My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  Nevertheless, I was now committed to doing something about Denny. So I took him up to see Gerald, after telling Gerald what had happened at the Vedanta Center. Perhaps I slanted the story a little, to prejudice Gerald in Denny’s favor; in any case, this was a sly tempting of Gerald to demonstrate his superior charity. Denny assisted me by turning on all his powerful charm. Gerald was quickly won over.

  As for myself, I continued to see Denny quite often, and was soon able to feel sincerely what I had told him—that I did like him and did want to be his friend. I was able to admire him, too, for Denny declared that he wasn’t going to be discouraged by what Prabhavananda had said. He was determined to start meditating and living “intentionally,” under Gerald’s guidance. He and I remained friends throughout all the ups and downs of his life during the next few years, but he never forgave Prabhavananda. This was a constant cause of friction between us.

  * * *

  November 7. Some while ago, driving home through the evening traffic along Sunset Boulevard, I was attacked by one of those spasms of cramp which often follow Dr. K.’s injections. It was so violent and so unexpected that I exclaimed “Oh God!” aloud. And now something extraordinary happened. The word, which I have misused ten million times, produced a kind of echo in my consciousness, like the vibration after a bell has been struck. It seemed to vibrate down, down into the depths of me. It was so strange, so awe-inspiring, that I longed for the cramp to return. I thought: “I have called upon God.” After a moment, I had another spasm, but this time there was no echo. The word was just another word.

  How much unhappiness there is in the world! No need to search for it across the ocean, in bombed London or China or Greece. The other evening, outside my window, a little boy cried to his mother: “You don’t want anyone to play with me!” Even the most trivial unkindness is heartbreaking, if one weren’t so deaf and blind. Very occasionally, I’m aware of this. The other night (it sounds absurd when I write it) I ran the car over a tin can on our parking lot, and felt almost as bad as if I’d killed an animal. “Oh God,” I said to myself, “must we always keep smashing things?”

  Tomorrow morning, I’m going up to the temple to be initiated by the Swami. I know he is only doing this to encourage me—because, as he told Gerald, I am “arnest”—but I feel terribly inadequate. Lately, I’ve been getting up too late and missing my morning hour.

  November 8. Picked up Gerald in the car and was at the temple by seven-thirty. When I went into the shrine, the Swami was already seated. I took my place on his left, holding a little tray with the flowers which one of the women had given me to offer; two red roses, a white rose, and a big white daisy. First the Swami told me to meditate as usual. Then I had to offer the flowers—the red roses to the photographs of Ramakrishna and Holy Mother, the daisy to the icon of Christ, the white rose to the Swami himself, as my guru. Next, he told me to meditate on Ramakrishna in the central cavity of the heart. Then he taught me my Sanskrit mantram, which I must never repeat to anybody, and gave me a rosary, showing me how to use it.

  A mantram consists of one or more Sanskrit words, a holy name or names, which the guru gives to his disciple and which the disciple is required to repeat and meditate on throughout the rest of his life. The giving of the mantram is the essential act of the initiation ceremony. The guru may also give the disciple a rosary; this can be thought of as a physical gift which embodies the spiritual gift of the mantram.

  The rosary beads used by the Ramakrishna Order are made of small dried kernels of the berry of the rudraksha tree. There are 108 beads, plus a bead which hangs down, out of line with the others, and has a tassel attached to it. This bead is said to represent the guru.

  Repeating your mantram is called making japam. When making japam with your rosary, you repeat your mantram once for each bead. On reaching the tassel bead, you reverse the rosary and start it the other way around. Out of the 108 repetitions of the mantram which make up one turn of the rosary, a hundred are said to be for your own devotions, and the remaining eight to be on behalf of the rest of mankind. Since these eight represent a labor of love and not part of your personal efforts toward spiritual progress, you must not count them in reckoning how much japam you are going to make each day—one turn of the rosary counts as one hundred only. The average amount of japam made by an energetic devotee would be between five thousand and ten thousand daily. The value of the rosary is that it measures your japam for you; you aren’t distracted from it by having to count. But you are also encouraged to make japam at times when you can’t use a rosary—when you are engaged in some manual work or driving a car.

  In my diary, there is no mention of any others having been initiated that day. Later on, as the Center grew, Prabhavananda would usually initiate several people at a time, each one in a separate ceremony. However, a number of devotees must have arrived later that morning, for this was the birthday of Holy Mother. By nine o’clock, I was back in the temple, having my first experience of a full-scale puja (ritual worship).

  The Swami offered flowers, incense, water for washing. He made spots of red on the foreheads of Ramakrishna and Mother with sandalwood paste. Food was brought in, a complete meal: soup, curry, and chocolate cake with whipped cream. The Swami’s nephew acted as prompter, reading the directions for the acts of ritual in Sanskrit. At the end of the ceremony we each offered a flower.

  After this, we went into the Swami’s study, where there is a grate, for the fire ceremony (homa fire). All our actions, good and bad, were symbolically offered up and purified in the fire. The Swami made a sign on our foreheads with the ash, to symbolize the opening of the third eye, the eye of the spirit.

  Then lunch, very gay, with lots of people. The food offered in the temple had been mixed in with what we ate, so this was actually a kind of communion service. They do this every day. The consecrated food from the temple is called prasad.

  The Swami admitted that he oversmokes. “You must listen to me,” he giggled, “not follow me.” He told us that during his first years here he made no converts at all. Now he has about twenty-four.

  Drove Gerald home. We agreed that this sort of thing could never be transplanted to the West. Ritual is valuable, certainly—but perhaps only for the person who actually celebrates it. The holy women seemed more concerned today with the mere domestic bustle of preparing and serving food. At least that was the impression I got as an outsider.

  Nevertheless, all this Hindu domesticity doesn’t repel me. Precisely because it is so domestic. Ramakrishna really does seem to be established in that household. They fuss over him like a guest of honor. There is no dividing line between the activities of the temple and their daily lives. And, after all, if you admire the man at all, why not make him feel at home? Why not reproduce, as far as possible, the ceremonies he used to practice and the style of life he was accustomed to? It’s really a matter of common politeness—like eating Chinese food when the Chinese Ambassador comes to dinner.

  I was still, as is obvious from the above, seeing the Vedanta Center very much through Gerald’s eyes—from an anthropological rather than a spiritual standpoint. Nevertheless, I had just entered into a relationship with this little Bengali and his establishment which was far more binding and serious than a marriage—I who had always had an instinctive horror of the marriage bond! Would I have involved myself in this way if I had clearly understood what it was that I was doing? Not at that time, I think. I didn’t understand because I didn’t yet believe in the spiritual reality of the involvement.

  Prabhavananda must have known very well what he and I were letting ourselves in for. According to Hindu belief, the tie between the guru and his initiated disciple cannot be broken, either in this world or on any future plane of existence, until the disciple realizes the Atman within himself and is thus set free. Meanwhile, the disciple may neglect, reject, or even betray the guru, but the guru cannot disown him. In such cases, the guru must continue to guide the disciple mentally, from a distance, and
protect him through prayer.

  I had to take it for granted that Prabhavananda had long since faced up to and accepted this tremendous responsibility; it was, after all, his justification for being a swami. The mantram which Brahmananda had given him implied the obligation to pass on its power to others by giving them mantrams of their own. The Christians claim that their line of apostolic succession still carries the authority of spiritual power, even though it is now nearly two thousand years long. How short, by comparison, was the line that led us back to Ramakrishna! It was as though we at the Vedanta Center were disciples of a disciple of one of the apostles of Jesus.

  Prabhavananda often told us he believed that no one who came to seek instruction at the Center did so by mere accident. “Ramakrishna chose you, all of you,” he would declare, with conviction. “He led you to this place.” In other words, we had to thank Ramakrishna’s grace rather than any good karma of our own, accumulated through our previous lives. Did I believe this? I would have liked to—good luck gives one far more satisfaction than a reward of merit. But, for the present, I put Prabhavananda’s statement into my “suspense account.” By this time, it contained many items whose disposition couldn’t be determined—and might never be.

  * * *

  How did Gerald regard my initiation? He certainly hadn’t discouraged me from accepting it. He himself had already been initiated. So had Huxley. But both of them, as I have said, were temperamentally eclectic. I don’t believe either would have felt that the initiation ceremony imposed limits on him or committed him to a special loyalty.

  I suppose Gerald assumed that I would feel the same way. He can’t have regarded me as having now become Prabhavananda’s exclusive property, for he kept discussing with me his plans for a monastic community in which I was to be included. He had provisionally named it Focus.

  Gerald was now no longer thinking in broad terms, of interrelated groups dotted about the country. Focus was to be independent, and very small—just Gerald and an English friend of his and Denny and I. Gerald had already arranged for Denny to go and work on a farm in Pennsylvania, because the farm was being run on biodynamic principles—involving the use of compost heaps. He wanted Denny to become a biodynamic expert and then put his knowledge into practice at Focus, since we were to grow our own food.

  It seemed that life in our community was to be turned strictly inward, with all of us focused on “this thing,” and the time left over between our meditation periods allotted to vegetable growing, household chores, frugal meals, and rationed sleep. Maybe we would never go outside the place at all.

  Surely neither Denny nor I—for Gerald’s friend I can’t answer, since I didn’t know him—would have lasted at Focus a single month. Did I ever seriously intend to join it? I don’t think I knew, myself.

  I was still living with Vernon, still working at M-G-M. I knew that I should be obliged to make a move of some kind, before long. Now that the United States had started conscription, conscientious objectors were to be drafted for firefighting and other forestry duties and sent to camps in the nearby mountains. At present I was over draft age, but I felt sure that men in my age group would be called up in the nearly certain event of war. So why shouldn’t I volunteer now, just as many people were volunteering for the Armed Forces, instead of waiting passively to be pushed? (I did do this, some while later, but was told that volunteers for service in the camps were not being accepted.)

  Six

  November 12, 1940. Headache this evening, and rheumatism in my hip. So I did my meditation sitting upright on a chair in my room. Perhaps because of the headache, concentration was much easier than usual. My mind soon became calm. Sitting with closed eyes in the darkness, I suddenly “saw” a strip of carpet, illuminated by an orange light. The carpet was covered with a black pattern, quite unlike anything we have in the house. But I could also “see” my bed, standing exactly as it really stands. My field of vision wasn’t in any way distorted.

  As I watched, I “saw,” in the middle of the carpet, a small dirty-white bird, something like a parrot. After a moment, it began to move, with its quick stiff walk, and went under the bed. This wasn’t a dream. I was normally conscious, aware of what I saw and anxious to miss no detail of it. As I sat there, I felt all around me a curiously intense silence, like the silence of deep snow. The only sinister thing about the bird was its air of utter aloofness and intention. I had caught it going about its business—very definite business—as one glimpses a mouse disappearing into its hole.

  November 13. I told the Swami about the parrot, this evening. He said it was a “symbolic vision,” not a hallucination. On the whole, he seemed pleased. He thought it a sign that something is happening to my consciousness. Probably, he said, there will be other visions. I must take no particular notice of them, and not regard them as a matter for self-congratulation. They have no special significance. The psychic world is all around us, full of sub-creatures, earthbound spirits, etc. To be able to see them is just a knack, a minor talent. Dogs see spooks all the time. It is dangerous to let them interest you too much. At best, they are a distraction from the real objectives of the spiritual life. At worst, they may gain power over you and do you harm.

  I also asked the Swami about sex. He said that all sex—no matter what the relationship—is a form of attachment and must ultimately be given up. This will happen naturally as you make progress in the spiritual life. “The more you travel toward the north, the farther you are from the south.” But he added that force is no good. A man came to Brahmananda and asked to become a monk; he had castrated himself to be free from sex. Brahmananda wouldn’t receive him into the Order. When the Swami was a young monk, he once asked Brahmananda to release him from sexual desire. (Brahmananda had the power to do this.) But Brahmananda smiled and answered, “My son, if I did that, you would miss all the fun of the struggle.”

  To encourage me, the Swami quoted a saying of Ramakrishna: “He who has been bitten by the cobra is sure to die … The cobra has bitten you, Mr. Isherwood,” he said with a giggle. “You won’t live long!”

  November 30. About two weeks ago, I had another vision. The same orange light but redder, this time, like firelight. I thought, it’s happening again. A face began to form. It was my own face. I looked at it, quite consciously, for several seconds before it disappeared.

  When I started to tell the Swami about this, he looked dismayed and exclaimed in alarm: “Not that parrot?” (Because, says Gerald, the parrot might eventually have “come through” and been visible to other people. Most embarrassing. And then the Swami would have had to exorcise it. We’d have a three-day sit at the temple, and, goodness, how much Ramakrishna would eat!)

  However, when I explained, the Swami was pleased and told me I’d seen my own “subtle body.” He asked me if the face wasn’t much handsomer than my own physical face. As a matter of fact, it was: very distinguished, rather like a Red Indian, with light blue eyes.

  (The Atman in man is said to be covered by a number of koshas, sheaths. The outermost of these is the gross body, which is visible and tangible to other human beings at all times. Beneath this is the subtle body, not ordinarily visible to others, which vitalizes and holds together body and mind. Unless the individual becomes united with the Atman, this subtle body will not disintegrate with the gross body at death but will survive to form the basis of a new gross body when the individual is reborn.)

  * * *

  January 5, 1941. To the temple. The Swami lectured on the universality of religion, and against sects and fanaticism. Today he looked very young and sounded vigorous and political. I could picture him in the days before he joined the monastery, as a young student agitator and terrorist, fighting for a free India. He kept thumping his fist on the pulpit. As usual, he worked in a little nationalism—the Hindus were tolerant, the Christians and Mohammedans were not.

  January 6. Sometimes I feel that my whole day depends on the first ten minutes after I wake up. Which kind of waves will firs
t break the surface of undifferentiated consciousness? The war, personal resentments, my health, the studio, the weather—anxiety, depression—they wait just outside the illuminated field of thought, ready to move in and impose their ugly vulgar little pattern, the pattern of the day. But suppose one puts some other arrangement of one’s own, consciously, in the middle of the field? Then they cannot combine.

  January 11. The Swami is in bed, with a slight heart attack. So I had to do something as a substitute for his lecture. Read poems aloud—by Herbert, Vaughan, Emily Brontë, Tennyson, Swinburne; and the duel scene from The Brothers Karamazov.

  January 14. Gerald lectured to the class at the temple, on the difference between meditation and contemplation. Meditation is the stage of effort in which we struggle to fix our mind on the Object by means of images, similes, and metaphors. Contemplation is effortless. When we achieve it, we are unaware of the passage of time; our mind has become one-pointed. The need for images stops. We pass beyond the stage of logical analysis. We cease to infer. We know.

  * * *

  It must have been soon after this that Gerald decided he couldn’t any longer be publicly associated with the Vedanta Center, couldn’t go on lecturing at the temple or helping Prabhavananda edit our magazine. This decision wasn’t sudden. Gerald had first discussed it at length with several of his friends, including me. Having made up his mind, he wrote Prabhavananda a letter of resignation.

  I suppose I must have been shown this letter, but I can’t remember what was in it; perhaps because there is a confusion in my memory between what Gerald privately said to me before writing it and what he actually—and no doubt more tactfully—wrote.