This was my first trip outside Europe and the United States and my first vision of a Third World country. I was not prepared in any way for the reality of India, for the poverty and human suffering that I glimpsed for the first time in my life from the window of the taxicab driving past some of the world’s biggest and poorest slums. The only way I knew to deal with this sudden descent into the real world was to immerse myself even more in the shadow world of spirituality. The appalling poverty and disease I saw when I arrived in Bombay did not really exist. It was maya: an illusion. What you see is not what you get. What you see, the suffering you perceive around you, is unreal, a philosophic illusion (“the external world is merely an idea, and a not very good one at that”) and therefore need not be attended to.
India was particularly well suited to the spiritual insularity I had developed. It, too, suffered, to some extent, from the same debility, so we were well matched. Indian philosophy had long ago solved the puzzle of human suffering by depriving it of its reality. The philosophers were constantly discoursing on a cosmic double standard. Suffering, misery, and unhappiness were defined as such only from the lower point of view. From the higher point of view, there was no difference between the wealthy man and the beggar. It was, needless to say, extremely convenient as a balm for any conscience that threatened to erupt when faced with the suffering all around. This powerful rationalizing phrase—with parallels in many other spiritual traditions—was invented by a privileged Brahmin class to distract from the poverty and misery created by this same class.
Gandhi once suggested that all the Jews of Europe commit joint suicide to shame Hitler. P.B. held similarly bizarre views. He believed (along with Jung) that Hitler was a mystic, a medium, though an evil one. P.B. was convinced that the Holocaust was a result of mankind’s karma and that Hitler was just a punitive instrument in its hand. “The suffering the Holocaust brings to people,” he said, “is really the reactions of their own near or remote deeds. They are visited by the consequences of their own making.” It is a cold view, as well as a remote, privileged, inaccurate, and heinous one. Similarly, P.B. saw the physical starvation and privation that afflicts so many millions in Asia as deplorable, but he thought “the spiritual starvation or moral degeneration is a worse evil.” This was to be my guide to India.
The first guru my father and I visited was a man by the name of Swami Ramdas, who lived in Ramnagar, near Khanhangad, in the South of India, between Madras and Bangalore. He was a traditional guru who stressed bbaktiyoga, the yoga of love and devotion, especially through chanting the one word Ram, which is the Hindi name for the mythological hero-deity, Rama. Ramdas lived in an ashram called Anandashram that was patterned after those of ancient India. About a hundred disciples lived in this ashram, where all life revolved around the movements of the guru. Swami Ramdas himself was most gentle. He spoke excellent English. A small and quiet man of about seventy, he seemed quite frail. I could see why P.B. would like him. He was neither pompous nor threatening.
We stayed about a week in the ashram. I was not struck with anything Ramdas said, but I liked the peaceful atmosphere. I also liked that every day people were fed in the large dining hall, people who had no connection with the ashram but had come or were passing through, or were hungry. The food was delicious, my first taste of good Indian vegetarian food. I learned with delight to eat with my hands. I found it frustrating, though, that talking was forbidden or at least not encouraged during meals. I would have loved to ask the various sadhus—Indian holy men who came there to eat—about their lives.
They were a diverse lot: Some were naked, in defiance of normal societal conventions; some had let their hair grow for many years without washing or cutting it; some looked crazed, some looked wise, some looked weary. I wondered about their personal stories. I am sure most of them did not speak English, though, and it never occurred to me that there was a language I could have learned, Hindi or Malayalam or some other contemporary Indian language. For me, the only language in India worth thinking about was Sanskrit.
At our first meeting, Ramdas told us, “The easiest method by which we can keep God-remembrance is repetition of His glorious Name. Be always cheerful, fearless, and free. The name Ram [God] has an intrinsic value of its own. Because of its soothing melody, it has a marvelous effect on the distracted mind. Of all words, the word Ram produces the most charming sound. No two letters linked together could, by their harmonious music, lull and bring peace to the mind as the letters in the word Ram.” Mantrayotja, this was called, chanting of the name of the Lord. It did not offer much to satisfy any intellectual craving to think about what one was doing. I was bored. So was my father.
We were given a small private cabin in which to stay, a rare privilege. But I found it hard to sleep: When I put my head on the firm pillow, I could hear an alarming rumbling going on inside the pillow. Clearly there were a lot of noisy insects moving about in the stuffing. Could they get out? It made me nervous. But something even more disagreeable was about to occur.
A few days after arriving at the ashram, we were summoned to Swami Ramdas’s room. He was surrounded by a circle of disciples, in the center of which was a woman vigorously washing his bare feet. As Swami Ramdas went most places barefoot, his feet were definitely in need of washing. However, I don’t think this was the purpose of this particular ritual. I noticed that instead of throwing the water out, it was being carefully saved in a special container. When the woman had thoroughly washed both his feet and collected a considerable amount of the filthy water, it was placed in a glass and with great fanfare handed to me. I was given to understand that my father and I were going to be granted the rare privilege of drinking the holy water from the holy feet! I turned to my father in panic and asked him in French, “Quefais-je?” What should I do?
“Bois,” he instructed me. Drink.
I did. Then it was passed to him. He ceremoniously poured it over his head, a gesture that was well received by the disciples, as it showed even greater devotion than drinking. I later asked him why he hadn’t told me about this trick, and he explained that it could only be done once. I thought the ritual was ridiculous and unhygienic. I wanted to vomit.
Swami Ramdas stressed devotion in the traditional manner. His teaching was very simple: He taught us a series of mantras to chant as often as possible: Om Sri Ram, jai Ram, jai jai Ram (“Om Blessed Rama, victory to Rama”) over and over. His disciples did so endlessly. I thought it was numbing. But he also taught me a Sanskrit verse that I memorized and loved to repeat often, simply because of the way it sounded when I recited it:
Satsangatve nihsangatvam nihsangatve nirmohattvam
nirmobattve niscalatattvam niscalatattve jivanmukti
(From being in the presence of the godly comes detachment, from detachment comes the lifting of illusions; from the lifting of illusions comes tranquillity; from tranquillity comes liberation in this life.)
Being around Swami Ramdas, I sensed the comfort it could bring to believe that the only important thing in life was devotion to God or to the guru. He was a most lovable, gentle man. But his views were so simple that both my father and I could not help wondering: Why be devoted to such a simple man? I yearned for wisdom, my father for magic. Ramdas never made grandiose claims. “I am but the servant of God,” he would say, as his name implied. He never claimed to be more than that. Yet the devotion he required, no matter how quietly, somehow seemed to demand that he be more.
Swami Ramdas was in complete contrast to the next guru we visited, who was as rough as Swami Ramdas was kind. P.B. had written to my father about him years before in a letter mostly about the “entirely secret principal mission” that had brought him to India. He said that in between he had taken advantage of meeting the very few remaining gurus of any worth left in this country and collecting some more material from untranslated and unpublished texts. He wrote that he had been to a jungle retreat where an entire community of nearly one hundred souls comprised into family units were l
iving in mud huts miles from the nearest village and surrounded by wild jungle. The guru was an old man of over eighty who was sprightly and vigorous. The aim of this community was to achieve the prolongation of the body’s life far in excess of the normal. The guru, called simply “the jungle-guru,” told P.B. that his own guru had been three hundred years old when he passed away. Another feature is that they were trying to conquer sleep, and nobody was allowed to sleep for more than three hours, while the guru himself claimed not to sleep at all. Also, they sought perfect health of the body, the development of the powers of astro-projection, and so on. P.B. had there met a girl of seventeen who had not eaten for seven months, taking only a couple of cups of coffee or tea a day, and another girl who was twenty-six, a “saint” who did not eat or drink at all for a couple of years. It was a most improbable description, but it intrigued my father.
It was this jungle-guru whom my father and I went to visit. He too lived in South India, a long car ride from the nearest town or village, surrounded by several hundred disciples in what was a kind of semidesert wasteland. It was not clear how old he was. He looked remarkably vigorous. From our first interview, I felt he took a rather sharp dislike to me and I reciprocated. Whereas Ramdas had stressed devotion to chanting, this guru seemed exclusively interested in magic powers, of which he claimed to possess an immense number. I think I angered him by saying I would like to see him demonstrate them. He said testily that I would have to live there for many years before he would show me anything. I said I couldn’t do that, as I was still in school. He thought this foolish and said something to the effect that it could be arranged for me to stay with him “for a long time,” and he looked significantly at some hefty-looking disciples who were more or less guarding him. They looked fierce, and all were armed. I felt very uncomfortable. I was struck by the number of guns—old army rifles—that we saw lying about. When I asked what they were for, the guru told me ominously that I would soon see. By that point, I was really quite frightened, and my father and I were led off to the little room that had been prepared for us.
That night I discovered what the guns were for: We fell asleep around ten at night, when suddenly I heard gunfire. Convinced that I had so angered the guru that his disciples were now shooting at me, I leaped out of bed only to see somebody outside shooting his rifle in the air. I went back to bed, puzzled. At eleven, the same thing happened. And at twelve. And so on, at every hour of the night until the morning. The next day we found out what this meant: The guru did not sleep, at least so he said, and he wanted his disciples to achieve the same mastery. In order to make certain nobody fell asleep, guns were shot off every hour. It seemed more like a threat than a reminder.
We had our second interview. “Master,” I said, not taking any chances with being perceived as impolite or skeptical, “do you ever sleep?”
“No,” he replied. “I conquered sleep years ago. I have not slept for many years now.”
“Not even a little bit, to rest at night?” I persisted.
“I just told you, not at all. I have not been asleep for more than seven years.”
I noticed, however, that at night the door to his large private room was guarded by armed men. Who would dare to intrude upon him, especially to see if he was taking a little catnap?
“I am beyond ordinary needs,” he boasted to me. “I do not require sleep or food, and I take only a small amount of water.” He was large, even corpulent. I did not believe him. “Of course, I have never known sexual desire,” he continued, with what definitely looked to me like a leer. I saw the faces of the women disciples nearby go blank. I felt something slightly threatening in everything he said, as if he were daring me to disagree with him. I was beginning to find the atmosphere unspeakably creepy. “I visit the entire world every night. I even go to other planets once a month.” I did not need to ask how he got there—I already knew. “Come stay with me for a year, and I will teach you to do the same.”
“I will think about it, Guruji.” This was a polite epithet used frequently in India for any respected person. The ji added to any name simply made it an honorific (Gandhiji, and so on).
“You don’t need to think about it, just do it.”
When the interview ended and we were out of earshot, I quickly told my father that I wanted to leave this place. He didn’t seem reluctant himself. Within a few hours we arranged a car to take us back to the nearest town. It was with real relief that we said good-bye to the “Jungle Ashram.”
Soon we were on our way to Pondichery, the former French colony, to see the famous Auroville Ashram, a Utopian “spiritual city” run by the disciples of Aurobindo Ghose. Aurobindo Ghose, known in later life as Sri Aurobindo, had been an Indian nationalist leader and mystic philosopher who had studied in England and earned a degree from Cambridge. The British had imprisoned him for sedition, and while in prison he had had a series of mystic visions that took him away from politics and into yoga. He retired to Pondichery where he wrote a series of impenetrable books about “supramental forces,” especially The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga. In 1926 he went into seclusion and named his spiritual consort (Shakti) as the new leader of his spiritual community, possibly the largest in modern India. She was a French woman of Egyptian decent, named Mira Richard, born in 1878, known simply as La Mere, the mother. She looked ancient to me (at the time she was just turning eighty), but she had told the disciples that she had conquered physical death and would not die. It was widely believed that she was immortal. Thousands of disciples lived in the ashram, which was very modern by Indian standards and included a well-known university, libraries, and hospitals.
Shortly after arriving, my father and I were granted an interview with one of the Mother’s chief disciples, who immediately launched into an account of the financial difficulties experienced by the ashram, and said that they needed one million dollars. My father asked him, as a joke, whether he would be willing to accept a check or did it need to be cash? The man’s eyes lit up, he excused himself, and within minutes we were ushered into the exalted presence of the Divine Mother herself. We had an interview with her for about an hour, in French, but we were constantly interrupted by people asking her about the smallest details of everyday life on the compound: Did she know what had happened to the fifth wheelbarrow on the vegetable plot? She did. Had anybody found a pair of sandals? She had them. I was amazed at what a hold she had on everything that happened there. She seemed ancient and looked to me as if she were about to die right there on the spot. But her disciples all kept photos of her playing tennis and insisted she was immortal and in perfect health. (In fact, she has since died, but not until she was ninety-five, in 1973. Her disciples refused to call it death, however, and said she had simply changed planes.) She said she wanted us to meet a young American yogi who was one of her favorite disciples and arranged for us to meet him later that day. She also suggested that we return for the holy darshan—a “showing” or a silent meditation, in which she sat on a little platform and three or four thousand disciples sat in a kind of theater around her. This invitation was a great honor, due, no doubt, to the amazing power of my father’s imagined checkbook.
Later that day, we met the American yogi. He had just graduated from Yale and was very good-looking, large and athletic. He invited us to come with him to the small island that had been given to him by the Mother, whose picture he wore around his neck. It was a beautiful little island, and he had built a charming small house on it. I asked him how he had come to have such faith in the Mother, and he explained it to me:
“I always ride my bicycle to this little fishing village, where I keep a small boat to take me to my island. After a few weeks, I noticed a very pretty woman who always came out of her house when I was parking my bike and looked quite brazenly at me. When I realized what she wanted, I was very aroused. One day I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I threw my bike down and started walking toward her. She smiled and beckoned me into her house. I started to tremble with
desire, and just at the moment I was about to enter her house, there was a crash of lightning, and my stiffening penis was directly hit. It was a miracle my penis survived the lightning attack. The pain was terrible, but I was unhurt. The next day when I went to see the Mother, she gave me a small orange flower. I learned that this stood for sexual abstinence. So she knew what had happened to me! It was a miracle.”
The Mother had given me the same orange flower. In fact, as I later learned, she routinely gave them to anyone under the age of fifty, and everybody was amazed at her prescience. I always wondered what happened to that American.
That evening, we joined thousands of her followers for the meditation with the Mother and the silent darshan. My father was given a chair next to her, and I was on the ground on her other side. She told me that I was going to have a mystic experience that night. When the meditation was over, she asked me if I had felt anything. The truth was that I had. I was beginning to feel sick.
Sure enough, by the time we returned to the little French hotel where we were staying, I had developed a fever. My fever got much worse during the night, and by the next morning it had not come down at all. That day, I wrote to the Mother:
Douce Mère:
Unfortunately I have come down with a fever, and thus being in bed, I will not be able to see you this afternoon as prearranged.
Last night I had no Mystical Experience, probably due to the fact that I was uncomfortable, not used to sitting on the ground for meditation.
I am extremely grateful at having had the blessed opportunity of talking with you. I cannot fully express my thanks for the Spiritual help I have received from you. It was certainly worth coming all the way from America for this alone.
I would appreciate it greatly if you could write some personal advice to me on the large photo of yourself, and anything you like on the remaining photo and book. I would consider this a great blessing.
My Father's Guru Page 14