by Sister Gargi
December 3, 1961
Several devotees were sitting in the front room of the Old Temple. Swami sat on the couch, as always. On Sunday evenings his mind is still soaring high from his morning lecture. He likes to talk to us at that time. I came in rather late and the conversation was already going on.
Dorothy Madison: Sri Ramakrishna says in the Gospel [Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna] that love for God should be as strong as three kinds of love combined—the love of a mother for her child, a husband for a chaste wife, and a miser for his gold. Did he mean that one should love God in all those ways or that one should have the combined strength of all those loves?
Swami: I would say he was speaking of the quantity rather than the quality—one should have the power of those loves combined. Love for God has a quality of its own. It is not just like any worldly loves.
Dorothy: But how can one possibly have that much love?
Swami: You have an obsession. You are thinking of your love for your mother. Do you think that is the be-all and end-all of love?
Dorothy: I can’t imagine a stronger love than that.
Swami: Why do you judge everything by your own experience? When one feels real love for God, it is a tremendous thing. One’s whole being becomes charged with love.
Me: Swami, I have an obsession too. It seems to me that unless God is real to a person—that is, really real, not just a strong idea or conviction—unless He is real, then one cannot have such intense love for Him. I can see that if He does seem real, then one could not help but have such love. But unless He is known as real, one cannot have that kind of love; and without that kind of love, one cannot know Him as real. That seems quite a dilemma.
Swami (smiling): You have said a mouthful. But your supposition is wrong. One can have love for God before realizing Him, because He is real. He is real for you all the time. It is just your ignorance that hides that fact from you.
Swami went on to speak of the great Bengali saint Sri Chaitanya, who was mad with love for God. Chaitanya once flung himself into the ocean. A fisherman found him several days later floating about, still in an ecstatic trance. The fisherman brought him in to shore; but having touched Chaitanya when he was in that exalted spiritual state, the fisherman was himself out of his mind with divine ecstasy, dancing around, singing, and weeping. The people asked Chaitanya to bring the fisherman back to his senses. Chaitanya told them to get some food from a very worldly house and make him eat it. They did so, and the fisherman’s mind at once came down to normal.
Swami: Things happen like that. One who is not ready for spiritual experience may have it by accident, but it cannot be retained.
Once a man was brought to Sri Ramakrishna. He had been at a kirtan [devotional songfest] and had gone into ecstasy, such that he could not speak. Sri Ramakrishna told the man’s family not to worry; he wouldn’t be able to retain that state and his mind would soon come down. Actually it did; in a few days the man was back to normal.
Anna Webster: Isn’t it good to have that happen—even if one isn’t up to it? I mean, when a person isn’t ready for an experience like that, isn’t it good just the same?
Swami: No, it can be very harmful.
Anna: Harmful?
Swami: When the body and mind aren’t prepared, it can be a terrible thing. The body can be shattered. One could have a stroke.
Anna: What of it?
Swami: Do you want to spend the rest of your life paralyzed?
Anna: I wouldn’t mind—what difference would it make if one’s inner state were good? I mean—
Swami: The mental state would not remain up. It could become worse that it had been before. The reaction could be very severe. It is much better to prepare one’s body and mind so that they can retain spiritual experience. One should progress along all lines simultaneously.
September 21, 1962
We were at our annual Lake Tahoe retreat. Swami began talking to us about the work at Sacramento and the struggle involved in changing the soil for the gardens, and so forth.
Swami: To work for the Lord is never easy; there is always struggle. Always! There is no other way. It is good to have the spirit of struggle. Out of that, growth comes.
If spiritual life is made devoid of struggle, there is a danger in it. The danger is twofold: first, there is the danger that the work will gradually peter out, and second, that it will draw third-rate people who are seeking comfort and enjoyment. Those who have a little substance in them will find themselves in the minority and will go away. Those who are pleasure-seeking will take the whole thing over. That is the danger. If you continually provide entertainment, you will draw that kind of people. I am in favor of keeping things a little on the dry side. Without a background of strength, the right kind of people just won’t come.
With strength, there comes a joy in the struggle, in wrestling with your mind. It is as though you had climbed a steep mountain—you breathe pure air and see vast views all around.
I have a horror of this watering down just to make everyone feel comfortable. There is a trap there. We fall for the obvious and we miss the deeper thing.
Always struggle—the struggle of a hero, not of a coward—a conquering struggle, without even a thought there could be defeat in that struggle. It is not as though you can take an easy path and find that good meditation comes. There is no easy path. When the mind is difficult, you have to rise up and battle it. Outside troubles may come; inside troubles may come—but rise up and be a conquering hero. There is no other way.
September 24, 1962
It was Swami Ashokananda’s birthday today in Lake Tahoe. Jo, Helen, Marilyn Pearce, and I had arranged a picnic at Mount Rose in celebration. Marilyn had a special gift for him—a polished box with a fitted lid that she had carved out of a block of incense cedar. But this morning Swami received the news that Swami Akhilananda had died last night at 5:00 p.m. Swami Ashokananda debated whether or not to go on the picnic and decided not to cancel the arrangements. During the picnic he said, “I am talking with all of you, but my mind is with Swami Akhilananda.” In the evening, Swami spoke only of his friend, Swami Akhilananda, and so lovingly.
During the mid-1960s, Swami continued to spend a month or six weeks each year at the Vedanta Society’s monastic retreat at Lake Tahoe. Although the altitude and quiet days no longer refreshed him, he still loved the piney fragrance and the expansive view of still, blue water. My journal for 1964 gives a glimpse of the atmosphere with Swami at Lake Tahoe, beginning just after John Varrentzoff’s tragic death as the victim of a freak accident. Found in John’s coat pocket were cards on which he had written things Swami had said to him. One of these was “Whatever your experiences are—reject them!” Another was “Do you want to stay forever in your miserable, miserable, miserable mud puddle? You don’t have to keep checking and rechecking mistakes. That is not a spiritual way of life. Many times a mistake is just left behind. Plunge into the thought of God.”
September 8, 1964
Virginia Varrentzoff and her daughter Chela drove to Tahoe this morning with John’s ashes. Jo took the grieving mother and daughter to a spot at the north end of the lake in Nevada, where the water is a clear turquoise and rocks string out from the shore. Chela climbed out to the last rock and there poured the ashes into the water. When they returned to the car, they were crying.
Tonight Virginia and Chela had dinner at Jo and Helen’s cabin and then saw Swami alone in his cabin for some forty-five minutes before the rest of us (Kathleen, Ediben, Jo, Helen, and me) came in. Swami seemed so tired and ill that he could hardly speak, yet he tried to talk cheerfully for the sake of Virginia and Chela and served us ice cream and cake.
Swami said that the soul after death resolves to think only of God in its next life, but as soon as it emerges from the mother’s womb and breathes the air of this world, it forgets all its good resolutions.
Swami: But Chela should
n’t hear these things. She is young and should enjoy life.
Chela (laughing): What are you trying to do? (She meant, I think, “Are you advising me to enjoy worldly life?”)
Swami: There is a right time for everything. In youth one should have enjoyment. If one does everything at the right time, then in each period of one’s life one will feel fulfilled. There is a way of life for each period: youth, middle age, and old age.
(Virginia and Chela stayed overnight in a motel and had lunch the next day with Jo and Helen before returning to San Francisco.)
September 11, 1964
Swami’s blood pressure is still high. I have never seen him look worse than he has in the past few days. Yet he notices each little thing—a Band-Aid on someone’s finger, a new piece of jewelry, a missing button, a new pair of slacks, and whether or not one is dressed warmly enough—small things that indicate states of mind, body, or soul. Nothing escapes him that concerns the welfare of his disciples. His mind is never on himself.
He is worried about Swami Vividishananda, the head of the Vedanta Society in Seattle, who has failing eyesight. It seems that the optic nerve is affected. Swami Ashokananda looks so tragic when he thinks about it. If Swami Vividishananda should go blind, his work in Seattle will collapse because the center does not have enough real workers to carry on.
Later that day
Swami: In ten years you will change your opinion about me; then how will you write a book about me? All of you [his students] will change your opinion.
Me: If that is true, you are surrounded by worthless people.
Swami: I am surrounded by normal people. It is natural that one’s sense of values should change. It is human. What seems good now might not seem good later.
Me: I don’t understand why you talk this way.
Swami (with an amused gleam): To warn you—so the jolt of disillusionment won’t be so great.
September 1964
Since the first stormy days after our arrival at Lake Tahoe, every day has been warm, clear, and still—day after day of wonderful, golden weather. Swami looks better now, though he has become sad and tired worrying about Swami Vividishananda’s eyesight and financial problems. Perhaps Ediben and Doug also weigh upon his mind; Doug, who has prostate cancer, grows worse and worse.
September 16, 1964
Swami: Sri Ramakrishna’s and Swamiji’s work is a power in itself. It will go ahead of itself. It is that power that draws people and makes them want to serve. Even if one should decide to shut down the Society, there would be an opposing force. A group of people would keep the work going; the power would work through them.
September 17, 1964
Kathleen and I were sitting in Swami’s cabin.
Swami (to Kathleen, referring to me): Don’t imitate her; you will get into a mess if you do. Her path is different from yours. You have your own way. You are channel 7 and she is channel 5, or vice versa. Each life has its own channel.
September 18, 1964
Swami: Swamiji sowed the seeds of Vedanta in San Francisco. He left a power there.
Me: Where are the seeds? After the people whom he knew or who saw him and heard him died, then where are the seeds, or power, located?
Swami: They are not only in the hearts of people; they are in the very air. Those who live in San Francisco are affected by them. The atmosphere he created is a force.
Me: It is an esoteric thing.
Swami: We are speaking of esoteric things, not of material forces.
September 19, 1964
Swami was sleeping when I went as usual to his cabin at 1:30 this afternoon. He had not, of course, slept all night. He sleeps in the afternoons.
This evening he seemed to be well and his eyes were shining, lustrous—his face full. His blood pressure was lower, and he no longer looked so deeply worried since there is hope that Swami Vividishananda’s eyesight may recover.
He spoke of my writing a book about him and seemed pleased. Now and then he told me stories of his early life. I write down all I can remember as soon as I can.
September 20, 1964
Except for the time he walked over to Ediben’s, where I was staying, Swami has not stepped out of his own cabin. Though his health has improved since we arrived at Lake Tahoe, he is still weak and thin. God knows how he will lecture in San Francisco a week from today!
I go every day to work with Swami at 1:30 p.m. Generally he is asleep and I tiptoe away. He hasn’t been able to work at all. Sometimes (as in earlier years) he gives me lunch in his kitchen. We stand at his sink, he on the left and I on the right, and look out on a parklike forest. He eats, almost always cottage cheese, yogurt, and canned pears, and I have something similar. Then he washes the dishes.
In summers past, Swami would sometimes bring one or two young men from the monastery to stay in his cabin at the lake. But he would never let them serve him. He made his own bed and washed his own dishes; he did his laundry in a bucket and hung his clothes out to dry on the porch railing, securing them with large, pancake-shaped rocks that Jo had gathered by the lake. He even did outdoor tasks.
Once, when the fire in his living room smoked, he came outside, wearing bedroom slippers and a coat over his dressing gown. He got a ladder from under the porch, set it against the house by the chimney, and (ignoring Ediben’s panicky protests) proceeded to climb the ladder carrying a long broom. When he reached the roof, he tossed aside the screen that covered the chimney and thrust the broom down the opening as far as it could reach. The broom was not long enough to do a thorough job, but the maneuver helped because smoke came out of the chimney. He then climbed down the ladder, returned the broom to its place under the porch, and went inside.
Many years ago, one of the young men fortunate enough to come to Tahoe for the summer with Swami was the youngest of Edna Zulch’s three sons, Fred, who was thinking in those days of becoming a monk and was living in the monastery in San Francisco. Fred told the story of how he and another young novice knocked down a wasps’ nest from the eaves of the porch. The dispossessed wasps were angrily buzzing around when Swami deliberately enticed one of them to sting him on his bare arm (in order, he said, to know what a sting felt like). When the wasp obliged, a look of sheer ecstasy came into Swami’s face as though he, like the Hindu saint Pavhari Baba, had received “a message from the Beloved” when bitten by a cobra.
I was sometimes aghast at how Swami dealt with the wildlife at Lake Tahoe—often with a vision beyond the ordinary. One day during our kitchen lunch, I was horrified to see a big, black, long-legged spider in the sink. Swami summarily washed it down the drain. When I made a cry of protest, he said, surprised, and with total conviction, “Don’t you see? It is just the form.”
He usually took a very practical and commonsense view of the forest creatures. Aside from providing a salt lick for the deer, he did not accommodate them. On the contrary, he discouraged familiarity, for he knew from his experience with rodents at Mayavati that they could be highly destructive. He gave them no quarter. Once, I inadvertently let a mouse into Ediben’s cabin when I was staying there alone. I put out food and water for its comfort. Swami insisted, instead, that I set a trap. Reluctantly I did so, and the little mouse, accustomed to my offerings, was betrayed. The next day, Jo, Helen, and I gave it a decent burial. Another time, walking along the path between Ediben’s house and his own, Swami, Jo, and I came upon a sick or disabled bat, lying helpless in the open. With his cane Swami gently nudged the little creature into the bushes, where it would not be visible to a hawk. “Let it recover,” he said.
And there was the memorable time when the long tail of a mouse dangled between the boards of his bedroom ceiling. He grasped it firmly and maneuvered the attached mouse toward a knothole, from where it fell into his hands. He then drowned it without ceremony.
All that was in the days when he had his health. Now, although he still washed his clothes
in a bucket and sometimes padded into the kitchen at lunchtime wearing a many-layered combination of jersey pajamas, sweaters, and ski jacket, I found him most often reclining on his lounge in the living room gazing at the wide, blue water of the lake, which reminded him—as an expanse of quiet water always did—of infinity.
Here my journal ends. It ends not because there weren’t many more spiritual gems to record after 1964, but because I was given innumerable small writing and editing tasks in addition to one big, all-consuming job. I had little time left to jot down my conversations with Swami Ashokananda.
My big job was to write the second book of New Discoveries. I began working on it at the close of 1964 and finished it toward the end of 1969. I did the research as I went along, by correspondence and sometimes by actual fieldwork—or, I should say, by pleasure jaunts to see the places and to meet the people that had loomed large in Swami Vivekananda’s second visit to the West (which was what this new book was all about). Actually, Swami Vivekananda’s first visit to the West had not been fully covered in the first book, which had been based entirely on my research, for I had not included what was already known. Moreover, I had followed Swamiji’s trail only up to the middle of 1894, whereas his first visit to the West had not closed until the end of 1896.
Nevertheless, in 1964 I jumped ahead to his second visit, which began in 1899. I am not sure why Swami Ashokananda wanted the story to take that leap. Perhaps he felt that Swami Vivekananda’s work in California in 1899 and 1900 was of great importance and wanted to be sure I recorded it correctly, or perhaps it was just because he wanted to see that period written before he died.
As had been the case with the first book, a great deal of research took place by miracle, as though Swami Vivekananda were closely watching the work and guiding it—or so I liked to think. For instance, in regard to the Hales (who played the role of Swamiji’s family in the West), I found the McKindley sisters’ niece (a relative who I had not known existed) by writing to a man for some unrelated data. In reply, he included the incidental information that there had been a third McKindley sister named Mary, whose daughter was still living; and, in an act of good will and generosity, he gave me the daughter’s current address.