My father, 1928-2013

Dad was in a cooler.

Saturday afternoon, Mom said, “I need to see him again.”

They were keeping him over the weekend. He’d wanted nothing. No chemicals. No box. No ceremony. Ashes to ashes. And fast.

But he died on a Friday afternoon. So he did get no chemicals. He did get no box. He was going to get no ceremony. But paperwork had to come before ashes, paperwork that had to be processed by offices that weren't open on weekends in that semi-rural Texas town two thousand miles from where he’d grown up.  

“He’s in there all alone. And he’s so cold.” Mom said.

I'd flown back -- just two weeks after I'd helped them move there. “I know, Mom, but it’s good he’s cold. It’s like a blanket for him now.”

“I suppose…” And then a few minutes later. “But he’s in there all alone. I can’t stand to think of him in there all alone.”

She had no choice but to leave him in there all alone all weekend. She’d asked my brother, the one who lived there, to make sure that, when she went in to sign all the papers, that Dad would be out where she could see him again. One last time.

There was only one funeral home in Brazos county that would cremate a body. Only one. You couldn’t be born yet again if your entire body wasn’t in the ground. No seed, no body, no resurrection. Resurrection required nostrils, there, ready to breathe in the breath of the Divine even if those nostrils would soon be dust by time and life feeding on itself. Cremation was for heathens.

To get to that one funeral home, we took turn after turn through ramshackle residential streets. Low yellow brick houses, one with plywood over a window, a dog barking, another with a car on blocks, most with high green grass fed by the heavy wet air. I thought we were going through this area to another. But we weren’t. At a low red brick building, my brother turned in to what I thought was just a wide open graveled dirt lot with one big tree in the middle and standing pits of water too large to be called puddles. I looked for a funeral home like the ones back east. I looked for the too perfect former house of every funeral home I’d ever seen and, when I didn’t see it, I thought my brother was stopping here to tell us all something, to leave one of the cars for some reason, to change directions. But he turned off his car and my brothers got out.

“I guess we’re here,” I said to Mom.

“Where?”

“There, I guess.”

In front of us was a worn house that had once been painted white with dark green trim. It was attached to the back of the brick building. There was a small sign over a bent screen door, a sign like motels have, that said “office.” 

When I opened the car door, a humid mass of unbreathable air flopped like gelatin inside the once-air-conditioned car. I stood up and went around to the passenger door to help my mother out. Kevin, who'd flown in to be with me, followed behind. She took my arm and we picked our way slowly around muddy pits of water and loose piles of scree.

At the office door, there were no stairs, just a step up off the dirt over discontinuous slats of worn white wood, one with a wide wedge rotted and gone.

From the look of it, there weren’t enough heathens in Brazos County, Texas, to support even this one funeral home. 

We stepped up into an office as bad off as the outside of the building. The mat by the door meant to clean dirt off muddy shoes had all the dirt and mud it could take and the carpet it was supposed to protect needed none: it was threadbare and worn.  Floor boards sagged in places and office equipment sat on top of old metal file cabinets with their thick wires running to large, completely filled multiplugs. Worse, when we walked in, no one was there. The five of us, my mother, husband, two brothers and I, stood, listening for any sign that it was worth calling out for someone.

I wanted to scream at my brother, what were you thinking taking our east coast surgeon Dad here? Were you thinking at all? How could you do this to Dad, to Mom, to us?

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it without making things worse for Mom, without making things worse for all of us. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t saying it, wasn’t reacting to any of it, when an only slightly subpar upscale hotel could make her reel.

She was standing like she was underwater, a current flowing through her seaweed hair.

But no one said anything. Not one of us. For the first time in our lives, the scene wasn’t written by Albee or Williams or O’Neill. No, we stood there, kind – or, rather, not inflicting on the others what we thought their “kind” should sound like, look like, be.

In 1968, when I was eleven, I’d seen a movie - I don't remember which one - in which time and space stretched out for eons before and for eons after me, the me that I’d never considered in relation to time, to space, to stars, to planets, to rocks, to mountains, to grains of sand and the oceans that made them and I was in terror. I flew out of my bed and into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. My father was asleep, the acrostic book on his bedside table. Beyond him, the rise of my mother’s hip, her arm on top, the orange glow of a cigarette in the blue light from the television.

I ran around the king bed to her side and threw myself down on the floor. I knew better than to try to crawl in bed with her. As I whispered and cried my incomprehension, my fear, she took the cigarette she'd been smoking out of her mouth, stubbed it out in the large ashtray on her bedside table then, before she took another out of the pack with her mouth, she said, “Don’t be such a little fool.” She flipped her silver lighter open, spun the flint wheel, and leaned her cigarette down to the flame. A drag of air drew the fire towards her and, when the end glowed red, she snapped the lighter shut and put it back on top of the cellophane–wrapped pack on the table. “What happens after? Nothing. When it’s done, it’s done. That’s all. That’s it. And there’s really no point in thinking anything more about it. You're too old for this. Now stop your foolishness and go to bed.”

I did go back to bed - there was no place else to go - but my foolishness didn’t stop, not then, not ever, I just learned to hide it better. I learned that no one really knew what to say about death, that the ones who did were just making it up to anesthetize themselves or to make me shut up and go away. I learned that I was going to have to build my own structure to cope because Mom didn’t need any and she thought I was damaged if I did.

But I did need one. I was defective.  It's probably the seed of this entire project.

After waiting for too long in the funeral home office, my brother went to find someone but came back without results. Finally, a vague woman wandered in to the office. She seemed surprised to see us standing there, her eyes magnified by her large glasses. We said we had an appointment.

“Oh,” she said, then went away. When she came back, she said, “Ricky will be out as soon as he can.”

“Is there someplace more comfortable for my Mom to wait?”

“Oh, yes. Sorry. Right this way.” She walked up the short set of stairs and then disappeared into a room. When she realized we weren’t right behind her, my mother couldn’t move that fast, she came back out and stood at the top of the stairs and said, “You can wait in this room here. May I get you some water or something?”

I didn’t want anything but thought some caring action was better than nothing. “Yes, please. That would be nice.”

The room was an ochre cube. An oval conference table too large for the space was on the diagonal so people might be able to get to the plush chairs on wheels around it. There were only four chairs and soon to be six of us: my mother, my brothers, Kevin, the funeral director, and me. My older brother helped Mom sit down.

I said, “I don’t want to sit.”

No one else did either. 

The shelves along the wall advertised the funeral home’s services, casket upgrades, choices of headstones, keepsakes and special jewelry, urns for ashes, possible flower arrangements along with pamphlets offered by plastic holders, all in bright pinpoint spots.  “Helping Yourself Heal”, “When Your Parent Dies”, “Accepting a Loss”, how to deal with those who are only in the process of dying and another about how to help children understand what’s going on. Yeah? Some bullshit pamphlet was gonna do that? Help me understand what the fuck was going on? Help any one of us clueless panicked parents make sense for our children of what doesn’t make sense?

What was going on was Dad was dead, his unpreserved body in a cooler somewhere, rotting in this rotting place, and Mom wanted to get him out of the icebox to see him again, wanted us to go with her and what choice did we have but to wait in the ochre box that wrapped us in advertisements for what we should be buying if we really loved him, the “deceased”, my dad, the man who’d tickled me on the den floor until I couldn’t breathe, the man who’d held my hands so I could stand on his feet and walk as he walked, the man who’d made me Halloween costumes year after year until the Tin Man’s wrapping paper tube legs came without knee joints and I told him I wanted to be like everyone else with plastic princess masks from the five and dime, the man who'd made big garage clean-ups fun, the man who’d broken up the spin the bottle game at Doug’s because Doug was four years older, the man who’d taken us to the science museum and liked pushing the buttons as much as we did, the man who'd take me to the penny candy store to buy red hot dollars that weren’t hot, the man who’d bury us up to our necks in the cold wet sand and then walk with me on his shoulders into the waves, the man who'd bring boxes of donuts home with him when he had to see patients on the weekends.

You know, the deceased.

The vague woman was back with small warm bottles of purified water she put in a clump on the table. Behind her was Ricky, a squat middle-aged man wearing a yellow shirt and brown striped tie. He stood just outside the door jam until she left.

My brother who lived in Texas sat down next to Mom. He was in charge of this part.

Ricky sat down at the table with papers. He left to get more papers he’d forgotten. He explained. He spoke with a mouth with too much spit. He turned papers over. He pointed to lines to sign. He smoothed his shiny dark hair. He talked about faxing and state regulations and turn around time and office hours and how long “it” would take once all papers were signed and faxed and approved. He told us what day and time he thought we could return to pick up the cremains (i.e. Dad) and did Mom want a special box? Oh, and did she want to take his wedding ring now?

The air conditioner strained against the heat outside the small wooden building. My other brother leaned against one of the walls and looked over at me. I gripped my lips thin and saw him do the same, something I’d never noticed we had in common.

Mom nodded, her hands abandoned, palms up, on her lap.

Ricky stood and said, “Now, if you give me a moment to make sure the room is ready…” and backed out the door.

We listened to the building’s hum. The sound of a door. Some footsteps walking on carpeted sagging wood. A copier working.

“He never took off his ring,” Mom said. “Ever.”

She waited for an answer from someone.

I said, “I know, Mom.”

Too soon, Ricky was back. His hands in front of him as though that was more respectful. He stood back from the door and motioned for us to walk down the hall.

I had decided I wasn’t going in the room. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing my father like that. He hated viewings. He told us so. It was part of the reason he wanted to be cremated and as fast as possible. If he'd been there, he would have told me to forget about it, to not go in, to run, that he didn't want to be seen like that, that it meant nothing to him, that he was gone, done, dead, and what was left was "nothing but chemicals." He'd said that so many times at the dinner table. Nothing but chemicals. Complex chemicals breaking down into simpler ones. Order to disorder. Energy released. I knew he wanted to make sure no one ever saw the beginning of his personal breaking down from order to disorder. At eighty-six, a doctor with a bad heart he'd kept a secret, he'd made a choice to go suddenly instead of a visible slow decline in a hospital. He wanted his body gone the moment he died. And I thought my mother felt that way, too. 

There's a Buddhist practice - I think meant mostly for monks - of sitting in a crematorium until you truly accept how impermanent you are. And a story Swami Sarvadevananda told me about a Hindu abbot or head of a monastery who was throughly fed up with how distracted all of his monks were by a particularly beautiful woman so, when she got sick and died, he made his obsessed clerics sit and watch her body decompose so they understood how empty and meaningless their obsession had been. Gruesome to think about.

But here, in this country in 2013, we have almost no contact with death and as little as possible contact with the sick and dying, like it's an embarrassing and unseemly thing to do, best kept out of sight. Even here it wasn't always like this. But medicine has gotten so good at keeping us alive to an old age and then medicalizing our final decline, that most of us have precious little experience with death. My grandparents all died suddenly so my only experience of their deaths was a phone call. Two of them had no funeral and my parents kept us from the two funerals that did happen. The only funeral I attended as a child was that of a great-aunt I adored, my father's favorite aunt. Her body was on display with make-up she never wore looking like she never looked in life. It was horrific. My father thought so, too. 

I’d decided to walk Mom to the door and then wait for her outside. My younger brother helped her up and then she took my arm, looked up at me, and said:  “I want you to come in with me.”

My mother, who talked about open caskets like they were for ghouls and crazy people. My mother, who thought people who needed some belief structure to cope with death were weak. My mother, who hated maudlin emotional displays. My mother, who never went to funerals. This was the woman who said: "I want you to come in with me." 

“Uhm, okay, Mom.”

We walked around the corner and into a room only marginally less rundown than the rooms we’d been in before and there, at the far end, was my father’s body under a fake pieced quilt, the kind with the squares printed on them, the top edge folded back as though he was lying in a bed. But his face was gray, rigid. His cheeks, sunken. Aside from the blanket, the only other thing they’d done was to comb his baby-fine white hair. It had comb lines in it but it wasn’t the way he combed his hair. And it was straight down to the pillow and then it hung, shaggy, above the top edge of the pillow. There was no other attempt made to pretend he was anything other than dead. We hadn't paid for it.
        My brothers and husband were back by the door. Mom hadn’t given me that choice.

I felt embarrassed to look at him. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone to look at him like this, so helpless, so defenseless, so lost. So dead.

That wasn't my father lying there. But it was. But it wasn't. He, the him I knew, wasn't there. But what wasn't there? That was his body, his face, his hair, his neck with the scar he'd gotten in the Korean war when he'd stepped between two privates having a knife fight, but...
         I would have given anything for any shred of faith, for any story that I could believe, that would make it stop being this.  

When she got close to Dad, Mom let go of my arm to put her hands on his chest. She bent down to whisper, “You know how much I love you, don’t you? You knew, right?”

I felt like I was watching something I wasn’t supposed to see, a child walking into a tangle of bodies in the dark, something that shouldn’t have had any other eyes, any other witnesses, an act sacred because of its privacy. But I was standing there, listening, watching.

My mother said to my father’s body, “I’m really not ready for you to leave me. Not yet.” She kissed his cheek, softly patted his chest and said, “But I’ll see you soon.” Then she turned away and left me there.

I would have given anything to have a ritual other than this.

I looked at my Dad. I didn’t know what to do.

I touched his soft white hair. 

I don’t think he’d have minded that.
         

My new name?

When you become a Buddhist monk or nun, you get a new name. Mine was "Ben Ri." For the rest of the Hsi Lai Eight Precept retreat, that was what I was called and how I had to sign my name. Our entire group was "Ben" something. When they gave me my new name tag, I decided that, when I got a chance to talk, I was going to ask Venerable Miao Hsi how to pronounce it and what, if anything, Ben Ri meant.

This idea of getting a new name... I guess that happens in a number of different religions. At least some Catholic nuns change their names when they become nuns but I think they get to choose their own. I'm not sure how I feel about this idea of a new name, of leaving the one I was born with behind.

Before I got married, I never felt all that strongly one way or the other about the whole name change thing, perhaps because I really only ever use my first name anyway. It's unusual enough, it usually doesn't require a last name to separate this Marley out from all the rest. So, I figured that, if I got married and if I liked my future husband's last name better than mine, I'd change it. If I didn't, I wouldn't. But, when Kevin and I decided to get married and it turned out that I actually did like his last name, I found I just couldn't do it. I'd been "me" too long. It felt weird to change my name, the implication seemed too great, like I was going to have to give up my very identity just because I'd decided I could spend the rest of my life with this guy and I didn't think that's what being married meant, giving up my separate identity. I thought it was more like deciding to go down the same path together.

Now, this may explain some of why we had a pretty rocky time of it our first decade together. But, just a few months ago, as a twentieth anniversary present, I told Kevin that I was finally -- and officially -- going to take his last name. He burst into tears. He'd been pretty cool about it when I'd decided not to back in 1987 so I was shocked it meant so much to him. I can't finish all the paperwork to make the name change official until the end of the summer but I put a ribbon around the initial social security forms and gave them to him as my present. Just in terms of reaction, it may be one of the best presents I've ever given.

I wonder what it'll feel like, how much it'll matter, that my name will be new, different. I mean, I even have to get used to a new signature when my pen seems to write the name I was born with almost automatically. I guess I'd better start practicing...

But I'm not writing about marriage...although, perhaps, the problem I had letting go of my old identity and the effect of that unwillingness is exactly why ordination comes with a new name. I guess I have a pretty strong notion of who "Marley" is and what it means to be me. I always assumed that that was a good thing, something to work for. And it's important to me, this name: it was my mother's mother's last name. There have been consequences of the choice of this name for me, a story that went with it, a story that I love, that has become mine because my name is Marley. So, when I consider the possibility that I could, if I wanted to, live the rest of my life without that name, I find it completely confusing. There is part of me that's sitting here demanding to know who I might be, then, without that name? Would I be "me?" Should I care that much about something that's the definition of superficial? I mean, my name isn't me, is it?

My Hindu teacher, Swami Sarvadevananda (who also got a new name when he became a swami) refused to talk about his previous name, the name he was given at birth. He'd left that person behind along with his old life, his old concept of himself. Do I want to leave mine behind? Is it even possible?

How much does my name have to do with who I am anyway? Who I really am?

During the time we were supposed to be taking our showers, I went looking for Venerable Miao Hsi. She was answering email at her desk. "Can you tell me how to say my name?"

I cannot even pretend to replicate here how Ven Miao Hsi said to pronounce Ben Ri: it's pronounced nothing like it looks. The "Ben" part is pretty straight forward but"Ri" involves some teeth, mouth, and throat action we don't use in English that I could never quite master.

And how did she choose mine? "We just give out the names at random. From a list. 'Ri' means 'now,' so Ben Ri means: 'beginning' or 'starting now.' "

Beginning Now. Pretty perfect, eh?

10 July 2007

How will I know?

…when it’s time to move on to Buddhism, to Confucianism, to Daoism, to Christianity, to Judaism, to Islam?

Humility, patience, sincerity,
nonviolence, uprightness, purity,
devotion to one’s spiritual teacher,
constancy, self-control,

dispassion toward objects of the senses,
freedom from the I-sense, insight
into the evils of birth,
sickness, old age, and death,

detachment, absence of clinging
to son, wife, family, and home,
an unshakable equanimity
in good fortune or in bad,

an unwavering devotion to me
above all things, an intense
love of solitude, distaste
for involvement in worldly affairs,

persistence in knowing the Self
and awareness of the goal of knowing—
all this is called true knowledge;
what differs from it is called ignorance.

Bhagavad Gita, 13.7-11

I was in Swami Sarvadevanada’s tiny office, trying to understand more about the specific elements of the Kali puja when I tried to ask him some personal questions again. Old habits die hard.

“What was your name…before?” I asked.

The swami was behind his desk.

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I don’t know. But I do.”

Cool fall air was coming in the window behind him. There was a long pause before he answered. “We want to forget our past identity. This is a monastic identity. I am a monk. I am for the whole world. My name is Sarvadevananda; I am a priest ‘of the consciousness of all gods.’ That means universal. I don’t give any attachment to my family.”

“None at all?”

“No. Wherever I am, that is my family, eh? So, to get over our personal identities of little things of life, we left that (his original name) back and I don’t want to go back to that identity and remember ‘Oh I belong to this. I was born here and this and that.’”

“And if you miss--”

“What shall you miss? If you get something higher, you don’t miss.”

I tried to imagine doing this to my family: I just couldn’t. But then, I didn’t grow up in India or in a household where religion comes before everything so I can’t possibly get an accurate sense of the meaning or the impact of Swami Sarvadevenanda’s decision on his family. I do know that Swamiji’s so firm about the insignificance of names that it’s been the source of one of our only intractable disagreements.

I’ve had Swami Sarvadevenanda (along with several other people) fact-check everything I’ve written and will write about Hinduism and he’s asked for only one change I’ve refused to make: Swamiji wanted me to remove every mention of his name, Sarvadevananda, except for the very first time I introduce him, and simply refer to him as “the swami.” The reason: the message is what’s important, the message of Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, not the person delivering the message.

I said I understood his point but I thought it’d seem awkward and a bit odd if he became this anonymous shadow rather than the flesh and blood person that he is. And it’s that flesh and blood person who is my teacher. Okay, so it’s really (according to Vedanta) the teachings of Ramakrishna, of Swami Vivekananda, of Brahman coming through this teacher sitting in front of me in his orange robes and big glasses but, still, he is the teacher before me and it’s his way of communicating these ideas that brought me to the Vedanta Society in the first place.

I decided to move from the personal family history to safer ground.“What does – Sarvadevananada mean?”

“First word ‘Sarva’ means ‘all’. ‘Deva’ means god, gods. And ‘ananda’ means joy, bliss. So you have: ‘the bliss of all the gods’. That means you are reminded you are not a man, not a woman, you are (imperishable consciousness) and you are awakening to that consciousness.”

I looked down at my hands. Ink from my pen was on my fingers. “I’m so grateful to you for what you’ve been giving…”

Swamiji interrupted me with a wave of his hand. “Spiritual life is like that, to share, eh? If you eat good food, you want to share with others.” He laughed.

I said, “All the different temples I went to and ...I end up here, a temple where Ramakrishna has done, obviously in a much deeper way, what I’m trying to do.” (Ramakrishna spent some time practicing both Christianity and Islam.)

“I think that is the way God is taking you in different experiences and brought to the right place. That’s all.”

In some of the classes, the swami had discussed other religions so I said, “Buddhism has come up a little bit and you’ve talked about the point of religion is to see God, to have that real sense of a Presence. Doesn’t – again, I don’t know that much about Buddhism yet but doesn’t Buddhism say there is no god?”

“Yes. But the question is the definition of God. What do you mean by God?” He paused for effect. “Buddhism says: don’t talk about it. Buddha took the Vedantic idea – he (Buddha) was born Vedantic – he said: ‘Look at the world. What is permanent? By the time you sit for some moment, the thing changes. Every fraction of a second everything is changing. So, if everything is changing, it gives the illusion of reality.’ For example if you take a fan blade: when it moves very fast you don’t see the blade. Does it mean that there is no blade?”

“No.”

“Vedanta says negate, negate, to come to one Absolute Reality.” The swami was talking about the Hindu idea of going through everything your senses can perceive to realize, one-by-one, that these were not the Divine. “Buddha didn’t say that. He said only: ‘Be a lamp unto you.’ What Buddha said – he didn’t want to get caught into that trap of God, God, God, what is this, that? He wanted to emphasize: go back to the source of the light - consciousness. Eh? So, his language was different (but) go to the realization— When he got the realization, look at his face. He was beaming in joy. Where the joy comes from if there is no joy inside? So what’s the difference between (the Hindu definition of God and the Consciousness of Buddhism)? The effect we see the same. So the words are just labels.”

I then brought up a subject that had been on my mind since I started this whole project. “So how will I know when it’s time to go on to another (faith?) If I’m going to do this work, at some point I have to say, ‘Okay, it’s time to turn my attention to the next tradition.’ What is your suggestion about how I will know?”

“This is your project. Writing about this is one thing, that’s a project. But your spiritual sadhana, you should have to go deep with one thought, one idea, one practice. Otherwise, it is like digging the ground to get water: you dig ten feet here, you dig ten feet there and you never get any water. You have to be persistent in going down and down. Your spiritual life should be dedicated to one idea, one principle.”

“But can’t this (project) be of service?” I asked.

“This can be a great service,” the swami said, “to bring this concept is a great thing because harmony is the need of this age. So, you should have to study the others and put their views forward with as much emotion and connection in that particular practice as you can. Here is a person, Ramakrishna, he individually practiced all these religions and came to the same conclusion: that all roads lead to the same conclusion.”

“What is your suggestion about how will I know when it’s time?”

“You’ll have to figure it out.”

I laughed. “I knew you were gonna say that. I was just kind of hoping there’d be something more, I don’t know, you know….”

“You pray inside and say: ‘Oh Lord guide me from my heart’ and your mind will say. Or some opportunity will come or, as you say, you didn’t know about us or anything and you happened to be in Kumbha Mela. So, I am saying something like that may come up and God will show you the path.”




Sri Ramakrishna & Swami Vivekananda























The Hollywood Vedanta Society main office and chapel

Swami Sarvadevenanda

Atman cannot be attained by speech, by the mind,
or the eye. How can It be realized in any other way
than by the affirmation of him who says: “He is”?

Katha Upanishad, II.iii.12

I wanted to get a closer look at Swami Sarvadevananda, to find out if he really was The Guy - but I wanted to be invisible while I did it. I felt like a skittish animal peering out at someone from the edge of forest: Is it safe? Does he have food? Will he hurt me? The website of his temple, The Vedanta Society, said he was scheduled to teach an evening class and that seemed like cover enough. It turned out that, after searching in temples all over southern California, I was headed to a temple I could almost walk to from my office. The Vedanta Temple is right near the 101 freeway but you can’t see it because it’s on a small hill surrounded by trees.

The white temple with leaded glass windows sits next to a dark house that serves as office and bookstore. Inside, the chapel is spare with cream-colored carpets, walls and nave. Oak pews with cushions stop at about the middle, leaving room to sit on the floor in front of the steps up to the altar which is deep in the back. The display is much more subdued than the other temples I’d seen; instead of many large life-sized deities, there’s just a wooden stand with three photos on it – one higher than the rest - and a lot of flowers.

A silent meditation was just ending when I walked in – I really should say burst in. I could only see that the room was dim but nothing more through the rippled glass door. I made more noise than I wanted to finding a seat but, as soon as I settled, a white man of about sixty with a grey beard came in, much more quietly than I had, wearing his office clothes. He must have known the drill. He put down his black briefcase by the back door and walked straight up the aisle until he was standing before the carpeted steps leading up to the altar. Once there, he got on his knees and then bowed down long and deep. Sitting up, he then bowed again. And, with that, he stood up, walked back down the aisle, scooped up something small from the tiny covered brass dish on the table by the back door, picked up his briefcase, and walked out. He seemed like he was stopping by from work on his way home just to say hello, to acknowledge a revered elder as if the photographs were real people. The visit seemed to make him happy, content, a peaceful end to a long day.

The worship of people who lived recently enough to be photographed makes me nervous – not that devotion to mythic deities is much easier. Maybe I’ve just covered too many conmen in my old job as an investigative reporter but I’m always on the look out for someone playing a role to get something from others, to get something from me. Not the best attitude when you’re trying to wrestle with matters of faith, I think…or maybe it is. I dunno. But it is a fact that my first reaction, my first action, my first thought is to try to figure out if someone I’m talking to is a fake and this obsessive focus on the veracity of others often gets in the way of my even getting a clue about what I think and feel. But, sitting in the quiet, the photographs suddenly struck me as no different than the photographs on my mantelpiece of the people in my life whom I loved and revered. From looking at my father-in-law’s broad open Irish face, a face almost precisely mirrored in my son, Matt’s, I get a sense of compassion and service, of humility and deep love. From the photograph of my difficult but vibrant mother-in-law, I feel a sense of fire and perseverance while, from the hurt eyes of my grandmother at five, comes a call for unconditional love.

Okay, so the photographs on the altar in temples are draped with garlands of fresh flowers and candles and people were bowing down before them but it doesn’t seem like they’re being worshipped like deities so much as way-showers, people who, by example, truly lived the spiritual practice in a way that still motivates some. So why should these photographs or icons give me so much trouble? I think it’s much easier to accept a representation of Jesus or Buddha because no one really knows what they actually looked like so they’ve become an idea bigger than a single human being. I mean, I find it much easier to see the divinity in every person (well, most of the time) but I get hinky when one actual person is literally put up on a pedestal.

Moments before the class was to begin, I ran to get something from my car. In the quick dash out and back, Swami Sarvadevananda, draped in light orange fabric, had come in. He was sitting on the floor of the carpeted stage, his legs under a small table that held a book, a lamp, and a microphone. I slipped into the second pew, behind a handful of others, and discovered that I’d run back in with my shoes on. A glaring whoops. I pushed my shoes forward under the pew in front of me, hoping no one noticed.

Swami Sarvadevananda was cheerful. “Well, it’s 7:30. I guess everyone’s late but let’s start, shall we?”

From twenty feet away, Swami Sarvadevanada could be mid-fifties, perhaps early sixties. He's thin, with a dark, somewhat random head of hair and an open, playful face announced by almost absurdly large glasses. He seems perpetually on the verge of smiling.

I hadn’t bothered to look at what tonight’s topic was supposed to be. It was Raja Yoga, one of the four basic paths to enlightenment in Hinduism. For us in the west, although we’re unlikely to have heard the term “raja yoga”, it’s probably the most familiar path as it’s the path that includes what’s known here as yoga, meditation, and the exercises that lead to the ability to control one’s body for the purpose of coming to experience the presence of God – the part of Hinduism I’d been hoping to avoid - not the meditation part but the body-control stuff. I don’t know what religion or the practice of faith has to do with theories of how bodies work.

“When we’re talking about prana, about taking in prana.” The swami inhaled deeply. “Most people think we are talking about the breath, about controlling the breath. No. It’s energy, it’s really energy. By controlling the breath, we are controlling the muscles that contract the lungs and that means you are controlling your energy. If we control our energy, we control our body. If we control our body, we believe, we can control the whole system.”

His hands were the most elegant thing about him: when he spoke, one of them usually traced graceful serpentine figures in the air, his long fingers close together, his palms turned over as if offering something from a pocket – if he had any. “Let me explain. Most people think they can’t move their ears. But we know some people who can. We can’t simply because it’s a skill we haven’t developed because we don’t practice it. But we have the power to do anything inside of us. It’s all potential power, power that we can realize by practicing control.”

The swami pointed out that when we held our breath to move a heavy object that was an example of an unconscious use of raja yoga, of controlling our energy.

As he went on to give examples of healing and healers, I found myself veering off into judgmentland. I mean, what he was talking about, these particular Hindu beliefs, were the root of much of what people consider nutty about California: energy healers and crystals and alternative medicine, etc. My doctor’s-daughter mind balked. I mean, I get why meditation and the practice we know here as yoga could be considered antidotes to the frantic stress of our lives. I meditate but I don’t make a big deal of it. I feel better when I do it; simpler, less jangled. And, like many people, after learning that middle-aged bodies need stretching along with running and lifting weights, I go to an occasional yoga class. Not only do these practices no longer seem strange to me, even western medicine acknowledged their usefulness. But it’s difficult for me to go much further than that.

“Energy can be transferred from one person to another. When we are near a powerful person, we feel the power. Similarly, have you ever been with someone who just took all the energy out of you, dragged you down? When we hear a speaker who touches us, who speaks with enthusiasm, with passion for what they are saying, we are touched. We really learn something. We say: ‘they really talked from the heart.’ It’s just the language that we use but what we’re talking about is pranic energy. All we’re talking about is that they were a conduit for the energy that is all around us all the time to flow through them to us.

“The whole world is nothing but energy. You are energy, I am energy, words are energy… I mean, all I’m saying is energy and nothing else but that. And there is only one energy, one prana and we are but individual expressions of it. It’s like a vast lake; if you throw a stone into it on one side, the ripples will be felt on the other shore so long as you’ve got instruments sensitive enough to measure it. So, if we heal ourselves, we can affect the people around us. The great healers – Jesus, Buddha - all knew this. What did Jesus do? He said, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’ Buddha knew this and he healed people.

“Now it’s not so easy to be such a healer. There are some people who take advantage of the innocence of normal people and pretend that they are healers!”

Now he was talking my language. It wasn’t until Swami Sarvadevananda acknowledged the existence of fakers, of people who misuse others’ faith or desperation, that I began to relax.
“Why is it that Sri Ramakrishna,” the swami said with a gesture towards the top picture on the altar, “that Christ, that Buddha have had so much influence on people all over the world? It’s because they raised their pranic energy to a level that they can awaken the cosmic pranic energy. If you are ready, you can feel this uplifting energy when you come close to this vibration. You have the power, the potential, inside of you but it must be awakened.”

So, that was the name of the man in the photo: Ramakrishna. But there were two others down lower. None were easy to see in detail from where I sat.

Swami Sarvadevananda ended the class with some chanting.

I ducked down behind the first pew to pick up my shoes when it was over and, when I came up, I found the swami standing right in front of me. Me. He began talking as if I’d already asked him a question when I hadn’t said a word. “Yes?” he said. “How can I help you?”

Did I have a sign on my head? On my face?

“I’m a writer working on a project and I’d like to come talk to you.”

“When?”

“As soon as it’s convenient for you.”

“Why don’t you stay for dinner? Follow those people, they’ll show you where to go.”

“Okay.” With that, I dropped the books in my arms and some of the contents of my purse at his feet because I was trying to hide my shoes underneath the books in my arms. He said nothing, nor did he embarrass me by bending down to help me pick any of it up. He turned and walked to the back of the chapel to greet people. One after another, almost all of them bent down to touch his feet, even the American ones. So it wasn’t just Hemu’s temple then. I headed out the back door and into the cold night, following a couple of people around the back of the building.

The sun was gone. I walked down a dimly-lit brick pathway and up a few steps into what looked like another, newer house.

I was beginning to get it: eating was clearly a very big thing in Hinduism. Everything ended with a meal – even the rituals in the temples ended with eating things. By leaving the mandir in Whittier without taking food, I was, in some sense, being quite rude. Well, maybe not rude but I was rejecting part of the practice. I never think about food as ritual, as part of a spiritual practice; for me, it’s an afterthought, something dispensable. I even think I’m being nicer by not staying, not imposing, not requiring work on my behalf. And I’m always in a hurry to get home as any “extra” time spent away from my family feels wrong.

That night, I accepted the invitation but I had my internal meter running.

On the long wooden side board, were bowls filled with rice and various simple dishes – including fish. I got my plate and Swami Sarvadevananda said, “Sit there,” motioning to a seat near his place at the end of the long table, capable of seating perhaps two dozen people, too large for intimacy but too small for anonymity.

It took me a moment to notice I actually knew the woman sitting between the Swami and me, an acquaintance I’d met through a friend years ago. When the Swami came to the table to sit down, ready to hear me out, everyone stopped talking to listen to what I had to say - not exactly the scene I’d imagined or wanted.

Describing this project isn’t easy under the best of circumstances, let alone in front of a table full of strangers. I stumbled through it and heard myself stress that my parents thought religions were “the root of all evil, the cause of strife and dissension.” I know I must have said more but those were the words still clanging in my ears days later. I had no idea how the other people at the table were reacting, I couldn’t look at them.

When I was done, the swami said, “Okay, when do you want to come?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Tomorrow at five?”

“Okay.”

And then the swami turned from me to the thin Indian man with salt-and-pepper hair beside me and said, “Are you staying with us?”

My acquaintance, a pale, freckled woman named Leslie said quietly, looking at her plate. “That sounds like an awesome idea. A really, really great idea.”

With relief, I answered, “Thanks.”

I’d finished eating the small amount of rice and vegetables I’d taken while the table full of people who didn’t know each other managed to patch together a kind but somewhat awkward conversation. It felt a bit pushy to ask any more questions so I’d decided to just sit and listen when the swami, again, turned directly to me without my saying a word and said, “You can leave if you want to go. It’s all right.”

Before I left, I handed him my proposal for this project in which I described my background and what I was planning to do; I wanted to make sure he knew exactly what he was getting himself into with me. The swami said, “Oh! I’m not sure I’ll have time to read this but, if not, you can just tell me tomorrow.” He turned to the people who were just starting to clear their places and said, “Now, if anyone wants to work on their karma, the kitchen could use some help cleaning up!”

And he was gone.

I’d found my teacher.



(26 September 2006)

Kumbha mela...

Find a wise teacher, honor him,
ask him questions, serve him;
someone who has seen the truth
will guide you on the path to wisdom.

Bhagavad Gita 4.34


One stop guru shopping. Well, Professor Chapple didn’t really say it that way but that’s what he meant.

After I told him about my difficulty with both the language and strict separation of men and women at the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan mandir, he suggested I might want to check out the kumbha mela set to take place at the University of California at Irvine. He thought I might find my guru – I cringe typing that word but that’s what a teacher is called in Hinduism – there. It’s the first one ever held in this country.

Kumbha melas are held every three years in India and millions of Hindus go. The purpose of the kumbha mela is to bring together as many of the disparate sects of Hindus as possible. Historically, it also allowed for some standardization of sacred texts, rituals and beliefs but its primary purpose was to anchor peace among all people. A group of temples had decided, after 9/11, to have one here. I decided to go. (Los Angeles Times article on the event.)

When I got to the campus, it was still flat-out summer so I grabbed a bottle of water out of the backseat and a tattered parasol and fell in with the steady stream of people heading for the open parking lot where the opening procession was to begin.There were knots of people lining up, some in robes of various colors, holding bright banners or photos of spiritual leaders decorated with garlands of flowers, while others prepped elaborate carts holding brass icons. Umbrellas and conch shell horns, saris and drums, ropes of flowers and brass bells – I wasn’t sure how I was going to spot my future teacher in this tumult.

The Hare Krishnas’ gold cart, two-people high, required twenty people pulling two ropes to make it move when the procession began. Those not pulling beat drums or danced between the “V” made by the ropes. The Nithyananda Foundation , the temple whose Swami had instigated the event, had five different carts, each with a different icon, each shaded by round red-fringed parasols. While all the Nithyananda devotees were wearing long white dhotis, they also had cobalt blue t-shirts pulled on over them that said: "Be Blissful" and had the website address on the back. Some groups danced, others marched, still others blew horns or gave out flowers.
One vague white man who looked like he'd just come from a data-entry cubicle somewhere was scooting along side the procession carrying an Arrowhead plastic gallon jug partially filled with a murky yellow liquid. Moss or algae was floating in it. He abruptly stopped right in front of me and thrust a capful of the liquid at me.

When I didn’t really respond because I had no idea what I was supposed to do, he blurted, “Sacred river water.”

I looked at the cap and then back at him and all I thought was, if he expects me to drink this, he's got another think coming.

He finally gave up on my ever coming out of my paralysis. "Pour it over your head.”

Relieved that I wasn't supposed to drink it, I did as I was told…and then spent the rest of the day wondering if I should have. Blessed water or not, my college roommate was an infectious disease specialist so I had plenty of things to imagine and, on top of that, I was a kid who wouldn’t go near a pool with even a few leaves in it or any trace of cloudiness and who tried very hard not to touch the bottom of any river I ever swam in. I walked around the rest of the day occasionally wondering what might come of the dried remains of the yellow swampy water that was now in my hair.

There weren’t many of us watching the procession so people kept bounced out of line to offer me a red flower, to ask if I had any questions, to hand me a pamphlet. One white woman put a smudged dot of orange powder in the center of my forehead. Strangely, the only group I had to chase after to get the literature they were handing out were the Hare Krishnas. Along with small booklets describing the message of their founding spiritual leader, Prabhupada, there was a card inviting anyone interested to come to their free “Love Feast” every Sunday afternoon. On the other side of the card, were directions and a suggestion that “your life will be sublime” if you chant the mantra: “Hare Kishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.” One of the temples sponsoring the event handed out a light purple folded flyer to anyone who would take it: “Enlightening Golf Classic 2006.” On the inside it said “Tee Off For Meditation.”

As I watched the procession go by, I kept a look-out for anyone who looked like a possible teacher. But, what was I looking for? Would I recognize him or her if I saw them? And, how? I didn’t think what I was looking for was something that could be seen but I wasn’t willing to let any chance encounter pass me by.

The parade ended at an above-ground pool that had been set up just outside the basketball stadium. A diverse group of swamis ceremonially poured water from a silver urn, said to be from twenty-one sacred rivers in India into the pool, and then each immersed their temple’s idols in the holy water. Once all the holy saints were symbolically bathed, people could touch the water. All of the idols – and there were at least forty to fifty of them of various sizes – were then brought into the event center and put, side-by-side, across the back of the stage in what became a circus of shapes and colors, flowers and brass idols, photographs and garlands and tall round fringed umbrellas.

After a long series of songs, dances and performances, the mayor of Irvine, a barrel of a woman who spoke in a flat but kind politician voice, welcomed the group by saying her city was blessed to have such a rich spiritual tradition in its midst. Then, one after another, the swamis who came together to make the event happen got up from the long table on the stage to speak, their devotees cheering loudly when they came to the podium.

The first to speak, the swami whose idea the Kumbha Mela was, was also the youngest – a smiling, long-haired guru who, at twenty-seven, looked like a movie idol. His followers were the ones wearing the white dhotis covered by the blue t-shirts and, I don’t know what was wrong with me, but they all looked just too happy, like you couldn’t even talk to them, they were in such a transported, blissful state. That sort of abandon makes me nervous. Next, came a swami who spoke passionately but in his native language. Then, a thin, cerebral, man with thinning black hair and big glasses got up to speak.

Undisturbed by the large, somewhat inattentive audience, the earnest man in orange robes began to speak into the microphone as if he were in a small room of intimates rather than a basketball stadium. “I am glad to be here today, to be with you all to celebrate this wonderful Kumbha Mela which means a congregation of all religious ideals and ideology.”

He then talked about the differences between all of the various Hindu sects at the conference, between the various spiritual leaders sitting up on the stage, saying their differences were only in practice but not in their faith, not in their belief in prayer, not in their resolve for peace. With an elegant sweep of one hand, the swami said, “All these different deities represent different aspects of the same One. And, as different streams have their sources in different places, all mingle their water in the sea, so the different paths men take, through different tendencies, various though they may appear, all lead to the same One, the Infinite Absolute. Hinduism is the mother of all religions. We don’t worship idols, we worship any image we choose that can lead us to the One, to the Absolute, to that which is beyond all description.”

Idols lined the back of the stage but this swami was saying they weren’t worshipped, they were more like tools that helped show the way to a single Infinite Absolute. I’d never heard that before.

"Some say that only their God is real, that ‘my God is higher, more real than yours.’ We Hindus don’t. We are not here to change anyone, to make anyone a Hindu, to make them believe what we believe. We want a Christian to be a better Christian, for a Jew to be a better Jew, for a Muslim to be a better Muslim. This is the need of this age, this harmony is the need of this age. That is the way to world peace. And we should be very proud to be part of this religion that has given the world this openness, this acceptance.”

As I watched this sincere man speak his simple words with such kindness and conviction yet with such seeming detachment from any effort to manipulate the crowd or broadcast his personality, I thought: “That’s him. That’s my teacher.”

I looked in the program. His name was Swami Sarvadevananda.



(10 September 2006)