The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  She had no trouble finding receptive audiences for her astonishing stories. This was, after all, a uniquely fertile moment for Indian holy men. In 1967 the New York Times reported that the Indian consulate was receiving at least twenty calls a week from people seeking yoga lessons or Indian spiritual teachers. Disenchanted with Western religion, great numbers of Americans and Europeans were, like the Theosophists before them, turning east in search of salvation or at least enduring wisdom.

  No one symbolized this trend more than the bearded, beatific Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, inventor of Transcendental Meditation. In 1967, the year the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and others took a course with the Maharishi in Wales, the New York Times Magazine declared him “Chief Guru of the Western World.” In September, when he flew to Los Angeles, three thousand students showed up to meet his plane.

  The expansion of the Maharishi’s movement throughout the 1960s mirrored the growth of American yoga. Both first took root among rather square elites and then spread to the counterculture before being reappropriated by the mainstream. The Maharishi’s first American supporters were, in the words of Philip Goldberg, “citizens of Ozzie and Harriet’s America—clean-shaven dads with neat haircuts and good jobs, and apron-wearing moms who supervised nuclear families in homes equipped with the latest appliances.” His Transcendental Meditation, like Devi’s yoga, offered itself as a tool for those seeking greater happiness, productivity, and contentment—in other words, those trying to adjust more effectively to the status quo. He was popular with socialites; tobacco heiress Doris Duke put up the money to build his Rishikesh ashram.

  As the 1960s progressed, however, the flavor of American romance with Eastern religion changed. The young people increasingly turning toward Indian gurus weren’t seeking a calming way to shore up conventional American middle-class life; they were seeking an alternative to it. Hippies—the word had come into circulation in 1965—were influenced by Beats such as Allen Ginsberg, who had wandered the Indian subcontinent in the early 1960s looking for ecstasy, or at least something beyond the “shit and desire” of quotidian existence. Some had tried mushrooms or acid but wanted a more authentic, lasting form of mind expansion—techniques of cosmic bliss, not just health and happiness.

  Meanwhile, in 1965, the quota system that had restricted Asian immigration to the United States was abolished, allowing a trickle of Hindu holy men to make their way to the country. That year, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupata, a Calcutta pharmaceuticals manufacturer turned monk, arrived in New York, where, from a Lower East Side storefront, he taught a form of devotion based on the repetitive, ecstatic chanting of Krishna’s name. His followers, who soon became known as Hare Krishnas, would spend hours singing in Tompkins Square Park. When a New York Times reporter visited them in the fall of 1966, he found Ginsberg among the celebrants. “It brings a state of ecstasy,” Ginsberg said. “For one thing, the syllables force yoga breath control.”

  Soon Bhaktivedanta expanded westward. Ginsberg wrote with prophetic solemnity, “And a second center for chanting Krishna’s Name was thereafter established in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury at the height of the spiritual crisis and breakthrough renowned in that city, mid-sixties twentieth century.” By 1967, Ginsberg and the guru were presiding over a “Mantra-Rock Dance” at the Avalon Ballroom featuring the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Though Bhaktivedanta’s creed was deeply austere—Hare Krishnas abjured drugs, extramarital sex, meat, and even caffeine—he intuited that he’d find followers among the pleasure-seeking youth. Hippies, he said, “are our best potential. Although they are young, they are already dissatisfied with material life. Frustrated. And not knowing what to do, they turn to drugs. So let them come, and we will show them spiritual activities. Once they engage in Krishna consciousness, all these anarthas, unwanted things, will fall away.”

  A host of lesser-known gurus found American followings as well. In Life magazine, Jane Howard described two weeks spent on New York’s “Swami Circuit,” “a loose network of holy men who in a remarkable sort of brain drain, or spirit drain, have been drifting in from caves and ashrams back in India to fulfill their earthly destiny this time round by setting up institutes and centers all over America.” The venues, Howard wrote, “range from slummy storefronts to chic brownstones, but they have one thing in common: none is big enough to handle the swelling crowds who drop by to exercise, chant or meditate and, through these ancient disciplines of mind and body, reach the ultimate goal: bliss.” One young woman told the journalist, “all my friends who went to shrinks five years ago are going to swamis now.”

  Unlike these swamis, whom he often disparaged, Sai Baba never came to the West. He told Devi there were too many gurus in America, “each known by the amount of money he is charging.” (Indeed, despite promising her that he’d visit Tecate, he left India only once in his life, on a 1968 trip to Kenya and Uganda, East African countries with large Indian diasporas.) Staying away from the United States and Europe ensured that even as his Indian following grew to eclipse those of other gurus, he’d never be as internationally well known as figures such as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. That, however, only increased his appeal to intrepid Western seekers. To encounter Sai Baba, you had to go on an old-fashioned pilgrimage, one that promised not just wisdom, but also miracles. And if you didn’t feel like plunging into India on your own, Devi would guide you.

  —

  Devi began taking groups of Westerners to India to meet Sai Baba in 1968, and by 1975, nine years after her conversion, she’d made nineteen trips to see him. His followers often referred to her as Mataji, an honorific form of “Mother.” For ashram novices, traveling with her was the easiest way to get close to the guru. Baba was famously capricious and would keep some visitors waiting weeks for one of his coveted private audiences. His followers adored his playful unpredictability, seeing in it a divine whimsy characteristic of Indian gods, but for an impatient American with limited time, it was immensely frustrating. Those traveling with Devi, however, could usually be assured of meeting him. Indeed, at both Prasanthi Nilayam and Brindavan, Sai Baba’s summer residence in the Bangalore suburb of Whitefield, everyone with her would be treated like a VIP.

  At the start of her first group visit, Baba sent beautiful new saris to the women in her party of thirteen, saying that the garments were easier to wear while sitting on the ground than Western dresses. Then, during the group’s audience, he produced for Devi a jap-mala (a sort of Indian rosary) made of pearls, which he said she could use to cure others. It was as if he were endowing her with some of his supernatural gifts. “The jap-mala created quite a stir in Prasanthi Nilayam,” Devi writes, obviously proud. Everywhere she went, people would ask to see it, then press it reverently to their faces. Some claimed that, afterward, their physical afflictions were lifted.

  Sai Baba visited Devi’s group every day at their guesthouse, giving them private lectures on his reassuringly ecumenical religious philosophy. They must always avoid sectarianism and fanaticism, he said. All those who revere God, however they describe him, are brothers: “God is only one.”

  During that trip, the great ophthalmologist M. C. Modi, whose eye surgery clinics gave sight to millions of poor Indians, set up a camp sponsored by Baba in Puttaparthi. Thousands of blind and nearly blind people poured into the ashram, and Modi conducted lightning-fast examinations. Those he could help were laid on a row of assembly-line-style operating tables. He’d move from one to the next, performing surgeries with a flick of his scalpel. As soon as he was finished with patients, volunteers from the ashram would carry them away to recuperate and lay new people in their place. In just a few days the surgeon completed more than five hundred operations. On the last day, when all the patients’ bandages had been removed, Baba gave Dr. Modi traditional sarongs to distribute to the men, and he had Devi hand out new saris to the women.

  It was exhilarating to be part of such undeniably good works, and Devi was struck by the way Baba
remained lighthearted in the midst of it all. One overzealous female volunteer was scandalized by the way the half-blind peasants sat in mixed-sex groups, contrary to ashram policy. When she brought this to Sai Baba’s attention, he brushed off the violation. “Doesn’t matter, let them,” he said, adding with a smile, “They can’t see the difference anyway!”

  In 1970, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono arrived without warning at Baba’s ashram on the eve of his birthday, Devi was given the job of chaperoning them. It didn’t strike her as much of an honor—she was so out of touch with pop culture that she kept calling the legendary Beatle “Mr. Lemmon.” The couple, in turn, weren’t particularly impressed with what they saw. They refused to sit separately in the men’s and women’s sections of the prayer hall, instead holding hands throughout Baba’s talk. Ten years later, in a long joint interview published in Playboy two days before Lennon’s assassination, Ono described Sai Baba as a showman. “In India you have to be a guru instead of a pop star…Guru is the pop star of India, and pop star is the guru here.”

  —

  Samuel Sandweiss arrived in India with Devi and her party in May 1972, and like many first-time visitors to the country, he found that the heat, the squalor, and the surging masses of people made him wish he could turn around and go home. Baba had organized a school of spirituality for Indian college students at Brindavan, and Devi had arranged for Sandweiss to sit in on the classes, which would be given by guest lecturers, and to attend the guru’s evening discourses.

  His first letters home to his wife, included in a book he later wrote, are full of impatience, frustration, and doubt. The school’s emphasis on strict sexual morality was jarring. When one of the teachers informed the students that negative thoughts were the same as negative deeds, it offended Sandweiss’s psychiatric sensibility. He found Sai Baba fascinating—“He has a high smooth voice, bright eyes and the quickness of a cat,” he wrote. “He often acts with childlike innocence but can change in a wink to a commanding, powerful figure.” But a God? Sandweiss was far from convinced.

  Still, he longed to be. In his book, he admits that he’d been nurturing fantasies of returning to America as a modern-day apostle, “a great bringer of the word of God…marched down the streets of the USA on shoulders of admirers.” He felt desperate to see a miracle. For all his claims to skepticism, his dreams for a huge and meaningful life depended on Sai Baba being who he said he was.

  Meanwhile, the more he listened to Baba, the less attached he felt to the liberal Western convictions he’d arrived with. “I now wonder why I have such faith in my value system, for this system is the reflection of a culture which isn’t doing very well,” he wrote to his wife a week after arriving. “Half the marriages in Southern California now end in divorce; people are raping the land, polluting the air and killing each other, and there seems little regard for love or for God.” With self-indulgence so utterly unsatisfying, perhaps he shouldn’t be so quick to reject the value of discipline, the peace to be found in aligning one’s life with eternal verities. “Baba gives people the strength to believe in these forgotten attitudes,” he wrote.

  Two days later he saw his first miracle: Baba materialized a religious medallion and placed it around a professor’s neck. “Amazing! Unbelievable! Unthinkable!” Sandweiss writes. He was becoming convinced that the stories in the Bible were not allegories but fact. “The divine does become manifest in order to teach,” he writes. “God does appear on earth. There are forces in the universe, powers of being, that we cannot even imagine.”

  Sandweiss eventually became a leader in the Sai Baba movement, and in 1975 he published his influential book The Holy Man…and the Psychiatrist, a hit in New Age bookstores. He even converted one of his psychiatric residents. “For two years we met and he told me stories of this man of miracles,” writes psychiatrist Dennis Gersten. “The miracle stories shook my very foundation of reality.” Gersten eventually accompanied Sandweiss to meet the guru in India, after which he concluded, “There is no miracle known to humankind that Sai Baba has not performed.”

  —

  That year, Devi published her own book, Sai Baba and Sai Yoga, which attempted to marry asana practice to Sai Baba devotion. The short volume is divided in half: first comes a hagiographic account of her miraculous encounters with the guru, and then instructions for assuming yoga poses, coupled with messages of spiritual uplift and suggestions for meditation. Sai Yoga, writes Devi, depended on learning the postures so well that one no longer needed to think about the position of the body while practicing them and could instead turn the mind toward the divine. As a Yoga Journal writer described Sai Yoga, “The main pose of each class includes an invocation, so that the fulcrum of each practice involves a meditation in the form of an ecumenical prayer.”

  —

  From time to time, Sai Baba would suddenly start criticizing or ignoring a previously favored disciple. In his book Lord of the Air, Tal Brooke, an edgy young ex-acidhead, longhaired and bearded, whom Sai Baba nicknamed “Rowdie,” describes the first time it happened to him. It was during a meeting of the leadership of Sai Baba’s Indian organizations, a group that included thousands, many of them members of the country’s political and business elite. Devi was speaking, and Baba asked Brooke to address the audience after her.

  During her talk, Devi repeated one of her favorite stories, about driving on a crowded Los Angeles six-lane freeway when one of her front tires blew out. As the car careened out of control and oncoming Mack trucks threatened to crush her, she screamed, “Sai Ram!” and made it safely to the grassy median. Baba smiled at her as she left the stage. Then it was Brooke’s turn.

  His talk attempted to synthesize Sai Baba’s message with Christianity: “It was Truth that turned the world upside down after Christ had come, and it will be the same Spirit of Truth at work in this age…The wickedness of the Roman empire is here again today. This time it is the Kali Yuga mentioned in the Agni Purana—that Bible calls it ‘the Great Tribulation.’ ”

  There was nothing particularly unusual in this sort of conflation. Sai Baba had always subsumed the world’s faiths into his own message, and in fact, the ashram’s logo was a picture of a lotus with the symbols of the world’s major religions—a Christian cross, an Islamic star and crescent, a Hindu Om, a Buddhist wheel, a Zoroastrian fire sign—in its petals. (In some versions, there’s also a Jewish Star of David.) He gave Christmas discourses and frequently spoke of Jesus, especially with his Western devotees. “Call me by any name—Krishna, Allah, Christ,” he’d said in 1968.

  When Brooke was finished, Devi stepped across the red carpet dividing the hall’s men’s section from the women’s section—a boundary she often flouted, with singular impunity—and threw her arms around him. In his book, Brooke renders her accent as vaguely Transylvanian, quoting her as saying, “Thatt vas turrific.”

  When he saw Baba, however, the guru barely acknowledged him. “Too long,” he grumbled. “Too fast speaking. Words too complicated. American accent not understanding. Not enough surrender, sir.”

  Brooke protested that his accent hadn’t changed and that everyone had understood his previous speeches. “Indra Devi just now tell me that she not understand,” Baba replied.

  Had Devi really been that two-faced? Brooke found her and asked if she’d spoken to Baba after his speech. She insisted that she hadn’t.

  He told her what Baba had said. “He must be testing you,” she said. “I’ve been tested many times. Don’t let it get your goat. He only does that to his most favored disciples.”

  —

  That didn’t make it any easier when Baba turned on her. In 1974 Devi was part of Sai Baba’s entourage during a trip to Sanduru, a mining town a hundred fifty miles away from Puttaparthi, where he was to lay the foundation stone for a new plant, inaugurate a public park, and be received by the local maharaja. On the way back, she writes vaguely, he accused her “of things I had neither said nor done.” She tried to talk to him when they returned
to the ashram, but he was avoiding her. Hurt, she decided to go home early.

  As soon as she reached California, she went to see her mother. Then in her nineties and living in a nursing home, Sasha hated her daughter’s constant traveling. When Devi arrived at her side, it quickly became clear that Sasha didn’t have much longer to live. Devi stayed with her mother overnight, and according to Sai Baba and Sai Yoga, Sasha died early the next morning. Later, when Devi had drifted away from her guru, she stopped telling this story, so perhaps the timing wasn’t quite so precise. For the moment, though, Devi’s faith in Sai Baba was renewed. He had sent her to be with her mother when she was most needed.

  Devi had loved Sasha more than anyone on earth. She was, she writes, “my friend and companion throughout every adventure of my life.” Still, protected by the detachment she’d spent a lifetime cultivating, she did not give herself over to grief or let herself dwell on death. Her childhood horror of coffins had never dissipated—instead, it had expanded to include hearses and everything associated with burial. Thus, instead of giving her a Russian Orthodox funeral, she had her mother cremated and scattered her ashes into the Pacific Ocean. As she said her last good-byes, she didn’t cry, believing that her mother had simply moved on to another plane.

  This ability to avoid suffering, to hold part of herself aloof from even the most searing losses, was something she’d been working toward since she first discovered yoga. From the Bhagavad Gita, she writes, she’d learned the paramount importance of two “fundamental virtues,” love and nonattachment. Attachment turned love into a prison, she believed, but without love, nonattachment was cold and sterile. Through yoga, she was convinced it was possible to love without ever experiencing the anguish of loss or the constriction of dependency. That doesn’t mean, however, that those close to her were able to do the same.