His three big spiritual experiences:
A vision of the Impersonal God, at Puri. He lost outer consciousness and was aware of nothing but light and a voice saying in English, God, God, God. He couldn’t see the images or the people worshiping. A brother swami, Sujji Maharaj, grabbed one of his arms and told a priest to hold the other one. Later Swami asked him, “How did you know what was happening to me?” He answered, “Because I’ve lived with Maharaj.”
Then, in his bedroom in Sister’s old house in Hollywood, he saw Holy Mother “very powerful.” After this, he was dazed for three days.
Then, once, in the temple, he saw Swamiji, with Ramakrishna, Holy Mother, and Maharaj more dimly behind him. Swami took this vision to be a special reassurance that Swamiji wasn’t angry with him—shortly before this, he had had a letter from Ashokananda of the San Francisco Center, accusing him and me of having insulted Vivekananda.
(The alleged insult was contained in my introduction to Vedanta for the Western World, a selection of articles from our magazine, Vedanta and the West. Ashokananda must have read this introduction when it first appeared in the magazine itself, early in 1945, several months before the book was published.
In the passage to which Ashokananda objected, I began by describing Vivekananda’s extraordinary strength of intellect, character, and will. Then I suggested that, if he had never visited Dakshineswar and met Ramakrishna, “he might well have become one of India’s foremost politicians.”
Admittedly, the word “politicians” was unwisely chosen; it is so often used in a derogatory sense. The kind of politician I had in mind was Gandhi.
I think Ashokananda also objected to the idea that Vivekananda could ever, under any circumstances, have followed a way of life other than the monastic. Vivekananda used to recall how, as a child, he had pictured himself “as foremost among the great men of the world,” but also “as having renounced everything in the world.” He would add, “I always ended by choosing the latter—I knew that this was the only path by which a man could achieve true happiness.” So Ashokananda was right, from his point of view. And I was ready to admit that I hadn’t expressed myself clearly. What I had actually been trying to point out was that Vivekananda’s great qualifications for worldly success made his choice of the monastic life all the more impressive.
Swami was enormously disturbed by Ashokananda’s accusation, which he took to mean that we had insulted Swamiji intentionally. Even though he knew that this was nonsense and even though his vision of Swamiji had reassured him that Swamiji wasn’t offended, he would brood on the accusation from time to time, throughout the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, peace was made with Ashokananda—outwardly, at least. And for the book, the offending phrase was altered to: “… one of India’s foremost national leaders.”)
June 23. Swami was impressed because Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had gone to Victoria Station to welcome Radhakrishnan, the president of India. I told him I didn’t find this at all impressive; it was only a matter of protocol. But Swami disagreed: “A few years ago, they’d have just said he was a native.” In Swami’s eyes, Elizabeth and Philip have a kind of reflected glory, despite their dowdy harmlessness, because they are related to India’s Mother-Tyrant, Victoria!
A boy who comes to the readings at the Center on Wednesdays said that a man at the place where he works had told him a hard-luck story and so he had given the man ten bucks, and then the man had spent it on liquor. “Did I do wrong?” the boy asked, very earnestly. Swami much amused.
August 16. Don found me the perfect title for my novelette—A Single Man—a couple of weeks ago. Today I was revising the description of Ramakrishna’s cremation. I wanted to convey an image of the Ganges waters flowing past the cremation ghat, offering no reassurance, no sense of security to Ramakrishna’s mourners. Don thought a little and said, “How about the inconstant waters?” “Wonderful! What made you think of that?” “Romeo and Juliet.”
* * *
1963 was the centenary of Vivekananda’s birth. Since he was born in January, the celebrations had begun then and were continuing throughout the year. Their final event was to take place in Calcutta, from the last days of 1963 through the beginning of January 1964. This was a so-called Parliament of Religions, to which foreign devotees of Vivekananda and swamis of the Order from centers abroad had been invited.
Swami had long since started a relentless campaign of gentle hints that I should come with him to India and speak at the Parliament. I had answered evasively. But, on September 25, he had succeeded in making me say yes. Having done so, I was immediately horrified. I wrote in my diary:
A passionate psychosomatic revolt is brewing in me against the Indian trip. I am almost capable of dying at Belur Math, out of sheer spite.
* * *
On November 4, I again found myself inside the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, nearly a year after I had seen Laughton there for the last time. Now I was visiting Huxley. I knew already that he, too, had cancer and that it was spreading rapidly.
Aldous was in obvious discomfort, but there was nothing poignant or desperate in his manner, and he clearly didn’t want to talk about death. Not talking about it made me embarrassed, however, and I touched on subject after subject, at random. Each time I did so, Aldous commented acutely, or remembered an appropriate quotation. I came away with the picture of a great noble vessel sinking quietly into the deep; many of its delicate marvelous mechanisms still in perfect order, all its lights still shining.
Seventeen
December 16, 1963. Don is in New York. Woke up in a big flap this morning; travel dread gripping me. So I have started taking Librium in advance.
December 18–19. About fifty people came to the airport to see us off. The parting was like a funeral which is so boring and hammy that you are glad to be one of the corpses. Anything rather than have to go home with the other mourners afterwards!
We got onto the plane at last and it took off. Swami said, “To think that all this is Brahman and nobody realizes it!” I sat squeezed between him and George; the Japan Air Lines seats are as tight-packed as ever. Despite my holy environment, I couldn’t help dwelling on yesterday afternoon’s delicious sex adventure. I even did so rather defiantly.
After Honolulu, the long long flight northwestward, passing the dateline between the 18th and 19th through the almost infinitely extended afternoon. Tried to read Cather’s Song of the Lark, but could concentrate only on Esquire articles—Calder Willingham’s reply to Mailer, Mailer’s threats to write a novel, Vidal on Tarzan of the Apes.
Swami ordered a drink and pressed me to take one. I refused, feeling priggish but knowing that this trip will be even worse for me if I don’t keep it dry. Swami refused a steak. He has always maintained his beef taboo but never imposes it on us. He and George ate stuffed chicken instead. My steak was perfect. We got to Tokyo at about 6:30 p.m.
Swami spent most of December 20 in bed, having slept badly. George and I wandered around Tokyo. This was certainly the longest stretch of time in our lives that we had been alone together and in a non-religious atmosphere—unless one could call Tokyo’s commercial Christmas display religious. (In an English-language magazine published in Japan, I found a joke drawing: a Japanese child and his mother are looking into a shop window full of Christmas decorations, all of them strictly Western in style, and the child is asking: “Do the Americans have Christmas, too?”) The magic of Japanese window dressing made everything on sale seem toy-like, including the photographic and audio equipment. George himself became a child, overcome by temptation. Chuckling as though he were doing something naughty, he bought a camera and a tape recorder. This made us suddenly intimates and fellow conspirators—since George already had a camera with him and would be too ashamed of this extravagance to confess it to Swami.
On the twenty-first, Swami woke with pains and a slight fever. He feared a recurrence of his kidney trouble and said he would like to fly straight back to Los Angeles,
if only there weren’t all those people awaiting us in India who would be disappointed. His indecision didn’t make me at all uneasy; I felt an equal readiness to go back, to go forward, to stay where I was. I might have mistaken my mood for resignation to God’s will, if I hadn’t recognized it as the indifference caused by Librium. If this is how so-called ordinary unimaginative people feel when they travel, I thought, well—good for them!
Inevitably, Swami decided that we must fly on to Calcutta. We arrived there after many unforeseen delays—which, normally, would have driven me frantic—in the dead of night. But the welcoming party of monks was still at the airport, waiting. Swami and George (who instantaneously became Krishnananda) had flower garlands hung around their necks. I was happy to see Prema and Arup (another of our Hollywood brahmacharis), who had arrived in India ahead of us. They were to take sannyas at the Math early in January.
By the time that we had got through the passport control and customs, and into the cars which would bring us to Belur Math, I was aware that the Librium had lost its power. I felt a magic begin to work as we drove through the dark lanes and streets. I smelled and felt the strange perfumed softness of India; the perfume is dust and charcoal smoke. A booth, brilliantly alight and noisy, in which a kirtan was being held. The darkness around it full of phantom people.
December 22. Belur Math is far more delightful than I’d remembered it. The light is so soft. In the afternoon, the monastery grounds along the riverbank are crowded with visitors. The people just sit on the grass or peer into the shrines; they don’t seem to annoy the worshipers. A small black cow walks by and various groups shoo it away; they are not a bit respectful. Prema loves it all, says he never wants to go back to California.
Swami, seated in the room which Sankarananda had when we saw him in 1957, is like the Head of the Order—more kingly, gracious, and assured than any of the other swamis. He doesn’t seem different here; he isn’t adapting himself to India, just making himself at home in it … He showed us the exact spot where he first met Brahmananda, on the upper balcony of the building he is now staying in. As Swami stood there, describing their meeting in all its often-repeated details, it seemed uncannily actual.
I am staying at the new guesthouse, just outside the monastery compound—I don’t think it existed when Don and I were here. Also at the guesthouse are a few other devotees from the States. Swami and Nikhilananda from New York come and have their meals with us. Nikhilananda, like Swami, was an anti-British terrorist in his teens and has the distinction of having been imprisoned in a British concentration camp. Now he is quite a despot. He bullies his Western disciples ruthlessly. He can’t bully me because I belong to Swami. I greatly respect and rather like him. He talks obsessively and critically about the weaknesses of the Indian character, which are, according to him, fatalism, love of chatter, and indifference to social abuses. Swami says wistfully to me, “I can’t make conversation.” He is a little bit jealous, afraid that Nikhilananda will impress me.
December 23. When I came here in 1957, I only made a pranam once, to Sankarananda; I didn’t bow down to any of the other swamis. This was because I didn’t want to embarrass Don—my bowing down would have called attention to his refraining from doing so, and he couldn’t bow down because, in those days, he wasn’t a devotee.
During this visit, I am playing it very broad. I bow down even to the most junior swamis. This is partly clowning, partly aggression—and how it embarrasses many of them! A few retaliate—I have to take a standing jump backwards, to avoid having them do it to me.
December 24. We drove into Calcutta, where I made a reservation on the BOAC flight to Rome for January 7. That seems centuries away. Swami changed into Western clothes to come with me—I think because he didn’t want people to know he was a swami and keep making pranams. He looked dapper and ridiculously non-Hindu. He very seldom dresses so formally at home.
Crowds and crowds and crowds. This is what a vast area of the world must be like, now—the part one prefers to forget; squalor, overpopulation, near-starvation. Old trucks, bullock carts, rickshaws, little closed cabs such as Ramakrishna used to ride in. Holy men smeared all over with ashes. And the skinny wandering bulls.
Arup is sick with the shakes.
This evening, after vespers, we had a Christmas Eve puja for Jesus. They built up an altar on a side aisle of the temple, with shelves of fruit and cake, surmounted by a picture of the Virgin and Child.
I had been told to read the birth of Jesus from Luke and the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew. Was much disconcerted when I found that they had given me a Roman Catholic Bible—it was the first copy I’d ever looked into. I had to sight-read unfamiliar phrases, such as “our supersubstantial bread,” or else substitute phrases from the King James version, which I guessed that the monks here would know better.
All those dark faces listening to this mock-Hindu paleface! I knew exactly how I ought to be feeling, but I didn’t feel anything at all. The ceremony wasn’t in the least embarrassing, however. They sang a couple of songs to “Sri Isa” in Bengali, which had the merit of lifting Jesus right out of the West and putting him back in Asia, where he belongs. George recorded it all on his new Japanese recorder.
December 25. How nice it is to wake here, on my refreshingly hard bed under the mosquito net! Waking up is helped by the rude crows, and a bird which emits liquid tropical whistles, and the factory sirens and riverboat hooters and the noise of trains crossing the Vivekananda Bridge, and then finally the great smashing clash of buckets and pans as the help starts to get ready for breakfast, which we eat at seven-thirty. A purely British meal: porridge, cold scrambled eggs, marmalade, strong black tea, hard toast. The art of preparing this must have been passed down from one generation to the next, since the British left.
Arup is still shaky. Swami is very concerned because, he says, if you aren’t perfectly well, you are not allowed to take sannyas. One of the hazards of the ceremony is that you have to bathe in the Ganges, and in the middle of the night, too. Telling me this, Swami drops his voice, as though he were describing some obscene rite of sexual initiation performed by a primitive tribe, instead of the most ordinary of Hindu holy acts.
Poor Arup, when I went in to visit him, seemed isolated and a bit humiliated by his illness, which I suspect is nothing but psychosomatically expressed India horror. Prema has almost forced him into this role by grabbing the role of India lover. The greatest possible demonstration of India love is not to get sick here.
All over the Math grounds, they are putting up pandals, canvas tent halls with a bamboo framework, for speeches and mass meals on the day of the Vivekananda birthday puja, January 6th.
December 26. Prema has taken hundreds of photographs, from which we are to choose illustrations for the Ramakrishna book. We spent the morning looking through them. Prema, with his usual crushing frankness, remarked that he has been rereading the book and doesn’t think it’s really “great.” I agreed with him, of course, and added that I could probably give a much more vivid impression of Ramakrishna when talking to a sympathetic stranger in a bar, after several drinks. There is that in me which will never write its best to order. Deep down, I have always resented the censorship of the Math.
Meanwhile, thank God for the greatness of Willa Cather. I am relishing every single page of The Song of the Lark.
December 27. This afternoon, I talked at the Ramakrishna Mission College. They had fixed up their gymnasium for the occasion; the stage seemed partly a shrine, partly an Oriental parlor. On the back wall a thing like a monster valentine, enclosing Vivekananda’s portrait. Downstage were a draped couch and a draped table with a stick of incense burning on it, right under the noses of us speakers, as we sat on the couch, garlanded by the students, like gods. (Luckily, we were allowed to take the garlands off before speaking; they were terribly hot.)
I was fairly good, I guess. Not that I said anything much, but it came through without hesitation and loud. Then Swami was asked to answer
questions. He was all silver and gold—silver hair and gold skin with a silvery light on it, and the blending yellow of his robe. He told the boys that their college would be a success only when it produced at least a dozen monks a year. He was adorable—smiling and teasing and yet quite serious. Many of the students had their arms around each other as they listened. They were slim pliant-waisted youths with dark melancholy mocking eyes and smiling white teeth; many wore mustaches. Afterwards we were served gray sweetened milk-tea and oranges and cookies. There were also glasses of water. Swami, who is determined I shan’t be poisoned on this visit, said quite loudly, “Don’t drink that, Chris.”
December 28. This morning, one of the papers prints an interview with me, which begins: “Why did distinguished writer Christopher Isherwood become such a strong admirer of Swami Vivekananda—to the extent of banging his fist on the table in raptures, as he did in Calcutta on Friday?”
Today Swami, George, Prema, and I had lunch with the swamis in the monastery dining room, sitting on the floor. You eat with your right hand, mustn’t use your left. I finally had to sit on mine, because it kept flying up to my mouth to help the right.
Now and then, one or another of the swamis would start a chant. I noticed particularly one sturdy old swami because he chanted with such enthusiasm. I could easily picture him as a young boy, just entering the monastery; he hadn’t really changed at all. He had taken his vows unquestioningly and never faltered. Such a comical old man, his nose nearly meeting his chin. And all he has done with his life has been to take Ramakrishna’s teachings absolutely literally. With the result that he has no children, no money, no fame, and isn’t afraid of anything in this world or the next.
Later Prema lectured at the college, on the Vedanta Society of Southern California, showing slides made from his own photographs. Seen in this setting, they seemed exotic because they gave you such an exaggerated impression of American luxury and cleanliness. Even the freeway looked well swept, and the Hollywood shrine room appeared so sleek with polish, so well carpeted, that it was more like a hotel bedroom. The very flowers and trees had an air of wealth … I didn’t feel that the students quite understood any of these pictures. Surely they must find them unnatural, almost sinister?
My Guru and His Disciple Page 22