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

by Sister Gargi

  Me: I know it is wrong. I was examining how I felt, how much enthusiasm I had, and I came to that conclusion. There is a lack in me.

  Swami: You have seen the other swamis; they are great men. If I should die, someone greater will come.

  Me: I didn’t think that far. You would want me to stay here and work for Vedanta?

  Swami: Certainly. Devotion in itself shows highness of heart. Life here will not always be pleasant. There will be hardship, but hang on!

  Later that day

  Me: I feel awfully unspiritual when I wake up.

  Swami: Don’t pay attention to that. Attend to your conscious moments. When a man has to catch a bus, he doesn’t stop to think how he feels or whether he has a good or bad sleep—he just runs to catch the bus. In worldly life a person goes to work no matter how he feels; it should be the same in spiritual life. Just go ahead. After you wake up, lift your consciousness.

  Me: Yes. But it takes a little time.

  Swami (sternly, lest I regret the breakup of my marriage): Do the best you can. There is nothing in mutual love, because neither person is perfect enough, and after a time each finds the other empty. It is when two people love a third thing—have another thing together—that they find satisfaction. With ordinary people the third thing is children, but even this is no good. After a time the children develop their own selfishness; they cause trial and heartbreak. Love God. If you are inclined spiritually, that is the thing to do. All this marriage business is no good. Pray to God.

  For many years, as soon as I got home, I would write down a little of what Swami had said during the wonderful evenings in the back office. Often the hour would be late and I would simply jot down a few notes in speedwriting, promising myself to write it out in full later on. I seldom did, and now those notes are indecipherable. Thus many evenings of inspired talk are forever lost. This was before the days of tape recorders, and, in any case, it would have seemed out of keeping to record those informal, semi-private talks. Several notes from those years, full of my early frustrations and anxieties, are given here.

  October 15, 1951

  Swami: How is the article [about the swamis] coming?

  Me: Slowly.

  Swami: Why is it so slow? Because your mind does not focus. Why does your mind not focus?

  Me: Why, Swami?

  Swami: It is tamas [sloth].

  Me: What can I do about it?

  Swami: Fight it! The mind should always be profitably employed. Why do you find the article so difficult?

  Me: I don’t know.

  Swami: Do it this way: take each swami chronologically as he came here. Make a list of everything about them. Then relate them each to a larger thing—their work in the United States, the work of Swami Vivekananda; then relate that to a larger thing—to Sri Ramakrishna; then relate that to a still larger thing—the universal. You seem dispirited.

  Me (after a prolonged silence): The thing is that I know nothing of those swamis.

  Swami: An anthropologist builds a whole skeleton from a single bone.

  Me: I just write a lot of nonsense.

  Swami: Don’t be afraid of writing nonsense. You must write. You are not playing any more. Write as though your livelihood depended on it. If you do not do it, you will never become established in this way of living. There will be nothing to fasten on to. Your life will become empty and meaningless. What will you do? You say, “Oh, I will meditate.” For how many hours can you meditate? And do you think that your meditation will always be inspiring? No. There will be long periods of time in which you will meditate and nothing will happen. If you do the thing now that is difficult for you, you will not be afraid any more.

  Me: Swami, I find it difficult to study when I am trying to write.

  Swami: You are to do the difficult thing.

  Me: I do not know whether to write first or study first.

  Swami (crossly): I thought you had a schedule. You were to write in the afternoons.

  Me: Yes; that was before I started to write.

  Swami: Do that. Write in the afternoon.

  October 21, 1951

  Swami: Are you feeling happy?

  Me: Yes, Swami.

  Swami: How is your apartment? Do you like it?

  Me: Yes. It is fine.

  Swami: What will you do when you become restless and unhappy here? You will take off to New York.

  Me: I do not think so.

  Swami: Do not become too isolated. You study and write at home all day or come and sit here in these dingy rooms. Your mind will become tired and dissatisfied. Do you see your friend Miss Day [Bobbie, my friend since high school days]?

  Me: No. I haven’t seen her for some time. I have talked to her over the phone.

  Swami: Well, see her. Do not lose contact with your friends. What other friends have you? There is that one who is crazy. How is she?

  Me: She is all right. She is in Okinawa now. I have another friend who lives in San Mateo. I see her now and then.

  Swami: What does she do?

  Me: She is married and has children and goes to a psychiatrist.

  Swami (laughing): Well, see your friend Miss Day.

  Me: Bobbie and I always had a wonderful time together, but even the most unworldly of worldly life seems empty and boring to me now.

  Swami: That is all right as long as this life holds interest for you.

  Me: It does, at the moment.

  Swami: That is good. Worldly people deplete themselves until they become like dry fibers. They run around filling in their lives with this and that—art, music, entertainment, social life—so that in the end there is no energy left. They spend their whole lives filling in time.

  Me: It is terribly sad.

  Swami: Yes. In spiritual life one grows quiet and tastes real joy. One learns to be quiet. The mind grows still and one finds real happiness.

  Me: That is a great art, the art of living.

  Swami: It is the great art. The whole world becomes joyous, filled with sweetness and festivity. Wherever one goes it is festive, dripping with honey. One sees everything that way—stars, sun, moon, a dung heap.

  Me: Does one see it that way always, all the time?

  Swami: Yes, nothing can change it. Sickness, old age, nothing can touch it. But don’t look at me to see a person in that state. I used to see everything that way. Well, it will come again.

  Me: Don’t you see it always?

  Swami: Do I look like a man full of joy?

  Me: Yes.

  Swami (smiling): My mind is so full of bricks and buildings and figures! When one is so busy helping people, how can one just be blissful?

  Me: Does one cancel out the other?

  Swami: It is a different state of mind. I cannot just sit here exuding joy and sweetness. People would come; “Oh, what a wonderful man!” they would say.

  Me: That would help people.

  Swami: Yes, but how many would come for that? People do not want that joy.

  Me: They would if they knew what it was.

  Swami: But there must be a house to come to—a retreat, roads, buildings. There has to be a cook. It is all fine to enjoy the dinner, but somebody has to cook it.

  October 22, 1951

  Swami Ashokananda and the assistant minister, Swami Shantaswarupananda, went with Ediben Soulé and Anna Webster, two devotees, in the afternoon to see The River, a movie made in India by the great French director Jean Renoir. Somehow the women seemed to be done up in furs and jewels, off to the matinee. As he was leaving the Temple, Swami put his hat on in the hall and, seeing me there, took it off very formally and bowed his head slowly toward me. I laughed and looked at Swami Shantaswarupananda, who was standing by the front door and witnessing the whole thing. There was a look of baffled horror on his face. He does not understand these games.

&nb
sp; When they had left, the air of festivity went with them. The place seemed to be empty and forlorn.

  I said to Miriam Kennedy, “We are left behind.”

  “One gets very used to that,” she said.

  “I guess I will just go back to my little hovel,” I said.

  “And I will go back to my bookkeeping,” said Miriam.

  October 23, 1951

  Swami: How is the article?

  Me: I cannot write more than a page a day—two at the most.

  Swami: There is no excuse for that.

  (Silence. I grew hot and flushed while Swami turned the pages of a magazine. At length he looked up and smiled somewhat slyly.)

  Me: What can I do about it?

  Swami: What do you do? Does your mind just wander off into a daydream?

  Me: No, I don’t know what I do. The time just goes by.

  Swami: You daydream. Your mind just wanders off, wool gathering.

  Me: It doesn’t get off the subject.

  Swami: Pah! You are not even aware that it gets off the subject. Do you cook your own meals?

  Me: Yes, Swami.

  Swami: All your meals?

  Me: I cook my dinner. (He asked me what I usually eat.)

  Swami went back to looking through his magazines—the Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentleman, Sunset, The New Yorker. He turned the pages casually, glancing at them. Sometimes something caught his eye and he read it more carefully, such as an article on converting a garage into a dance hall. This he then read aloud to me. “My, how wonderful,” he said in genuine appreciation.

  Later, Swami went into the hallway and started to talk to Ediben about India. I stood in the door of the library and overheard him express some of his long-standing opinions of Mahatma Gandhi’s role in Indian history.

  Swami: Gandhi was a very holy man; there is no doubt of that, but he was a stupid man.

  Me: Politically stupid?

  Swami: I said a stupid man; I did not qualify it. He had a hobby, and he put his hobby [ahimsa] before the good of his country. What India needs is what Swamiji taught. Strength! They have been grass eaters for too long.

  October 1951

  Jeanette Vollmer was sitting on the floor of the library trying to unravel a billowing mass of recording wire that the students in Sacramento had managed to get tangled. Luke (Mary Lou Williams) was helping.

  Swami (coming into the room): What are you doing?

  Jeanette: I am trying to save some of this wire. We can use it over again.

  Swami: Everyone here is a crazy person. I have come to that conclusion. You are all crazy people. Something is wrong up here (touching his head). You ask and ask if you can record lectures. The next thing I know there is just tangled wire that you spend hours and hours untangling. Then you ask again to record lectures; again the tangle.

  (To Luke and me) Once Jeanette insisted upon recording a lecture. She played it for me, and there was nothing—silence. You go to all this trouble and expense. What for? I do not know. The only conclusion I can come to is that I am surrounded by crazy people.

  October 28, 1951

  A number of disciples were gathered in the back office of the Temple after the Sunday lecture.

  Swami: No one here need worry about progress. You are being pushed. Everyone who came to Sri Ramakrishna attained spirituality. It is the same even now. That force is still working and will go on working for a long time. Those who kindled the fire may be gone, but the fire is still roaring. You can warm yourselves by it. Just do what you have to do; you will go ahead. But you do negative things and hold yourselves back.

  Disciple: What are negative things?

  Swami: Well, hating others, comparing yourself with others, not being contented—those are negative things.

  November 3, 1951

  Eve Bunch, a novice in the convent, said to Swami that she was discouraged by his lecture on the kundalini.

  Swami: Discouraged—I hate that word—only fools and cowards are discouraged. Do you think the practice of religion is easy? Did Sri Ramakrishna ever say that anything was easy to follow? Don’t be cowards; be strong! On the one hand, you accept Sri Ramakrishna as an Incarnation; on the other hand, you act as though you are weak, miserable creatures. You are a jumble.

  If you want to attain to the highest, practice Vedanta. This is the way: think of everyone as God Himself and serve Him. But you do not do that. You hate this one and that one. You are hurt; you shrink from others. You cling to your own idiosyncrasies. See the Divine in all.

  November 16, 1951

  “The subtle desires of the senses cling even after the gross desires are gone,” Swami said to Mara. “The monks, after their physical desires are gone, will want to hear a woman sing—the voice of a woman. It is the sex desire in its subtle form. One is never truly rid of it until realization, complete purification of mind.”

  Sometimes, homesick, I drove down to the “Ranch” near Los Gatos, sixty miles south of San Francisco. The thirty acres my family owned was called the Ranch, although it was a country home and not a ranch in the true sense of the word. My parents had no intention of growing crops or raising livestock, although my mother had a fancy for hens of various breeds and for turkeys that strutted when provoked, dipping their wings in the dust and making a “pfutt” sound.

  It had once been a large Spanish holding owned by the first governor of California, who gave shelter to a famous daring-do bandit named Joachim Murietta. His large hacienda had long since burned down, leaving only a two-story adobe dwelling. This building, about twenty-five feet square, was a landmark and boasted a bronze plaque that attested to its age and historic prestige. Its roof was covered with the branches and flowers of ancient rose vines, whose thick trunks seemed to support the roof itself.

  Enchanted, my parents had bought the thirty acres, extended the adobe house, and built five other houses around it. Under the property’s huge and ancient oak trees, my mother created extensive, informal, and luxurious gardens. I spent every summer at the Ranch from the age of eight—swimming, playing tennis, riding horseback. Best of all, I liked wandering alone on its uncultivated hill, from the top of which one could see to the east the vast orchard-filled Santa Clara valley, which was a mass of white blossoms in the spring, and, to the west, the low coastal mountains, where every tree and bush seemed placed by a master artist. During my childhood and youth, the presence of God was exceedingly, sometimes unbearably, strong on that hill. Once, when I was fifteen or so, I flung myself upon the earth and vowed to dedicate my life to that presence, to God. I believed He, or She, took note.

  At the Ranch, I saw beauty wherever I looked. I loved the place with my whole heart, not just for the wonderful, flawless summer days I and my family and our friends spent there, but for the solitary hours of peace and inner happiness that I whiled away just looking, just being. A stranger once told my brother-in-law that he used to park his car on the public road that ran alongside the Ranch and listen to the bursts of laughter that filtered through the trees. Those moments of eavesdropping, on what he rightly assumed to be heaven, made his day.

  My mother died in 1941 when I was twenty-nine, and the gardens began to go to seed. My father died ten years later. Most of the Ranch was sold off and subdivided. My sister Leila and her husband, Holloway, took possession of the main house and its immediate surroundings. The Ranch died. I felt that its presiding deity had forsaken it, and when I asked Swami Ashokananda if that could be true—if there had really been a presiding deity—he did not deny the possibility. He just strongly recommended that I put all that behind me. Actually, I had no choice. But nostalgia dies hard, and from time to time, with Swami’s reluctant consent, I drove to the Ranch at Los Gatos for a day or two.

  November 26, 1951

  Swami: How are you?

  Me (having just returned from the Ranch): Not so good.

/>   Swami: Why?

  Me: I am upset because I get upset.

  Swami: Los Gatos is no place for you. Whether you know it or not, that life is not based on the same thing on which you are basing yours.

  Me: I cannot be away from here for two days without getting upset and depressed. It does not seem to be a very strong state of mind.

  Swami: It is as it should be. When one comes down from a high altitude, it is very depressing. You are used to being here in rarefied air. Naturally you feel it when you leave. Just be cheerful. Everything is all right. You have no problems. The situation with your husband is still unsettled; but just wait. This life may be difficult now; but it will be gratifying later on.

  Me: Will I ever be spiritual?

  Swami: Why not? Don’t expect it within one year or five years. Plod on.

  Me: It is difficult to be patient.

  Swami: Don’t use that word in my presence. This is your life. There is no alternative. Face it. The mind must be trained.

  December 7, 1951

  Swami: God became man so that He could sacrifice Himself and thus be redeemed. People participate in that sacrifice and redemption through communion. It is the great drama.

  Me: I can see that it must be all for fun. What other reason could there be? It need never have started. It starts in order to get back to where it was in the first place. Everything was just fine.

  Swami: But we see the world. Here it is. No sense in asking why. The thing is to know what to do now. Yes, it is all a play. It is a great fun. See it all as a game He is playing. Welcome the thunder and the lightning. Welcome the storm and the quiet before the storm. Welcome pleasure, welcome pain—Brother Pain, welcome to you! Stand aside as the witness. See sweetness in all. When you can do that, you will be free.

  The great swamis [direct disciples of Sri Ramakrishna] were like giant redwood trees. The ones you know today are like bay tree saplings compared to them.

  Me: Could one know their greatness just by seeing them?

  Swami: When you see the ocean, you know it. They were a vast ocean, but filled with sweet water, not brackish.