My Guru & His Disciple (34 page)

January 29, 1971. Went to Mount Sinai Hospital and saw Swami, so tiny and bird-legged and so beautiful with his silver hair. He was attended by two nurses, one Thai, the other Japanese. He said, “They are my daughters”; and already they seemed somehow to have become devotees, without quite knowing of what.

The earthquake of February 9 was felt even more violently in Hollywood than by us in Santa Monica. Swami told us that, when it started, he got out of bed, put on his robe, and went to stand in the doorway of his bathroom. As he did so, he remembered a text in Sanskrit: “If Krishna saves, who can kill? If Krishna kills, who can save?”

February 21. I went to see Swami yesterday afternoon, having been told that I could, although he was feeling tired and his pulse was missing beats and he had slight asthma, which the doctor said was due to his heart condition.

I arrived early, so I went into the shrine room and sat up close in front of the shrine. I don't know when I did this last—not in years. It is quite different, and not nearly so satisfactory from my point of view, to sit at the side—as I do when I read at the Vivekananda breakfast pujas. I often try to imagine myself sitting alone in front of the shrine when I'm meditating here at home.

It began working almost at once and without my making any effort. I just kept reminding myself that it was before this shrine that Swami had had his visions and Sister used to see “the light” and George had been chanting for nearly thirty years. I exposed myself to it as though it were some kind of medical radiation and I were the patient, but I did try to include Don in the exposure. However, just when I imagined myself to be open to it, without any resistance, one of the nuns came into the shrine room and whispered apologetically that Swami was ready to see me. So I got up and left, telling myself that he is a human shrine, and therefore much more extraordinary, and that he contains relics too, his memories of Maharaj and the other disciples.

I found Swami looking surprisingly well. He described his latest treatment in great detail and with obvious relish, as he always does, and then told me that the doctor had asked him, “Are you depressed?” and that he'd answered, “Oh no, I'm never depressed!”

This may not be literally true; Swami certainly has his gloomy moods. But the beautifully amused smile with which he said it did express what I think he meant: once you have known a Maharaj, you may still get upset about trifles, but you can never again become really depressed, because real depression is losing your faith that life has meaning.

May 5. Swami told me that he had just initiated a woman he thought was slightly crazy. He did it because her husband begged him to, but he didn't like doing it. She smelled of garlic all over her body. (Could she have feared that Swami was a vampire, I wondered?) During the initiation, the figure of Krishna fell off the shrine and broke its pedestal, and Swami was so upset that he couldn't think of a mantram to give her—at least, not for a long while; and she couldn't make up her mind which chosen ideal to choose … This scene suggests to me the style of a new kind of religious farce.

May 11. At the end of the question period in the temple, Swami was asked, “Does the guru ever withdraw his love from a disciple?” The question sounded to me, and, I think, to most of us, subtly hostile and provocative. Swami answered, “I don't know yet.”

The lazy good-humored tone of voice in which he said this was startlingly comic. It came out of his mouth so spontaneously, with such perfect timing, that everybody laughed and a lot of us clapped. It made me imagine a very relaxed Jesus, kidding and verbally sparring with Satan during the temptation in the wilderness.

August 4. We were talking about Hindus and Moslems, and Swami—to illustrate the fact that he had been on good terms with Moslems in his youth—told how, when he was on a train going to visit Maharaj, he sat down next to a Hindu priest. Suddenly the priest groped him, right up beside his crotch—Swami didn't use those words but he indicated the position of the priest's hand. “I felt very narvous,” he said. “I didn't know what it was about.” Sitting opposite to him were three Moslems. They saw what was happening and invited him to come over and sit with them, which he did. They also offered him food, which he didn't accept, although he appreciated their kind gesture.

(I couldn't help thinking that what this story really illustrated was the height of the social barrier between Hindus and Moslems, if such a drastic situation was needed to break it down!)

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On August 14, early in the afternoon, Gerald Heard quietly stopped breathing. Michael Barrie, his devoted friend and secretary, was at his bedside. Later that day, Gerald's body was taken to the anatomy department of the medical school at the University of California, where it would be used for dissection or research and then cremated and buried without record. Gerald had made this arrangement many years previously and used to refer to it in conversation with his friends—some of whom, I believe, were slightly shocked.

Gerald's life had always seemed to me to have the aspect of an artistic performance, expressed in a language of metaphors and analogies. I now asked myself the question: Did his performance still seem valid, as true art must, in relation to the terminal mystery? I felt that it did—that our glimpses of him, undergoing this searching five-year test, had been powerfully reassuring. I believed that he had indeed been able to see his temporary state of dying in the context of what is both now and always “the real situation,” and that therefore one of his favorite metaphors, “taking a look around the corner,” had now become a description of his actual experience.

That day, I wrote in my diary:

I am only just beginning to realize that it has happened, at last. My chief feeling at this moment is that I would like to get on the air and tell the brute stodgy thick-skinned world that it has lost one of its few great magic mythmakers and revealers of life's wonder.

Swami said that Gerald had been able to come through this test so triumphantly because of the many hours he had spent in meditation. Michael Barrie had been tested, too. Toward the end, he had nursed Gerald single-handed, month after month, seldom leaving the house, being determined to spare him the one ordeal Gerald dreaded, a move into a hospital. Now Michael looked years older than his age, gray-faced and emaciated. Luckily, he still had enough stamina to make a recovery. Swami arranged for him to live at Trabuco. He stayed there several years.

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September 22. Swami talked about grace and was so beautiful, so shining. He said that he didn't feel he had ever gone through any particular spiritual struggles; Maharaj had made everything easy for him. “All those visions I had, Chris, I never felt I had really earned them.” As Swami said this, he positively shone with grace, he was the lucky one and his luck was adorable. When I left, I made an extra-long prostration until he said, “Get up now.” Maybe he was embarrassed, feeling that I was worshiping him. And I was, but it wasn't
him
.
October 1. When Swami spoke of Maharaj last night, it was as if he had seen him only a few moments before. These weren't like the boyhood memories of an old man. I realized, more vividly than I usually can, what Swami means when he keeps saying that Maharaj is present with him.

Just before I left, he said in his unaffected childlike way that he was hungrier than he thought, and he phoned the kitchen and asked for a lamburger to be fixed for his supper. What seems childlike is that he never apologizes for showing appetite or otherwise taking pleasure in something “worldly,” as “holy men” are expected to.

October 27. Saw Swami for five minutes—all that the doctor allows. He was sitting up in a chair in his room, having been told not to sit with his legs crossed, as that interferes with the circulation. (What can Americans know about Bengali circulation, I couldn't help thinking; Bengalis are practically born cross-legged.)

He seemed pleased to see me but was very quiet and withdrawn. Somehow he had an air of having been deserted. I asked him if he had had any spiritual experiences and he said, rather forlornly, “No—you see, Chris, I couldn't eat anything. When you don't eat you can't think. I realized for the first time what it means in the scriptures when it says that food is Brahman.” He also told me that there were “gray waves” before his eyes when he looked at anything, because of his cataracts.

November 11. They are giving Swami tests to find out if his almost continual dizziness is due to bad circulation, or what. George and Len both sleep in his room, now—Len, as a former pharmacist's mate in the British Navy, knows how to keep check on Swami's pulse at intervals, during the night. Swami complains that this overcrowding makes the room become “smelly.” But he says that he can nearly always go to sleep by telling himself that Holy Mother's feet are touching his head.

January 5, 1972. Swami told me that he had made only one big mistake in his life. This was in Madras, while Maharaj was still alive. Maharaj was about to leave the monastery and go elsewhere. He instructed Swami to visit various places of pilgrimage and meditate there. When he had finished doing this, he added, “I shall miss you.” This was when Swami feels he made his big mistake. He believes that he should have said, “I'm coming with you,” and that, if he had said this, and insisted, Maharaj would have agreed.

In that case, they would have been together for more than a year—the rest of Maharaj's life. Swami believes that, during this period, Maharaj might well have taught him certain special spiritual disciplines which Maharaj had learned from Ramakrishna and had never taught to anyone. But, as it was, Maharaj left Madras without Swami and they never met again.

February 16. Yesterday we went to the vespers of the Ramakrishna puja. Swami was in the shrine room when we arrived. He looks much better, almost his old self. He had initiated someone that morning and someone else the morning before.

Asaktananda was doing the worship. Before he had finished, Swami stood up to leave the temple and return to his room. But then, on a sudden impulse, he stopped and began talking to all of us.

He told us how, immediately after he had joined the monastery, he had been present at the Ramakrishna puja with Brahmananda, when Brahmananda had had a vision of Ramakrishna. There were musicians in the shrine room and Brahmananda had asked one of them to move his instrument a little, because it was touching the robe of the figure of Ramakrishna, which Brahmananda but nobody else could see.

Having had this vision, Brahmananda had declared that anybody, anywhere, who on that day took the name of Ramakrishna would be liberated. Swami ended by saying that he was sure that this was still true, and he made us chant Ramakrishna's name.

After we had been touched by the relics, we went to Swami's room. (Being touched by the relics raises a tricky question of protocol, if Don and I are both present. Since I am one of the oldest householder devotees, Asaktananda has taken to calling me up into the shrine room immediately after the male and female monastics have made their prostrations. Thus I save maybe as much as twenty minutes of hanging around, waiting my turn amidst the rest of the congregation. But this time saving is of no use if I then have to wait for Don, so I've persuaded him to follow right in my footsteps, just as married couples make their prostrations one after the other. No doubt this causes a lot of ill feeling. It must seem to anti-homosexuals that our relationship is thus receiving a sort of sanction by the Vedanta Society. But I refuse to be embarrassed.)

We found Swami on the telephone, trying with great difficulty to cut short a torrent of long-distance conversation from a well-wishing devotee. Don and I knelt and took the dust of his feet and he blessed us with his free hand, while still phoning. Then, as we sat on the floor in front of him, he insisted on our taking prasad—a big fat-making slice of rich cake each, and coffee for Don and tea for me, and then two tangerines each to take away with us.

March 8. This evening, when Don and I were in Swami's room, one of the senior nuns asked me to help them do something to discourage the personality cult of Swami, which, according to her, is getting more and more feverish and ridiculous. Since Swami has been isolated for quite long periods by his various illnesses, he has become a rarity—no longer someone whom everybody can easily get to meet. So now there are young girls who actually weep whenever they do see him, and people who stand around in the garden outside the door to his room, hoping they'll get a glimpse. When he's able to go out for a walk, quite a lot follow him in a procession.

Don told me later that he had agreed with what the nun said—also that he had felt Swami hadn't liked hearing it, although he hadn't made any kind of protest. My own feelings are mixed. On the one hand, I agree that the cult exists and that it has gotten much stronger lately. And even when I first came to the Center I was disgusted by the way some devotees gushed over Swami. It is true that a post-mortem cult of Swami might make it very difficult for whoever has to succeed him. And then again, as Don pointed out, this is, officially, a Vedanta Society first and foremost; the cult of Ramakrishna is only practiced by those members who wish to practice it. Vedanta, in its purest form, negates all cults, even cults of divine beings.

On the other hand, I personally am a devotee first and a Vedantist second. I flatter myself that I can discriminate—bowing down to the Eternal which is sometimes manifest to me in Swami, yet feeling perfectly at ease with him, most of the time, on an ordinary human basis. My religion is almost entirely what I glimpse of Swami's spiritual experience. I still firmly claim that this isn't a personality cult.