My Guru and His Disciple Read online

  All I then knew about Krishna was that the Hindus regard him as an avatar—one of the incarnations of “this thing,” who are believed to be born on earth from time to time; and that Krishna is described as having been extraordinarily beautiful in his youth. I understood the Swami to mean that I should try to see Vernon’s beauty—the very aspect of him which attracted me to him sexually—as the beauty of Krishna, which attracts devotees to him spiritually. I should try to see and love what was Krishna-like in Vernon. Well, why not? I told myself that I didn’t just desire Vernon, I also loved him. This was a way to prove it. I was aware, of course, that if I was successful, I should lose all desire for Vernon’s body. But the Swami had only said “try.” There was no harm in trying—especially when we weren’t actually in bed together.

  I wasn’t at all discouraged by the Swami’s reply; indeed, it was far more permissive than I had expected. What reassured me—what convinced me that I could become his pupil—was that he hadn’t shown the least shadow of distaste on hearing me admit to my homosexuality. I had feared a blast of icy puritanism: “You must promise me never to see that boy again, or I cannot accept you. You are committing a deadly sin.”

  From that moment on, I began to understand that the Swami did not think in terms of sins, as most Christians do. Certainly, he regarded my lust for Vernon as an obstacle to my spiritual progress—but no more and no less of an obstacle than lust for a woman, even for a lawfully wedded wife, would have been. Christian sins are offenses against God and each one has its fixed degree of magnitude. The obstacles which the Swami recognized are offenses against yourself and their importance is relative to each individual’s condition. In fact, the Swami’s attitude was like that of a coach who tells his athletes that they must give up smoking, alcohol, and certain kinds of food, not because these are inherently evil, but because they may prevent the athlete from getting something he wants much more—an Olympic medal, for instance.

  I doubt if I had already heard, at this time, of the kundalini. But I will write about it here because it is relevant to the subject of sex and chastity.

  According to Hindu physiology, the kundalini is a huge reserve of energy situated at the base of the spine. Its name means “that which is coiled up,” and hence it is sometimes referred to as “the serpent power.” We are told that, when this power has been aroused, it rises upward along the spinal canal. In doing so, it passes through several centers of consciousness, known as chakras. A chakra is not an anatomical organ; its nature is described as “subtle,” as distinct from “gross.” Subtle matter is invisible to gross eyesight and can be seen only in spiritual visions.

  In the great majority of people, the kundalini seldom rises above the three lowest chakras; therefore, its power causes only material desires, including lust. When, however, a person becomes sufficiently spiritual, the kundalini rises to the higher chakras, thus causing greater and greater degrees of enlightenment. In exceedingly rare cases, the kundalini may reach the highest chakra, the seventh, and cause samadhi, which is the ultimate experience of union with what is eternal within oneself.

  Regarded from this standpoint, chastity isn’t even a virtue; it is a practical necessity. By being chaste, you conserve the kundalini power which is absolutely necessary for your spiritual progress.

  I found this image of the kundalini most helpful as a corrective to puritanism. The religious puritan regards certain parts and functions of the mind-body as “pure” and others as “impure.” He refuses to admit that there can be any relation between the two groups. Meanwhile, the anti-religious puritan thinks that he is effectively damning religion when he declares that it is nothing but repressed sex. There is only one kundalini, one power behind all these functions. Why call it either pure or impure?

  * * *

  At the end of our interview, the Swami wrote out a sheet of instructions for me—what I was to try to do when I meditated:

  1. Try to feel the presence of an all-pervading Existence.

  2. Send thoughts of peace and goodwill toward all beings—north, south, east, and west.

  3. Think of the body as a temple, containing the Reality.

  4. Meditate on the Real Self. The Self in you is the Self in all beings. I am infinite Existence, infinite Knowledge, infinite Bliss.

  August 5. I find number one the easiest—especially at night. It would be quite easy in the desert. Here, you keep hearing cars, steam hammers, distant radio, the clock, the icebox motor—and have to remind yourself that the Existence is also within these mechanisms.

  Number two is easy as long as I think of typical people in each country. For some reason, it is most difficult to send goodwill toward the South Americans or anywhere south of the equator, perhaps because I’ve never been there. The points of the compass bother me, too. Where is everybody? This would be easiest on top of a mountain or a skyscraper.

  Number three: very difficult. Much involved with thoughts of sex.

  Number four: relatively easy. When I think in terms of writing, I can easily see that the writer taps a great store of universal knowledge. The more daring, the more persistent he is, the more he finds out … “Infinite Bliss”—infinite possibility of bliss inside each of us. Why do I make myself miserable? Fear and desire are simply a blockage in the pipe. Get them out, and the water will run. It’s there all the time.

  This evening, on bedroom floor, in the dark. Unsatisfactory. Stuck at number one, because I couldn’t get over the feeling that everybody was asleep and therefore no longer part of “Consciousness.” Posture is difficult. My back hurts. But I feel somehow refreshed.

  The mention of “posture” in my diary reminds me that even my first, pre-Swami sits had been made cross-legged on the floor. This wasn’t in imitation of Gerald, who preferred to sit on a chair. I think I preferred the floor because I wanted to set my meditation in some way apart from my normal experience of life. Seen from floor level, even a familiar room looks different; it was as if I had put myself into another dimension.

  All that the Swami required was that one should take a position in which the spine was held straight. I could meditate on a chair, provided I sat upright. It wasn’t important to cross your legs, he said. Hindus only did it because they were accustomed from childhood to sit that way.

  I never achieved the classic lotus posture, in which both legs are crossed over the thighs; my legs were too stiff. But I did find that I could make myself quite comfortable cross-legged if I eased the tension by putting a pillow under my coccyx. Before long I could hold this position for at least an hour, keeping a straight back. I even began sitting on the floor like this at parties—thereby getting a reputation, no doubt, as a show-off.

  * * *

  I have already shown how Gerald not only introduced me to the Swami but first prepared my mind to receive the Swami’s teaching. Without his help, I would surely never have found my way to 1946 Ivar Avenue. For this, I shall be grateful to him as long as I live. I shall also be grateful to him that he never tried to make me his own disciple; that would have ended in absurdity. Gerald and I belonged to the same social class, both of us were ex-Londoners with many mutual friends, we were sensitive to every nuance of each other’s phraseology and humor. Although Gerald was a strict celibate, he viewed my sexual life with tolerance. Despite differences in our temperaments, we were entirely at ease together. For these very reasons, we could never have entered into a satisfactory teacher-pupil relationship. Neither of us could have taken his role seriously.

  What I did take most seriously, however, was Gerald’s judgment of other people. Those mild blue eyes of his had shrewdly weighed the claims of so many pretenders to spiritual knowledge; that long, sensitive nose had sniffed out so many fakes. It was Gerald’s acceptance of Prabhavananda which made me willing to accept him, at any rate until I was able to form an opinion of my own.

  * * *

  I can’t remember now by what degrees and through whom I found out the facts about Prabhavananda’s past li
fe and background. This anyhow seems the right place to tell what is essential.

  He was born on December 26, 1893, at Surmanagar, a village in Bengal near the town of Bankura, northwest of Calcutta. His name, during the first twenty years of his life, was Abanindra Nath Ghosh.

  Abanindra’s parents were normally devout Hindus. He accepted their religious beliefs, but he wasn’t a deeply meditative or reclusive boy. He liked playing football and other games, and had plenty of friends.

  However, by the time he was fourteen, he had read about Ramakrishna, the holy man already regarded by some as an avatar. Ramakrishna had been born in a village not very far away, and had spent his adult life at a temple just outside Calcutta. Abanindra had also read about Ramakrishna’s chief disciples, Vivekananda and Brahmananda, who had founded the Ramakrishna Order of monks after Ramakrishna’s death in 1886. He felt a mysterious power of attraction in their names.

  Then one day, by seeming chance, Abanindra met Sarada Devi. She had been Ramakrishna’s wife and was now regarded by his disciples as their spiritual mother—“Holy Mother,” they called her. One of her attendants told Abanindra who she was; otherwise, he would have taken her for an ordinary countrywoman, sitting barefoot, without the slightest air of self-importance, outside a village inn. When he approached and bowed down to touch her feet in reverence, she said, “Son, haven’t I seen you before?”

  When Abanindra was eighteen and a student in Calcutta, he visited the Belur Math, the chief monastery of the Ramakrishna Order, which is beside the Ganges, on the outskirts of the city. He wanted to see the room in which Vivekananda used to stay; since his death in 1902, it had been maintained as a public shrine. When Abanindra left the Vivekananda Room, he found himself for the first time face to face with Brahmananda. And Brahmananda said to him, “Haven’t I seen you before?”

  The effect of this encounter upon Abanindra was far too powerful and subtle to be described in a few words. I shall keep referring to it throughout this book. All I need say here is that Abanindra longed to meet Brahmananda again. So, a few months later, he impulsively spent the money he had been given for tuition fees on a ticket to Hardwar, because he knew that Brahmananda was visiting a monastery there. He arrived in the middle of the night, unannounced, but Brahmananda didn’t seem at all surprised to see him. He allowed Abanindra to stay a month, accepted him formally as his disciple, and then sent him back to Calcutta to continue his education.

  Although Abanindra felt such devotion to Brahmananda, he wasn’t yet intending to become a monk. At college he came under another strong influence. Organized militant opposition to British rule was now growing, and many students were involved. Abanindra decided that his first duty was patriotic. He must devote himself to the cause of India’s freedom; in order to be able to do this single-mindedly, he vowed not to marry until it was won. He joined a revolutionary organization and wrote pamphlets for it, which were secretly distributed. Because he looked so boyish and innocent, his comrades entrusted him with some revolvers which had been stolen from a British storehouse; he hid them in his room. These young men were mostly untrained—Abanindra wasn’t even sure how to use his revolver—but they were risking their lives just as much as the veterans of the movement. One of them threw a bomb at the Viceroy and had to escape from the country. Another, who was Abanindra’s close friend, was arrested and died in prison, probably as the result of being tortured. The authorities called it suicide.

  Abanindra was now studying philosophy. He began coming regularly to the Belur Math because one of the swamis there could instruct him in the teachings of Shankara. His instructor kept urging him to become a monk, but Abanindra would argue with him, saying that the monastic life is escapist, a refusal to accept one’s political responsibilities.

  During the Christmas vacation, Abanindra stayed at the Math (monastery) for a few days. It was then that another extraordinary incident took place. Here is Abanindra’s account of it, written many years later. (“Maharaj” was the name by which Brahmananda was known familiarly in the Order; its approximate meaning is “Master.”)

  One morning, as usual, I went to prostrate before Maharaj. An old man was also in the room. Suddenly he asked Maharaj, “When is this boy going to become a monk?” Maharaj looked me up and down, and his eyes had an unforgettable sweetness as he answered quietly, “When the Lord wills.” That was the end of my political plans and ambitions. I remained at the monastery.

  During the years which followed, Abanindra was at the Ramakrishna monastery in Madras. He attended Brahmananda whenever he was allowed to, which was not often, because Brahmananda had to travel from one monastery to another in the course of his duties as Head of the Order. However, Brahmananda was present when, in the autumn of 1921, Abanindra took his final vows (sannyas) and became Swami Prabhavananda. (Prabhavananda means “one who finds bliss within the Source of all creation”; ananda, meaning “bliss” or “peace,” is the suffix usually added to a swami’s given name.)

  In 1922, Brahmananda died. In 1923, Prabhavananda was told by his seniors that an assistant swami was needed at the center in San Francisco and that they wished him to go there. (There were already several such centers, founded by Vivekananda during his second and last visit to the United States, 1899–1900. These centers were often called Vedanta societies, meaning that they were dedicated to the study and practice of the philosophy which is taught in the Vedas, the most ancient of the Hindu scriptures.)

  Since Brahmananda’s death, Prabhavananda had been hoping to be permitted to lead a contemplative life, practicing intensive meditation, at a monastery in the Himalayan foothills. He felt quite unfitted to teach anybody. In his own words, “I was barely thirty, I looked like twenty, and I felt even younger than that.” But his seniors rebuked him for his lack of confidence. How could he presume to imagine that success or failure depended on his own efforts? Had he no faith that Brahmananda would help him? “How dare you say you cannot teach? You have known the Son of God!”

  When Prabhavananda lectured for the second time at the San Francisco Center, he was suddenly at a loss for words and had to excuse himself and walk out of the room. But this was only beginner’s stage fright. He soon became an effective speaker, as well as an efficient assistant to the swami in charge. Within two years, he was sent to Portland, Oregon, to open a center there.

  While he was living in Portland, Prabhavananda was invited to Los Angeles, to give a series of lectures on Vedanta philosophy. It was then that he got to know Mrs. Carrie Mead Wyckoff. Thirty years earlier, as a young woman, Mrs. Wyckoff had met Vivekananda while he was in California. Later she had become a disciple of Swami Turiyananda, another of Ramakrishna’s direct disciples, and he had given her the monastic name of Sister Lalita—Lalita was one of the handmaidens of Krishna. Henceforward, people usually called her “Sister.”

  Sister was now a widow and she had just lost her only son—it seemed natural for the elderly lady and the youthful swami to form a kind of adoptive relationship. Sister returned with him to Portland and kept house for him at the center. Then, in 1929, she offered him her home, 1946 Ivar Avenue, to be the center of a future Vedanta Society of Southern California. They moved into it as soon as arrangements to carry on the work in Portland had been made.

  At first the Society was very small. The living room of the house was easily able to hold Prabhavananda’s congregation. An Englishwoman whom they called Amiya came to live with them; later they were joined by two or three other women. They had barely enough money to live on.

  Then, around 1936, the congregation began to expand. Prabhavananda had become well known locally as a speaker. It was now only rarely that anyone would telephone to ask if the Swami would draw up a horoscope or give a public demonstration of psychic powers. In fact, word had got about that he wasn’t a swami in the usual California sense but a teacher of religion whose title had the same significance as “Father” in the Catholic Church.

  And then donors appeared with enough money to pa
y for the building of a temple; there was room for one in Sister’s garden. It was finished and dedicated in July 1938—one year before I first saw it.

  Three

  In the beginning, the most important aspect of my relationship with Prabhavananda was that I was British. For, however hotly I might profess anti-imperialistic opinions, I was still an heir to Britain’s guilt in her dealings with India. I was well aware of this and of the mixed feelings which guilt caused in me. While condemning the British, I felt an involuntary hostility to Hindus—just because my ancestors had treated them badly and because spokesmen of other nations kept telling the British how badly the Hindus were being treated.

  Before meeting Prabhavananda, I had known few Hindus and none of them intimately. I could therefore indulge my prejudice without having to admit individual exceptions. I could picture all Hindus as victims, the kind of victims who provoke you to aggression against them. Their weakness shames you while their silent arrogance condemns you as a bully belonging to an inferior culture. It was this imagined combination of weakness and arrogance which repelled and enraged me.

  Now, feeling strongly drawn to Prabhavananda, I had to get around my prejudice by telling myself that he was indeed an exception and not even a typical Hindu. (It is significant that I chose to think of him as looking “slightly Mongolian.”) Though I had been charmed by his gentleness, I refused to think of him as weak, so I dwelt on his youthful image as the student terrorist. Despite my own pacifism, I preferred a teacher who had been willing to use a revolver; I was glad that he hadn’t practiced mere non-violence, lying down in passive protest on the railroad tracks. And I was glad that he still spoke vehemently, in public and in private, against British imperialism.

  I am nearly certain that Prabhavananda, by the time I met him, harbored no prejudice against the British as individuals. Indeed, I often suspected that he felt more akin to us than to the Americans among whom he had now lived for fifteen years. An enemy, present or past, is more intimately related to you than a neutral can ever be.