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

by Sister Gargi

  Dorothy Peters (Pravajika Nirbhayaprana)

  Presently the senior sannyasini of the convent in San Francisco, she was one of the first four nuns to take monastic vows (brahmacharya). Dorothy was a leader in landscaping the many beautiful gardens of the Vedanta Society and worked with Swami Ashokananda on the sculptures for the altar in the New Temple.

  Ediben (Edith Benjamin Soulé)

  Ediben was one of Swami Ashokananda’s first students. She had a pure and beautiful voice and, before coming to Vedanta, became well known locally as a concert singer. Spirited and out-going, with a loving word for everyone, she was the Society’s secretary from 1942 until she resigned in 1972.

  Edna Zulch

  A diminutive and congenial widow with three grown sons, Edna was a hard working editor of The Voice of India, the Vedanta Society’s high-quality magazine that was published during 1945–46 and later revived with trial issues in the early 1950s. She was an amusing and loving friend.

  Elna Olsen

  One of Swami Ashokananda’s first students, Elna was a dedicated and tireless worker of the Vedanta Society in many fields. She had been trained to drive by the racer Barney Oldfield. Although gentle and soft-spoken, Elna alarmed other devotees when she drove Swami Ashokananda in record time to and from Berkeley.

  Ernest C. Brown

  A disciple of Swami Trigunatita, Mr. Brown joined the monastery in the Old Temple in 1908. Later he left and married, but was readmitted by Swami Ashokananda when his wife died. In the 1950s he served as president of the Vedanta Society until, in his eighties, he made a pilgrimage to India, where he lived for the rest of his life.

  Eve Bunch

  Eve was a registered nurse who joined the Vedanta convent in San Francisco in 1961. She was one of the first four nuns to receive brahmacharya.

  Florence Wenner

  Florence joined the Vedanta Society around 1940 but, to Swami Ashokananda’s dismay, she left it in 1946. She was the chief editor of the Vedanta Society’s journal, The Voice of India, during 1945–46.

  Helen Sutherland

  Helen was the decorator of the interior-decorating firm of Sutherland and Stanbury, while Jo Stanbury kept the accounts. For many years they furnished and decorated at cost all the temples and retreat houses of the Vedanta Society of Northern California. Helen and Jo were inseparable friends as well as business partners.

  Jeanette Vollmer

  Jeanette was an active member of the Vedanta Society who held classes in Sanskrit. She performed her most essential service by recording Swami Ashokananda’s lectures and classes.

  Jo (Josephine) Stanbury

  Jo was a beautiful young widow when she joined the Vedanta Society in 1933. She was in charge of the exacting ceremonial preparations for worship at the Society, which included the preparation of offered food. She also cooked for Swami Ashokananda, who required a special diet, and for any devotee who was ailing or in need of a good meal.

  Kathleen Davis

  Kathleen was one of the first students of Swami Ashokananda. A grammar school teacher in San Francisco, she spent all her spare time at the Vedanta Temple. She did a great deal of literary work for The Voice of India and in later years was of indispensable assistance in the preparation of volumes 3 and 4 of New Discoveries for publication.

  Luke (Mary Lou) Williams

  A brilliant and caustic thinker, Luke was an active worker in the Old Temple and at the Vedanta Retreat at Olema. Austere and strong-willed, she was nonetheless a highly entertaining and humorous companion.

  Mara Lane

  A much loved grammar school teacher in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Mara was one of Swami Ashokananda’s first students and a lifelong practitioner of Vedanta. For many years she served as librarian at the Old Temple, where she was a cheerful presence with a halo of golden hair.

  Marilyn Pearce (Pravrajika Vishuddhaprana)

  A high school student when Dorothy Madison introduced her to Vedanta, Marilyn graduated with honors from the University of California in Berkeley before joining the convent in San Francisco—one of the first four nuns to take brahmacharya. Now a senior sannyasini, she is in charge of the bookshop at the Vedanta Society.

  Marion Langerman

  A member of the Berkeley Vedanta Society, Marion remained an ardent devotee throughout her life. Although she was an efficient office worker, she had a penchant for either quitting her secular jobs or being fired from them. This habit allowed her free time to devote to temple work.

  Miriam Kennedy (Pravrajika Nityaprana)

  The Vedanta Society’s troubleshooter and assistant to the secretary, Miriam was an extremely efficient and dedicated worker. She was one of the first four nuns to take brahmacharya and was a lifelong member of the permanent convent in San Francisco.

  Miriam King

  A loner, Miriam was independently undertaking the practice of meditation and austerity when she discovered Vedanta. She joined the San Francisco convent but left it after a year or so, and her subsequent attempts to be a nun were also temporary.

  Nancy Jackman (Professor Nancy Tilden)

  While completing her doctorate in philosophy in the late 1940s, Nancy became Swami Ashokananda’s disciple. She introduced many students of Western philosophy to Vedanta, several of whom also became students of Swami Ashokananda. She was co-secretary of the Vedanta Society from 1972 to 1998.

  Sally Martin (later Mrs. John Hoffmann)

  Sally was one of the college students introduced to Vedanta by Nancy Jackman. She was a madcap and eventually a dissident.

  Virginia Varrentzoff (Mrs. John Varrentzoff)

  Virginia became the joint secretary of the Vedanta Society with Nancy Jackman in 1972. Since the death of her husband in 1964, Virginia has lived within the Vedanta convent in San Francisco as a lay member. Her daughter, Chela, became a student of Swami Ashokananda when she was a young girl.

  A Disciple’s Journal

  In the Company of

  Swami Ashokananda

  PROLOGUE

  For almost twenty years I sat at the feet of Swami Ashokananda. I learned from him, was amazed by him, enchanted by him—and often left in profound awe.

  I had my first appointment with the Swami in early 1949. I had been attending his lectures for several months and had found, almost at once, that the philosophy and religion of Vedanta accorded with and clarified my own way of thinking. I knew without any doubt that Vedanta was a way of living that I wanted to follow. Yet, I had taken months to ask Swami Ashokananda for an interview because I feared he would sense, with his unfailing insight, the dark and bottomless pit within me and turn me away. I could not have been more wrong: he did not turn me away; he was kindness itself.

  After my first interview, I had an appointment with him every two weeks for several months. He came to know me, and I came to feel that his words were the voice of my innermost being.

  He once asked during one of my sessions with him what I wanted. I thought to reply, “I want to realize God,” but such an answer seemed too pretentious, too grand, and also too glib and not altogether true. What did I want? I wanted simply to be my-self as truly as I could be. Finally I said, “I want to be a real person.” He nodded; he was satisfied with that. I remember that he told me in connection with the life I was then living, “You are riding on the crest of a wave; it is bound to crash.” On another occasion, he said, “You gild everything with a veneer of beauty; real beauty comes from deep within things.” Sometimes, after I had expressed some opinion, he would remain silent, and my own voice would come back to me like an echo of a braying donkey. Those silences were far more effective in pointing out my failings than anything he could possibly have said. I squirmed under them. But also he listened to my opinions and my dreams with deep attention, as though there were nothing more important and fascinating on earth. I felt his compassion and his unders
tanding flowing out to me and over me, like a healing balm.

  “Do you believe in God?” he once asked me. “Yes,” I replied. “I believe that if God did not exist, nothing could exist. I believe He is existence itself.” I did not know how very Vedantic that reply was, but his eyes shone with what I had come to think of as “Swami light.”

  I trusted his words implicitly, even in mundane matters. I remember once telling him of a worldly dilemma I had. He gave a clear answer and then said, “Anyone could tell you that; you don’t need a spiritual teacher for that.” “Yes,” I said. “But I believe you”—again the Swami light. Every day I prayed with all my heart that he would be my teacher.

  For some reason that I don’t remember (perhaps it was for no particular reason), in the spring of 1949 my husband and I went to New York for a week or so, between my appointments with the Swami. While we were in New York, we walked one night to our customary restaurant, choosing on a whim to take an unfamiliar street. Suddenly a voice behind us called out my husband’s name, and a man whom I did not know caught up with us. “My God,” he said to Jackson, “I was just thinking of you. I had no idea that you were in New York. It’s a miracle!”

  It was indeed. Jackson’s friend went with us to dinner, and it turned out that Jackson was the only person on earth to fill an important job at the top of his profession at the Merganthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn. Of course, we would have to live nearby—perhaps forever. Jackson was at loose ends at the time, and the offered job seemed to fall straight out of heaven at his feet. There was no question of his not taking it, and when he asked me if I would be willing to live in New York, there was no way to say no.

  Back in San Francisco, sitting across the desk from Swami Ashokananda, I told him that I had to go to New York for good, perhaps in July.

  “Ah!” he said. “I had wanted to teach you!”

  “That is what I want,” I said.

  “Why did you not say so?”

  Flabbergasted, I whispered, “I thought it should come from you.” I had indeed thought that disciples were chosen like adopted children, only the most worthy picked and cherished. It had never occurred to me to ask. Swami laughed. “No,” he said. “You have to ask. But never mind. I will teach you. You can come back from New York twice a year to see me.” He leaned forward in conspiracy. “Now, don’t tell that I asked you.” I do not remember a happier day in my life. When I got home I did cartwheels across the lawn in my joy—and to Jackson’s prescient dismay.

  That summer we went to live in Manhattan. Before I left San Francisco, one of the devotees at the Temple asked me what I was going to do in New York. “I don’t know,” I had answered, and she said, “Why not try to find things about Swami Vivekananda in the old newspapers there.” And that is what I did. I made a resolution to go to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street every day and search through the huge volumes of yellowing newspapers for the name Swami Vivekananda. The task seemed hopeless.

  In those days, I was absorbed in reading The Life of Swami Vivekananda by His Eastern and Western Disciples (Advaita Ashrama, 1949), but I found very few clues in that wonderful book about what Swamiji was doing or when he was doing it. When, exactly, was he in New York? When did he lecture there, and when did he hold classes? The pages of the Life, when read for exact dates, or even for approximate dates, were of no help. I once asked Swami Nikhilananda, head of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in New York (whose Sunday lectures were to me like water in a desert), how one could learn about Swamiji’s stays in the city, for I thought that someone must have done this work before. He said, “Nothing is known. You have to do it the hard way, but give me whatever you find.” Although I thought that all swamis were God Himself, I did not reply. Whatever I might find would be a surprise gift for Swami Ashokananda; no other eyes would see it first.

  I kept on turning the huge, crumbling pages of the New York newspapers from 1895—at least I knew that he had been in New York that year—looking up one column and down the next for the magic words Swami Vivekananda. Nothing. I was beginning to think he had never really existed. Then one afternoon I saw it! VIVEKANANDA! I do not remember now what news article I found first, but it was like a bolt of lightning. He was real; he was there in New York. After weeks of searching those old newspapers, I had come to feel that I myself was living in 1895 Manhattan, buying the goods that were advertised, attending that year’s performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, and being aghast at the news that a bicycle (newly introduced) could whiz along at nine miles per hour. And lo! There was Swami Vivekananda, real, in the newspapers, walking the same streets as I in my own 1895 world.

  After that, things grew easier. One date led to another and I found more reports and articles. I went to the public library in Brooklyn, and there found yet more. Fortunately, I had a good friend who had worked for many years in the New York Public Library and who could readily get things done there. He arranged to have the library make photostatic copies of the articles I had discovered (xeroxing was far in the future).

  I bought an album with plastic sheets, between which the photostatic copies could be inserted, and made a compilation of news articles from the New York and Brooklyn papers, articles that as far as I knew had not been discovered before. (Indeed they had not been.) I took this album with me when I returned to San Francisco in late December and presented it to Swami Ashokananda—a Christmas gift.

  His delight astonished me. I had not thought the newspaper articles were anything very special, aside from being curiosities. But to him they were as wondrous as they had been to me when I had first found them. And all those tedious afternoons when my searches had yielded nothing were a thousandfold rewarded by the sight of his joy. He told me that Josephine Stanbury (another student) had recently found an advertisement in some obscure decorators’ journal that offered for sale some items that had belonged to Swami Vivekananda. On inquiry, it had turned out that Swamiji had stayed with a family in Salem, Massachusetts, before the Parliament of Religions in 1893.

  “When you return to New York,” Swami said to me, “you must go there and find out all you can.”

  And so, of course, that is what I did, with results that have since been published as the first volume of Swami Vivekananda in the West: New Discoveries (initially titled Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries, Advaita Ashrama, 1958). When I brought my meager findings to Swami in the summer of 1950, his delight was again the greatest reward I could ever have wished for. But much later, his reaction to those findings came as a shock to me. One day, leaning forward slightly in his chair, he said, “You must write about Swamiji.” He might as well have told me to fly to the moon (when such a thing had not even been dreamt of).

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “You must!”

  “But I can’t! How can I write about Swami Vivekananda?”

  He looked at me sternly. “I would not ask you to do something,” he said quietly but with the firmness of finality, “if I did not know you could do it.”

  I went on making sounds of protest, but I knew I was defeated. What I did not know was that a great gift had been given to me, pressed upon me, and that I should have been dancing with joy and gratitude, just as I had on the day he said he would teach me.

  I visited San Francisco from New York a few more times. My recollections of those sojourns run together, but I took notes. On June 15, 1950, I began to write the journal that starts with instruction in meditation and continues for the next two decades with the ups and downs of spiritual life under the eagle eye and guiding hand of Swami Ashokananda.

  1

  CARTWHEELS

  In the summer of 1949, Swami Ashokananda had said he would be my teacher. Although I didn’t know exactly what that meant, I didn’t care; I was overjoyed. Whatever it was, it was what I wanted. That much I knew.

  A few months later, I had to move wi
th my husband, Jackson, to the East Coast, a whole continent—and a whole world—away. In the sweltering July and August of a Manhattan summer, I wrote several letters to Swami, telling him of some dreams I was having. He wrote back to say that they were “significant.” A little later, he sent me some instructions in meditation, which I followed to the letter and also with my whole heart and soul. After a few weeks my brain did a series of what felt like somersaults. I reported these cerebral acrobatics to Swami.

  Alarmed, Swami sent a series of telegrams: STOP MEDITATING AT ONCE. WRITE TO ME DAILY. He told me the brain (“like an old jalopy”) had to catch up with the meditating mind, particularly when the meditation was on the philosophical side. He said he would tell me more when I returned to San Francisco for a visit.

  It was not until the summer of 1950, during one of my frequent visits to San Francisco, that his instructions became more specific. My journal entries for that year all took place in Swami’s office in the Old Temple, the first Hindu temple in the Western world.

  June 15, 1950

  Swami told me to meditate on two specific holy people.

  Me: Can’t I also meditate on God?

  Swami: Just do as I tell you. They are God.

  Me: Yes—but with form.

  Swami: What is wrong with form? I like form.

  Me: Yes. But I don’t understand God with form.

  Swami: Do you have to understand?

  Me: Sometimes I like to understand.

  Swami (more kindly): Do you understand how food is digested, how vitamins are absorbed into the body? Must you know all that before you will eat?

  Me: No.

  Swami: Meditate as I tell you. It is food. It is not necessary to understand.

  June 16, 1950

  Today Swami said I must never be impatient about realizing God. If there is quiet determination, it will come. It is not alone through meditation that one grows in spirituality; one absorbs it throughout the day. One must just go on breathing; one cannot stop breathing. Breathe like a fish. He imitated a fish and looked exactly like one—a great benevolent fish in an ocean of spirituality, breathing in and out effortlessly and blissfully. I could not laugh; it was such a beautiful picture. (As I was to learn later, he was a marvelous mimic, particularly of animals—lions and cobras and birds. And also of people—though I never saw him imitate any person except to his or her face, and then hilariously and often devastatingly.)