short honeymoon and then sets out to reinvent it, Indian culture has preserved in tact humanity’s most important legacy…love of Truth.

          Vedic culture is based on the idea that all names and forms in this world are nothing but Consciousness, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is roughly equivalent to God or Truth.  This Truth created the world out of its own Consciousness in the way that a spider creates a web out of its body.  And then He, She or It (conceive it as you will) playfully took up residence in that web without getting caught up as we do.  The purpose of life here is to let go of your limited self concepts and discover that you are that Consciousness.  If you do, you will live a free and fulfilled life.

          Several thousand years before the Christian era this and a handful of ancillary ideas were developed by a group of forest dwelling ascetics called rishis and enshrined in the Vedas, the oldest extant texts on the science of God-Knowledge.  A rishi is someone who ‘sees’ or knows God directly.  The rishis established ‘forest academies’ where the spiritually inclined came realize Truth.  Since the knowledge of God is the ultimate knowledge and the means of realizing it proved effective for thousands of years, it remains in tact to this day.  All lineages of enlightened souls ultimately stretch back to the Vedic Age and beyond.

          By God’s grace I had stumbled onto a bona fide rishi and his forest academy.  One might think that because it was situated in suburban Bombay and the rishi flew in jets and wore an Omega, things had changed.  But Truth is Truth and when it comes down it comes down like it always did.  Merely to walk into the classroom, decorated with pictures of great mahatmas, including, in the place of honor, the swami’s guru, my spiritual grandfather, and hear the text in Sanskrit, a Spirit language unchanged in thousands of years, is to be transported back to the Source.

          Attractive as they were to me in the West, the teachings became immensely richer in India .  As I slowly grasped the Idea animating the world of the visible I came to understand that one could scratch the surface of any cultural ritual and find the mandala of God hidden beneath, a realization that wiped out what little pessimism I had concerning the future of the human race.  The Truth would be kept alive forever because it delivers fulfillment.  

          By the second day a steady stream of humanity beat a path to his door.  I was allowed to stand in a corner behind his desk when he received devotees, guests, visitors, and mission workers.  What a privilege to witness such deep respect and love for the institution and observe the subtle way his words lifted them up, dissolving their cares and woes, giving new meaning to their quests.

        It was easy to see how he had attracted such a large following.  One day we were alone for a few minutes and I remarked that he had a pretty cushy deal, that all he had to do was sit back and let the Lord do it all.

        He put down his pen, removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and said wearily, “It’s not like that Ram.  It looks that way to you because of your high state.  But you do not know what’s behind it.  I started out with nothing.  Five people attended my first talk.  I've been hard at it for twenty five years building it up brick by brick.  It is not a miracle at all, simply a lot of hard work.  Why do you think this body's such a wreck? "

        A few days later I realized what he meant.  I was so empowered by my mystic experiences I rarely slept.  One afternoon, when everyone was napping, I decided to slip out of the ashram and have a cup of tea in a nearby park.  When I approached the ashram gate I heard the Swami's raised voice.  I ducked behind a tree to see what was happening, and peeked out.  He was standing in the middle of the path in the scorching afternoon sun, looking every inch the Old Testament prophet, sweat running down his face as he argued passionately with a young Brahmin boy, a temple priest who wanted to leave the ashram and return home.  The boy was not interested in what the Swami had to say and met the angry words with sullen and resentful stares.  Eventually, however, under the pressure of the swami’s logic and the force of his personality he reluctantly agreed to soldier on.  Big man or not, to the boy he was just another Indian. 

        It also showed that Indians tend to take spirituality with a grain of salt because it is such an obvious part of their culture.  A few days later I was talking with a devotee, a businessman from Bombay , about the urgency of attaining enlightenment.

        "What's the hurry?" he asked humorously.  "There is much time.  You should enjoy yourself first, have a family, and do something worthwhile for the society.  If you do not get it this time you can get it in your next birth.  Why rush?  Anyhow what good does it do?  We've had mahatmas for a long time and look at this country.  It's a downright shame.  We ca not even look after ourselves properly.  We were better off under the British.  These yogis should come out of their caves and get some honest work.  The best and brightest minds in the society are sitting in ashrams going for moksha."

        "Yes, but you're a devotee.  You must be working for your enlightenment.  The Swami talks day and night about moksha."

        "Well, moksha is not something you get," he said.  “It is something that comes from God.  Only rich people can afford the leisure of chasing moksha."

        "So why do you follow the Swami?" I said, intrigued.

        "He is a great man, you see.  He is teaching us to think for ourselves, not to get hoodwinked by religion."

        "Hoodwinked by religion?"

        "Yes, religion is the bane of Indian society.  It stands for everything that is backward, superstitious.  Religion is the most powerful and corrupt force in the land.  Not one government has had the backbone to stand up to religion.  The priests are in total control of the people's lives."

        "But this is religion," I argued, referring to the Mission .

        "Yes, but this is how religion was in the time of the rishis.  It is religion for the thinking man and it puts something back into the society.  The Swami is a great man.  He is giving us back our heritage."

        I did not make it to the tea stall for fear of incurring the Swami’s wrath.  In fact, although I had occasionally tasted the lash I tended to forget that there was a fierce spiritual warrior behind the peaceful facade.  I am reminded of an article in an Australian paper that called him the Pope of India and said he was "no peace-love pussy cat, but a real tiger."  

        Apart from confirming his contention that teaching was hard work I understood that holy does not mean pious and nice, but whole and complete.  And although the Swami portrayed the goal of spiritual work as a desireless mind, I was secretly pleased to know he had strong desires - because desire was language I understood well.  But it did seem a contradiction.  If he was the ever-blissful ever-peaceful Self, then what was all the fuss over such a small thing…a homesick boy wanting to abandon his duty?   

        The doubts created by the incident were resolved a few days later when a devotee asked, "What is the right attitude to take toward the guru, Swamiji?"

        "The guru," he said forcefully, "is only a temporary psychological aid.  He is supposed to reveal the Self.  He will give only one kind of advice: seek the Self.  When the Self is known the Self becomes the guru.  You cannot rely on the outer guru to solve your problems.  What does he know about the details of your life, especially gurus who have many devotees.  You must be very suspicious of gurus who are eager to take on your problems.  If you maintain dispassion and discrimination and let Truth be the guru, you will move quickly toward the goal.  Do not swallow everything the guru says or does."

        He looked directly at me.  Then, with a twinkle in his eye, dramatically stroking his long beard, he said, "When dealing with gurus here is a good rule of thumb.  The longer their beard the greater (should be) your doubt!"

         A guru’s ego is only a problem if the disciple’s heart is impure.  If he or she is only interested in truth, truth will keep the guru under control.  This idea contradicts conventional wisdom, which states that the guru, by definition, is egoless.  Manifestations of gurugic ego are meant to be blithely dismissed as projections, as if egolessness, which undoubtedly has its points, were the ultimate spiritual goal.  It is not or there would not be so many egoless people who do not know who they are.  Nor would there be so many who have attained enlightenment who have so much ego.  Like so many apparently important issues, however, the guru ego idea turned out to be a wash because I had been given an ironclad inner assurance I would find fulfillment through him.  So I took the warts and all approach - love somebody, love their stuff.   When I got over wanting a saint, I found a very interesting and complicated man, outwardly joyful and fun loving but pure steel inwardly.  Sometimes I saw him as a huge raptor perched on a lofty crag waiting for a small rodent to appear.  Often enough my ego was the rat.  But he never toyed with me or seemed to enjoy the attacks, like a cat, but tore into me impersonally and mechanically with impeccable logic, a spider indifferently bundling up a moth fluttering in its web.  Whether they came from his ego or not, the infrequent attacks were useful to me; I took what I thought valuable and left the rest.

                                                                 

NINETY-TEN

 

        After servicing the Bombay devotees we toured other cities and towns repeating the ten-day routine with mantric regularity.  Because I was young and inspired I had the energy to keep up with the schedule, but the Swami was not in good health and was forced to draw on meager reserves.  One day the doctors put their collective feet down and insisted that he take a break.  I received permission to accompany him, but he disappeared without giving me the details so I found myself cooling my heels in the ashram while he flew to Hyderabad .  The devotees had either been kept in the dark or instructed not to give out the address, so I decided to track him down on my own.

        The moment I stepped through the ashram gates a taxi stopped and took me to Andheri where the Bombay train was just pulling into the station.  We reached the city an hour before the Hyderabad train departed.  Though holding a third class ticket, the conductor graciously offered me a berth in first.  I arrived rested and alert the following morning. 

        The Mission ’s number was out of service, a big blow to my plans.  Though the Indian grapevine is second to none and the Swami was very famous, my inquires proved useless.  I sat down, depressed, in a small café for a cup of tea, eventually deciding to get a hotel and think about my options.  I paid my bill and turned down a narrow side street where I noticed a small shrine dedicated to the elephant God, Ganesh, remover of obstacles, one of the oldest and most popular Gods in the Hindu pantheon.  Having been recently worshipped with flowers and incense, a few coins lay in an ornate brass dish at his chubby feet.  He seemed alive, a beatific smile on his elegant elephantine face.  Laying a rupee in the dish, I asked that the obstacles to my search be removed.

        The depression lifted and my mind entered a meditative state.

        Suddenly the whole thing seemed ridiculous, a metaphor for the quest.  How could I search for something I already had?  He was my connection with the Lord no doubt - but the Lord was right there in my heart.

        My desire drained and I felt a miraculous infusion of energy.  The body  seemed heavy and meaty for a few minutes but now seemed light and insubstantial.  Then, without any help from me, it got up and headed down the street!  It walked with mindless certainty for about ten minutes, automatically turning here and there until it stopped in front of the gate of a large Raj-era mansion.

        The Voice said, "Ring the bell, Ram."

        A servant came to the door, and the Voice said, "I'm a devotee of Swami Chinmaya," and I was ushered in.  I walked into the front room just as Swamiji was entering from a hallway on the left, a look of genuine surprise on his normally inscrutable face.

        "How did you find me?" he said.  "I'd given instructions that no one was to come."

        "You said I could come," I replied.

        "Who told you?" he said suspiciously.

        "No one, Swamiji.  You forgot to leave instructions so I decided to find you myself.  I caught the train yesterday and wandered the streets today but had no luck.  When I asked Ganesh to find you the body knew exactly where to go, like a homing pigeon."

        He paused for a second taking it all in, shook his head, said "Hare Ram!" which more or less translates as, "Holy Cow!" and told one of the servants hovering around to give me a room.

        Every morning I got up a few minutes before four, showered and peered down the hall to see if light were coming under the Swami's door.  I hovered in the hall until I was sure he had completed his toilet, then wormed my way in on the pretext of bringing him a cup of tea.  Once inside, stood like an usher in a corner basking in his energy, meditating on the Self.

        The way God had taken me to him, virtually moving the body through the streets without my participation, convinced me that I could rely completely on the inner Swami, so attachment to the outer swami’s physical presence began to dissolve at this time and I entered a stage where just the thought of him kept me in meditation.

        It is easy to think continually about someone you love.  The more I loved him, the more he became part of me - to the point where we started to physically resemble each other.  Fortunately I did not suffer the anxiety of love, however, because I understood that the whole process was part of my sadhana, the will of God.

        As recently as a month before I had secretly spent several nights sleeping in the garden outside his window like a faithful dog - afraid to lose contact.  I knew I would not be discovered first, because nobody would be so crazy, and second, because it was God's will.  By the time we headed back to the West he had become completely internalized, as much a part of me as my own mind, allowing me to leave his physical presence for a short time, take care of some small family karma and return without breaking the transmission.

        As I meditated on him over the months a pure form emerged in my mind, one corresponding with my own spiritual qualities because at the level behind the personality we are all the same divine Person.  Fixing my attention on that image as it played in the mind, invariably lead me to the Self, the ‘light’ enlivening it.

        The Swami was my guru because his inner energy ignited mine.  The subtle flow of divine energy between one soul and another is the only relationship pleasing to God and a true teacher.  Lesser gurus are quite happy to count bodies, bask in the adoration of devotees, tell people what to do, and take satisfaction in the idea of guruhood, but not the Swami, who eagerly held up his side of the equation once the shakti was activated.  As our relationship progressed I realized that he was as devoted to my enlightenment as I.

        Usually, when I came to a new level he would acknowledge it in some way.  After we had been in Hyderbad about a week we were sitting alone in the parlor waiting for devotees to show up for satsang.  I was thinking about our relationship.

        "What are you thinking?" he said surprisingly, the only time he ever asked such a question.

        "About guru-disciple," Swamiji.

        "Yes, what about it?  I do not read minds." he said almost testily.  I could sense a lecture coming on.

        "Would you say I was your disciple?" I said.  Often, when a conversation seemed headed toward the personal dimension, he would conveniently fail to understand and go off on a tangent or dissemble.

        But he looked directly at me and, in a deadly serious tone, obliquely replied, "Well Ram, the disciple gives ninety percent and the guru ten.  Is that understood?"

        It took me a minute to get it because a business deal was such an indirect way to respond, but when I did get it I was ecstatic.  Doing ninety percent or more of the work did not scare me because I was capable of anything. My heart was going to have its way.

          When we were in Bombay the swami had agreed to facilitate the renewal of my visa.  As the deadline approached I sat on my agitation because I felt it impolite to ask again.  It was due to expire Tuesday and by Monday nothing had been done, though I kept putting out the thought, hoping he would pick up on it.

        About three o’clock Monday afternoon he was having satsang with two or three devotees, but my mind would not stay with the discussion.  About four a well-dressed middle-aged man arrived, touched the Swami's feet and sat down.  They talked for a few minutes, the Swami got up to leave, and I started experiencing intense anxiety.  I came from a legal family and we always had our papers in order.  When he reached the doorway, the Swami turned, pointed to me and said to the man, "Ram's visa is about to expire.  Will you fix it up?"

        The man, the Chief of Police, happily agreed and we walked out together.  I made it back in time for dinner, visa extension in hand.  The Swami, sitting in the front room smiling as I entered, said, "You look like the cat that ate the canary."

        "Thanks," I said, "I thought you had forgotten."

        "Even if I had," he said mischievously, "you could have meditated in jail.  Its nice and quiet there."

        "So did you put them in your pocket?" he said after a brief pause.

        "My pocket, Swamiji?".

        "Did you give the cops darshan?"

        "You bet," Swamiji, they all have liberation now.  Tomorrow there will be a crime wave in the city."

LUNCH WITH THE MAHARANI

          The swami resumed his schedule, ten day stints in various towns and cities.  One day, after speaking at a religious ceremony at the Ramakrisha Mission the head monk was showing us around the ashram grounds when we came upon a small shrine with a radiant icon of Ramakrishna.  I was immensely attracted to this image and broke ranks leaving my place behind the swami.  As I stood in front of it I was overcome by a powerful energy and transported in the twinkling of an eye to a dimension known as siddha loka, were the subtle bodies of enlightened souls emanate from.  Ramakrishna was sitting in full lotus, arms outstretched, welcoming me.  I responded to his gesture and entered into his heart chakra where I dissolved into the state of pure being, nirvikalpa samadhi.

          A few minutes later I was called back to reality by a boy from the mission shaking my shoulder.  Overwhelmed with ecstasy I opened my eyes and realized I had fallen to the ground.  Swamiji, looking mightily put-out, was standing nearby, arms akimbo.

          By way of explanation, he said to the monk, "Ram just had darshan of Ramakrishna.  He's very emotional.  He has devotion for all the saints."

          The monk smiled.

          Then he turned and handed me a clean orange handkerchief and, pointing to the dust on my white dhoti, said, "Well, wipe it off.  It won't do.  We're taking biksha (having lunch) with the maharani."

          I interpreted the experience to mean that I was about to become a siddha, an ‘accomplished one.’

THE FISH EYE

 

          During this period many extraordinary inner experiences, most of which I have forgotten - which is how is should be - took place; all were bathed in a subtle radiance, a Light that seemed to shrink and swell and come in several ethereal colors…although it is clear and still today.  And all were accompanied by a steady vibration in the center of the chest which I recognized as pure love.  As the days passed I found myself more and more absorbed in the Light and less interested in the experiences generated out of it.

          "Self-Realization is not an experience," said the Swami one day in answer to a question.  “It is the knowledge that you are the Self, the Light.  In the Self there is no you and no experience.  It is an experienceless experience."

          I did not make much of the experiences except to wonder at and enjoy them as they happened.  Liberation means freedom from even this marvelous inner stuff.  Pyschedelia had supplied me with enough spiritual exotica to fill a dozen diaries but, except to point to the dimension beyond the physical, what use had it been? 

          Spiritual experiences happen to prepare the mind for knowledge, but my contemplation on Vedic culture’s plethora of spiritual symbols, both visual and auditory, the so-called ‘Gods,’ also worked to purify my heart and mind.  The Gods can be taken as independent diving entities but I took them as personifications of the formless all-pervading Self.

          For example, Self realization is equivalent to pure love.  Therefore you have Krishna , ‘the one who attracts,’ a divine lover who, according to legend, had 16,283 wives, a symbol of the immense potency of love.  Radha, Krishna ’s consort, embodies the passionate feeling of the Divine for its creation, the intense love that holds all the worlds together.

          Another Self symbol, Vishnu is the infinite all-pervading stillness, the peace that passeth understanding.  Vishnu reclines on the coils of a serpent in the center of an infinite ocean of milk in the ‘sleep of yoga,’ Self realization.   Snakes, one of India's most common spiritual symbols, represent the hidden or unmanifest power of the Self because they live unseen underground, just as the Self lies hidden in the realm beneath the senses.  Owing to their vastness, oceans have come to symbolize the Self as limitlessness and nourishing milks represents love, essence of the Divine, which nurtures the soul like mother's milk nurtures the child. 

          The awesome transformative power of the Infinite is symbolized in a masculine form by Shiva, destroyer of worlds and in a feminine form as Kali, eater of time.  Shiva, the auspicious, represents the Self as pure being or meditation and Ganesh, his son, stands for Wisdom, probably because elephants are known for their memory and intelligence.

          India 's talent for creating provocative symbols is nowhere more evident than in the name of the Meenakshi or ‘Fish Eye’ temple situated in Madurai in the state of Tamil Nadu.  I puzzled long and hard how such a wondrous edifice could have been given such a bizarre and apparently profane name.  One day I met a South Indian pundit who confirmed my suspicion; because it has no eyelid a fish eye, like the Self, never sleeps.

         The deeper I plunged into my inner being the more I began to see everything as a symbol of the Divine, not just my guru's subtle qualities and the conventional symbols, but every aspect of Indian life.  The earth itself, trod by saints and sages since time immemorial, seemed permeated by Consciousness.  At nearly every bend where a river turns back to its source and on every other street corner one encounters a temple or shrine, the most pervasive reminder of the Divine.  Cows garlanded as God in small morning rituals regularly wander the streets sporting the sandalwood paste third eye.  India ’s version of our soulless tractor-trailers are decorated like the chariots of the gods and often named for one of the many aspects of the all-pervasive Power.  Dashboards of countless buses and taxis invariably have altars adorned with plastic flowers and tiny colored lights and worship is the first order of business before the trip begins.  Nearly every proper name, or its root, refers to God.  One is continually treated to the sight of orange-clad sadhus, wandering ascetics, whose lives, like our monks, are dedicated exclusively to the search for Truth.

        The fire blazing in my heart saw its reflection everywhere.

        One day a sandwich board cluttered with strange symbols advertising the services of a tantrik palmist caught my eye one day as I was walking along a busy street in Trivandrum , Kerala, South India .  Curiousity compelled me to climb a flight of worn rickety stairs, at the top of which I entered what seemed a necromancer's chamber, a darkened incense-filled room decorated with occult symbols, pictures of gods, saints, and bizarre totems.  Behind a cluttered desk in the center of the room sat an intense bespectacled man in his early forties.  Since I put no stock in the occult and the reading cost one thousand rupees, I opted for the fifty-rupee special just for fun.  Before beginning I was instructed to approach an elaborate altar on one side of the room and extract a thick silk thread from one of two highly-polished brass bowls sitting beneath a picture of Sai Baba, the ‘avatar’ whom I had seen vomiting the stone lingam in the movie at the Holy Man Jam a couple of years before.  I did as requested and returned to my chair in front of his desk where I was instructed to place it in the palm of my right hand and make a fist.

        "Now put your fist in the center of your chest, close your eyes and chant your mantra, twenty one times," he said.

        After one or two silent inner repetitions I was overcome by a strong supernatural energy.  When I completed the chanting he instructed me to open my hand.  To my surprise twenty-one knots at evenly spaced intervals appeared in the string!

DEMON EGO

        As the date of Swami's third tour approached I had to get my worldly ducks in line so I went into the city to make reservations.  On the way back I purchased ten rupees worth of hash from a street vendor and a few days later found myself sitting on the roof of the ashram dormitory furtively smoking in the dead of night!  Had I been discovered I would have been shown the door with out so much as a by your leave.

        The incident was troubling because I realized I was not in charge, the charade seemingly unfolding on its own, as if I had been possessed by a malevolent dark energy.   And in spite of prayer and increased vigilance subconscious forces would soon lure me into an even more humiliating situation.

 

 

CHAPTER 7

 

THE SHINING WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE

NOTHING BUT THE BEST

 

        When we got to Hong Kong I was prepared to go to the Sikh temple but the Swami invited me to stay with him in the luxury flat.  The invitation confirmed my suspicion that I was nearly as much an inspiration to him as he to me. 

        One afternoon I was sitting in the living room writing in my diary when my pen broke. 

        "Damn cheap Indian pens!" I groused, throwing it in the wastebasket.

        The Swami glanced up, a look of amusement on his patrician countenance, and said, “What’s the problem, Ram?”

        “All due respect, sir, but India is a useless country.  Can’t even make a decent pen.”

        He got up and went to his room, returning a few minutes later with a brand new gold Cross Pen in its box.

        “What were you doing with such a pen?”  he asked.

"I don't know, Swamiji.  It was just what the Lord sent at the time."

        "That's not good enough.  Forget the Lord,” he replied. handing me the pen.  “Nothing but the best for a spiritual man!

        A few months had my chart done by a retired astrologer living in the ashram.  Before the reading he revealed half a dozen small facts about my parents and early family life that had not been communicated to him by me.

        “You, see,” he said, “I’m not telling you these things to impress you, like the palmists on the street, but just to show you that this is your chart.”

        He proceeded with a reading which over the years has proven to be exceptionally accurate. 

        “In conclusion,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “this chart shows that you are indeed a great king.”

        When I smiled he said, “Unfortunately no one came to the coronation.”

        When the Swami handed me the pen I felt as if the only person who mattered had placed the crown on my head.

 

A CRIPPLED LIMB

 

        The day before the flight to Hawaii I came across the small flat packet of hash, not more than a couple of grams, sandwiched between the pages of a scriptural text and realized I had unknowingly carried it through Hong Kong customs.  The obvious response was to dispose of it, not only because it was third-rate dope I did not want but because its discovery by customs would have put an end to my relationship with the Swami and caused me no end of legal grief, perhaps even a short stint behind bars.

        Incredibly, I could not let it go, as if it were a crippled limb or a scar.  Instead I tucked it neatly between a stack of fresh one hundred dollar bills in my wallet.

        When we boarded the flight for Honolulu the Swami invited me to sit with him in the first class cabin.  .

        "I don't have a first class ticket, Swamiji.  They'll ask me to leave."

        "Don't worry about it, Ram.  When they ask, you can leave," he said dispassionately.

        My mind began to agitate as the flight attendant approached.  The Swami just looked at her and her mind went totally blank. 

        She hesitated, as if trying to remember what she was thinking and said, "time to fasten your seat belt, sir," handing me a pillow with a smile.  "We're about to take off."

        I turned and looked at the Swami who rolled his eyes mischievously.

        "Remember, Ram, nothing but the best."

        After takeoff he blew my mind a second time by ordering bourbon on the rocks and sipping it with great pleasure.

        "If only the devotees could see him now," I thought.

        Next he decided to make small talk, another major departure from form.  Perhaps he was trying his hand at being a regular guy.  I felt honored.

        But as I thought about it I realized that he was saying that one should not get too wrapped up in one’s idea of who one is; that even great Swamis, need to sin intelligently to keep their sanity.

        We disembarked, cleared immigration, and stood in line waiting for customs.  I figured that as long as I was in his energy bubble there would be no trouble, but another counter opened and he moved over at the signal from an agent leaving me behind clutching the oxygen bottle.  When my turn came he had disappeared into the bowels of the terminal.

        The long hair, Indian dress, and oxygen bottle was a bit too much for the customs agents to process.  They went through my luggage with a fine-toothed comb and took me to a special room where I was strip-searched.  As I was dressing the agent asked to see my wallet, which I presented without betraying my agitation.  He looked in it but did not examine the money, perhaps for fear he might be accused of theft, handing it back with a look of genuine disappointment. 

        After depositing the hash in a trash can, I called the contact person to find out where the Swami was staying.  Ananda Ma, the Yagna sponsor and a well-to-do Honolulu native, had put him up in a two hundred dollar a day suite on the top floor of one of Waikiki 's best hotels.  When I rang the bell I was confronted by a white, good-looking, greying, well-dressed woman with a pained expression and the psychology of a pit bull, the antithesis of her name which translates as "The Blissful Mother."

        "What do you want?" she said suspiciously peering through the partially opened door like a housewife checking out a door-to-door salesman.

        "Please tell Swamiji Ram is here," I said, zapping her with a bolt of love which withered and died the minute it hit her aura.  I could see her wheels turning, figuring how to brush me off.

        “Who is it?" said the Swami, hip to her game.

        "Sri Ram," she said dejectedly.

        "Show him in."

        One of the scriptures says something to the effect that a person who lies to his or her guru will spend a thousand lifetimes in a fiery hell.  So far I had not put myself in that position and this was as close as I would come.

        "Have problems with the customs, Ram?" he said glancing up from his work.

        "Yes, Swamiji.  It was my clothing.  They thought I was a freak,” I said, handing him the oxygen bottle.

        "No law against clothing.  What did they want?"

        "They have profiles, Swamiji.  Means if they don't like the way you look they can hassle you."

        "What did they want?" he repeated.

        "They were looking for dope,"

        "Well, it's good you did not have any," he said in such a way I thought he knew.

        "They were disappointed.  They actually made me strip.  Did they give you any problems? " I said moving the conversation on.

        "It's not my karma," he said enigmatically, turning back to his work and motioning me to sit.

        I could not tell what he was thinking.  The way he said, "It's not my karma," made me think the statement had meaning other than the obvious.  Perhaps I was just a bit paranoid, but it did not matter because that was the end of it.  

        I took a seat on the sofa and began telling the beads, the Blissful Mother breathing fire nearby.  After a few minutes I settled in, putting my bare feet on the edge of the coffee table, decidedly an impolitic gesture.

        "Take them off," she said with vehemence.  "Who do you think you are?"

        I looked at her disinterestedly letting them linger a couple of seconds too long, causing her to unleash a volley of verbal abuse that would have done a fishwife proud.

        "Why don't you say something!" she said when it was clear I was not rising to the bait.

        "What's to say?” I replied.  “You obviously have it in for me.  I won't be drawn into an argument, but if you want my opinion I think you're not angry for the reason you think you are."

        The Swami perked up.

        "And what might that be?" she said with contempt.

        "I do not know for sure but it can't have anything to do with me.  You do not even know me."

        "I do not have to know you to know that you have bad manners," she shot back.

        "That's a matter of opinion," I replied. "I just have the sense that such a small breach of etiquette should not evoke such anger.  My feeling is that you're angry because you can't keep the Swami all to yourself."

        I'd evidently hit the nail on the head because she turned and stormed out in a fury.

        The Swami burst out laughing and, looking affectionately at me, said, "Very good, Ram.  "Never come down."

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BLISS

        According to legend, Buddha, like many illumined souls, struggled valiantly with a Temptress called Mara whom he defeated just before attaining enlightenment.  I made it past the dope demon by the Grace of God, but one more lesson, full of ironies, awaited.  My Mara was a thirty something woman named Marla who had shown a decidedly unspiritual interest in me during the first Hawaii yagna.

        This time around I had just taken my seat during the evening talk when she appeared looking like a film star and pointedly took a seat next to mine.

        "How are you, Ram?" she said her voice full of love as she took my hand.  "It's so good to see you."

        "Very good, Marla," I replied barely able to conceal my agitation.

        "You're still with the Swami," she said stating the obvious.

        "Can't get enough," I replied. "I'm not leaving till I get moksha."

        "You seem pretty liberated to me," she said stroking the back of my hand affectionately.

        "Yes, it's been fantastic, India with Swamiji," I replied.  "But there's more.

        "I'd love to hear about your trip," she said.

        "Well, yes.  Why not?"

        "Perhaps we could meet after the lecture," she said.

        "There's satsang at the hotel," I replied.

        "My, you are dedicated.  I like that.  How about tomorrow?”

        "About the only free time I have is in the afternoon."

        "Let's have lunch."

        We met for lunch at the Royal Hawaiian and sat outside under an umbrella on the veranda overlooking the beach, enjoying a fine lunch.  I told her of my spiritual experiences, hoping she would realize I was not in the market, but my spirituality seemed to turn her on even more.

        "That's incredible," she said when finished.  "And the way you tell it, makes it come alive.  Come on, let's take a walk."

        Grabbing my hand, she pulled me onto the beach.  She was an attractive woman, several years older, well dressed and obviously rich.  I wish I could report that my mind remained fixed at the feet of the Lord, but it immediately began contemplating a different kind of bliss.  We walked down the beach arm in arm making small talk, flirting, enjoying each other.

        "I've got to go now," I said after we'd walked to Diamond Head and back. "The Swami will be finished with his nap and satsang will start in a few minutes."

        "Skip it today, Ram," she cajoled.  "Come over to my place for a cup of coffee.  There's much more I want to know about you."

        A totally different path opened up.  I had to be clear.

        "Sorry, Marla.  I'd love to, but I can't miss satsang.  The Swami will be expecting me."

        "Expecting you?" she said doubtfully.  "I wouldn't think he would expect anybody."

        "Well, you're right on one level," I replied. "But he has very traditional views.  If I missed even a single event he'd ask what I'm doing.  I don't want to have to tell him I'd been having coffee with a beautiful woman during satsang.  It wouldn't go down too well."

        "You've got to be kidding," she said, her voice full of disappointment.  "What is he, your father?"

        "Not exactly, Marla.  But there's more going on here than lectures.  He's a great mahatma and I'm his disciple.  I have to do what he wants."

        "That sounds pretty weird," she said.

        "Don't get me wrong," I replied.  "I want to do what he wants.  I'm no dummy, Marla.  I know what I want and I need him.  And he wants for me what I want, so it's not like I'm just there out of duty or idle curiosity.  He's done a lot for me.  I wouldn't be where I am today without him.  I can't disappoint him.  He's taken me where I could never go on my own.  There are certain rules that I have to follow or the whole thing goes down the drain."

        "What whole thing?" she said.

        "My moksha, the relationship with the Swami."

        "You're incredible," she said.

        "Why?"

        "You really believe this liberation stuff!"

        "I don't believe it, Marla.  I know it.  I've tasted it.  I have it most of the time.  There are just a few small doubts in the way.  Why shouldn't I believe it?"

        "You're incredible," she said unable to conceal her irritation.  "You're very grandiose.  You actually think you can get what the Swami has.  How can you even compare yourself to him!"

        "The Swami was just a regular guy when he was my age, Marla.  He didn't become like that overnight.  He's worked hard on himself for over twenty-five years.  It is possible.  I know it.  And I'm well on the way.  I have to do it right.  I'd be glad to meet you in the afternoons but I cannot miss anything."

        "I have to say I admire your spirit," she replied, the love returning to her voice.  "Can I drop you off at the hotel?"

        "I have to stop by my room and pick up my Gita for tonight," I replied.

        "Never mind," I'll take you.

        Not one to be denied, Marla realized I was vulnerable.  Perhaps she liked a challenge.  As soon as I took my seat for the evening talk she appeared and sat down, causing concern.  The Swami was sharp as a tack, not the innocent type, and would notice a pattern and draw conclusions.  I did not want him getting ideas.

        "Fancy meeting you here," she said in a sexy voice.

        "Hi, Marla.  How's it going?"

        "Great!  Absolutely great.  I ca not say how much I enjoy sitting with you.  You've got great energy," she said caressing the back of my hand, causing panic.

        "Thank's for the compliment."

        "Oh, it's not a compliment, Ram.  It's the truth.  You do have great energy," she replied, giving my ego the kind of strokes it loved.

        "By the way," she continued.  "What are you doing after the lecture?" 

        "The satsang as usual," I said.

        "Oh," she said, "I just talked to Ma and she said the Swami needed rest and would not be giving satsang tonight.  He'll take his meal and sleep early.  Why don't you come over and tell me more about your India trip?  I'm thinking of going."

        "Let's see how I feel after the talk," I said removing my hand.  "Right now it's time for my meditation," I lied, since I was already in meditation.

          When we stepped into the warm tropical evening she took my arm and suggested a walk on the beach.  Too overwhelmed to resist, I agreed. Caught with the dope I would have been taken into custody and I would have had the sense never to show my face again.  But this was different.  If I slept with her the word was bound to get out and I would be ruined.  And things were progressing to the point where if I did not sleep with her she might spitefully tell The Blissful Mother I had, handing her a tailor-made opportunity for revenge.  I felt trapped.  And disappointed that I was not as far beyond my sexuality as I thought.

          Suddenly I longed to be back in India , the land that gave birth to the Kama Sutra, where ironically temptation had not been a problem.  A woman would never make her feelings known to a man outside marriage.  And the Swami's views on sexuality were decidedly unsuited to the have your cake and eat it too philosophy.  He was treating me like a man, master of my senses.  To his mind God was God and sex was sex, a ‘stinking cesspool of sensuality.’  But I was back in America where the sexual revolution was in full swing, in the prime of life, and in the attractive position as the disciple of a spiritual master.

          I managed to keep her at bay with inspired talk on higher subjects for the rest of the evening, but when we parted she kissed me with such passion my body was shaking like a leaf in the breeze as I climbed the stairs to my room.

          If I had loved my teacher as much as I loved myself I would not have given Marla the time of day.   Not that I shared his views on sex, but because sex was not in my contract.  And secondly, the attraction had nothing to do with real love.  In his heart of hearts I do not think the Swami gave a damn one way or the other either, but he was a spiritual master, a public figure, conservative Hindu who lived an impeccably moral life and anything I did reflected back on him, so I should not have even considered it.

          The verse for the morning class came from an ancient text entitled ‘Narada Bhakti Sutra’ which loosely translates as ‘a train of thoughts on Divine Love.’  The text distinguishes between the love of God and ‘the love of a paramour.’  Even in my confused state, the irony was hard to miss.  Afterwards, struggling with my lust, I went for a walk along the beach.  True to form, the ego childishly tried to convince me I could give Marla what she wanted without suffering any untoward consequences.

          I turned off the beach and, for old time’s sake, entered the International Market Place , which was just opening for business.  The lovely cool morning with the sun slanting through the palms, illumining the drops of rain that still clung to the flat green leaves of the tropical plants, reminded me of the morning the Lord had broken through my misery and taken over my life in front of the post office, a scant two blocks away.  About twenty yards ahead I noticed a young woman coming in my direction.  As she approached I could feel the sexual energy concentrate itself to such a degree that I thought I was going to have an orgasm.  Then suddenly, when she was about fifteen feet away, it moved up the spine and became finer and finer until it came to rest in the brow chakra where it transformed into a powerful radiant light where it lingered for a split second.  Then my mind tuned to her mind and the light, like a laser, pierced her brow chakra.  She immediately broke out in a radiant smile and ran up to me gasping, "You! You! You did this!"

        "I did not do it." I replied.  "It just happened."

        "But it came from you.  I could see it.  My God, what's happening to me," she said caught up in a wonderful inner experience!  "Who are you!  Who are you!  What is going on! "

        I invited her to sit on a nearby bench.

        "This is wonderful," she said.  "Fantastic.  What is it?"

        "The experience of the inner Self," I replied.

        "The inner Self?"

        "Yes, just like you have an outer self, a body and mind, you have an inner spiritual self."

        "This is unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable.  I've never felt so good."

        "We call it bliss, the joy of the Self," I replied.

        "We?  What religion are you?"

        "No religion.  I'm the disciple of an Indian Swami and follow the path of Self-Knowledge."

        "But how did you do it?" she asked.

        "I did not.  It was as much a surprise to me as it was to you.  I was just walking along thinking about things when I felt this strong energy rise up and concentrate itself between my eyes.  Before I could even understand what was happening it was passing into you.  It was entirely the will of God."

        "God?  I do not believe in God," she replied.

        "It does not matter.  God believes in you.  He wanted you to experience Him."

        "Are you crazy?  Nobody experiences God.  It's just a belief that some people have."

        "That's true," I countered, "but we call this experience of deep inner peace and bliss the experience of God.  It does not really matter what you call it.  Perhaps God is not the best word.  We call it the Self.  It isn't a person as much as it is a kind of dynamic formless spiritual energy.  I would not have believed it either but it has happened to me too many times to doubt it.  My guru experiences it all the time and I do too, with small exceptions."

        "Your guru?" she said doubtfully.

        "Yes.  When the inner Self is awakened many strange things happen, things that can cause a lot of confusion.  So it's good to be around someone who knows about the inner world, who can help you to sort out what's going on, a guide."

        "I think you must be my guru," she said.

        "No, I don't think so," I replied.  "I'm not a guru.  I still have a lot to learn.  This kind of thing happens when the mind gets concentrated.  It is not something I control.  I'm just a student."

        "So where is your guru?  Maybe I could see him."

        I told her about the talks, hugged her, and continued on my walk full of wonder.  It was not until late afternoon that I thought about Marla.  The lust was completely gone.

        The evening class consisted of a lecture by the Swami on the following verses from the Gita. 

        “When the mind dwells on the objects of sense, attachment arises.  From attachment comes desire which leads to anger.  Anger engenders confusion which results in loss of memory.  Loss of memory destroys the intelligence and the soul perishes.  But the one who maintains discipline, moving among the sense objects with the senses free of attraction and repulsion and under control of the Self, attains the highest state."

        When the talk was over Karen, the woman from the market, came up and said, "I don't know what's happening but it sure is wonderful.  It's still going on.  Do you think I could talk with the Swami?"

        "There's a small meeting tonight after the talk.  I'll take you along.  People can ask questions."

        "I don't know how to thank you," she said with real feeling.

        "Don't thank me.  Thank the Lord,"

        As we walked out Marla came up dressed to the nines, looking positively edible.

        "Marla, Karen," I said.  "We're going to the satsang.  Would you like to come?"

        "No thanks, Ram," she said with obvious disappointment.   “I had hoped we could go for a walk."

        "How about lunch tomorrow at the Royal Hawaiian?" I said.

        "Yes, that's good," she replied perking up. "At noon ?"

        " Noon 's fine.  See you then."

        "Who's that?" said Karen with interest.

        "A lady who has the hots for me," I replied. "I have to give her the brush off but hate to hurt her feelings.  I'll take care of it tomorrow."

        "So being a disciple means you have your fill of gorgeous women," she said.

        "I need gorgeous women like I need a hole in the head.  I'm no saint."

        Karen's interest transferred to the Swami during the satsang and I breathed easier.

        The next day as we sipped coffee after lunch Marla said, "You know Ram, I think I owe you an apology."

        "What for?" I replied with surprise.

        "For not appreciating how into your spirituality you are.  I've never met anyone so focused."

        "I can't be that focused, Marla," I replied. "Until yesterday I really had it bad for you."

        "You did?  I couldn't tell.  It's hard to know just where you're at.  Why until yesterday?"

        "The night before last I put it in the hands of the Lord and yesterday the weight lifted off."

        "The weight?" she asked.

        "The conflict between my spiritual path and the love of a woman."

        "Does there have to be conflict?" she replied.

        "On some level I suppose not.  But I'm at the place where I have to make certain I have enough Self love to last forever.  I can't be trying to get it from the outside, from someone else.  When I'm one hundred percent sure that I am love, that it can never leave, I'll be able to love someone else purely.”

        "I don’t like what I'm hearing," she said with emotion, "but I appreciate your honesty.  I have it bad for you too, but you're right.  It will never work.  We're not even close to the same place.  I like the spiritual idea but I'm not ready to live it like you and the Swami.  I still have my desires.  I hope you get what you want. "

        From that point on I didn’t look twice at a woman until I got what I wanted.

 

 

 

BREATHLESS

 

        After the San Francisco yagna, which was like a homecoming, I visited my parents just to reassure them I had not ‘gone off the deep end’ as mother expressed it.  The Swami did not bat an eye when I informed him I was leaving, just glanced up from his writing for a second.

        They did think I had gone off the deep end but loved me anyway. I had been a problem to them all my life.  I tried to get Mother interested in a spiritual path but she was not having any.

        "That's all well and good, James," she said "but the Lord doesn't bring home the bacon."

        Ever one to have the last word, I replied, "The Lord is the bacon, Mom."

        On another occasion she nearly broke into tears when she found me in the TV room in a dhoti with a sandalwood paste third eye sitting in meditation pose chanting a sanskrit mantra.

        "I don't get it, James.  What's wrong with your own religion?"  This from a woman who claimed she had serious doubts about the divinity of Christ.

        I could understand her views.  Having ‘failed’ at everything important in life, I had committed the ultimate rebellion, transforming from a WASP into a WASH , a white Anglo-Saxon Hindu.  I would have to wait twelve long years for understanding, when, a few months before her death, she said, "Perhaps I was wrong expecting what I did from you.  I realize now that everyone has to find his own way.  I think you've done a good job getting yourself together James."

        Dad, always a decent guy who loved me no matter what, thought I should be worrying about my future, but did not rag on me like mom.  And when the time to leave came he slipped me a couple of hundred on the sly.

          Because I was forced to rely completely on the Self, the separation from the Swami strengthened my meditation.  During this visit I found myself in the state of ‘non-existence,’ nirvikalpa samadhi, many times.

          Vedic culture has systematically identified and catalogued all states of consciousness.  Samadhi is a term describing a state of mind in which all experienced objects have equal value.  A quaint example from scripture says that a person in samadhi sees no difference between a lump of gold and the excreta of a cow.

          Samadhi is classified as savikalpa and nirvikalpa.  Savi means ‘with’ and vikalpa roughly means mental activity, i.e. thought or feeling.   So savikalpa samadhi is a state of meditation in which mental activity is witnessed from the Self as if one were the sun shining down on a turbulent ocean.  Self-realized souls see everything equally, treat everything and everyone the same.

          ‘Nir’ means ‘without.’  So nirvikalpa samadhi is a state where the mind has stopped putting out thought and merged into the Self, like an ocean without waves.  In this state the outside world and the mind are not experienced so there is nothing to treat equally to anything else.  Because language is dualistic this non-dual state cannot be described.  The experience reported in the last chapter when I found myself living without breathing is the best I can do.

          By this time I was in savikalpa samadhi ninety five percent of the time.   Only on rare occasions would I get identified with the mind for a few hours.  But the intense sadhana I had been doing had burned out some unconscious tendencies, which in turn opened up a bit of space and took a little pressure off the mind so that occasionally it just dissolved. 

          Sometime in the fifties a yogi came to a small village in Eastern India , had a hut constructed, went in and sat down.  Twenty-five years later he had not moved, eaten, or slept, the only observable change being the length of his hair and nails.  After he had been sitting ten years another yogi appeared and took up a seat nearby.  As time passed their fame spread and they became known as the brother yogis and attaining the status of gods, that is, they became objects of worship.  Eventually declared national treasures they were kept under lock and key and once a year, on Shiva's birthday, a government official unlocks the door and permits pilgrims who come in the thousands from all over India to file respectfully past for their darshan.

        Not that I was at that stage or even wanted to be, but life with Mom and Pop made this samadhi possible because, except for dishes, there was nothing to do.  I would drive out to the rolling hills on the edge of town where I used to roam with my dog as a child, sit on a rock, and disappear.

 

 

 

MEDITATION

        The Swami actually did a double take when he entered the lecture hall and found me sitting in my usual place.  I could see he was tickled pink I had shown up for the last dance.

        "Ram Ram" he said with great affection.  "You're here?"

        When Buddha attained enlightenment they say flowers showered from heaven.  I think this means that since the universe is a temporarily self-forgetful extension of the Divine in time and space, it becomes happy when some small part, a human being, crosses the threshold and remembers who it is.  Maybe a better way to put it is to say that as you approach the Center you start to vibrate with the vibration of the whole cosmos, like a tuning fork.  Up until this moment, with a few duly noted exceptions, a sense of watching things, witnessing them from a hidden dimension had characterized my experience, but when I arrived in India the third time, that fine spiritual sense of separation began to dissolve and an oceanic feeling of identity with everyone and everything arose.

        Several weeks after my arrival the Swami called me to his room.  He sat on the edge of his bed and I stood in front of him in the manner of a devotee.  The room was suffused with light and time stopped.  I could hear my heart beat and see each and every thought with crystalline clarity as it arose and subsided in the mind.  A crow lit on a branch, made a few desultory squawks, and peered intently into the room.  He sat in silence for a long time as the sun dropped behind the mangos and the heat of the day began to dissipate.  I noticed how tired and old he was, how frail and delicate, bound to life by the thinnest thread.  I understood his heroism, willingly crucifying himself day in and day out on the cross of the world’s ignorance.  I felt a great wave of tenderness followed by the thought that I had to finish my sadhana before he died.  I loved these moments more than anything.  Just the two of us, totally self-aware, totally one, participating in an ageless ritual, the passing of the torch.

He looked up and said, "I want you to meditate."

        "Swamiji?" I said, completely surprised.  "I've been in meditation since we met give or take a few days here and there."

        "That's true, Ram, but that's been my glory," he said without a trace of egoism.  "You've figured out how to tune in, but now I want you to find this state on your own, using the knowledge you've been given.  These states you've been experiencing have just happened.  It is important to know exactly how to get there, not just for you but so you can show others."

        I nodded.

        He continued. "I won't always be around.  You ca not rely on your relationship with me.  Access to the Self should not be dependent on the guru.  You have to find it yourself."

        I nodded.

        "The way I understand it, Swamiji, is that I'll just stay in this state until my tendencies burn out and then there won't be any need to get here ever again.  I often sit and meditate."

        "That's not meditation," he said, "but just a small calming of the mind.  You have to go beyond the mind altogether.  You have to evolve your own yoga."

        The discussion was over.  He looked up, his eyes brimming with love.  I realized I had known him in many births and that this was the last time we would meet.

        "You can go now, Ram," he said, dismissing me so I would not see his feelings.

 

***

 

        A bit confused, I returned to my room to think because the Swami was a Vedantin, not a meditation master.  One day during an informal satsang a newcomer, overwhelmed by the powerful meditation, asked, "What is your meditation technique, Swamiji?"

        Surprised and amused, the Swami said, "Technique?  I have no technique.  I am the technique," an idea totally consistent with Vedanta where meditation is the result of Self Knowledge.  Now he was talking yoga, Self Knowledge through meditation.  It seemed odd.

        But he was right.  I was not a master of my mind.  I had never tried to reach the Self with meditation technique, unless you call love of God a technique.  Until this moment I simply accepted my meditation as the Grace of God.  Since the initiation in the shower at Redwood City things had happened so effortlessly I just went along with them, assuming that in the fullness of time all would be revealed.  Evidently the fullness of time was now.  His instructions, of course, were completely in keeping with his teaching in another sense: spirituality was a science, one performed experiments to achieve certain results.  Meditation as a craft was the next experiment.

        ‘Meditation,’ he said the following afternoon looking squarely at me, "depends on knowledge.  It is true you can just follow a technique and things will happen but without the knowledge of the Self how can you know what the final state is?  Many people get peace or bliss from calming the mind and assume that is all there is to meditation.  So they stop short of the final goal.  The Upanishad gives a very clear definition of what we are seeking.  If you come upon an inner experience or state you can check it against your knowledge.  In this way you discriminate the mind from the Self.  Meditation practice is only a temporary situation, a technique that shows you the Self.  Once you have experienced It and identified It as your Self, what need is there to meditate?  Meditation is your nature."

        I knew all that, but got what I was looking for in the idea that followed.

        "All techniques have common elements because the body-mind-ego complex is universal. All involve working with the breath, synchronizing it with the mind, withdrawl of attention from the material sheaths, concentration on the Self, and so on.  Though there are many techniques, the seeker has to be ready to experiment on his own, to work with the breath and the mind based on the idea that where the flow of thought has ended the mind merges into its source, the Self."

        The hints were useful.  The first time I tried, the next day after the morning class, the doorway to the Self yielded. I felt empowered because I understood that I was no longer tied to an outer path.  I had no intention of abandoning our relationship or the Vedanta because something in me knew that there was something beyond meditation, something that needed to come through the guru.  And by this time I loved him so much I would have been willing to hang around forever, enjoying his presence.  Nonetheless I was overjoyed that I had successfully used my own knowledge of the body and mind to attain transcendence.

        "What is the point of practicing all your life?" the Swami often said.  "Religion can become as confining as worldly life.  Once upon a time a man came upon a lion that had stepped on a thorn and was suffering immensely.  He took compassion, offered to remove the thorn, and the lion agreed.

        "One thing I neglected to tell you," said the man.  "This is going to hurt."

        "Never mind," said the lion, "if I ca not walk I'll die."

        "The man took another sharp thorn, pushed it into the wound and popped out the first, much to the relief of the lion."

        "So what did he do with the second thorn?  He threw it away.  Similarly, religion removes the thorn of worldly suffering.  Then you are free to live.  What use is it once you know who you are? "

        I was now so close to what I was seeking I could almost taste it.  It was not a knowledge that could be imparted verbally or understood intellectually.  I had enough Self experience to know what It was.  In fact my soul was humbly and expectantly standing before the Lord just as I stood in front of the Swami when receiving instructions.

        That I saw God every minute of the day and experienced His\Her unalloyed mercy was not enough, however.  One small essential bit of information was missing.   Meditation was an exciting, playful sport.  As I probed deeper into the causal layers of the mind I came upon extraordinary ‘lokas,’ fields of experience where the seeds of the soul's destiny lay dormant, ready to sprout when activated by karma.  Worlds of indescribable beauty on the one hand, the realm of the gods, and worlds of damnation and torment on the other, the hell realms.

        During one session I re-revisited siddha loka where I had experienced Ramakrishna, a plane peopled with the subtle forms of realized souls many of whom I had met in past lives.  A feeling of gratitude arose when I realized that without them I would never have come to this point in my evolution.

        On another occasion I entered a hellish protean elemental world irradiated by a strange arc light and populated by shadowy souls emitting bizarre tortured sounds.  These beings, endowed with long stringy plasmic bodies, sped about in torment seeking release from their scorching narrow universe.

        My attention became so subtle and powerful that I observed thoughts in their seed state before they manifested in the mind.  The more I watched the more I became aware of the watcher, the Self.  And invariably a merger would take place, a subtle ‘click’ as I passed out of time and space into the timeless spaceless Reality.

        I learned how to stop the mind by turning my attention away from it and putting it in the Self.  A verse in scripture, "When pure awareness blends with a thought in the intellect the experience of knowing is produced," confirmed what was happening.  When I withdrew my awareness from the mind it died, leaving only pure Awareness, the Self, shining in great splendor.  Returning attention to the mind caused the world to appear like a movie on a screen!

        Mind control brought cornucopias of bliss, ecstasy so powerful I would lie for hours without moving, like the night I discovered sex.  Life, the guru, and my quest suddenly became supremely uninteresting and I found attending class difficult.  Playing hooky, however, was unthinkable.  Though he called himself a ‘modern’ swami, Chinmaya was about as modern as Moses.  Except for a family visit, I had not missed a single class, satsang, or official function of any kind.  He soldiered on.  Therefore, I soldiered on.

        One night during an outdoor lecture in Bombay at the oval near Churchgate Station attended by thousands, unable to come up with a quote to illustrate the meaning of a verse, he appealed to the audience for the answer but drew a blank.  Though I knew the quote, I was sitting too far away for him to hear.  He shrugged it off and went on.

        The next morning, I was simply too exhausted to get out of bed and missed my first meditation.  Prepared for a taste of the lash, I wandered over to his hut where he was giving darshan.  When I came in he stopped everything, looked at me with a baleful eye, and inquired of my whereabouts. 

        "Remember the quote you were looking for last night in Bombay , Swamiji?" I said.

        "Yes, so what?" he said with obvious irritation.

        "Well it applies to my case," I said. "Do you want to hear it?"

        "OK, Ram.  This better be good."

        "It is Swamiji."

        The devotees shuffled because speaking with familiarity to the guru was a violation of custom.

        "The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak," I said.

        He burst out laughing.  "Very good Ram!" he said heartily. "You're

forgiven."

DORMAT SADHANA

        One afternoon, during siesta, in a terribly exalted state of God consciousness I was walking around the gardens telling the beads.  The sun was extremely hot so I decided to go to a refreshment stand in the park next to the ashram for a cold drink.  The grounds were deserted (‘mad dogs and Englishmen’) so I made my way down the path to the park where I sat in the shade sipping a Limca, a carcinogenic version of lime soda.  I returned about fifteen minutes later apparently unobserved. 

        The next day, Sunday, during satsang in the temple, which was large enough to accommodate the weekend crowd from Bombay , a man asked for an explanation of the concept of ego.

        "Ego is the need to be different, to think you're special," said the Swami, looking pointedly at me.  Suddenly I felt the sinking sensation that accompanies the knowledge that you are about to be royally exposed, vainly hoping he would not humiliate me in front of the crowd.  I had tasted the lash before and took it like a man, but this attack was notable for its ferocity.  And to this day, though there was truth in it, I do not think it was fair.  There was something personal in it, something that signaled a change.

        I was not unaware of my ego and its arrogant tendencies.  I would have suffered almost anything to rid myself of it once and for all, but that is not how it is.  Ego is a superimposition on the Self, a false personality built up over lifetimes, a carefully constructed edifice of fear and desire designed to protect oneself from the aggressions and cruelties of the world.  No spiritual dynamite can reduce it to rubble in a matter of seconds.  And if it is reduced to rubble, it miraculously reconstitutes itself in seconds.  Unlike an atrophied limb, it cannot be surgically removed but has to be patiently dismantled thought by thought over a long time. 

        "Ram thinks he's special," he said with great scorn as two hundred and fifty heads turned in my direction.

        "He thinks he's beyond the rules.  He's convinced he's not a human being.  He dresses up like a yogi and prances off in the middle of the afternoon to the tea shop with his mala conspicuously twirling.  He wants the world to know he's spiritual."

        In fact I was just thirsty and certain no one was about.  He paused to let it sink in.  I sat still, completely detached, listening carefully, discounting his anger.

        "Just who do you think you are?" he said rhetorically with scathing contempt. "You think you're God's gift to the human race.  You believe there has never been anyone as wonderful as you.  Your idea is that the world should beat a path to your feet and worship you!  What nonsense!"

"Spirituality's not about building ego, it's about destroying ego.  You were a big sinner and now you fancy yourself as a saint and you want the world to recognize you."

        He paused to let it sink in and continued, "You're nobody.  You're nothing.  You know how you should be thinking?  You should think that you're a doormat!  A doormat!  Do you hear!!”

        He was shouting at the top of his voice.

        "You should let the world walk over you every minute of the day, wipe its feet on you, grind you into the dirt.  This is not spirituality.  You think you're so clever, so wonderful, but you're wrong.  You're nothing but a doormat, do you understand!  A doormat!!”

        I nodded.

        The storm abated and he continued talking in a calm voice.

        I should have been devastated but, oddly, felt quite good.  Not, I think, because his point was well taken, which it was, or because the barrage of energy lifted me higher, which it did, but because I realized he was projecting, sharing his personal solution to the ego problem.  He had a similar kind of ego and kept it in check by serving the world, doormat sadhana, if you will.  It was a good lesson.

        But it was the beginning of the end. 

        The change was inevitable because I had learned the fundamentals of self inquiry so I did not need to be there for that reason.   Secondly, there was no danger that I would ever go back to the old way of life.   And finally, I think he felt uncomfortable that I was getting to know him a little too well on the relative plane. 

        I do not say this because I fancy myself a profoundly insightful person, but simply because I was probably the only non-attached person who consistently observed him every day in every situation from dawn till dusk.  Most saw him in tightly regimented public situations, the classes or the satsangs, or in short interviews.  In addition, the Indian guru-disciple relationship is practiced across a wide gulf of respect, superstition, fear, and need.  The guru is a kind of absolute monarch, always partly concealed in a cloud of mystery.  So you are never dealing with a real person.  He was by his own admission, ‘an institution.’  This is not to say that there was not a real person there, but that that person was faithfully serving an institution, and as such could not afford to be a person.  So, some things that he needed to look at were not getting looked at because of his position. 

          I was not looking for weaknesses or inconsistencies, but my mind was open so I saw everything.  I am not suggesting he had anything to conceal.  He was not an uncultured small minded guru chasing power, wealth, fame or pleasure.   He was a very classy dignified guy.  But, odd as it sounds, I think the intense awareness I focused on him brought up feelings he was ill prepared to deal with.  

          One day, a month or so before the end, I was sitting in class in an extraordinary state.  The body was automatically assuming complex yogic postures, the mind was so radiant with Consciousness it was subtly affecting the other students.  Gradually, in response to the energy the students in my vicinity moved away until there was a noticeable ring of empty space around me.  I think they must have unconsciously felt someone was spying on them - such is the power of Consciousness.  I came out of my absorption for a minute and noticed that the Swami was looking at me in an unkind way, as if I had consciously done something to mess with the classroom energy, about which he was very possessive.  At the same time I had the sense that he was drawn to me, momentarily envious.  Whatever it was, I understood that I did not belong there any more; I was simply becoming too powerful.

          I say ‘momentarily envious’ because I think seeing me like that, more a god than a human being, must have called attention to the negative side of his own situation.  His karma as a famous jet-setting mahatma put such heavy demands on his mind that it often pulled him down, making him cranky and irritable, sometimes downright nasty.  His body was not well and required a good deal of mental energy to sustain, energy he probably should have invested elsewhere.  My body was young and strong, an asset, not a liability.  He had a highly regimented life.  I was free to do what I wanted, as if I were a ghost, transparent and unreal, unaffected by physical reality.  I did not have to lift a finger or even speak unless I wanted to - which was infrequently.  I could soar and fly and disappear and experiment all day long.  While he squandered his capital at an alarming rate helping others, I husbanded mine, selfishly investing it in pure meditation.  And finally, he had to live with the knowledge that he was nearing the end of his incarnation, whereas I was being reborn into a brand new life.

          Maybe my speculations are off the mark but my perception was accurate; our relationship was starting to become all too human.  No doubt I was fulfilling him in a very deep way, but I was also starting to be a problem.  Yet when the time came to deliver the coup de grace, he played his part with consummate class, like the truly great man he was.

 

A DIP IN THE GANGES

          After lunch one day I sat on my bunk and fell effortlessly into deep meditation.  By this time the unconscious had been so heavily programmed by meditation impressions it was only a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds, before I achieved transcendence.  I experienced all the usual effects: deep peace, radiant light, intense bliss, loss of self.  The body, which had been purified by two years of austerities, seemed insubstantial, the flesh, pure spirit.

          The chakras appeared, vibrating in inner space.  Many believe the chakras are situated in the physical but the physical body actually exists in the subtle body which is made of subtle matter, chitta, and the chakras are vortices, energy centers, in the chitta.  Suddenly, without warning, a powerful force, the subtle body of a yogi, broke into my consciousness through the root chakra awakening an overwhelming feeling of sexual desire, illumining the meditation with redness.  In a fraction of a second his consciousness pierced the root chakra and entered the Heart, lingering for a few seconds as if gathering momentum.  A golden color accompanied by an unbelievable feeling of love flooded my consciousness.  The energy continued its ascent, piercing the throat and brow chakras and dissolving into white light as it passed out of the subtle body and into the thousand-petaled lotus, known as the sahasrar, the Self.  At this point consciousness of inner and outer disappeared and only pure Consciousness, me, remained.

          By this time the experience of the Self did not evoke great wonder as it once had but was a very natural state.  But the piercing of the chakras was truly extraordinary, a kundalini experience with a twist.  Instead of an impersonal kinetic force at the base of the spine as the texts portray it, in my case it was the subtle body of a Himalayan yogi.  Who could it be?  Two strong clues puzzled me for days.  My body gave off the unmistakable stink of strong tobacco for days and the mind was permeated with an image of the Ganges and the Himalayan foothills.

          A couple of weeks later we set off on a trip to Swami's ashram in Uttarkasi, one of the holiest spots in India , high in the Himalayas .  Since the region was off-limits to foreigners, I was to accompany him as far as Rishikesh.  We flew to Delhi , stayed a week while he blessed the eager devotees, and left by car for Haridwaar.

          Because India ’s handmade roads are jammed with every imaginable moving object, the ride from Delhi to the Ganges , about a hundred fifty miles, takes six bone-crunching hours.  To beat the traffic and knock a couple hours off the total, the trip should begin by three or four. 

          Watched by a couple of ravens sitting idly on a nearby branch, I joined the group of devotees shivering in the cold hazy morning, the silence of our meditation punctuated by the sounds of the waking city.  The Swami came out wrapped in a shawl looking very severe, a wondrous golden aura surrounding his elegant form.  The devotees approached and took the dust of his lotus feet with great feeling.  He waited patiently as they finished the ritual, occasionally touching a bent back and uttering ‘Narayana, Narayana’ in a deep otherwordly way, each repetition bringing sweet ecstacies to the mind.  When they had finished they formed a circle around him, their clasped hands pointing heavenward like cathedral spires.  He stepped forward and the circle broke to let him pass.  I opened the car door, he seemed to float in, and we drove off down the deserted streets in silence.

          After a couple of hours, during which not more than half a dozen words were spoken, we pulled up at a roadside tea stall somewhere in the flat fertile farmlands to the north.  Everyone but the Swami got out and ordered breakfast.  He sent me for chai on the sly because the devotees had been instructed by the doctors not to accede to his requests.  I sneaked it back and he sipped it with relish.  A disgusting, sweet, over boiled concoction, chai is as much a part of India as the great god Shiva.

          Within minutes people started showing up and before he could finish his tea we were surrounded by onlookers.  As we were about to leave a peasant woman came rushing up holding her baby high over the crowd to give him darshan of the Swami. 

          Haridwaar is often called the Benaras of the north and is mentioned in the notes of a Chinese traveler over two thousand years ago.  It is situated at the spot where the Himalayan foothills give way to the vast Gangetic plain.  Looking upriver from the ghats, one has the sense that a profound mystery begins here.  A trek upstream would eventually lead to Mount Kailash , the source of the Ganges and the abode of the ascetic god Shiva from whose matted locks the Ganges cascades.

        It is not a large city by Indian standards; one could easily walk from end to end in thirty minutes.  In addition to a noisy, dusty, chaotic main street, hundreds of small shops served by a maze of narrow streets cluster next to the river.  Many sell religious items: statues and pictures of the Gods and goddesses, incense, kum kum (brightly colored powder for the third eye decoration), sacred ash, yogic paraphernalia and spiritual books.  These are interspersed with yogurt shops sporting huge iron woks with piping hot milk cooking slowly over gas fires, fly and bee-infested sweet stalls purveying an unholy array of sugar products (diabetes is one of India's most serious health problems), dharmshalas (cheap accommodation for pilgrims) music shops, restaurants, small shrines, and sari shops.  The narrow lanes teem with colorfully attired Punjabis, Rajasthanis, Gujaratis, Bengalis, and Western-dressed middle class office types from Delhi who compete with dogs, cows, goats, monkeys and beggars for precious space as they wend their way toward the ghats.

        Emerging from the warren of streets, one sees an old temple on top of the last small Himalayan foothill on the left and the Hari Ki Pyari (Light of the Lord) ghat, the city's claim to fame, and one of the holiest spots in India , on the right.

        According to legend a long time ago the gods learned of a chalice of nectar, symbol of the Self, sitting on the bottom of a deep ocean, the mind.  The possessor of this chalice would attain immortality.  The Gods tried to find the chalice but were unsuccessful.

        Dejected, they went to the Vishnu, the omniscient all-pervading Supreme Being and told him of their desire.  Moved by compassion Vishnu agreed to help.

        "Churn the ocean until the chalice comes to the surface," he said.

        "Churn the ocean?  It ca not be done," they said.

        "Sorry,” said the Lord, "it’s the only way.  Think about it.  Maybe you will come up with something."

        In those days mountains had wings and flew around doing what mountains do when they have time on their hands.  Indra, king of the Gods, saw a holy mountain flying around and had an idea.

        Hey," he called, " Mount Mandara , please come down here.  We want to talk with you."

        The mountain, always eager to chat with the king of the Gods, flew over and landed nearby.

        After explaining the situation, Indra said, "So you see, you would make a perfect churn.  You could sit down in the middle of the ocean and enough of you would stick out so we could wrap a rope around your neck and pull.  What do you say?" he said, pleased with his idea.

        "Why not?" said the mountain affably.  "As long as it does not take too long.  I have things to do next week."

        "No time at all," said Indra who had no idea what time was because he lived in a timeless world.  "We'll have you out of here as soon as we get the treasure.  Not to worry."

        The day was hot and Mandara had been flying around all morning so the idea of cooling off in the ocean of milk seemed attractive.  He flew out to the center and settled in.

        "So far so good," said Indra.  "Now we need a rope."

        "There's no rope in heaven that long," said the Gods in unison.  "Not a chance.  Forget it."

        "I hate to admit it but I think you're right," said Indra sitting down in despair.

        Just then Vasuki, the cosmic serpent, slithered by and Indra was struck with another idea.

        "Hey Vasuki," said Indra motioning him over. "I want to talk with you."

        "Ok," said Vasuki, “what's up?"

        Once Indra had explained the situation Vasuki agreed, swam out and wrapped himself around the top of the protruding mountain, his head resting on one shore and his tail on the other.  One group of gods took the head, another the tail.  They pulled and pulled but nothing happened.

        Dejected, they approached Vishnu who suggested enlisting the help of the demons who were very strong, an idea they found distasteful but eventually accepted.  

        Indra instructed the demons to pull on the tail.  They felt insulted and refused.  "You pull it,” they said.  “We want the head."

        The gods did not want the tail either and a furious altercation broke out.

        To resolve it Vishnu suggested flipping a coin.  The Gods got the head so the demons unhappily agreed to pull on the tail.

        After churning enthusiastically for a long time an emerald green chalice glowing with an ethereal light arose from the depths to the cheers of the participants.

        During the discussion about division of the spoils the demons grabbed the chalice and ran off with the gods chasing them all over the cosmos.  Eventually, somewhere over India they caught up, grabbed the chalice, and in the ensuing struggle four drops of nectar fell to earth, landing on holy rivers at Haridwaar, Nasik, Allahabad, and Ujain.

        These places are therefore considered to be extremely sacred and, in addition to serving as pilgrimage centers, host the Kumba Mela, a celebration of immense importance that attracts millions.  Astrologers have calculated to the minute the moment when each drop landed at each spot and it is believed that to bathe in the river at that time washes away all sins.  Although carefully organized, occasionally at the most auspicious moment the crowds stampede into the river many die.  Death in these circumstances is considered fortunate, however, because it is thought to release the soul from bondage to the eternal wheel of birth and death.  Because of this legend hundreds of temples and ashrams have sprung up in Hardiwaar and many mahatmas and yogis reside there contributing to an already charged atmosphere.

        Although last year I literally stood within fifteen feet of the Ganges and direct-dialed the USA , in those days India was not plugged into the information superhighway.  TV was non-existent, the phones barely worked, and the mails were notoriously slow, but the grapevine made the fiber optics of today seem Byzantine.  So by mid-afternoon devotees started showing up like ants attracted to sugar.

        About four the following afternoon the swami came to my room and said conspiratorially, "Come with me, Ram."

        We quickly slipped out of the bungalow and got in the car after waking up the driver sleeping on the back seat.  In ten minutes we were standing on the banks of the Ganges .

        "We'll take our bath here," he said with great love.

        I had never seen him outdoors, alone, away from the devotees.  We were always in University lecture halls, hotel conference rooms, devotee's homes, jet planes, or automobiles going to and fro, surrounded by hundreds of people.  How absurd, almost comic, to see him standing alone on the banks of the river without all the spiritual hoopla, an ordinary human being, indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of sadhus wandering India.  I touched his feet.

        We undressed and stepped into the icy swift river.  I took the downstream side lest he loose his footing in the current.  I would never be forgiven were he to drown, not, I think, that he would have minded.  Tradition dictates that mahatmas be immersed in the Ganges when they die. 

        After the bath we sat in meditation and being downwind of the Swami I caught the , smell of tobacco. The chakra-piercing incident flashed back!  So he was my secret benefactor!  By some incredible yoga he had pierced my chakras, a kind of mystic housecleaning, setting me up for what was to come. 

        I suddenly saw his past, the years of struggle to find the Self, his discipleship and release from the round of births and deaths.  I realized what it must have meant for him to disregard his guru's advice and descend from the Himalayas into the madness of Indian life to bring Self knowledge to the people.  And how could it be that I had successfully negotiated my way through such a chaotic and apparently misdirected life to sit on the banks of the Ganges with this South Indian man who would shortly set me free?  The full significance of what was happening hit me with the force of a ton of bricks as we sat in deep meditation serenaded by the sounds of the river.

        The meditation could have lasted forever but was broken by the sound of a car.  I looked downriver and spied a white Ambassador packed with devotees racing exuberantly up the road next to the river in a cloud of dust.

        He looked at me with a weary face, rolled his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, palms up in a gesture of resignation.

        "What to do? he said, smiling. "They know not who they are."

LETTING GO

        The next morning I was up at three, ready for the ride to Rishikesh.  At ten to four the Swami appeared, looked at his watch, scanned the yard and said with impatience, "Where are the drivers?"

        "Out back, Swamiji, taking chai.  They should be here any minute," I replied.

        "That's not good enough," he said with anger.

        "GET THEM NOW!" he shouted with incredible force.  I can not recall ever being yelled at like that.  My first thought was that my sense of surrender was imperfect - perhaps I should have seen to it that the vehicles were parked out front when he emerged.  But as I ran around back I realized he was just in a bad mood, a spoiled child who was afraid of not getting what he wanted when he wanted it.  A great sense of love flooded over me and I found it very charming that my God had feet of clay. 

        We left at four on the dot.  Thirty minutes later I was standing beside the road in the early morning light, a beautiful Vedic chant, the Ganesha Suprabhatam, wafting from a nearby temple pervading the chill morning air.  My mind turned inward, entered the cave of the Heart, and exploded into meditation.

        I went to the ashram of the swami’s number one disciple, the third mahatma I had met.  Each mahatma was different on the surface, each had is own personality and unique karma, but something about them all was very much the same.  And that sameness came into clear focus during my stay, a sameness that I could now see in myself.  This realization, which was simply knowledge, helped to dissolve my attachment to the swami.

          Letting go of the spiritual path, a gilded crutch, is always difficult - but attachment is attachment.  It would be incorrect to say that I renounced the guru, the good times, the romance of India , the quest, and the teachings, but attachment to these things began to drop away at this time.  Being a seeker meant I was not the Sought.  Being a lover meant I was not the Beloved.   All limitations had to go, particularly the sense that part of me was not included in my experience of God, the part that longed for union and was attached to the Swami and the ‘spiritual’ life.

          As the train sped across the Deccan plateau on the way to Bombay I realized that letting go of outer stuff was still not enough.  I had come to the subtle point where, like anybody driven by a dream, I had to not only let go of the dream; I had to let the dreamer itself go.

          Contemplating a life without the questing needy self induced a wave of fear and I momentarily lost heart.  Though he had been a big fool and made many mistakes, I felt a great affection for him, even though he was little more than a tacky image stuck together by an ignorant schoolchild from bits and pieces of memory.  Still, he had been me for so long I could not imagine life without him.

        These were my thoughts when the train pulled into a station and the usual commotion ensued.  Passengers struggled on and off.  Beggars and kids swarmed through the cars with outstretched hands.  Porters shouted, muscling their way through the crowd.  A couple of goats appeared on the platform and a family of monkeys raced helter-skelter through the iron girders supporting the roof.

        Suddenly, in the hustle and bustle of the moment the mind emptied and my vision shifted.  Everyone and everything became transparent and ghostlike, and I realized that once again the Self was reminding me how it really was.  And, as I had seen so many times, my reality was not reality at all but merely a momentary play of ideas in Consciousness!  I looked at myself, the person to whom I had been so attached just minutes before and re-discovered that he was only a shadow of a shadow.

        I broke into a deep hearty laugh attracting a beggar into whose hand I stuffed every rupee in my pocket, a king's ransom to him.  "Take it," I thought, "you are taking me.  I am yours.  I am you. Take it all."  He looked confused, as if maybe it were not really money, causing me to roar again with laughter.

        What a joke the whole business spiritual had been!  What a lot of serious striving.  How could I get so sentimental and clingy about a mere thought, a phantom appearing in Consciousness?  What use was all the study, meditation, discipline?  What had been gained?  Was I any different for it all?

        He stood before me, frozen in time, his outstretched hand overflowing with rupees, an image of life reaching for a blessing it already had, a manifestation of God shot through with a fine radiance, an eternal shiningness which I recognized as myself.  I was that endlessly blissful self-generating Light projecting from the center of the mind, not the poverty-stricken hungry little dreamlike self illumined by It.  There was nothing to give up, nothing to understand.  As this Light I had everything... and nothing.  As this Light I knew everything that needed to be known... and nothing.  As this light I would shine forever.

        A family, little bundles of Light, entered the compartment.  I nodded, welcoming them as my Self.  As the train pulled out of the station I knew I was nearing the end of a very long journey.

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

        When I arrived at the ashram I went immediately to pay my respects to the swami but he was no longer the big guru.  The mask was gone.  The only way to describe it was that he was me, the Light.

        "Ram, Ram,” he said, with great love.

        "Hari Om, Swamiji," I said talking to myself.

        As I took my place in one corner of the crowded room my whole life flashed before my eyes, every experience superimposed on this eternal radiant Light.

        If my quest had been exciting up to this point it was nothing compared to what happened next; I was literally lifted up into a state so far beyond my ‘equipment,’ as the swami called the body and mind, that I honestly can not remember what went on in the physical world because the experiencer, me, was coming apart at the seams, a salt doll sinking into the ocean.

        For three days an incessant rain of radiant golden light poured out from an unseen inner heaven sweeping away every trace of self, every thought, feeling and emotion... until there was nothing left.

        When the body lay down to sleep the experience continued, sheets of cascading Light, seemingly without end.  When the body got up and went about its business the Light was unaffected.  It rained and rained and rained.  Unable to contain the ocean, the body, a small cup, poured the light into the world, blessing the table, the chair, the walkway, the souls sitting woodenly, comically in front of the Swami trying to grasp the truth.  "It's you!" I wanted to scream.  "It's you!"  But I knew better.

        On the third day the golden rain stopped.  There was a knock at the door.  One of the boys, dressed in white, an angel really, said "Swamiji wants to see you."

        This was it, my last instruction.

        I walked up the path to his hut and entered his room, the silence so overwhelming I could hear my heart beat, the blood coursing through my veins.  God Itself, an ocean of mercy, looked up, smiled, and showed me a chair.

        "How much food do you take everyday?" It said.

        I looked in disbelief and thought, "Here I am talking to God about food.  How absurd!  Who does He think He is, asking about food?  Under my shawl my ribs were showing.  I was every inch an ascetic.  That vice had been mastered.

        A smile appeared on His face as he observed my reaction.

        "I don't know, Swamiji, whatever they give.  I go in with the boys,

take my place and eat whatever is put on the plate."

        The answer seemed irrelevant.

        He paused for a minute, looked out the window, turned to me, cupping His hands and said, "From now on you will take no more than you can hold in your hands."

        "What an odd request," I thought.

        "Swamiji?" I said.

        After a long pause He spoke the words I had been waiting lifetimes to hear.

        "I'm returning you to your original form."

        An intense shudder passed over me and my body filled with a wild ecstasy.  I felt like jumping up and dancing a jig.

        I had come to the end of the road.

        "You can go now," he said.

        I got up, touched his feet, and left.

        Three days later about one in the afternoon as I was sitting on my bed it happened.

        The logic of my crazy life, all the dramatic inner and outer experiences chronicled here point to a dramatic crescendo, the heavenly host singing hosanna to the highest, a cosmic explosion….another incredible something.  But, thank God, it was not like that.  It was the simplest, sanest, most undramatic, anti-climactic non-event in my life, one that has continued unabated to this day, one that will never increase, diminish, or stop.

        I woke up in a timeless world where only I existed, the still point of existence.  I looked around and everything was as it had always been: the wall just a wall, the bed a bed, and me, me.  Nothing was hidden or missing.  I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was no longer necessary to do anything, go anywhere, search for anything.  Everything desirable was in me: infinite peace, infinite love and unqualified freedom.  I understood that I was whole and perfect and would never, could never, change.

        Though words are never right, it was as if the Light that blazed forth with every experience, good and bad, spiritual and worldly, throughout my short thirty years had coalesced into one simple Consciousness and become a permanent feature of my experience.  It would never leave because it was me.  I now inhabited a hermetically sealed capsule, a state of total security and certainty.  Untrue.  I was the capsule.  I would no longer be the me looking into the heart at the Self.  From now on I was the Self looking out through the ‘me’ at the world.

        My guru had erased the veil.

        I left the world of action and entered the shining world of Knowledge, never to suffer the disease of ignorance again.

        The body got up and walked out into the hot afternoon sun.  The ashram was quiet, not a soul to be seen.  A couple of ravens behind the cafeteria quarreled pointlessly over the leavings from the noon meal.  I walked down the path to the park and came upon the body of a man who had just died, a look of perfect peace on his face.  Recognizing him as myself I continued on my way, appreciating the Lord's aesthetics.

        The boy at the teashop was sitting out front listening to the radio.  When he saw me coming he got up and began preparations for the sweetest cup of tea I have ever drunk.

 

 

CHAPTER 8

   

AFTER ENLIGHTENMENT

 

 

          As far as stories go, the quest for enlightenment was easy to chronicle, the plot with its peculiar twists and turns winding inexorably toward its climax.   Now, from the top of my holy mountain a welcoming light-filled landscape stretched endlessly before me, the boundaries that once defined…and confined…me having been obliterated by this secret knowing.

          Knowing that you are limitless renders you fearless and reveals your desires to be as insubstantial as a mirage.  What’s to do knowing nothing can add to or subtract from your happiness in any way?  You become lazy and satisfied.  What can you say knowing nothing important, meaning you, is going to change - forever?  What words, no matter how eloquent, can hold a candle to the Word blazing eternally in every thing you see?

          Paradoxically, enlightenment’s final ending is also a new beginning.  I am pure and perfect, no doubt, and always will be, but some small part of me still needed the not always tender instructions life had to offer.  Whether I come out looking good is up to you to decide.  Or not.  For me, evaluating outcomes is difficult.  An acute appreciation of the unresolved is one of enlightenment’s benefits.  Life is vast.  It carries our small vehicles to unknown destinations and incomprehensibly picks them up like a great wind that blows them on to places we could never imagine.

 

A NECESSARY DISGRACE

 

          A few weeks after the eternal moment on my bed the Swami informed me that I would be enrolling in a two-year course in Vedanta taught by his number one disciple, Swami Dayananda, information I received with mixed feelings.  The idea of learning Sanskrit properly and systematically studying scripture was appealing, but I had attained everything the Veda reveals.  Since nothing he did was innocent or uncalculated, I assumed he wanted me to become a Vedanta teacher in the West.  The Chinmaya Mission is very exacting and turns out highly qualified professional gurus, none of whom to my knowledge have been involved in the tawdry sex and money scandals that seem to perennially plague Hindu swamis.  Not knowing or particularly caring what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and eager to please the person who had given me so much, I agreed.  However, I distinctly remember feeling sad as I walked along the path back to my room.   If you do it right, discipleship happens only once.

          The course began and I took my place among the boys, young upper-caste Indians from middle-class families.  Dayananda’s teaching style was quite different from the Swami’s although the message was the same…you are everything that is.  And over the years my ideas about the most effective way to communicate Vedanta have moved more or less in line with his.  Not that Chinmaya was an ineffective communicator.  Both his words, which rose spontaneously from the spiritual depths, and the extraordinary silence that permeated his whole being awakened and permanently enlightened many.  But he attained great fame so quickly that there was no time to refine his teachings, so, like Kentucky Fried Chicken’s secret blend of eleven herbs and spices, they remained the same for forty years.

          Chinmaya billed himself as a ‘modern’ Swami for reasons that were never completely clear to me.  Perhaps he thought of himself as a reformer, a modern Sankara, whose mission it was to bring the stodgy, hidebound, conservative world of Hindu spirituality up to date by spearheading a Vedantic renaissance in post colonial India .  His teachings became known as ‘modern’ Vedanta, perhaps to widen their appeal in a backward country struggling to enter the modern era.   But on the doctrinal level ‘modern’ Vedanta was actually a hybrid, blurring the boundaries between Yoga and Vedanta.

          Dayananda realized the need to purge Vedanta of the yogic ideas that were co-opting it, particularly the idea of enlightenment as a transcendental experience or an experience of the Self.  In the exuberant years immediately after my enlightenment I did not think about the teachings much, preferring instead to use them to awaken those who were attracted to my energy.  Most who came were introductory level people and they worked fine at that level.  But as I cooled down and the light penetrated into the farthest reaches of my mind I re-entered the ancient texts and realized that at the highest level of spiritual evolution Yoga and Vedanta need to part company.

          In any case, I was impressed with Dayananda’s teachings and decided to tape the talks.  I did not know that taping was forbidden when apprised of this fact by one of the boys.  I also do not know what got into me because I gave the poor fellow quite a dressing down.  Perhaps I felt justified criticizing the backward thinking that so much characterizes India ’s approach to life, but it was actually the Lord using my arrogance to move me on.

          A few days later, after checking with the Swami, he gave me my walking papers. Though humiliated, I was secretly relieved.  Something in me knew that I was not going to spend years in the Bombay suburbs studying ancient Sanskrit texts.  Nevertheless, to save face I went to Chinmaya and asked to be re-instated.  He looked at me with great love and, conveniently forgetting that the course was his idea in the first place, almost shouted, “No!  You will explode upon the society with this knowledge!  Go to California and sit under a tree in the park.  They will come to you.”

          And that was it.

        After paying faithfully for three years Magdalena pulled the plug and I was soon to be dead broke.  I still had enough to stay in India for some time so I decided to visit the ashram of Baba Muktananda who lived nearby in a small Maharastran village called Ganeshpuri.

        As the rickety bus huffed and puffed over the bumpy road that wound through the ancient beauty of the parched rural landscape a few miles from the ashram, I was hit with a bolt of transcendental energy from Baba that filled my body with such bliss I thought I would explode.  As I got down twenty minutes later in front of the temple, the world seemed to be floating in space, magically manifested out of nothingness like the image of a distant city in a mirror.  The ashram had a tentative, dreamlike quality, vaguely theatrical, as if patched together out of thought and feeling by a humorous and loving mind.  And the whole scene was bathed in an effortless and gentle rain of pure blue pointillistic light particles, chit shakti, that seemed to spontaneously dissolve and recreate themselves without reason.

        I set my bag inside the gate, bowed at the altar, and entered a small shady marble courtyard behind the temple where a few people, mostly westerners, were sitting in hushed silence.  A small man in an orange silk dhoti sitting cross-legged on a raised white marble dais turned the moment I entered.  Our eyes met, and I could feel his x-ray vision burn into my soul.  A deep current of prema, divine love, flooded over me as I walked across the courtyard, bowed, and touched his feet.  He looked at me and with great love said, “Who are you?"

        "The Infinite Self," I replied in Sanskrit with a smile.

        He laughed, reached around behind him and unexpectedly crowned me with a lovely hand-made sequined royal purple hat.

        Knowing I could not have attained liberation without help, he asked who my guru was, nodding thoughtfully when I replied and readily assenting to my request to stay.

          Swami Muktananda, Baba, as he was affectionately called, was the disciple of Bhagavan Nityananda, one of India’s all time spiritual giants, a strange otherworldly mahatma known as an avadhut, a class of God-Realized beings who live without possessions, often without clothing, wandering here and there, unaware of the physical universe, leaving a spate of miracles in their wake.

        Baba, for whom I developed great affection, was a shaktipat guru in the tradition of bhakti yoga.  He rarely spoke, unlike Chinmaya, effecting miraculous changes through the transmission of divine energy called shakti.

           After several months, my visa was about to expire so he sent me to the local magistrate.

        "Tell him Baba says to fix it up," he said.

        The magistrate would not grant the visa extension until my health certificate was updated and sent me to the local ‘clinic,’ a run-down shack, for an inoculation.  The doctor asked me to sit in a chair near a small table on which was sitting a pocked porcelain dish containing a couple of used syringes and several bloody cotton balls.  Before I realized what was going on he stabbed me with a used syringe from the dish!  I awoke next day with a painful infection in my upper arm, which quickly swelled to an ungodly size.

        Understandably I was not bristling with confidence in the Indian medical system, so I did not return to the clinic for treatment, deciding instead to rely on the big Doctor in the sky.  After the second day the infection showed no sign of abating and I began to reappraise my view, contemplating the arduous trip to Bombay , but, all things considered, decided to tough it out for another day.

        I was sitting in the courtyard meditating the following afternoon when Baba came out and sat in front of a group of low-caste women who were hunkered down lustily glancing at a pile of saris that had been recently donated by a Bombay merchant.  Never one to miss an opportunity to say a few words about the glories of God, he began to speak about the necessity of chanting the holy name.

        A few minutes later a gust of wind blew my light white cotton shawl up to expose the infection, the flash of white attracting his attention.  He turned back and continued talking to the women whose low state of consciousness and single-minded preoccupation with the saris provided a cover for what was about to happen.  In a few minutes he again turned toward me, still speaking to the women, and made a syringe-like manipulation with his hand which, coupled with a questioning look, made me understand that he was researching the cause of the infection.  I nodded and he turned back to his audience without disrupting his speech.

        Then, as he talked, he turned his head slightly in my direction, and, with my physical eyes I saw a ray of white light emerge from the space between his brows and strike on the swollen arm, which immediately began to deflate like pricked balloon!  A rush of warm tingly energy flooded through me relaxing the muscles.  The skin tightened and the small scab where the needle had entered fell off.  The arm was completely normal!

        He spoke for another minute or two, passed out the saris, got up, and disappeared into his rooms through a small door.

          Baba liked me and l gave me many gifts that would come in handy later on.  Occasionally when I was working on a particularly subtle problem I knew it was about to be resolved when his little dog came waltzing into my room followed by Baba.  He would stand in my doorway, his aura filling the room, silently transmitting vital information. During my stay I had many interesting experiences and met three people who would later figure prominently in my life.

AN EXPERIMENT

          I arrived in San Francisco dead broke and, on a hunch, called John, the merchant seaman I met abroad.  As fate would have it he was in town and invited me to stay.  He let me sleep on the floor and, if memory serves, gave me an old Ford Fairlane.  The Swami tried to set me up with an Indian importer but I was unwilling to work for five dollars an hour.  I drove the streets and dove into dumpsters instead, taking my booty to the Sausalito flea market where I offloaded it for whatever it would bring.  And I have to admit that I was not above ripping off the weekend overflow at Goodwill boxes, breaking into condemned Victorian flats in search of old furniture and fixtures or finessing foolish junk dealers out of their prized possessions.  With food stamps I was able to make ends meet.
         I met a fiery Flamenco dancer with a taste for the occult at a dance one Sunday afternoon in a vacant lot South of Market.  She was much affected by what I had to say and we soon became good friends and indifferent lovers.  Scavenging was a long way from the Waikiki big bucks and the glamorous life with a jet-set export guru but I spent some of the happiest days of my life cruising the streets looking for junk, Felicia at my side sipping coffee.  How fondly I remember sitting in an unholy assortment of Mexican restaurants listening to salsa, eating burritos and talking God or hanging out at the Flamenco clubs in North Beach watching her dance.  She was a bit crazy like all of us but had the eyes of God.  One day, after casing an abandoned hotel in the Tenderloin, she observed me walking toward the truck.  When I got in she said, “You’re beautiful, a walking altar.”                          When we came upon an empty dumpster we marked it on a city map.  On Saturday we would show up mid-morning before it was full so I could meet the occupants of the house and gain access to the premises.  I might offer to clean it for salvage rights or buy anything of value.  One evening in Chinatown I came across a large assortment of oriental antiques in a dumpster.  Before long I had a consistently fat wad of cash in my pocket and a tidy little stash in the bank.
          Tom, who I met at Muktananda Ashram, came back from India and we rented a flat on Cole Street in the Haight Ashbury.  He was a smart, righteous young man committed to his spiritual practice who quickly became my right hand man.  I loved him dearly but there was something menacing and unpredictable about him that occasionally made me uneasy and would eventually affect the physical outcome of the experiment. The experiment was my attempt to focus a number of minds so intently on the idea of Self realization that it just happened.
          How ironic that three years after my psychedelic sojourn through the Haight Ashbury I wound up living in a large Victorian railroad flat just off Haight Street .  By this time we had been joined by Terry who I also in met Ganeshpuri.  Terry was a bright, honest stand-up guy, who faithfully served the experiment for many years.  He had been an officer in Vietnam with a promising military career but what he saw so disturbed him he refused to renew his commission when his tour of duty ended.  He must have been through a lot because he once showed me a picture of himself in full military regalia standing next to a bright-red restored Morgan, the picture of arrogance and entitlement.  When I met him he was a shadow of his former self, a skinny balding washed out ghost-like devotee living off bananas in the ashram of a saint, doing penance and seeking enlightenment.
        With Terry we got a bonus - a stunning Italian artist named Sophia with a dark and unhappy past, ready to sand a lot of furniture to exorcise her demons.  John’s ex-girlfriend, Cindy, a ballerina, joined up.  She was a lovely person, the girl next door.  Spiritual life did not come easy for her.  Several others came and before long the flat was full.
        The flat was just off the Park Panhandle next to a three story Victorian inhabited by the White Panthers, a swaggering group of beastly, lower class, bike-riding drug-dealing, fornicating males - Hells Angels with a political twist.  My specialty is seeing the light in everyone, no matter how cleverly it may be concealed beneath layers sloth and stupidity, but I had to work long and hard to find the faintest glimmerings in any of them.  The women were disgusting too and the place was overrun dogs and stinky, whiny, malnourished half-naked brats… Appalachia on Ashbury.
        While they slept in from wild parties inside their filthy well-fortified bastion, their gleaming chrome ‘hogs’ parked in a line out front, we sat quietly next door meditating and chanting sacred mantras.  Contrary to TM’s claims of meditation’s wondrous power to change the world, to my knowledge not one holy vibration ever managed to find its way next door.  Once, about midnight , one of the panthers decided to fix his car.  He parked it in the middle of the street, jacked it up, turned on the radio full volume and crawled underneath with his tools and a six-pack of beer.  By two I was fed up and shouted for him to turn down the radio.  He ignored me so I went to the pantry, got a big glass jar and hurled it at the pavement from a second story window spraying him with shards of glass.  I am the first to admit it was not enlightened behavior…but it got his attention.  I told him if he did not turn it down I would call the cops, a foolhardy threat if I intended to go on living in the neighborhood.  After a few counter threats to save face he turned it down; there was probably an outstanding warrant for his arrest.  We went in and out through the back door for a few days until the incident was swallowed by the dark haze in this drug-crazed mind.
        I was driving home for lunch one day along the Park Panhandle when I had a vision of a woman sitting at a kitchen table.  When we entered the flat one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen was sitting in the kitchen in a very high state of consciousness.  When she looked at me there was…much more than a ‘connection’…there was a transmission…no…it was more than that…an understanding arose in her, one that would never leave, that she was the Self.
        She was a dancer who had been having many strange and wonderful inner experiences.  Her friends and family, who had no idea what was happening, thought she was mad.   One of the tragedies of materialist culture is its inability to distinguish madness from spiritual experience, although they are not always mutually exclusive.  Instead of support and the counsel of wise elders, both lunatics and the awakened are often shunted off to shrinks and mental institutions; the world fears what it does not understand.
        I spent the afternoon conversing with her, making sure she understood that her awakening was natural and instructing her how to live in the world with the fire of Consciousness blazing in her heart.  Six years later we would marry and embark on one of the most tragic, bizarre and rewarding experiences of my life.
        The money kept rolling in and everyone was enjoying so we took a larger flat in a better neighborhood on Scott Street near the ghetto.   We turned the front room into a meditation hall, sat regularly every morning and worked twelve-hour days.  We vegetarian food together and there was constant laughter and great camaraderie. 
        One day Terry asked if an Eastern European woman he had met in India could come and stay with us.  I assumed that she was the spiritual type since she was connected to Maurice Frydman, a devotee of Nisargadatta Maharaj, who was responsible for the book ‘I am That’ which is now considered a Vedantic classic.  I said yes, not realizing that spirituality was hovering near the bottom on her list of priorities.  All was not lost, however, because when she showed up I knew I had found my next girlfriend.  She was a beautiful young woman, bright, cultured and well-mannered, a petty aristocrat from an Iron Curtain country.  The only problem: what to do about Felicia?  After a bit of family karma the good Lord solved the problem.
        Shortly after Victoria arrived my dad called from Idaho and invited me to attend the World Series in Oakland .  I had no interest in baseball anymore but attending class B ball in Lewiston with him was one of my fondest childhood memories so I readily assented.  I put him up in a nice room next to the meditation hall.  He must have thought we were all crazy but was unfailingly polite and friendly.  In the morning he went out for bacon and eggs in one of the Black eateries along Divisidero Street since our Spartan vegetarian gruel was not to his liking.  I asked Felicia to tidy up his room and put flowers on the dresser.  A few minutes later she was standing in the doorway, her eyes as big as saucers.
        “What’s happening?” I said.
        “He’s a dead man,” she replied.
        Three weeks later I got a call from mom informing me of his death.
        The Series went the full seven games, I think, and at the seventh inning stretch I could sense that he wanted to say something.
        “Let me get you a hot dog, Jim” he said.
        “Sure dad, whatever,” I replied.
        He returned in a few minutes and we sat contentedly munching the hot dogs to the dulcet strains of ‘Take Me Out to the Old Ballgame.’  When the song ended he put his arm around the back of my seat and said, “You know, son, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”
        “Sure, dad,” I replied.  “Shoot.”

          He hemmed and hawed a bit and said, “You know, son, your mother and I have been thinking about your future.”

          “What have you been thinking?” I said, trying to make it easy for him.

          “The Post Office, Jim.  They got some very good jobs down at the Post Office.”

          It was all I could do to keep from laughing.

          “Oh, yeah, Dad, what they got?”

          “Well, there’s several grades, you know.  Now the first ones aren’t bad, about fifteen hundred a month, and you can work up.  They’ve got an exam but I figure you can pass it.  You did pretty good in college.  And they got good retirement packages too.  You’d be surprised.  What do you say?”

          I reached in my pocket and extracted a wad of hundred dollar bills, more than fifteen.  “See this dad?” I said.  “I made this on one deal a couple of days ago.”

          His jaw dropped.  To my knowledge there had not been a businessman on either side of the family for generations, if ever.  Everyone seemed to enjoy the security of working for wages.

          “But you know, dad, I like the idea.  Perhaps when the money runs out I’ll make an application.  You never know what with the economic uncertainty and all.  Thanks for the suggestion.”

 

A RECOLLECTION

 

          That seemed to satisfy him and as we watched the rest of the ballgame in peace my mind drifted back to the Forties and Sunday afternoons in Northern Idaho .  After an idyllic weekend in the country, we would leisurely head home in our 36 Plymouth sedan, my brother and I sitting in the back with the family dog on the plush brown mohair seats, staring out at the rich landscape, bubbling with good feelings, looking forward to Sunday evening.  On arrival we would grab our bikes and disappear into the neighborhood for an evening of hi-jinks.  Our inevitable late return would prompt a scolding and invite a sanction, usually an additional weekly chore.  Then we would reluctantly practice the piano, do homework, and stay up half the night reading adventure tales, Robinson Caruso and the like, under the covers with a flashlight.

          Wild goose chases ruined Sunday nights.  We would be cruising along, dad whistling sappy tunes like “My Darling Clementine” and mom thinking her (always practical) thoughts, when the car would abruptly halt, usually forty or fifty yards beyond a narrow washboardy side road heading out tentatively into the wilderness.  Dad would put it in reverse, steering with his left while he reached over to fumble through the jockey box (the ‘glove compartment’ to mom), and extract a local map.  When we were strategically situated he would hit the brakes, spread the map on the space between them on the front seat, and evaluate it with the dispassion of a sage.  Mom, exercising Herculean self-control, would remain silent, fidgeting consciously to show her displeasure; she knew what he was thinking.

Totally absorbed in the map, seemingly unaware of her mood, Dad would mutter various snippets: "cutoff to Superior , this neck of the woods, Sperry Grade, wonder if they fixed the..."

          Unable to contain herself mom would say, "You're not thinking of taking this road, are you Jim."  Emphasis on ‘not’ and ‘taking.’

          Too involved to reply, he would look up the road and back down at the map several times, like a general plotting an attack.  When he judged the time right, which, of course, it never was, he would scootch toward her side, ceremoniously place the map in her lap with great respect, as if he were consulting the Commander in Chief and point meaningfully to a road less section of wilderness.         There would be a dramatic pause and then, in a conspiratorial tone, he would say, "What do you think?  Doesn't this look like the cut-off that comes in just above Elk City ?  Carl said they fixed the bridge after the run-off.  Take this and we save a good hour."  ‘Save a good hour’ was his response to her ‘not taking this road.’

          Mom saw where this was heading and would firmly repeat herself, deleting ‘thinking of.’

          "You're not taking this road, Jim!"

          Dad was stubborn.  With a massive muscular chest and shoulders, a big head, and narrow hips, he somewhat resembled a bull.  And mom, born under the sign of the crab, could cling to her position like nobody's business.  A civilized argument would begin but rapidly turn negative, a sign for my brother and I to start quarreling.  When their war reached its crescendo the dog would bark uncontrollably. 

          Moments before breaking down and gushing her usually insincere torrent of tears, mom would trundle out the heavy weapon in her formidable arsenal - guilt.  “
          Must you subject me to this, Jim?  It is simply not fair.  Can't you see it is just another wild goose chase?"

          But that was just the point.

          Trust me," said Dad like a used car salesman, "you'll a save a good hour, hour and a half."

          An hour, maybe, an hour and a half, definitely not.  The recently added ‘half’ was meant to sweeten the pot.  Given the nature of the road, sixty miles probably translated into two hours, eating up the lion's share of the alleged savings.

          To be fair, mom, who was uninterested in surprises, never wanted the extra ‘good’ hour and a half anyway.  To her sensible mid-western mind, sticking to the tried and true, arriving on time without incident, was infinitely superior to taking an unmarked obviously third-rate road late in the afternoon solely out of curiosity.

          In spite of her diminutive five feet she was nobody's patsy.  In the Twenties, long before the advent of feminism, she graduated from the University of Chicago with a Masters and honors.  Then, in the manner of an aristocrat, did the grand tour of Europe , steamer trunks and her younger sister in tow…quite an accomplishment for a young farmwoman from Fargo , North Dakota .

          But dad, who worked the mines in Northern Idaho and loaded ships in the Navy, was raised on a far-from-profitable dirt farm half way up the side of a wind-swept Rocky Mountain foothill.  Understandably, he was a tad macho.  It did not look good to cave in to reason, not in front of his sons, so the car turned up the road and the wild goose chase began.

          What percentage of these forays into the unknown actually accomplished their stated purpose and which were merely wild goose chases, I do not recall.  On the one I am thinking about, the bridge north of Elk City that washed out during spring runoff had not been repaired, in spite of Uncle Carl's information to the contrary, and we were forced to backtrack.  The ‘good’ hour and a half saved turned into a ‘bad’ hour and a half lost, making mom right once again, a fact that did not impact strongly on dad who lived in a world where knowledge was king.  The information, that the bridge was still out, somehow justified the ‘wasted’ time, and, indeed, would crop up in all conversations with his peers for the next three weeks.

          Sometimes the wild goose chase turned life threatening.  One Sunday afternoon on the way back from the woods we came upon a small branch road at a bridge approach that seemed to follow the Clearwater River across from the main highway.

          “Betcha this cuts across behind Lapwai and comes out in the Orchards just above the mill," he said with visionary conviction, wheeling the car off the highway.

The road innocently followed the river for a couple of miles and headed up the side of a barren mountain, becoming narrower and narrower as we ascended.  Eventually we were crawling along at two miles an hour treated to an unobstructed view of the river three hundred yards directly below.  By this time the road narrowed to the point where dad had to get out and remove fallen boulders to continue.  "Don't you think that's a sign that this road is impassable?" said mom, trying to conceal her irritation behind a facade of logic.

          "Perfectly good road.  It's the damn government," he groused. "Pay my taxes, they can't even maintain the roads.  I'm going to write a letter to the editor.  It's a scandal," he said, inching along, ‘at a snail’s pace’ to quote mom.

          Eventually, near the top, it petered into nothing and we could not turn around.  In fact the passenger side was so close to the precipice, conventional egress was impossible.

          "That's the last straw!" said mom angrily, employing another of her quaint old-timey metaphors. "How dare you put our lives in jeopardy!  Get out!  The kids and I are walking back."  He squeezed out, the door unable to open more than a crack owing to the proximity of the mountainside, followed by mom who coaxed us out.

Dad, who was absolutely fearless, seemed surprised by her reaction.  “Whatcha doing?  No problem here.  Wonder why they didn't punch it through to Lapwai?" he said nonchalantly.  "Guess I'll have to back up."

          What had happened to that adventuresome and exciting man?   Evidently even he could not remember, the intervening years having been swallowed by nine-to-fives to numerous to mention and post-prandial nodding off in front of the tube until there was nothing left, just a nice old man who would have been overjoyed to see his son working in the Post Office.

          The A’s won the series I think.

 

ONWARD AND UPWARD

 

          After several nightly sojourns down the hall to Victoria ’s room it was abundantly clear that I had solved half the girl friend problem.  The other half, Felicia, was, however, crying for a solution.

          One morning at seven, everyone gathered in the meditation hall except Felicia.  I waited before starting, thinking she would be along shortly but after five minutes there was no sign of her.

          “Where’s Felicia?” I said.

          Everyone shrugged.

          “Please get her,” I told Tom.

          He returned a minute later.  “She’s not coming,” he said.

          “She’s coming,” I said.  “Everyone sits.”

          He shrugged and sat down.

          I got up and went down the hall to her room.  She was lounging in bed reading a book.

          “Get your ass down the hall,” I said.  “Everyone sits.”

          “Fuck you, Ram.  I’m not coming.”

          I had to admire her.  She had “spunk” as mother used to say.

          “Any special reason?” I said glancing down the hall where several heads were sticking out listening.

          “I just don’t feel like it.  That’s all.”

          “That’s good.  You don’t feel like it.  Now, what if everyone doesn’t feel like it?  Then do we have a meditation or not?”

          “Guess not.”

          “And if we don’t have a meditation do we have any reason to be here in this house?”

          “Fuck you, man.  Don’t give me any of your clever intellectual bullshit.”

          “OK.  Let’s put it this way.  Either you come and sit with the rest of us or you pack your bags.”

          “You’re not getting rid of me, that easy,” she said.  “I’m not leaving.”

          I recalled that by her frequent admissions she had been a “Queen” in at least a dozen past lives and wondered if she was not a bit confused about her status in this one.

          “OK.  This is your last chance.  You sit and we’ll talk about what’s bothering you later.  If you don’t sit you’re outta here.”

          “Who’s going to throw me out?” she said.  She reminded me of a cat I had once that thought it was a human being.  If you messed with it in a certain way it attacked like a raging demon.  She was not an inch taller than five feet and probably weighed 90 pounds soaking wet.  I am nearly six feet and weigh in at two hundred.

          “Come on, Felicia,” I said turning on the charm.  It is so easy to just get up and walk down the hall and sit for thirty minutes like the rest of us.”  It still did not dawn that this was the perfect opportunity to get her out of my hair.  I guess I really loved her.

          “Fuck you Ram.”

          I walked over, grabbed her and hauled her down the hall.  She was kicking and scratching and screaming and biting.  I could not believe the filth coming out of her mouth.

          When I got her out on the porch I locked her out, went back to her room, gathered up her possessions, which took all of five minutes, and delivered them to her.  Someone once called her the “closet saint” because she was so small and had so few possessions she could have easily lived in a closet.  A rich kid from the East who was visiting took pity, drove her to the Muktananda Ashram in Oakland and paid for her room.  I saw her on and off over the years and tried to make amends but she would not have any.  Twenty years later, after dozens of attempts, I gave up.

          I know it is hard to believe but it was only after she drove off that I realized I had just solved my problem.  There would be no more furtive trips down darkened hallways in the dead of night.  Guru Jim was getting respectable.

And, although Victoria was not ‘spiritual’ she had enough spiritual qualities to keep us together for the next few years - and our worldly needs dovetailed nicely.  By ‘spiritual’ I mean the understanding that there is an inner way to solve the need for security and love; that the Green Card, a cushy little job and the love of a man are not enough to satisfy the longings of the soul. 

          One day Tom told me that his mother, an attractive forty something widow, was in a quandary about whether to marry a sexy gambler or a respectable lawyer.  I told him to recommend the lawyer because I knew that she would only suffer with the gambler.  The lawyer, on the other hand, was not much to look and a bit short of style but he was a moral, decent, wealthy fellow who would make a nice companion in her sunset years.  She picked the lawyer and we fell into a nice house in the Sea Cliff.

          The Sea Cliff, one of the most prestigious locations in San Francisco , was an unlikely place for a group of erstwhile spiritual types.  We did not get one of the mansions along the ocean but we did get a very nice two story upper-middle class home just inside the gates on 28th avenue .  If memory serves we did not have one unpleasant incident with the neighbors, a remarkable fact considering that we chanted every day and ran an antique furniture restoration workshop in the basement.  I called the experiment ‘normal yoga’ and ruthlessly screened misfits, freaks, slackers and rebels.  Everyone was required to dress conservatively and behave decorously.  The idea, one that I believe in strongly today, is captured in an old saying from the Zen tradition, “Next to good manners, enlightenment is the most important thing in the world.”

          Tom’s mother gave us a deal on the rent and eventually sold us the house for a very fair price.  We ate together, meditated in the morning, chanted often, and worked like demons on the antiques.  A real sense of community developed and I do not think I have ever laughed so much in my life, except during my college days at Berkeley .  Indeed, there were occasional small problems, but the atmosphere was so unfailingly positive that they never developed into serious conflicts. 

          The consistent inspiration that flows in the mind when one knows who one is lifts a lot of boats, but working with people is difficult.  Because I attained permanent transcendence so quickly I was unable to completely clean my mind beforehand, so keeping selfish tendencies in check for the sake of the experiment involved additional effort.  I do not regret a moment of this period of my life.  But if I had to do it again, I would have ignored the swami’s instructions, as he did his guru’s, and worn the hair shirt for at least ten years before even considering ‘exploding on the society.’  He stayed with his guru in the Himalayas for seven years and could not wait to descend to the plains and begin teaching once he realized the Self.  The guru, however, a great sage of the old school, understanding his ambitions, the nature of his mind, and the purpose of the tradition, told him to stay put.  “If they are meant to get something,” he said, ‘they will come to you.”  But he could not wait.  He was man with a mission.

          I did not realize it at the time but, instead of finding my own voice, I was really just aping the Swami’s dynamic missionary style.  Fair enough, because it was all I knew.  But if I had to do it over, I would have taken time to grow a few gray hairs and see that that my ambition to enlighten the world was a bit less keen before I set out to mess with people’s lives.

          At this point there were about ten of us living in fairly ritzy digs.  One Saturday morning in 1972 I was cruising Fisherman’s Warf when I spied an empty dumpster.  I parked across the street, walked over and peered inside.  About twenty Art Nouveau picture frames in mint condition worth about three hundred dollars were scattered on the bottom.  I boosted myself over the edge and squatted to examine them.  As I appreciated their beauty and marveled at my good luck, another equally valuable batch came flying over the rim of the dumpster and rained down on my head.  I jumped up and looked out to see an attractive blonde woman walking toward a storefront.  When I called to her she turned, surprised to see a strange head staring at her from dumpster.

          I hopped out and asked her what she was doing.  She said her husband had died recently and that the landlord was insisting that she pay the rent on his shop or vacate immediately.  I asked her if I could examine the shop and she agreed.  Her husband was a local character who in an earlier incarnation had been a merchant seaman with a penchant for Oriental antiques.  When I scanned the shop I realized that my ship had come in.  I told her that she was a fool to throw it away and talked her into allowing me to fill the Ford and take it to the Flea Market.  She agreed to a fifty-fifty split.  I visited her at her home in the evening and gave her nine hundred dollars.  I do not recall how much my share of the shop was, probably over twenty grand, but it was a big shot in the arm financially.

          After liquidating the store I got a call from the woman inviting me for dinner one evening.  She lived in a very large Victorian flat in North Beach with a view of the Bay.  The flat was filled from top to bottom with antiques.  After a lovely home-cooked Italian meal we repaired to the living room for a drink.  Eventually she said, “I’ll bet you’re wondering what this is all about, aren’t you?”

          I nodded, expecting her to come up a romantic proposal.

          “Well, I’m very pleased with the way you helped me out and I’ve another deal, if you’re interested.

          “You bet,” I said, surprised but interested.

          “As you have undoubtedly noticed, this flat is stuffed with antiques.  They were my husband’s passion.  I hated my husband (he was a sex pervert) and I hate antiques and I’d like to offer them to you under the same terms.”

          I agreed, obviously, and asked how she was planning to decorate the apartment.

          “Danish Modern,” she said.

          With more money I was able to buy better stuff and trade at a higher level.  One day I was in the workshop sanding an oak dresser when a dealer friend came in and asked if I would be interested in a storefront.  I told him I did not want the headache of dealing with the public six days a week.

          “Come on, Sunny Jim, have a look.  I think you’ll like it,” he said.  I do not know why I agreed to look at it, perhaps I was tired of sanding furniture and wanted to get out of the shop, but I agreed.  We drove down to Divisadero Street to a Victorian storefront situated between the ghetto and Pacific Heights and walked through the junk-filled rooms.

          “So what do you think,” my friend said.

          “What do I think about what?” I replied.

          “The shop.  Do you want it?”

          “I told you, Rhino, I don’t want a shop.  It’s a pain in the ass.”

          “You want this one,” he said.

          “Why do I want this one?”

          “Because I’m giving it to you.”

          “Come on, Rhino, what’s the catch.”

          “No catch, Sunny Jim, no catch at all.”

          “OK. Why?”

          “Because the guy who’s been running it is a flake and my shop on California Street is making big bucks (I would later learn that his dope business for which the shop was a front was making big bucks) and it’s too much trouble to deal with any more.  So I give you the key and you pay the rent and the phone bill and it’s yours - lock, stock and barrel.”

          “Why me, Rhino?”

          “I like you, Sunny Jim.”

          “That’s it?”

          “That’s it.”

          “Thanks.  Give me the key.”

          It was a nice Eastlake Victorian with great windows.  The sign said ‘Old Stuff.’ There was a fading copy of a page from a Sixties issue of Time magazine with an article on the store taped on the kitchen wall.  I rented the ceiling to a friend I met tending the cows in the Muktananda Ashram in Ganeshpuri, an antique lighting restorer named John, and we filled the rooms with our best stuff.  In a short time we had a classy antique store and real money started rolling in.

 

SLAY THE BUDDHA

 

          For a few years nothing changed.  Some new people came until the house reached critical mass, a spiritual pressure cooker.  Something was about to happen.  I kept the energy ratcheted up and watched with interest.  Either everyone was going to wake up or the whole thing was going to collapse like an imploding star. Or both.

          The swami came to town and said to back off on the business side.  Before I had time to consider how to properly accomplish this, things started to unravel.

          Success is a fickle and demanding mate.  Because you generate it with skillful actions you are always tempted to think you are in control.  And you are…up to a point.  But a time comes when it takes on a life of its own and wrests control from your hands.  And if you are attached to what it gives, from that point on you are as much its victim as its author.  Either you succumb to its seductions or you look for a way out.

          Although it seemed like I was locked in, I was ready to bag it.  I gorged on success in Hawaii and still felt empty.  And lest I needed to be reminded of its unremitting downside all I had to do was contemplate the Swami’s karma.  Irrespective of that I had my ace in the hole, Self knowledge.  By dint of who you are you are always free of everything.  So I was not in love with what had been created.  It would have been pointless.  In fact I was sacrificing myself for the sake of a very abstract idea.

          I hope I get the next sequence of events right because a lot of water has flowed under my bridge since then.  My first mistake, which was not a mistake, was caused by my love of beauty.  One weekday morning about nine a man came to sell me a very elegant piece of antique stained glass at a reasonable price.  When I saw it I immediately visualized it behind the altar in the meditation room.  He seemed respectable and his story sounded right so I bought it.

          Over the next year I purchased twenty or thirty pieces, none of which I sold.  I do not recall at what point I started having suspicions about the source of the glass but eventually I realized it was hot.  My supplier was a very athletic junkie who removed it from public buildings in the early morning hours.  I was in a quandary about what to do.  I should have called the cops and turned it in but I was attached so I dithered.  I decided to move my collection to a secure storage space but before I could the chickens came home to roost.

          One morning Carlos, the junkie, brought an exceptionally rare and remarkably beautiful cut glass Victorian lamp in mint condition that was easily worth thousands of dollars.  In spite of my vow to wean myself I was unable to resist.  The next day I got a call from the store saying that two detectives wanted to talk to me.  I had plenty of time to dispose of the lamp but decided to give it to them.  When they asked if there were any other items I told them about the stained glass.  They were taken aback by my confession; they had not connected the lamp and the stained glass.  In fact, I suspect that very few of the windows were ever reported since they came from once elegant but run-down apartment buildings owned by absentee Slum Lords.  They booked me, I posted bail and we got Tom’s stepfather to get us a good lawyer.  I cut a deal with the cops to deliver the junkie, plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of receiving stolen property, and that was that.

          Coming clean was not an act of great courage.  I made two quick calculations while the detectives were on their way.  First, I had a spotless record and was unlikely to get more than a slap on the wrist.  Second, even though Tom was in on it, the store was registered in his name and the experiment would have been in jeopardy had he been charged because our business license would not have been renewed.  Additionally, he probably would have never flirted with the dark side had he not been associated with me so I did not to involve him in it.

          The incident had a silver lining.  Since most of the stained glass had gone unreported, after the proper waiting period the police held an auction and made some decent money for their war on crime.  And, as it turned out, the junkie got a chance to go into a drug treatment program.  When I looked at him in court he smiled.

          Did I regret it?  Yes.  Would I ever do such a stupid thing again?  No.

          Mistake number two.  Well, there are no mistakes.  Everything here serves a higher purpose.  But let us assume the conventional point of view and call my next decision a mistake.  The second mistake was attachment to pleasure.  One of the great saints of the last century, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa often said that there were two big obstacles on the road to enlightenment: women and gold.  I can amend that to read ‘before and after enlightenment.’

 

THE LOVE ISSUE

 

          This was an area where I needed a bit of work.  Without putting too fine a point on it, there are basically two kinds of love: conditional and unconditional.  Conditional love is business; I have my special needs, you have yours.  They roughly coincide.  We agree to take care of each other’s needs and, to make ourselves feel good, we call it love.

          Unconditional love means that I love you for who you are warts and all, no matter what.  If you do not give me what I want I still love you. I knew this intellectually at the time but was victim of a slight confusion, one that resolved in the next chapter of my life.

          The relationship with Victoria was perfect for who I was at the time.  In addition to admiring her many good qualities and respecting her for the service she did on my behalf and behalf of the group, I genuinely liked her.  I also found her extremely attractive as a woman.  My only complaint was her lack of interest in the spiritual life.  There was nothing to be done about it.  Spirituality, unlike religion, is it not a matter of belief.  Only one’s own experience of God can convince you that these is something more.  

          Anyway, one day she told me that she needed to go home to take care of some family affairs.  I asked her to postpone her visit because things were a bit dicey but she said it was urgent…so I agreed.

          The energy in the house was intense and it attracted one of the most lovely (inwardly and outwardly) young women I have had the pleasure to know, the kind of open-minded, innocent enthusiastic person that comes along once in a blue moon.  Sandy took to the idea of enlightenment like a duck to water and within a month or two realized the Self.  And, as fate would have it, we ended up lovers.  How could I resist someone who had everything Victoria had - and knew who she was?

          It does not take a genius to understand how these two developments might cause agitation in the minds of some of the group.  But everyone was having such a good time no one was ready to kill the goose that laid the golden egg over a few misdemeanors.  Except Tom who was young and self-righteous and plagued with stong feelings.

          Perhaps because I live so unapologetically, I have periodically been the victim of envy.  One day I heard him on the phone with someone who wanted to speak with me about some business deal.  He offered to deal with it but when the person insisted on speaking with me he angrily said,  “What’s the difference?  I can handle it!.”

          I realized then how badly he wanted what he thought I had.

          Thinking about it now, almost thirty years later, he may have been just longing for more of my company.  We had been very close in the beginning but as we became more successful I was spread increasingly thin.  There simply was not time to put the same degree of care into my relationship with him.

          The third mistake that was not a mistake was my attachment to compassion.  Ever since I was a boy I’ve had deep sympathy for people with disabilities, mental or physical.  Sophia arrived in the early days when we were living in the Haight and seemed quite normal.  She was a slim beautiful Mediterranean type with olive skin, refined features, and a lovely whimsical personality.  I found her hopelessly charming.  She fell in love with Terry and they are still together today.  I do not know how she slipped under my radar because I was careful to avoid persons with psychological problems.  Perhaps the symptoms did not develop until after she joined the group.  Anyway, within a couple of years I had a full-fledged anorexic on my hands.

          Because of the way things turned out no one believed I had such a strong love for her, but I did.  And I did what I did not just for me but for her.  By this time we were about five years into the experiment and people were waking up, realizing the Self.  I do not want to get into details but at a certain point they just started popping like popcorn.  I cannot take credit, nor would I if I could, because it was really the power of an idea and the traditional method that brought it about.  True, had it not been for my persistence, keeping the minds headed in the right direction, it would not have happened, but it was more will power and inspiration on my part than skill.

          It was a wonderful spiritual event, no doubt, but, like everything in life, it brought changes.  When you wake up you are not the same person who went to sleep.  And you no longer need what brought you to that point.  In fact, some of the outer spiritual stuff, the guru particularly, needs to be jettisoned if you are to reach your full spiritual potential.  I had been the focus of their spirituality and I was no longer needed.  The incident with Sophia, diverting my affections from Victoria and the stained glass incident coupled with Tom’s envy set the stage for the experiment’s final act.

          There is no need to detail the symptoms of anorexia, as they are well known nowadays.  It broke my heart to see such a beautiful young woman reduced to what might reasonably be called an ambulatory cadaver.  I tried to figure out what was causing her bizarre behavior.  In our talks it came out that the problem had begun around puberty and I surmised that perhaps she starved herself to appear unattractive to her father who had shown inappropriate sexual interest at that time.  Unbeknownst to her I consulted several psychiatrists and psychologists but came up with nothing useful. Looking for understanding I made calls to her family in Europe but got nowhere.  I tried to reason with her but she was too well defended.  Eventually, I realized that if nothing were done I might have a fatality on my hands and a huge legal mess (can you imagine what an ambitious lawyer might have done with the ‘cult’ idea) so I decided to resolve the issue one way or the other.

          In front of everyone I told her that if she was going to stay she had to eat.  I told her that she would have to take a little bit every day and that as her body adjusted we would slowly increase the intake until she was up to speed.  She reluctantly agreed and the program began.  We all ate together and every day the food on her plate disappeared before my watchful eye.  I was quite hopeful in the beginning but did not notice any change in her appearance or energy level as time passed.  I puzzled long and hard about why this might be but was unable to come up with a reasonable explanation.  Then one day as I lingered after the meal in conversation with a friend one of the women washing dishes said, “Yuk, what’s this?”  I looked up as she turned over a plate to reveal Sophia’s masticated meal carefully packed inside the rim on the bottom!  Why she had been unable to dispose of it is a mystery.  Evidently it was time to get caught.

          I called Marlene who had a big house with a small group of theatre people and she reluctantly agreed to take in Sophia as a favor to me.  This did nothing to enhance my reputation as an enlightened compassionate person.  It gave the faction gathering around Tom another issue in their campaign to bring me down.

          What they did not know was that I was not up.  I think perhaps they thought that the whole experiment was happening by some sort of magic and that, unchecked, I might screw it up.  But the reality was that I got up at four every morning and worked non-stop late into the night seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year for over five years.  I was not sitting on a throne waving a peacock feather to bless the faithful.  If I had a dollar for every time I gave impartial and sensible counsel, lifted someone out of the doldrums, made a clever business decision or headed off a problem before it had a chance to become a problem I would be a millionaire many times over.  Perhaps if I had insisted on being treated like royalty, like so many small-minded gurus, or shown them a taste of the lash it would have generated more sympathy, not that I needed or wanted it.  I had one small room to myself, three or four changes of clothes, and drove a beat-up ancient Chevy pickup.  I handled thousands of dollars a week and never took a dime for myself.  One rumor I heard after the breakup was that I had embezzled one hundred and fifty thousand dollars!  In fact when all was said and done I came out with three grand and a pickup full of antiques for my trouble.  The prevailing view was that I was too big for my britches and needed to be reigned in before a serious disaster happened.  They wanted a saint and I was only a regular guy

          What a pity that I was unaware of the ‘crazy wisdom’ idea that was about to establish itself in the American spiritual scene.  Crazy wisdom says that gurus who are attached to their bad habits can turn vices into virtues by con