Meeting Huston Smith

The only thing that is unqualifiedly good is extended vision, the
enlargement of one’s understanding of the ultimate nature of things.

Huston Smith

The World’s Religions

After the days of silence in Olema, I arrived in Berkeley, two hours before I was due at Professor Huston Smith’s home.

The neighborhood around the University of California’s Berkeley campus is filled with small, neat houses. Professor Smith’s was a cream-colored adobe with lavender trim and a gray painted cement walkway leading to the front steps. A silver station wagon in front had a blue bumper sticker that read: “Coexist,” – each letter the symbol of a different religion.

I was nervous, not even certain, precisely, what I was there to do but sure I needed to be there, to tell the man whose book provoked my desire to do this what I was doing, to hear whatever it was he might have to tell me. I hadn’t even turned off the engine when the “what ifs” started yammering in my head with their very creative list of why doing this was stupid, why this wasn’t the “right” time or why my preparation wasn’t “enough” to allow for any prospect of “success” even though I had no clear notion of what success might look like. But stubborn commitment to commitments and curiosity forced me out of the car and up those clean steps to ring the doorbell with a bouquet of pink and white flowers in my hand.

The bell caused several small dogs inside to start barking. After a few moments, Professor Smith answered the door himself. I was instantly sorry I’d brought the flowers. I’d heard Professor Smith, who was eighty-seven, had had some health challenges but I’d never stopped to consider what they were. Or I guess I assumed that, if they were severe, he wouldn’t have been willing to meet or he’d have someone to help him with visitors. None of this was true. This slender, once tall, regal man’s back is giving out. His wife wasn’t home or was elsewhere in the house so he struggled, bent over a walker, to answer the door himself.

He said, “The flowers are very lovely but unnecessary.”

I tried to make up for the misguided gesture. “May I put them in water for you?”

“No, please take a seat in there,” he said, waving the heavy bouquet towards the living room nearby. “The red chair is mine. Take any other you like.” As he turned his walker around with one hand while holding the crinkling bouquet in the other, he said, “And I’ll take care of these. I know my wife will enjoy them even more than I will.”

One of the squat, happy dogs kept his eye on me. There was more hardwood than oriental rug, more clean wall than art, and little in the way of religious iconography. His red chair had a large, well-used wooden writing surface off to one side, ready to be swung into place while another black leather chair stood quite close beside it. The room was set for single visitors with questions. It was clear that a consistent flood of faxes come like mine and he probably says yes a lot more than he says no.

As Professor Smith was sitting down, he apologized in advance for having very little time to talk. A relative he hadn’t seen for decades was arriving shortly and he and his wife were taking him out to dinner and, most of all, he was hard at work writing “his memories.” This warm and generous man, his kind face unfairly slipping beyond his control after nearly nine decades of use, then locked his eyes on my lips to help his hearing. One small dog curled up to sleep on the floor but another Corgi-like dog sat, almost erect, in the middle of a formal loveseat across the small room, as if monitoring the conversation. I felt as conscious as I’ve ever been that time was precious and I had best not use much of his.

After listening to the quickest and shortest explanation possible of my background and plan, he said, “I’ve retired from giving advice. There are only two things I can say confidently and I say to every serious seeker: seek and ye shall find. And the other is: follow the light where it leads. But beyond that, why, uh, it’s your project, if it’s what you want to do with your life ahead, for several years or something, why, God bless you. Do it.”

Out of the advice giving business? I was unsure what to talk about if advice was off-limits. I struggled for a minte, then figured I could ask how he’d come to his lifelong passion for the religions of the world.

Professor Smith’s parents had been Methodist missionaries and, because of that, he’d grown up in a small frontier town in China. Smith still considers himself a Methodist.

I asked, “But how did you go from the tradition that you were raised in to an interest in other faiths?”

“I’ve been very, very fortunate. I hope you feel that way about your life, too.” He waited, genuinely interested to find out if I felt I was leading a truly fulfilling life.

I said, “I do, so far. I am very, very grateful.”

His concern answered, he continued, “I have always had the deepest yearning within me to nurture what Aldous Huxley called that ‘small precarious flame, (which) kindled or quenched, creates the noble or ignoble man we are, the worlds we live in, and the very fates, our bright or muddy star.’ And I wanted to tend that flame. And then part of my good fortune was that I came upon Alduous Huxley’s book, The Perennial Philosophy (that’s basically an anthology of mystical texts) and I found myself saying: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ And, when I met him, he said, ‘You’re going to St Louis, you say?’ I said: ‘Yes.’ He said: ‘There’s a very good swami there.’ Swami? I doubt that I even knew what the word meant but he gave me the name.”

While continuing his devotion to Christianity and attending church every Sunday, Professor Smith soon found himself in weekday classes with the head swami at the fledgling Vedanta Society there, classes he said were “like Bible study” held in the small apartment then used by the Vedantists in St Louis.

The Society soon outgrew its space and had the resources to buy a building but it was 1950. Professor Smith said, “When the owner found out he would be selling it to one of those heathen groups, they refused to sell. And so we did kind of an end run around them and I bought the building - with their money, of course - and then it turned it over to the Vedanta Society. The current swami (there), Swami Chetananda said, ‘The deed for this building is still in your name!’”

After some discussion on how to go about doing this kind of project, the subject of Ramakrishna came up. I asked what he thought of him. Without pause and as if the answer was utterly obvious, he said, “Oh, he’s an Incarnation.”

“You feel that way for sure?”

“Yes.”

I don’t know why I felt so paralyzed by the conviction in his answer but I was. I retreated into asking for names of the most profound thinkers he knew in the various traditions, people who might be willing to share their wisdom with me.

Soon it was clearly time to go. I thanked him for his time.

“Remember my two dicta? Can you repeat them?”

I wasn’t prepared to be tested. I sputtered, “Uh, follow the light…”

And Profesor Smith finished, “Where it leads.”

I went on, “Seek and ye shall find.”

He nodded and said, “So, that’s my advice to you.”

I started to put my notebook away. I don’t know what I’d wanted, what I’d imagined. I got names of people to talk to, books to read -- what more could I expect? His blessing?

The dogs were on their feet, ready for anything, their nails slipping on the hard wood floor. As I stood up, I said, “I may let you know from time to time what’s happened.”

“All right. You have my address.”

Before I knew it, I was moving to touch his feet. “I know I should do this because this is what I feel.”

He laughed for the first time. “Oh no! I should push you away! Swami Satprakashanada said, ‘When I’m in India in my robes, then I accept that. But in America, no.’”

“Well, that’s how I feel. Thank you.”

“You are welcome. Because of my back I’m just going to let you make your own way out. Be well.”

Back down the steps and then out into my car, I was kicking myself for all the questions I was too shy or too scared or too conscious of time to ask. But it was done. There was no going back.

But the very next day there was a message on my cell phone. “Marley? This is Huston Smith. I have an afterthought about our conversation yesterday afternoon. I expect to be here until about six o’clock this evening or all of tomorrow. Good bye.”

Before I returned the call, I faxed him the one question that gnawed at me most: “How do you distinguish an “Incarnation” from the idea that there is divinity in each one of us? And how do you know so clearly that, for example, Sri Ramakrishna was one?”

He answered the phone himself later that night. “I have received your fax. I’m holding it in my hand.”

In answer to Professor Smith’s request that I clarify my question, I said, “I believe there’s divinity in everybody—”

“I do, too; it’s a fundamental element in each of us, the divine spark.”

“And is it that someone like Christ or Ramakrishna is different from us in that they are more aware of that fact?”

“Well, I would use different imagery,” Professor Smith said. “There was an early Christian theologian who put it: ‘God became man so man could become God.’”

“Oh.”

“An incarnation is what God would be if God had to fit himself into human form.”

But that wasn’t the reason Professor Smith had called. He found he did have some advice for me after all. “You are an experienced reporter but reporters present facts; it is very important that your book be a story of your progress.” What I feel, what I come to know, and how that changes my life – and me – over time.

For someone used to sticking her nose in other people’s business—I mean, for someone used to reporting on the world and the people in it while trying hard to remain invisible, this reversal has felt strange and awkward a lot of the time, so much so it’s made me wonder if I’m going about this in the right way, if this kind of personal probing is really the way to do this. To have Huston Smith tell me there really is no other way to go doesn’t remove those feelings but does say it’s time to let go of my endless second-guessing. There's nothing to do but continue on with “my story.”

5 February 2007

"I don't want to have to rescue you..."

It never crossed my mind that what I’m doing might affect my family…maybe even scare them a bit....

At the beginning the aspirant should go into solitude now and then. Spiritual discipline is necessary. You want to eat rice; suppose you sit down somewhere and say, ‘Wood contains fire and fire cooks rice.’ Can saying it cook the rice? You must get two pieces of wood and by rubbing them together bring out the fire.

Sri Ramakrishna
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

I'd decided to go to the Vedanta Society’s retreat center in Olema, California, near Point Reyes National Seashore. It required a letter from Swami Sarvadevananda and permission from the swami in charge of the retreat center – and I’d gotten both. The women’s center allowed no more than eight women at a time so, on a Sunday afternoon, I brought it up with Kevin. “The retreat center said it would be okay if I came up so I have to decide when to go.”

Kevin was at the sink, filling up the tea kettle. He’d gone straight from the gym to the farmer’s market without a shower. The late morning sun was coming through his wild, early silver hair. Sundays are sweet, sleepy; each of us usually puttering somewhere in the house in the comfort of communal solitude.

Kevin walked from the sink to the stove with the kettle and said, teasing, “I’m not going to have to come rescue you from a cult or anything, am I?”

A messy pile of newspapers was on the yellow-and-blue tablecloth in front of me along with the tops of a few strawberries on a small white plate. There was so much light coming from the windows near the table, Kevin hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on over the stove, the darkest part of the kitchen. We were both in our Sunday best: sweats and shorts, loose shirts, shoes meant to be worn, not looked at. Kevin put the kettle down on a burner.

“It’s just a silent retreat,” I said. “There aren’t any group events or talking or even eating together. You even have to bring your own food.”

His back was still to me as he bent down to make sure the gas was turned on under the correct burner even though he knew those burners by heart.

This wasn’t a joke. He was actually worried.

I got up because I couldn’t think what to say. I started to take some useless receipts and out-of-date school lunch forms off the refrigerator door when the kitchen door slammed open. Luke never could just open a door; his entrance was always an event. “Bertrand Russell’s a fucking idiot.” He paused, looking for a reaction, but then barreled on without one. “You think Mickey Morgan would mind if I called my essay: ‘Bertrand Russell’s a Fucking Idiot’?”

Luke was standing in his boxers and socks. There was no muscle, bone, organ or hair follicle in his body that wasn’t straining and stamping towards adulthood but not always at the same time or in the same direction. Still in front of the lichen of promotional magnets, yellowed receipts, a half-full grocery notepad and ancient school announcements, I was torn, between life and lists, between loving and organizing. I gave up on the fridge door. What were my options? Deal with the words or with the passion? Teacher Mom or Etiquette Mom? I hate Etiquette Mom. She ‘s a priss, and pretty ineffective, too. Of course, there was always Tired Mom or Distracted Mom or Keep-to-the-Schedule-Mom or I’m-Talking-to-Your-Father Mom.

Maybe it’s time to experiment with no official role at all.

I turned from the fridge door and said, “I think you have a perfectly grabby title without that one word.”

“Yeah, but he is, he’s a fucking idiot.”

I decided to concentrate on the fact Luke was, well, talking about homework, at least. “What’s this essay about?”

“God.”

“God?”

“God.” He swiped a glass from the cupboard and got between me and the refrigerator to pull the cranberry juice out of it.

I threw the papers I’d taken off the door into the trash and said, “How long is it supposed to be?”
“The usual. Two to three pages.”

That made sense. God, in two or three pages. By Wednesday. My insanity is spreading.

Or maybe he’s just fifteen.

When I was fifteen I took a stance that all music was bad, that it filled up space in brains like so much cotton, protecting people from the sharp edges of their thoughts. I took it mostly to see what would happen. It was thrilling standing out there alone on a plank, seeing what passion I could stir up just with words and stubbornness.

Kevin, who’s usually game for debates, was staying focused on his tea-making so I bit: “So why is Bertrand Russell an idiot?”

“He takes the position that Thomas Aquinas’ Prime Mover theory – you know the one that says that of course God exists because nothing can start moving without something making it move?” He waited, glaring. He’d even stopped mid-pour. When I nodded, he continued pouring but not before roughly wiping his long hair off his face - with the hand with the cap to the cranberry juice bottle still in it. “Well, Russell says that’s bogus because nothing can exist without a cause. Just because he can’t imagine something that could create itself doesn’t mean it can’t exist. I mean, if God is omniscient and omnipotent and infinite, then why couldn’t God create itself?” He threw the bottle of cranberry juice back in the fridge door, turned back to me, and said, “Om – ni - scient. Om - ni - po - tent.” He snorted and then took a swig of his red juice.

This was the child who, at six, announced that he knew there was no God because he thought the Big Bang theory made the most sense as the origin of the universe. Now, he's God’s advocate. Of course, his younger brother, Matt, whose answer when he was four years old to Luke's Big Bang thesis was , simply, that God did exist and who has insisted on saying grace before every meal before anyone can eat since he was five, now thinks he's Wiccan.

I took hold of Luke’s forearm so I could stand on my toes to sort of kiss his scruffy cheek and said, “I know you’ll figure it out.”

“What-ever.” He wheeled around, long hair flying, pounding the living room floor as he left for his room. Just before his bedroom door slammed shut, Kevin and I heard, “Fucking Bertrand Russell.”

Kevin and I just looked at each other in the stillness Luke left behind, the question and answer didn’t need to be said out loud: did we just do the right thing? Not reacting, not going after the language? Probably not, but who knew? Kevin scooped some loose tea from one of his tins of Chinese tea into a small pot.

I said, “Don’t worry, Boy. I’ve stayed away from any temple where they looked way too happy.”

“I’m not sure what that means, but, okay. I just don’t want to have to rescue you.” Kevin was on the other side of the butcher block island slowly pouring the boiling water over the dry leaves.

“Boy, don’t worry. It’s still me.”

The Destroyer of Time

One of the consequences of this project is that words I used to use without much thought, words like “miracle”, I can’t trot out so willy-nilly these days. I mean, before I started all of this, I’d have just let my fingers tell you that, by the end of this night, I’d sat still – as in no-moving-at-all still -- for more than ten hours and, for me, that was a miracle. Now that I’m quite certain that I have no idea what qualifies as a miracle, what I can say is: something’s changing and this is my evidence. The event? The Vedanta Society’s annual Kali puja.

The Hindu goddess Kali is terrifying – and she’s meant to be. Her annual celebration - or puja - is a big deal at the Vedanta Society because Ramakrishna had his first direct experience of the Divine after years of obsessively praying to “Mother Kali.” I’d been warned that the Kali puja at the Hollywood Vedanta Center was so popular, so dramatic, so theatrical, that people from all over southern California came, many with no interest whatsoever in Hinduism, making it impossible to get in the small chapel so, if I wanted to be able to see what was going on, I was going to have to get there early.
It was supposed to begin at ten o’clock at night so I got there four hours before. Even so, there were only a couple of spaces left in the small parking lot. With my notebook, a pen, a bottle of water, and a small bag of emergency cashews in hand, I walked to the chapel, passing by a wooden stand with a paper signed taped to it that pointed the way to the bookstore for those who wouldn’t be able to get in the building later that night. The white shoe racks were already standing outside to accommodate the crowds and keep the doorway clear.

Inside, most of the pews were gone and the raised altar area was lit up. A group of orange robed nuns and white-robed helpers were scurrying back and forth, preparing. But, even in all the tumult, you couldn’t miss her. 

In one of the corners of the normally muted ivory altar alcove was a human-sized representation of possibly the most dramatic deity in all of Hinduism, Kali, surrounded by blood-red silk that had been pinned to the fabric walls in her honor. Jet black with red accents, Kali is the mother of the universe, the power of time, the goddess of creation and destruction. She’s usually standing on the white body of Shiva, her consort, on a large silver lotus blossom. Every year a different local artist made a new representation of Kali and this one was stunning. Her four black arms each had red palms. A sword in the shape of a vicious question mark and dripping with painted blood was raised high over her head by one of her left arms while her other left arm held a recently severed man’s head by the hair with blood still dripping from the neck. Kali’s two right arms offered boons and protection. A vertical third eye was in the center of her ebony brow, her long black hair was thick and wild, and a necklace of fifty skulls hung from her neck. With embryos for earrings and a girdle of men's arms circling her waist, if you can get with Kali, the others, like the friendly elephant figure of Ganesh, the god of success, the remover of obstacles who rides on a mouse, or Hanuman, the playful obedient monkey, are a piece of cake.

A young man, dressed in sweats and a loose shirt, was busy marking off two narrow but long rectangles on the carpet up front with masking tape. When he stood to leave, pieces of paper with marker scrawl made clear that only monastics could sit within them. I grabbed a small round silk-covered cushion filled firm with seeds or husks of something and put it right behind one of the rectangles, insuring a clear view of Kali, and sat on it.

It was a few minutes after six in the evening.

Ramakrishna was an extremely emotional and devotional guy who cared little for what anyone else thought. Christopher Isherwood’s biography of Ramakrishna, written for a western audience, began almost apologetically by acknowledging that most of us western, factual materialists or even those devoted to almost any Judeo-Christian faith, might have a pretty hard time swallowing the stories about this fairly recent historical figure.

This is the story of a phenomenon. I will begin by calling him simply that, rather than ‘holy man’, ‘mystic’, ‘saint’, or ‘avatar’; all emotive words with mixed associations which may attract some readers, repel others.

I only ask you approach Ramakrishna with the same open-minded curiosity you might feel about any highly unusual human being: a Julius Ceasar, a Catherine of Siena, a Leonardo da Vinci, and Arthur Rimbaud. Dismiss from your mind, as far as you are able, such categories as holy-unholy, sane-insane, wide-foolish, pure-impure, positive-negative, useful-useless.

It is difficult, in fact, to reconcile this very emotional, experiential figure with the cerebral, almost protestant form of the faith one sees most days in Vedanta centers across the country. Perhaps it’s an accommodation to western tastes but, given that Hinduism’s central tenet is you must find whatever path suits you, it makes sense that the Vedanta centers would highlight the parts of their practice that might encourage instead of alienate us westerners.

Ramakrishna’s single-minded pursuit of direct knowledge of God made many people – even those who ultimately came to be his main disciples – consider the possibility of insanity before coming to revere him. He spent most of his life in the Kali temple in Dakshineswar, India, on the banks of a river near Calcutta (Kolkata)where he would spontaneously disengage from what was going on around him in a state of spiritual ecstasy that could manifest itself as dancing with abandon for hours or, more often, in an inability to talk, walk or move. After his death in 1886, Narendra, who had been both a follower and one of Ramakrishna’s biggest doubters, who became Swami Vivekananda, helped found this sect and finally introduced it to the United States in 1893. In his first visit here, Swami Vivekananda often wore a western clerical collar, so Americans would understand his role. He also concentrated on the tenets of the faith more than its rituals. Deities like Kali weren’t stressed in the United States…at least at first.

So, for those of us with a more theoretical rather than devotional bent, the Vedanta center’s almost protestant simplicity and well-stocked bookstore make it easy to forget about all of those exotic, multi-armed, sometimes well-endowed gods and goddesses. The worship of deities is, in some sense, optional in Hinduism. They aren’t meant to be “God” or “Gods” but representations of some of the powers of the Absolute Reality of which we are all a part. As an example of how different the concept of these deities is from the Judeo-Christian concept, the Upanishads, one of the central sacred texts somewhat equivalent to the Christian Bible, says: “The life of a god is eternal in comparison with a man’s life on earth but it is non-eternal from the standpoint of the Absolute.” So if you identify God as infinite, omnipotent, and eternal, these Hindu figures aren’t that. Their purpose is to offer different pathways for different people so they can personally come to know or experience the Infinite Unknowable called “Brahman.”

To tell the truth, it's an enormous relief not to have to consider directly worshiping these fearsome figures as “God.” But, given that they were, in some sense, the most well-known part of the faith even to outsiders, I felt I couldn’t pretend they didn’t exist any longer. My very western antipathy to idol worship had prevented me from coming to understand what those figures did have to offer.

As I settled in to the round rustling silk pillow on the floor to watch the nuns in orange and the novices in white prepare for the Kali worship ceremony, the striking sight of Kali in the back corner was soon rivaled by the incongruous profusion of flowers. They were everywhere. Too many vases to count crowded on every ledge on the altar, spilling out onto the floor all around. Kali’s flower is the red hibiscus although it’s clear that any red flower will do. Shiva’s is the white jasmine blossom though, again, color clearly trumps the species. After draping three firehose-sized garlands on Kali and smaller garlands on the photos of Ramakrishna, Vivekanada and Ramakrishna’s wife, (yes, Ramakrishna was, uniquely, in a lifelong celibate marriage) a young novice stuffed more flowers in the U of the garland so all that was visible was her scary black head. The head nun, a large, brisk elderly Australian woman, occasionally gave clipped directions in a regular voice that seemed like a shout in a room where people usually chanted, if they spoke at all.

So, what’s Kali’s story? There are many versions with slight variations but the one contained in a book called Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar for sale in the Vedanta bookstore was this: Demons were running wild and even the gods themselves were having a hard time dealing with them. So Shiva along with Vishnu, Brahma, Indra and the “other mighty gods” beamed rays of blinding light and…

…all the gods’ rays joined at one point and, slowly, the blazing concentration of light took shape in the form of a woman. The light of Shiva formed her face, Yama gave her hair and Vishnu her arms. From the light of Chandra, the moon god, her two breasts were formed. Indra modeled her waist and Varuna her thighs. Earth gave her hips and Brahma feet. The light from the fire god, Agni, fashioned her three eyes.

But the gods didn’t stop there; they gave her weapons.

Shiva gave her a trident drawn forth from his own, Vishnu a powerful discus, and Indra, the king of the gods, gave her a thunderbolt identical to his own. Surya, the sun god, bestowed his rays on all the pores of her skin and Varuna, the god of the ocean, gave her a divine crest jewel, earrings, bracelets and a garland of unfading lotuses.

Kali fought the demons, slaying most easily with her sword or gnashing them in her teeth but, when she encountered one who could regenerate from drops of its own blood when cut, she simply picked him up and swallowed him.

Once all the demons were gone, however, Kali’s destruction didn’t stop. She was in such a frenzy, she kept “smashing and slashing the dead demons all over again.” The gods didn’t know what to do to stop her but Shiva, Kali’s consort, had an idea. Covered with ashes, he lay down among the corpses. Kali, still raging with blood lust…

…found herself standing on top of a beautiful male body – nude and besmeared with white ashes. Awed, she stood still for a moment, looked down at him, and saw straight into the eyes of her husband, Shiva.

And she stopped.

This vicious story means Kali’s evil, right? Well, not really. Kali is beloved. As the Mother of the Universe or as Time or the Destroyer of Time, she ‘s kind of like a mother tiger …but yours. Although nothing and no one will survive Time, Kali’s destruction is creative, wiping away sin, decay, and disease to allow for a new start. “She’s Cosmic Power, the complete picture. Nothing is missing. All good (symbolized by her right side) and all bad (symbolized by her left side) is within her.” She’s black but that means she’s clothed in space, without any real form, and will continue to exist even when the world ends as pure energy. The necklace of skulls, one for each letter of the Sanskrit alphabet, represents the idea of creation by the naming of things, an early instance of the idea of Logos or “the Word” found later in the Christian Bible. Her embryo earrings represent creation and the girdle of men’s arms represents “human action as well as its resulting karma that has been taken back by Kali.” Kali is an extremely popular deity in India and is considered the patron saint of working people.

From information available on line, I also learned that the Kali puja back in the Indian headquarters of the Ramakrishna Order ended with the sacrifice of a goat.

A live goat.

So I came to the Center a bit worried about that, looking for evidence that that might be part of the night. But I figured that the person who warned me about the crowds – the American woman named Leslie - would certainly have told me if goat killing was part of it, right? But, what if she forgot? Or assumed I knew? I mean, I can’t even go to scary or violent movies because I can’t convince myself that someone isn’t really being hurt, that it isn’t real. The images of every single terrifying movie scene I’ve ever seen even by accident while flipping the channels never leaves my mind. Then, again, I’ve eaten slaughtered animals almost all of my life, I just haven’t had to see the process by which they ended up on my plate. Is there really any difference?

At the BAPS Sri Swaminarayan Mandir in Whittier(note: location now in Chino Hills) , there was no goat-killing. There was an absolute ban on killing anything, even a fly, even by accident. I was pretty certain the Vedanta Society couldn’t and they wouldn’t even if it were allowed, still, there was a tiny part of my brain that never stopped checking for any evidence that a live goat might be part of the evening to come. But there, amid the profusion of flowers and scurrying nuns, I finally noticed another small, mostly brown figure on Kali’s left. It appeared to be a representation of a headless animal at the goddess’ feet. A papier mache goat meant there wouldn’t be a real one. Right?

During the four hours it took to prepare, I sat on the cushion on the floor in silence, absorbed in the coming and the going. Small groups of friends, families with their elders, younger families with small children came in to bring gifts, which they left in bags on the front of the carpeted stage before bowing down until their heads touched the floor. Some of the younger women appeared to be particularly taken by Kali in all of her finery. Many took photographs. One young father brought a daughter wearing her very first sparkly dress who couldn’t have been more than two up to the carpeted steps leading up to the altar and tried to teach her how to bow but the wide-eyed child was too excited to focus enough for the lesson.

Once sheets of plywood covered in red fabric were on the ground, the nuns covered them with trays of blossoms and fruit; brass and glass dishes and pots; countless candles; glasses of sacred water; bowls of colorful powders; piles of tulsi leaves still on their branches; trays with jewelry, perfumes, bathing products or stacks of saris; and bouquets of incense and then dimmed the lights.

Here and there I saw faces I was beginning to recognize. A woman from the small class in the living room sat down on the carpet with a friend; the good-looking man who had marked off the carpet with masking tape was back to take his place inside one of those rectangles reserved for the monastics, tossing his white – what was it? A dhoti? What is that separate wrap of cloth on top called? – over his shoulder just as I’d seen the other monastics do. Even though all of us sitting on the floor were close enough to touch, there was at once a sense of privacy and an almost intimate and immediate accommodation for any small adjustment that any neighbor made. Most, except the smallest children, sat still, some with cream-colored shawls trimmed with orange or red over their heads. By the time the ceremony began at ten, even most of the children were still, asleep in their parents’ laps.

Although there are countless skills I lack, I did have one small trait that prepared me for this project. My legs have always been just a tad too short to reach the floor in most chairs so I’ve spent a lifetime sitting cross-legged even on normal chairs…at my own kitchen table. Or so I told myself. There had to be some explanation for the hours passing without my feeling rammy or restless or my knees and back starting to ache. But I didn’t and they didn’t. At one point I thought I really should drink something, drink some water, but it seemed too disruptive, not to anyone else but me.

The ceremony began so quietly, with such little fanfare, I was surprised when I realized it had started. The officiating swami, Swami Aparananda, a slight, grey-haired man who had come from Berkeley to officiate, was followed by Swami Sarvadevananda carrying a ring binder with the complex ceremony’s order of rituals and chants. In the hours of dipping flower after flower in sandlewood paste or sacred water, chanting over each joint in the swamis bodies to purify them, lighting of one stick after another of incense, and the presentation of tray after tray of offerings each given to Kali one by one, I lost all sense of time. At first I made notes in my book but soon I was floating on an image of two men in a perfumed smoky sea of fire and flowers, presided over by a goddess whose image - with the exception of her red tongue – was submerged in blossoms. For anyone who might have tried and failed at meditating, this was what we were all doing, eyes open or shut, whether we knew it or not, whether or not we were trying. Time became elastic, nonexistent, as we drifted in the dim half-light. There was no point in counting or knowing or clock watching. The swami’s movement from one object to another with a purpose unknown but a purpose nonetheless was our only reality.

One woman sang:

She comes with stars in her hair,
Garlands of lives she wears,
With her sword she severs chains
And shows how to love again.
Dazzling dancer
Nature’s song she sings,
Love is the message she brings.

Finally, around two in the morning, just as I began to get delirious, the service seemed to be wrapping up when a woman came to the center of the stairs and said, “Please move into the living room for the Homa fire which will be followed by the flower offering immediately after and then Prasad.”

It was after two o’clock in the morning and there were three more ceremonies?

Leaving the cocoon of the carpeted chapel in bare feet was a shock. No matter how hot the day, around here the temperature plummets as much as thirty or forty degrees at night so we tiptoed quickly across the cold bricks to find our shoes and, along with hundreds of people in every state from exhaustion to special-occasion adrenaline, we walked to the same building where the swami ate dinner with everyone after classes.

The wood paneled living room wasn’t big enough to hold everyone so some stood outside, watching through the sliding glass doors as Swami Aparananda and Swami Sarvadevananda, the ring binder still in hand, faced the fireplace. In the small manual The Worship of Sri Ramakrishna, the homa fire was called “a very ancient belief and practice that any offering…to a Deity should be offered to fire.” The Vedas call fire “the mouth of the Deities.” The purpose of the homa fire is to wipe out differences, to see that, when you get right down to it, all that we see as form, all that we see as substance, really is nothing, indistinguishable from ash.

A wooden frame was ready and, though hard to light at first, it soon took hold, turning a banana, a flower, an apple and a number of other things I couldn’t see into ashes while Swami Sarvadevananda led us in repeating the name of God twenty-eight times. When the ceremony was over, the swamis scooped ashes out into dishes and put a fingerprint of them on every person’s head as they left the room, mine included. Walking out, lightheaded, almost nine hours after arriving, the ashes on my skin felt like they had real weight. I think I was trying to see what the blotch of ashes looked like from inside my head out but I soon gave up. It was three-fifteen in the morning. I fell into the flow of people back to the chapel for the flower dedication.

The swamis began by laying prone on the floor in front of Kali. When they stood up, assistants picked up new voluminous bowls of flowers and stood at the bottom of the altar stairs. People began walking up the stairs, taking a flower, bowing down on the floor and then giving their flower to a swami for Kali. I wasn’t sure until the long line finally had an end whether or not I would or could do this. I was in an altered state after all those hours of sitting so, when the end of the line finally started to pass me by, I found myself in it, unwilling to be just an observer any longer.

At the stairs to the altar I took a yellow flower with a red stamen from the bowl and then climbed the soft, padded stairs. Swami Sarvadevananda seemed a bit surprised to see me but I didn’t to look to see if there was more in his eyes. The silver lotus blossom was full to Kali’s knees with flowers and the various offerings. Did people get these things back? Like some of the food we were going to eat next, the food they call “prasad,” made into holy food by spending some time as an offering? Maybe those who brought them got them back afterwards but I wasn’t sure.

I knelt, touched my head to the ground and handed over the flower. I felt like a gawky colt. Up close, I could see that some of Kali’s flowers, especially those on the garlands that had been put round her neck almost ten hours earlier, were starting to wilt but the riot of color was grand against such a black but unexpectedly gentle face. I turned, walked down the stairs to join in the final prayer which ended:

Om, I bow down to you,
O Ramakrishna!
Who established the truth of religions
Who is the personification of all religions
and The Embodiment of the best of all incarnations.

We walked outside to eat a full meal just a few hours before sunrise, ten hours after I first sat down in the chapel.There were baskets full of flowers from the altar by the doors. I took two still-perfect flowers – one pink, one giant yellow hibiscus with a violent red stamen and stain at its heart – and left.
And the flowers floated, whole and unblemished, in a globe full of water on my kitchen table for a week.

21 October 2006

(Note: Here's a picture of Kali I found online that isn't quite right - Ramakrishna's Kali has a total of four arms - her two "bad" arms (the one with a sword and the other with the severed head) on the left and her two "good" arms on the right - but I include this picture so you can see the girdle of men's arms and the necklace of skulls...)

Bowling and death...

Focused on me at all times,
you will overcome all obstructions;
but if you persist in clinging
to the I-sense, then you are lost.

Bhagavad Gita, 18.58

My brain is exploding.

There’s a good reason why people only consider subjects like these once a week, a good reason why most religions have sabbaths only every seventh day: the brain can only process so much. At least, this brain. My head felt so crammed with new thoughts, ideas, and concepts it actually hurt. But it turned out to be the perfect week: both of my sons had different days off from school so I had an excuse to play and it came in the nick of time -- I needed mindless. I decided to take Matt bowling. It’s hard to be too serious in rented shoes.

Right before we left I sent an email to Professor Amir Hussain, hoping he might know either where Huston Smith was or anyone who might introduce me to him. Although I’d decided to use the chapter structure of his book, The World’s Religions, as the archtecture for this project, it hadn’t occurred to me to try and talk to him about it until Swami Sarvadevananda mentioned that Smith had spent a great deal of time in the Vedanta Society temple in St Louis. I mean, how weird is that? After wandering around from one branch of Hinduism to another, I end up choosing a swami in the same sect of Hinduism as Huston Smith? It seemed, somehow, not accidental or, at least it made me think I should try to talk to him about what I’m doing. If he’d see me, that is.

Once I sent the email, Matt and I went bowling.

Just how bad a bowler am I? Let’s just say that Matt and I played with the bumpers up. Let’s just say that Matt, using his unique two-handed hurling strategy in which the ball slammed to the wood some distance down the alley and then bounced – sometimes twice - off the bumpers, consistently beat me. Three games, some air hockey, pinball, a game of absurdly poor pool and I could feel the pressure ease. But Matt still had his regular afterschool activities so it meant I actually could go to Swami Sarvadevananda’s private study group that afternoon so I went.

The class was already underway when I walked in to what used to be the living room of the small home that also houses the bookstore and Swami Sarvadevananda’s office. About four people were in a semi-circle of chairs with Swami Sarvadevananda in the center, his back to a fireplace. Painted onto the mantelpiece over his head were the words: “All Kare Abandone, Ye Who Tarye Here,” a remnant of the home’s original owner.

A somewhat elderly white woman with short, graying hair finished reading an excerpt from a book on Vedanta Hinduism called For Seekers of God. The subject was aging and death. Swami Sarvadevananda said, “It’s very difficult for people to accept growing old. I mean we accept youth, we accept the prime of our lives but can we accept change? Everything changes. Even since we have been sitting here in class, we have been changing. How many cells have died since this class began? Why do we care so much what happens to this body? This is a temporary, rented home. It’s decay and loss is natural.”

Decay and loss might be natural but I hate it. I’m about to turn fifty and I care very much what happens to my body. And I’ve never been much good at accepting change. I cried at the end of high school, of college, of every year of summer of camp, of jobs, of relationships, at the end of kindergarten for Luke because he was the first and for Matt because he was the last. But then change is easy to like when bad things finally come to an end, right?

The swami’s slim hands were doing their sinuous dance, turning over and over as though offering us his words. “Everyone loves a new car. Youth is like that. But when it becomes old no one looks at it, at us anymore,” Laughing, he looked around the room through his large glasses to see if we understood. “And then, when the car stops working, we exchange it for another. We are still the same driver but the car is new. I mean, we can beautify ourselves, some people have plastic surgery but, really, how long can you do it? We must accept our bodies as they are and see whatever stage we’re in as beautiful.”

Okay, that’s not so easy. My current body is a little tougher to love than the twenty-five year-old one but, if I stop to really consider, I was laughably harsh about my body even then. I look at photographs and can remember what I was thinking about how I looked and it makes me sad at the disconnect. For that reason and others, this stage is actually better. So some lines have replaced the blemishes, a trade-up if you ask me. And I was pretty uncomfortable in my own skin then. I was afraid and that made me judgmental, harsh, and not very trustworthy, even to myself at times. Looking back at old photos, there’s not one that makes me want to switch places with that girl.

There was a warmth, an intimacy in the room as the swami spoke. He said that there were six stages of life: existence, birth, growth, the prime of life, the stage where you gradually lose everything, and death. “Here I am in the fifth stage of life, nothing left but death. Well, okay! What is lost by dying?" he said. “Nothing! Who doesn’t like replacing an old car with a new car? That is what we believe. But why, why do we believe this? Ask yourself: who was there in your body when you were born? You would say: ‘I was.’ But your body isn’t the same as it was then. Yet you would say ‘I’ was in there, the same ‘I’ that is in there now. So, if your body is constantly changing, but the ‘I’ isn’t, could that ‘I’ be the same thing as your body?“

There was one of those pauses, a silence like a delta of thought branching off in all directions. The graying woman then ventured a quiet question. “Why do I have so much fear of death?”

Swami Sarvadevanda looked only at her. “Because you haven’t analyzed this. ‘I’ is continuously there. ‘I’ was there when you were just a girl. Your ‘I’ was there when you were a young woman and ‘I’ is here now. ‘I’ is birthless, deathless so what will you be losing in death? The ‘I’ doesn’t die, just the body does. And here’s the Vedanta answer to that question…” The swami seemed almost disconnected from his arms. “You can’t accept that you are going to die because you aren’t. You are infinite and the concept of death feels wrong because it is. The body dies but the ‘I’ doesn’t.”

Swami Sarvadevananda pulled his pale orange tunic away from his body to indicate the spare frame inside. “What does it matter if this goes? If it’s proven that ‘I’ exists through the first five stages why not the last?”

I spent a lot of time worrying about death as a child. I hated going to bed. I was afraid of the dark. I checked for evildoers under my bed, in my closet, and even behind the pictures on my wall – after all, a secret compartment could have developed behind the wall during the day. But even once my room was investigated and secure, I was too full of adrenaline to sleep so I had a lot of time to think and death was the subject more often than not. It went kind of like this: Most people don’t really think they’re going to die. Do I know that? Do really know that I’m going to die? Or am I a “weak” person unable to handle the truth? My mother certainly was afraid I was going to be one. Along with asking too many questions and my interest in religion, I also wanted a light on in my room at night. Weak people needed religion and lights on in their room at night. I would worry this point until I was quite sure that I believed that I was, indeed, going to die.

My courage reservoir wasn’t very deep. The only tenable faith within my reach at the time was that, somehow, my parents could save me from the abject terror of facing death truthfully and alone. Going to their room was a poor substitute for faith, but it was a substitute. However, there are only so many nights parents of four children will put up with being shaken awake after midnight so, most nights, I had to settle for watching them breathe by the light of the television my mother can’t sleep without.

I’m not sure if I can completely abandon myself to it but the swami’s concept of death - the ‘I’ doesn’t die, just the body does” - is a lot easier to handle than the idea of humans as just a walking, talking set of complex chemical compounds on their way to breaking apart into their component parts. Surely we’re more than that, aren’t we? What about those moments of intense communion with another person? Or those perfect moments in plays or in stories where the veil is pierced and you feel you really know something, get that gut sense that you’ve seen It, felt It, even without having the slightest idea what It is? Randomly-assembled chemicals?

“Don’t be ridiculous. Eat your peas.”

And even now, like the gray-haired woman, I’m still stunned by the idea that one day I will cease to exist. That is, when I let myself think about it. The only moments of grace, of freedom from this paralyzing fear come when I can grasp some piece of the idea that there’s a difference between this physical form and what’s underlying it; that this specific, physical me might not be quite as important as I think.

The swami was getting ready to end the class. “Creation itself is nothing. It is a ripple on an ocean of God, it rises up and then collapses and, without the ocean, waves cannot dance. We come from God, we dance in God, we fight in God, we love in God, we dissolve in God -- only we don’t know that everything comes from God. That’s why birth, death is just a matter of course, it’s natural, like a wave returning to the ocean.

“Here is the key point: Everything that is accomplished, everything we achieve in our lives, these accomplishments are nothing. They will pass away just as our greatest failures will. They will die when our body dies. But the Self, the eternal Atman presence, remains as it is forever. We are all connected with that eternal presence – Atman. Okay, let’s stop here for now.”

And, with a short chant, we started to gather our things to leave. And then my fellow students – most of them American – each bent down to brush Swami’s feet. I was panicked. I couldn’t do it. It felt fake and false. And how do you put your palms together when holding a notebook, pen, and a cellphone? I thought of shaking hands but that appeared hopelessly out of the question, too. So, from a polite distance away, I tried to awkwardly beam my gratitude and he did the same.

When there were only three of us left, the swami asked, “Do you want to come see the Durga puja? It’s just ten minutes long, right here, in my office, on my computer.”

What I wanted to say was, ‘No, I can’t process anything more,’ but I didn’t. Instead, I followed him and two other women around the corner and into his miniscule office. The other two women were almost as excited as he was to see whatever this “Durga puja” was. Almost. I encouraged the excited ones to sit in the chairs so I could stand in the back, nearest the door, wanting to be sure to be able to get out when I wanted without having to disturb someone to do it. While I never did come to understand what a Durga puja was then, I did get that it was something happening in India, at the central office, the Rome, if you will, of Vedanta Hinduism in Belur Math, India and they were going to be able to watch it on the internet. I watched people eager to watch a ritual performed half a globe away on a tiny pop-up window on an old fourteen-inch monitor. Would I ever get to the point where I’d actually be excited to see a ritual performed? It was hard to imagine. When it was all strange and new, it fascinated. But that was different from finding meaning, peace, comfort, or transcendence in it.

One of the women leaned in to point out where the Swami should click to start the web streaming. Swami Sarvadevananda’s head was tilted up so he could find the small arrow to start the video through the reading portion of his large glasses. His hands looked odd cupped over a computer mouse. With a click, the ceremony began to play.

He was delighted. “Oh, we’re right there! This is wonderful! Can you see? Look! There are a group of monks meditating.”

The swami began pointing out monks he knew, old friends who were participating in the service. The camera started to sweep to one side to show the crowd and, when it got to some trees and water, the swami exclaimed, “Oh, that’s the Ganges! You know the river, the Ganges? There it is, right there! I mean, this was happening just today, and we can see it, we can be there, can you imagine?”

He was transported, a traveler a long way from home with little hope of returning soon who was feeling the air, smelling the smells, knowing the light of a familiar, intimate place.

Within minutes, the video was over and, as the women helped the swami save it and email it to others, I said goodbye and slipped out, grateful I didn’t have to find myself unable to bow again.

The small relief I’d gotten from bowling earlier in the day, from not thinking, was gone.

I felt like a computer that needed a hard-drive upgrade.



(28 September 2008)

First teacher...

He who teaches this primal
secret to those who love me
has acted with the greatest love
and will come to me, beyond doubt.

No one can do me a service
that is more devoted than
this, and no one on earth is more
precious to me than he is.

Bhagavad Gita 18.68-18.69

Swami Sarvadevananda told me to ask for him at the bookstore. I was nervous opening the glass-paned wooden door and stepping up into the small store. The raw wood shelves were jammed with books on Hinduism as well as on every faith imaginable. There was other stuff, too: incense, incense burners, some photos, and small figures for sale. I looked around for someone to talk to and then realized that, down behind the boxy checkout counter, a gray-haired woman was bent over, peering at an old computer.

“I’m here to see Swami--,” I realized I’d only seen his name on the website and had no idea how to pronounce it. I stumbled through some approximation of it.

The woman looked confused so I did my best with all those syllables a second time and then said, “I have an appointment.”

She dialed the phone. The voice on the other end did not belong to the swami I’d met. When she hung up she said, “Oh! You don’t mean Swami Swahananda! You mean Swami Sarvadevananda!” but she pronounced his name “SHARva-day-veh-nan-duh” The other swami was Swami Sarvadevanada’s boss, the head of the Hollywood Vedanta Society temple. I confess I was still completely confused, their names still indistinguishable to me.

A few minutes later Swami Sarvadevananda came walking down the brick path. He pulled his keys out from somewhere inside his orange robes and opened the door to his tiny office. In his hand was my proposal. He’d read it overnight.

The swami began as if we were in the middle of a conversation, not the beginning. “I think this should be the question: Why religion? What’s the need of religion? Religion must help one to rise from animalistic instincts to human, and human to divine, and from divine to godly, from godly to an infinitely compassionate personality like Christ and Buddha’s. So, this is a great question and many people don’t understand: what is religion? Thousands and thousands of fanatics and followers and they don’t know what is religion!” Swami Sarvadevanada’s hands were flying. His lilting, accented voice made the already new words and thoughts even harder to follow sometimes. “They don’t know that the transformation of life is religion. Transformation means fighting with my evil tendencies inside, which is meanness, ugliness, which creates pain and suffering for others. That which brings even a little pain for others is not religion, it cannot be religion! ‘Blessed are the peace-makers.’ So, who remembers that word in the scripture? Eh? You should be peaceful, you should radiate peace!”

It was hot in that room even though the windows were open but the swami was untouched by it, his hands kept dancing farther and farther away from him as he talked. It was exciting to see him grab on to this crazy idea of mine instead of what I’d feared would happen. I’d come up with all sorts of ways imaginary spiritual teachers might reject me and my crazy project but I don’t think I had even one scenario that came close to this – complete acceptance.

He was really on a roll. “The transformation of life is religion and anything that causes even a little bit of pain for others isn’t. Sri Ramakrishna, who was born 1836, did not know the complexity of life and other religions. He was a seeker and lover of God.That is called religion. ‘I am religious’ does not mean that I go to any temple and bow down my head twenty times and come to my room and beat my wife, eh? Or I’m a religious person so I can go and straighten you by telling you are on the wrong path, and I can go to heaven, by killing you, if need be, forcing you to believe in my way. That’s a nasty concept of spirituality that has nothing to do with spiritual life. Have you read The Life of Sri Ramakrishna?”

Ramakrishna was the guy on the top shelf of the altar, the main guru of the Vedanta branch of Hinduism. I’d picked up a few books that morning. “I just bought The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.”

“Christopher Isherwood also wrote a book about his life. What Ramakrishna did was simple, he didn’t go for any philosophy. From the early days he wanted to know the secret of the universe. From the early days he felt the pull for seeing God and, after going through rigorous spiritual practice, he declared, ‘As many faiths, so many paths.’ He was born into a very spiritual family. His father (was apart from his wife when) he had a dream in which a deity said, ‘I shall be born in your home.’ About the same time, his wife also had a vision of a beam of light from Lord Shiva entering her womb and felt she had conceived a child!” And Ramakrishna was born, his given name was Gadahar.”

Okay, it must be said: I get nervous around immaculate conception stories. I always wonder if they were trying to compete or maybe the devout think us regular folk won’t pay attention, might not value the message, unless they hype their leader’s story. This was one thing the former biology major in me might never ever get over. I can accept the notion of divinity in people, of certain people, perhaps, being more in tune with that Something More than the rest of us. But beams of light causing a pregnancy in a person? A metaphor, a “true” story I can handle, but insist that it is True, that actually happened and that my faith depends on acceptance of that “actual” fact, well, I don’t know what to do with the big “no way” in my head.

Swami Saradevanada decided to give me the highlights of Ramakrishna’s life, a kind of book-flap synopsis. He said Ramakrishna began his spiritual journey by worshiping God, the Mother, in the form of Kali, a black female Hindu goddess. He went to the Kali temple in Dakshineswar on Ganges River near Bengal every day, demanding that she appear before him. “He’s like a mad guy, daytime and nighttime he is meditating on Mother. When the excruciating pains set in he used to cry, ‘Oh, Mother, another day is gone in my life and you have not come. What is the meaning of this life?’ And he’d cry and weep and rubbing his face on the sandy bed of the Ganges, so much is his urge to see the face of the Divine Mother who is the cause of this universe – that is called religion.” He cocked his head to one side and smiled. Swami Sarvadevananda really liked that story.

I sat politely on the other side of the desk. All I could think was: now why did he have to go and tell me a story like that? If that is religion, I haven’t got a prayer.

Of course the story ended with him seeing the Divine as a beam of light coming from the image of Kali. But – and this was what got my attention – it was through that vision that Ramakrishna came to realize that God had no form. “He reconciled all religions as true: ‘he’ and ‘she’ – gone. Now, you can understand what Hindu philosophy is. It is like a gateway. And after that what happened? Mother is gone, the form is gone. He’s lost into infinite waves of light, an ocean of light and joy.” Swami Sarvadevananda’s “joy” is so much more than a bland single syllable. It’s an explosive word that starts out like the word “jaw” and ends with a curlicue of sound as his mouth wraps around the sound of the “o” and “y.” Jahw-oy! …and he was remained in that ocean of jahw-oy for twenty-four hours!” The swami said Ramakrishna soon came to realize that there was nothing but God.

“He was going to Calcutta afterward. He was so humble that he will run, run towards anyone calling God. So one day a public (carriage) took him by mistake through a red letter – what you call it?” he asked, “A red zone? What is the word? You know, with prostitutes?”

“A red-light district?”

Swami Sarvadenanda nodded, “Yes, a red-light district. And the car he was in was moving and the ladies were looking and Ramakrishna was looking at them and saluting them, ‘Oh, Mother! You are here in this form?’ So if you see the end result is, what? The end result is you see the one Mother - call it whatever name you wish – the oneness in every being. That’s spirituality.”
He sat back, waiting for me to speak. I guess everything my written manuscript provoked in him had been said. I started to ask him about 9/11 but he didn’t want to talk about events like that, at least not right away. “We are trying to understand what is religion first.”

“Right.”

“We must understand our weak point. We must diagnose the disease and then put the medicine there. So if any religion does not allow anyone to think freely, if any religion contradicts normal rational and reason-based thinking, even like this Vedanta, this philosophy, we should discard it as poison! Say ‘I have no need of that religion.’”

Did he really say that? Throw away even his religion if anything he said sounded false or contradicted my own sense of truth? He was saying I had a choice to reject some or all of what he believed. I was surprised, surprised and relieved. That meant he was giving me permission to have my doubts about Ramakrishna’s immaculate conception, for example, which, therefore, gave me room to consider what of his wisdom, his practice, his ideas might have meaning for me. It wasn’t all or nothing.

Okay, so I didn’t have to run out of the room. At least not right away.

The swami continued, “And nowhere is that so strongly said except in this Hindu religion. (Other religions) say my book is the only book, you cannot deviate one letter from there, no? But Hinduism says you need not believe a single word we say, you (can) discard the whole Vedas, the foundation on which the whole spiritual tradition of India is based, unless you find it verifiable. Verified and verifiable. If you can’t, forget it.”

In the briefest of pauses, I tried another question. “Were you born into this part of Hinduism? Was your family also of your same tradition?”

“What if one is born or not, what does it matter?” With that one statement, the swami tossed away my personal question, returning to what he considered the more pressing topic at hand: the necessity of different paths for different seekers. “It’s like you want to eat fish? Fried fish? You want to eat McDonalds? Go. You want curry? Someone makes curry. But the question is: are you eating fish or not?” He laughed. ”Why fight? That my fish is better than your fish?”
The swami lifted a fold of his orange clothing with two fingers and said, “I wish to dress this way, you that; you should have your freedom, I should have my freedom. So, in our dress we don’t fight with each other. In our food, we go to restaurant and we choose one out of so many types food. So, why in the world would we have to have only one religion that survives and others will have to go?” He seemed very pleased with his analogy.

But I was trying to get to specifics. “So, if I came to you and said this is the path I want to follow, what would happen next?”

“Spirituality would unfold in your heart. What we’d do is give you some guidance.”

“Like, things to do and read?”

“Suppose I will put to you the very first question. You are asking me: what is religion? I would put that question to you back. I would say: who are you talking?”

Silence. I had no idea what he was asking me.

He tried again. “Are you a man, are you a woman?”

“Uhm, I’m a, ah, woman?”

“Yes. Are you the woman talking?” Meaning was the person sitting across from him. Is this everything that I am, the sum total of my existence?

“No.”

“Who’s talking?”

“I, well, there is a drive to know this that (comes) before the issue of ‘woman’ or ‘man’.”

My answer wasn’t good enough for him. “My question is a specific, intellectual question: who is that “I”? You say, ‘I drove here.’ Who is that ‘I?’ Is it the physical flesh and bone only? Is it the eyeballs?”

“No. That, I’m clear about. It is not just what I can touch, taste, hear, see. I know that.”

“That is what the rational mind wants to explore. In Vedanta, we say explore more. Go in.” He began to demonstrate what beginners like me should do, the questions we should ask ourselves. “Who sees? I see. What is the ‘I’ that sees? First comes: The eyes are seeing? No. No, eyes cannot see. My mind is seeing? Go one step more. Mind cannot see. Mind is also matter. Because when you sit for meditation, what do you see? Your mind is rambling here and there and there. So, your mind can be seen by somebody. You say: ‘My mind is not very happy today, I’m not happy, my mind is upset today.’ You say:‘My shirt.’ ‘My spectacles.’ And ‘my mind.’ So you are using the word ‘My mind.’ So the question really is: who or what is beyond the mind, the thing that claims possession of it?”

So, I am not my body. That makes sense to me, it makes sense that there’s more to life than this specific collection of skin and bones, dark hair and hazel eyes. But, until Swami Sarvadevananda pointed it out, I’d never really thought about the phrase “my mind” that we all use with its implication that there was something to which my mind “belonged”, something that can observe my thought process.

But rolling ideas around like this is comfortable. I think I’m looking for what might make me uncomfortable, what might challenge my assumptions, what I think I ”know.” I said, “I would like you to tell me things I can do or read. I want to take direction.”

“You have this wonderful basic understanding of spiritual life, about life, about who we are.”

I wasn’t at all sure what he meant but I said, “That’s good to hear.”

“We say, in Indian psychology, that we are the product of all our past thoughts and deeds. And Hindus believe and Buddhists believe that we are not in one life. Eh? One life theory is Christianity, a Judeo-Christian idea: one-life theory. There comes more responsibility, you know? If you have the one chance only, you have to do the best you can do and, if you don’t, then you are going to hell, they say. But Indian hell, Hindu hell is a little less disruptive,” he chuckled, “because you do some bad karma, you go to hell, and then come out and, then again, start your journey. You are not forever lost. Also, to go to heaven is not our goal because that is also temporary, the result of good actions. The goal is to realize God. So this is the many life times theory has a little hope and a little relaxation, also. ‘I could not do this much?’” he continued with a happy shrug of his shoulders underneath his orange robes, “‘Okay, I’ll do it the next time.’”

The swami’s smile was so broad it jostled his eyeglasses. I told him how much I appreciated all the time he was spending with me.

“This talk,” meaning the talk we were having right then, “is not talk, merely. For me, for my spiritual journey, I am worshipping God through serving you. I am talking to you, actually I’m serving God in you. We serve God through all of our actions.”

“And following what I’m driven to do is--"

“Exactly. All our duties are nothing but a chance to serve God. God has given you the life. God has given you the strength – it is to be utilized with proper understanding. God has given you the quest to know the truth and the skills to do it. It is like the waves – God is the infinite ocean and I am only one ripple and you are another ripple and we are dancing in God, we are crying in God, we are serving in God, there is nothing but God. So, to bring this awareness, read the Upanishads. It is the ancient wisdom of our spiritual practice.”

I felt like I’d gotten a seal of approval. “I’m almost through the Bhagavad Gita.” The central text of Hinduism, it seemed like the right place to start.

“When you have a question, make a point, and when you come we can discuss one of these points. How long it takes you to come here?”

“You won’t believe this but I have been all over, temples all over. My office? I can almost walk here.”

“Is it?”

“I couldn’t be closer. It takes five minutes, unless there is a Hollywood Bowl event. Then it can take half an hour.”

The swami told me the times of the classes he taught and then said, “Above all, if you have any questions you can come talk.”

I gave the personal questions another shot. “Now, did you always know you wanted to be---what do you call yourself? Are you a sadhu?”

“We are sadhus. ‘Sadhus’ means we are celibates from our childhood and they call me assistant head, so-called assistant minister.’

“You always knew that you wanted this life?”

“Because I was born in that culture, as you asked me. When I was a very young boy, the sadhus, the monks, the renounced people used to come and their life is so attracting, so much alluring, their faces beaming with joy (jahw-oy!) as it were. That attacted me very much. As I grew, fifth grade, sixth grade boy, the sadhus were very kind. They said: ‘What you are doing? Come here.’ So our home was not that far from the headquarters of the Ramakrishna organization which is near Calcutta. So on vacation I used to go and stay there on the banks of the Ganges. The sadhus meditative life and unselfish love filled with purity, peace, and no outward pretense attracted me most.”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

He looked pained at the question, like I’d gone one step too far. “I have brothers and sisters but that has nothing to do with what actually God calls you.”

I was nothing if not nosy and persistent. “Have your other brothers and sisters—"

He interrupted, “They are also very spiritual. Nowadays western materialistic ideals are creeping in through the television and other media otherwise in each Hindu Indian family but every morning and every evening, they start with God, they end with God, they pray in between, and before food they pray because the culture is there. All that intense practice goes only for a few very sincere people but, even our father, grandma, mom, our aunti, won’t eat before they take a bath, repeat the holy name, pray and meditate some time. Before that they will not eat at all. So, that is the tradition there. But these sadhus are more profound in their practices. From the early days I never thought of becoming anything but a monk. Seeing them, their joy, their freeness, their openness, their relentless service to others and how they are so princely even though they have no possessions!”

The swami said the Ramakrishna Mission was a huge organization in India. “We have 150 or 160 (temples) in India and activities are multifarious for the poor, for the downtrodden, for flood relief, for tsunami relief. For anything, these monks just jump and go to be the first to help with whatever they can: with material help, with medicinal help, with building up their homes and houses, and with establishing schools and community halls and everything. So that dedication also inspired me.” He tried to explain his thinking at the time. “What is this life, you think for yourself? Only eating, sleeping and dying? Do something for others. At least if you don’t see God, at least you don’t hurt anyone, don’t harm anyone and be a better person, be a loving, caring person.The world is full of misery. You can give a little peace to others.”

“And how did you end up in the United States?”

Swami Sarvadevananda smiled and raised his eyebrows. I’d hit a sore point. “Thaaaat is not my choice. Our organization has a central control in Calcutta and we have all over the world centers. We are not big like the Catholic church - about fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred monks, nuns and novitiates. According to the need of the work, the senior sadhus think who will be fit for what work and send us. I was in one village center, I was the head of a center actively working with the poor people, the needy people, building their homes, giving them education and self-employment skills to the women. Education gives them the strength to become self-reliant.”

“What village was it?”

“Sikra, a village near the border of Bangladesh. So, this was the way I was working very happily in the center and suddenly I was called here!”

“And you weren’t happy about it.”

“In the beginning, I was not at all! Because I had no idea to come and I never imagined in my life to come over here. It is not my choice. I was saying: ‘Please don’t send me, don’t send me. Send some other person.’ I was quite happy with the poor people, being with them, building up their hearts, giving them some shelter, giving them some education and the center was not very affluent but there was a great joy to serve these people. But, anyhow this is also a service to God, what I’m doing.” He laughed. “I didn’t plan. God plans! If you accept, it’s joy. If you resist, suffering.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you were open to this and how much I’m looking forward to working with you.”

“Please come to the class and give me a call, ask me any questions. It is a lifelong journey. Many people in this country, they want instant effect. Ah, so many impressions, good, bad, have accumulated in our mind and now our mind has to be cleansed. Cleansed how? By loving others, caring for others without keeping any selfish motive.”

“I know this project will be, at best, only a beginning. What happens after—”

“--will be your own journey. In your writing, you referred to Huston Smith. Huston Smith was closely connected with our Vedanta ideas.”

“He was?”

“There was a senior swami who passed away in St Louis, Swami Satprakashananda. And Huston Smith used to go there and he learned Vedanta and this universal idea of oneness. He’s very close to us. Our nuns know him. I also met him. A very humble and spiritual person!”

“See, there’s no accident that I’m here.”

“I tell you one thing: we do not publicize this Vedanta in the newspaper. We are a very silent group but at one time Vedanta created a great impact in this country. Alcoholics Anonymous which is so popular everywhere? Who is the founder? A Vedanta student.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“He employed all the Vedanta principles. Read their books, ideals, goals – all Vedanta. Vedanta has had an impact in subtle ways but it’s not that popular a religion.”

The swami told me Ramakrishna himself had actually spent time practicing other religions. “He one day prayed to Mother: ‘Mother, you are also worshiped by people in the churches. How do they worship? Why not make me like that?’ He had one Christian devotee and he used to go and ask him what is in the Bible. And one day he saw the image of the Christ, the baby, with the Madonna and that vision became tangible and that ray of light came.” Ramakrishna then spent “day and night, not a second thinking of any aspect of god or goddesses; only Christ and Christ and Christ. Then he practiced Islam. No one in the world ever appeared before who in one lifetime has ever practiced all those disciplines that you find in Huston Smith’s book. That’s why Ramakrishna finds truth in every religion. There is truth in every religion.” But, the swami said, there is only one important question. “Are you sincere? Are you following that? Are you living that life? Or are you only fighting for the purpose of fighting in the name of religion. So this is to be understood and this message should go to everyone. Swami Vivekananda (the first Hindu representative to come to the United States) said, ‘I did not come here to convert Christian into Hindu or a Hindu into Muslim or Muslim into Buddhist. We want to make a Hindu a better Hindu, a Christian a better Christian, a Muslim a better Muslim.’ So, we are not to convert. If you are following a path called Christianity, why not love God and see God? ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.’ Where have these principles gone? You’re are talking about other things, abortion, gay marriage, this, that --- these are social issues. Why are you bringing them into religion? Why not make your life spiritual? God sees gay? No, God sees the heart of your love. Eh?”

I felt heavy when I stood up, a thanksgiving meal’s worth of new ideas in my head, but then I remembered a question I’d wanted to ask Hemu but hadn’t gotten the chance. “Now, I watched them last night, the other students. They touched your feet.”

“In the Indian tradition, they do.”

“Is that what the greeting is?”

Swami Sarvadevananda stood up, too. “Anyone senior to us, we touch our head to their feet – it’s our deepest respect. It means I am bowing down my head to you - not you, the person - but the God in you, manifested better, because you’re senior. Our mom, our dad, our elder brother, our elder sister, anyone in the society that is a teacher, a school teacher, because their wisdom is higher. So, we go and touch their feet, but in this country we follow our own way. Okay?”

He was letting me off the hook, giving me an alternative I might be able to handle. He put the palms of his hands together in front of his chest and said, “Namaste. This means: ‘Salutation to you, the Lord in you.’ So, when you do, you remember the God in me is bowing to the God in you. This is the Indian custom.”

I tried it out. “Namaste.” Not too weird.

He said it back., “Namaste.”

And, with that, I dropped my notebook and pen on the floor.


(27 September 2006)