The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  A few minutes later, though, Baba appeared on the balcony outside his apartment, surveying the crowd below. His eyes met Devi’s, and she felt sure he was going to summon her. Her heart started pounding. Sure enough, in what felt like an instant, he was standing in front of her, beckoning her into the room where he held his private audiences. As she walked toward him, she felt as if she were floating. Steyer and a few other women, who had also been invited, had to hold her up.

  Sai Baba had an armchair in the room, but he took a seat opposite Devi on the floor. She told him she didn’t know why she was there—she’d heard his name for the first time only a few weeks before, and she didn’t need anything from him. “It was in Saigon that suddenly I was overcome by a desire to see you,” she said.

  He asked her where she was from, and she showed him a picture of Rancho Cuchuma. “You must come there, Swamiji—it is a beautiful place,” she said. He took her hand and promised that he would, repeating it three times.

  Then, looking at the sleeve where she kept the photo, he noticed that she also had a picture of Swami Vivekananda. She told him that she believed Vivekananda was her protector and guardian angel and that he must have guided her steps to Prasanthi Nilayam. “You would not be here otherwise,” he said.

  As they parted, he asked her, “What do you want?” She had been told to expect the question. “Jyoti,” she replied. “Light. Light in my heart.”

  “You have it,” he said.

  “Not enough.”

  “Bangaru, bangaru,” he said, a Telugu endearment. He told her he was going to give her something to keep with her during meditation. Turning his palm down, he made a circling motion. When he flipped his hand over, he held a little enamel image of himself, which he put into her hand. She was astonished and didn’t doubt the authenticity of what she had witnessed.

  “Wait,” he said. “Let me also give you some vibhuti.” That was the name for the sacred ash that was Baba’s signature, a substance that linked him in some mysterious way to Shirdi Sai Baba and his ever-burning fire. Devi writes that he poured the vibhuti from his fingertips until it covered the image in her hand. Then he took the icon and the ash and wrapped it in a piece of paper.

  “Call me whenever you need me, I shall hear you no matter what the distance,” he told her. “I am yours.”

  She was overwhelmed, dazed, and ecstatic. Sai Baba had a way of making the world seem enchanted, as if the magic that filled ancient religious books could also pervade modern life. Devi had never stopped hungering for such rapture, even if she’d stopped actively seeking it after Krishnamurti. Now here she was at sixty-seven, as filled with spiritual excitement as she was in Ommen forty years earlier.

  At five o’clock the next morning, Devi joined hundreds of other devotees to await darshan, the ritual in which Sai Baba allowed his acolytes to gaze upon him and feel the blessing of his presence. Life in the ashram, she quickly discovered, revolved around darshan—Bill Aitken, one of Baba’s biographers, calls it the “both the central communion and the theology of the movement.” As she walked toward the temple, the echoing sound of “Om” floated toward her from devotees who had already assembled. Two hours passed, anticipation mounting.

  Then, finally, Sai Baba appeared outside his apartment on the second-story balcony and raised his hand in benediction. In the audience, a few lucky ones felt his eyes meet theirs, and bliss surged through them. Hope for such a moment was part of what kept them coming back, morning after morning, for the same wait and the same brief appearance. “Away from Sai’s presence,” writes Aitken, “our imperfection is almost too painful to behold, hence the provision of photographs, medallions and other seemingly trivial mementos of Sai Baba…hence, too, the discipline of sitting long hours in Puttaparthi, building up the longing of the heart for its moment of re-contact with the divine.”

  Devi couldn’t return the next morning—she’d planned on staying only a couple of days, and she had to begin her journey home, but she felt changed by her short time in Sai Baba’s orbit. Back at the Mysore Palace, she absentmindedly packed her things, forgetting many of them in the drawers. From there, she went to Bombay, where she stayed with Enakshi Bhavnani, another old friend from the Theosophical Society.

  As she prepared to go back to Tecate, she found herself growing despondent, just as she had when she left India after her rapturous first visit. It had been many years since she’d felt that way, and it unnerved her. How could she return home and lecture about the transcendent peace to be found in yoga when she herself was unhappy and unsettled? She began writing Sai Baba a letter asking for his help, and then put it in her handbag while she and Bhavnani went shopping.

  Suddenly, she writes, while the two of them stood on a street corner waiting for a taxi, her sadness disappeared and she felt a flood of inexpressible joy, as if a “cascade of brilliant light” were pouring over her. Convinced that Sai Baba had answered her letter before she even finished writing it, she was flooded by the same sort of bliss she’d once experienced after meeting Krishnamurti, but this time, she’d found a guru who accepted the role.

  Almost as soon as she got home, Devi started making plans to return to Prasanthi Nilayam. Howard Murphet recommended that she go for the Maha Shivarathri festival, a great all-night celebration of Shiva and a holiday when Sai Baba was known to perform public miracles. The festival is held during the dark night of the new moon in the middle of the Indian month of Magha, which in 1967 fell in early March. Devi arranged to arrive a month before.

  At the ashram, she heard new stories almost every day about Sai Baba’s miracles. Most devotees believed that the guru spoke to them in their dreams, and so they eagerly discussed and analyzed their visions of the night before, looking for divine direction. Devi heard miraculous tales of healing and clairvoyance. The Maharani of Jind came to her room one day bubbling with excitement to tell her that Sai Baba had given her daughter, who was engaged to be married, a necklace of diamonds and pearls. “You have no father, so I am taking his place and giving you something befitting your status as a princess,” he told the maharani’s daughter.

  A pearl fell off the necklace, but this didn’t lead anyone to question the piece’s value. Instead, Devi recalled the story of a man who started wondering about the monetary worth of a gold medallion Sai Baba had given him. As a result of his greed, the medallion vanished from its box. Then, when the man fell to his knees and begged for forgiveness, Baba returned it. The missing pearl was likewise taken as one of Sai Baba’s playful reminders to his devotees about what truly mattered.

  As the festival of Shivarathri approached, more and more people arrived at the ashram. The sheds filled up quickly, so newcomers slept under trees. When there were no more spots near the trees, they unfurled their bedrolls in the open air. By the day of the festival, around thirty thousand people had crammed into Prasanthi Nilayam. That morning, Sai Baba hoisted the ashram’s flag over the temple, telling the ashramites to hoist the flag of love in their hearts. “Practice Yoga, or the mastery of the mind,” he said. “Then the lotus of the heart will bloom, and illumination be attained.”

  He spoke of the significance of Shivarathri. The waning of the moon was associated with the waning of the mind, whose constant restless whirling and unending cacophony of desires obscured the apprehension of God. Shiva, destroyer of illusions, revealed to man his true, sacred nature. The day devoted to him was a uniquely auspicious occasion for progress toward spiritual liberation. It was a day of fasting, to abstain not just from food but from negative words, deeds, and thoughts.

  Later that morning, the crowd assembled in and around one of the pilgrim sheds, which had been converted into an auditorium. On the stage, a silver statue of Sai Baba of Shirdi was placed on an urn shaped like a serpent. Sathya Sai Baba walked out to perform a ceremonial bath. First he materialized a statue of Ganesh, Shiva’s elephant-headed son, and placed it on the silver statue’s head. Then, as the crowd sang bhajans, Sai Baba held up a small vase and poured v
ibhuti over the idols. The ash kept flowing, far more than such a vessel could seemingly hold. There seemed to be pearls and precious stones intermixed with it, filling the serpentine urn. Devi felt herself falling into a trance, losing all sense of what was going on around her. When she opened her eyes, the ritual was over and the auditorium was nearly empty.

  Shivarathri’s miracles had barely begun. At the ashram, the most exciting part of the holiday was the ecstatic all-night vigil that reached its apotheosis when Sai Baba produced lingams, the phallic oval objects that symbolize Shiva. This, more than anything else, was what Devi and thirty thousand others had longed to witness.

  By the time evening approached, every inch of space at the ashram was occupied by yearning devotees. Walking around was nearly impossible. All eyes turned toward the Shanti Vedika, the ashram’s elevated rotunda, bathed in bright lights, where the night’s mysteries would unfold. People camped out for hours to be close to it, but as a foreigner, Devi would have been escorted to a privileged VIP area nearby.

  At around 6:00 p.m., Sai Baba took the stage with a group of disciples. He spoke in Telugu about the meaning of the lingam as a symbol of God. He led the crowd in bhajans, whose delivery grew faster and more rapturous as the hours went on. Then he began to cough. He’d start to sing again, and then would stop, struggling. He appeared to be in pain. The crowd knew what was happening, since it proceeded this way every year. Over and over, they repeated the last line Baba had uttered, an urgent prayer. His agony seemed to mount until, finally, he held a white towel under his chin and the first lingam came out of his mouth and dropped onto it.

  Baba was known to produce lingams made of all sorts of precious materials. This one, egg-shaped and four inches long, was the color of amethyst. The crowd’s singing became ecstatic. A second, smaller lingam of the same color emerged from Sai Baba’s mouth. He left the stage, and the lingams were placed on a flower-covered tray. The singing continued till dawn.

  In the morning, Devi volunteered to help serve the food that was distributed to break the fast. She wondered how the ashram’s little kitchen could prepare meals for so many thousands of people and was told that the dishes multiplied at Sai Baba’s touch. “Why are you so surprised?” asked one young man. “Didn’t Christ feed a multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish?”

  Over the following days, Devi was thrilled to find herself pulled into this Christ-like figure’s inner circle. Shortly after the Shivarathri festival, Sai Baba was due to travel to Bombay with a group of boys from the ashram school who were going to perform a musical about the life of Krishna. He asked Devi to come along. The caravan stopped for lunch in the village of Hampi, set amid the ruins of an ancient capital and dominated by an ornate, pyramid-shaped Shiva temple. Narayana Kasturi, Sai Baba’s official biographer, describes how much fun the guru had showing the boys around: “He caressed them lovingly like a mother and attended to the demands of their curiosity and wonder about the areas through which they passed.”

  In Bombay, they stayed in a large, old colonial bungalow on the city’s outskirts. Sai Baba’s fame was spreading, and every morning, thousands of devotees gathered outside to sing bhajans, overflowing the lawn and crowding the streets outside. At 9:00 a.m., the avatar would emerge to wander among the throng, blessing household objects, accepting beseeching letters, or simply letting people touch his feet and experience his darshan.

  The boys performed their play, written by Baba, for an eminent audience that included the governor of Maharashtra, the enormous state that had Bombay (now Mumbai) as its capital. Sai Baba addressed teeming crowds in city stadiums. An elderly man named Ramakrishna Rao, a hero of the independence movement and the onetime governor of Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s largest states, stood beside him, interpreting from Telugu into Hindi. Like Vivekananda, Sai Baba spoke of India as a light unto the world: “The greed and selfishness that are infecting this country are tragedies for humanity, for India has the role of guiding and leading mankind to the goal of self-realization.”

  For Devi, the week in Bombay was like a “fairy tale,” each day suffused with whimsical magic. One day, as she sat on the bungalow’s veranda, Sai Baba came out followed by a local Bombay politician. He was trying to fit onto his finger a ring that Baba had given him, but it was too tight. Sai Baba took the ring, put it in his palm, and blew on it, and when he handed it back, not only did it fit, but it was now adorned with precious stones. Devi was amazed. “That is nothing,” another devotee told her. “I have seen him return sight to a blind man by just blowing into his eyes.”

  Devi was flying home from Bombay, and on the morning of her departure, Baba lit a temple lamp for her Crusade for Light in Darkness and gave her a silver medallion bearing his image. “Be happy,” he told her. Happy didn’t begin to describe it.

  · CHAPTER 15 ·

  IN THE EARLY 1970S, Samuel Sandweiss, a San Diego psychiatrist, was growing disenchanted with his field. Outwardly, he was quite successful—in addition to conducting his private practice, he was an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, overseeing psychiatric residents. Yet he was increasingly convinced that psychiatry neglected both the moral and spiritual realms, contributing to a culture of selfishness and hedonism. It overvalued rationality and individualism at the expense of intuition and interconnection.

  Sandweiss was intrigued by new currents in psychology that seemed to combine the insights of East and West, particularly the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls, which was hugely influential in the more intellectual precincts of the counterculture. Gestalt therapy sought to reveal the ego as a story and a performance instead of an unchanging reality—an idea with parallels to the yogic distinction between the mind and the true self. The aim was to break out of the narratives that imprison us in order to live entirely in the present. It was, in the words of the scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal, “a psychology of pure consciousness, of pristine awareness in the here and now without a why.” Some people half-jokingly called it Zen Judaism.

  Submitting himself to Gestalt therapy, Sandweiss found it helpful but ultimately unsatisfying; it couldn’t ameliorate his deep-seated horror of aging and death. So he decided to look beyond psychology altogether. The therapies he’d been experimenting with, he suspected, approached “yogic or ‘spiritual’ practices known for thousands of years in the East.” Why not go straight to the source?

  His search for a yoga and meditation teacher led him, naturally, to Indra Devi, whose Tecate headquarters was only fifty miles away from his home. Crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, he and his wife, Sharon, drove down a narrow dirt road through the foothills until they arrived at Rancho Cuchuma. He was at once taken with the silence and the sunbaked tranquility. “I had the strange feeling of entering another world, removed by more than distance from the hustle of San Diego,” he wrote. The two went inside and were immediately struck by a large poster of an Indian man with an afro wearing an orange robe and surrounded by reverent devotees.

  Coming down the stairs, Devi charmed the couple at once. Somehow, as she got into her seventies, she seemed to have become only more girlish and effervescent. “I had the impression that she was marvelously open, as if I could actually feel a breeze passing through her body,” wrote Sandweiss. As she led them through the house, she sang a bhajan to herself.

  Soon, scarcely able to contain herself, she started telling them about her swami. Indeed, as she spoke, every topic led back to him. Instead of being annoyed, Sandweiss was intrigued. Devi was no naïve flower child. She’d been all over India and had met some of the country’s most renowned holy men. Yet Sai Baba alone had enthralled her. She began to dilate on his miracles—the vibhuti, the materializations, the healings. She told Sandweiss that Sai Baba had raised a man from the dead—an elderly American devotee named Walter Cowan, whom Baba was said to have revived after a fatal heart attack in Madras earlier that year.

  Sandweiss didn’t exactly believe Devi, but he was fascinated by the strength of her convict
ion. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. “You see people like Swami Satchidananda and Indra Devi, who have eyes that shine, who radiate so much love that you feel great just being around them, and you start to think, well, maybe they know something, maybe they’re right,” a Los Angeles yoga student told Harper’s in 1971. “I’ve even started to consider enlightenment. The more I think about it, the more irresistible it becomes.”

  Sandweiss wasn’t ready to admit to himself that he was looking for enlightenment, but he grew convinced that Sai Baba had something to teach him. “I felt that observing Baba in person would give me an idea of what might have happened at the time of Christ to propagate those incredible stories,” he writes. Devi would soon be taking a group of people to India to meet this modern messiah, something she’d been doing regularly. Sandweiss decided to go along.

  By the late 1960s, Devi had become Sai Baba’s most important Western evangelist. Five months after her second visit to Puttaparthi, she went back a third time, volunteering as an asana teacher at Sai Baba’s boys’ school. He regularly oversaw her classes, which delighted her and underlined her importance in the ashram’s informal hierarchy. On Krishna Jayanti, a holiday that commemorates Krishna’s birth, Sai Baba asked Devi to address the worshippers during the temple celebration. After putting a garland of flowers around Baba’s neck and ceremonially touching his feet, she spoke to the assembled thousands, marveling that the miraculous events surrounding Krishna’s sojourn on earth were being recapitulated in modern times. “All the miracles which had been performed then, are again being performed now,” she said.

  How could she help but want to tell the world? Returning to Tecate, she regaled her students, her friends, everyone she met, with stories about Sai Baba. She started lecturing about Sai Baba throughout California, showing a grainy film of the Shivarathri festival. Her husband was skeptical but supportive and even gave her a couple of rooms in his Sunset Boulevard office to start the Sai Baba Foundation, where Los Angeles acolytes could gather to sing bhajans and discuss Baba’s glory.