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

86 hours of silence

Can a man get pearls by floating or swimming on the surface? He must dive deep.

Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Ramakrishna

Silence and withdrawing for a period of time are an important part of Hinduism but I am one of the loudest, least solitary people I know. Don't get me wrong: I actually like being alone, at least, I think I do, but most of my working life I've spent in television news and, aside from a couple of years in my twenties, I've never lived completely alone. And the house I grew up in was loud: had three querulous brothers and we lived in a neighborhood filled with guys who never seemed to stop yelling, laughing or teasing. Now I live in a house with two boys and a husband, none of whom could be described as quiet. But I have liked being alone. The very first few words I put together on this project came when a girlfriend backed out of a cross-country skiing trip we were supposed to take together and, instead of canceling, I went alone. So, I figured it was time to see what a few days in the Vedanta Society's retreat house might be like.

With a letter from Swami Sarvadevananda, I got permission to go to the retreat center in Olema at the very end of January for four nights. It seemed like a good time to go, given that Luke’s and Matt’s finals were over and Kevin had just finished a project making that week a light one for him. Four nights meant I was going to have to keep my mouth shut from Tuesday dinner through Saturday at dawn. But it wasn’t just no talking: the rules of the center said no cell phone or computers either.

The retreat center confirmation also said to bring towels, linen, and all of my own food, that the kitchen was well-stocked with utensils and plates but “retreatants” were on our own for just about everything, including cleaning. So, on Tuesday morning, I dropped Luke and Matt off at school and drove six hours north through farmland and alongside the state’s endless aqueducts to Olema.

To get to the Vedanta women’s retreat center, you have turn onto a dirt road just outside the intersection that is Olema and follow it past the farmhouse that serves as the men’s retreat center, then through uncertainly fenced fields with muscular black cattle chewing in them. At the very end of the rutted road was a fairly new building built expressly for its purpose.

The kitchen was, indeed, well-stocked and cleaner than almost any kitchen I had ever seen. The open dining and living room had polished wooden tables, couches and armchairs and opened onto a wooden deck with a view of pastures bordered by trees. There were eight bedrooms off two short corridors, each opening directly to outside and a carpeted meditation room, Just off the kitchen, there was a small room for the caretaker – it was Noelle while I was there - who gave me keys to front door and as well as a “silence bead” to let the other women know that, even in the few hours we were allowed to talk (around dinner time), that I would be silent.

Not talking for eight-six hours is a lot easier if you’re in a beautiful place without cell phone service or internet or anyone you know. I brought nothing in with me except the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,

the puja kit Hemu had encouraged me to buy, the small handbook Swami Sarvadevananda had suggested – Worship of Sri Ramakrisha - and a journal, although I was determined not even to write in that. And I kept my meals simple: nuts, yogurt, some spinach salad, fruit, nothing that required major preparation.

Not talking wasn’t so bad; not doing was my problem. Watching the day flow by from a bench on a hill instead of being immersed in it was hard. I do so I don’t feel. I do to convince myself there is a point. I do to distract from the fact that doing isn’t the point but I have no idea what is. Days directed by sunlight, wrist stripped of its handcuff of time, were long, deliciously long when you stopped fighting them. When the to-do lists and the doubts came, I simply watched the storm clouds gather, the mental winds whip around and then pass. Thoreau and his sunlight kept coming to mind as I sat overlooking the valley, measuring time by the shadow’s spread from one tree trunk to another, by the layers of clothing needed to stay warm, by the herd of exotic deer’s slow climb from the valley into the hills just after dawn. The deer’s ancestors were left behind more than fifty years ago by men who planned to hunt them but now they overrun the place.

Comic relief: the first two mornings my wake up call was a gang of wild turkeys gobbling and complaining just outside my window as they scuttled across the grass at first light.

I tried to use the puja kit but its complexity, even with plenty of free time, even with the help of the step-by-step instructions in the Worship of Sri Ramakrishna, stumped me again although there was one revelation: in the directions for the daily ritual, devotees are directed to dip their fingers into purified water and then to draw a triangle inside a circle and then a square around both on the ground.

Sound familiar? It did to me. At home, I googled: “Alcoholics Anonymous symbol” and saw, on an AA-related website, the very same image (minus a square around the outside) and the following statement quoted from AA literature: “That we have chosen this particular symbol is perhaps no accident. The priests and seers of antiquity regarded the circle enclosing the triangle as a means of warding off spirits of evil, and A.A.'s circle and triangle of Recovery, Unity, and Service has certainly meant all of that to us and much more." I had forgotten, until seeing this image, Swami Sarvadevananda’s telling me that the founder of AA, Bill Wilson, had been a devotee of this particular form of Hinduism, at least for a while.

But most of the time, when I wasn’t wandering the grounds or trying to meditate, either inside the meditation room or outside on the bench on the hill, I read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

He sure was tough company. The Gospel is really more of a biography or journal written by one of Ramakrishna’s devotees under a single initial: “M.” What’s interesting about it is the degree to which “M” simply took notes rather than making a concerted effort to mythologize the man he came to believe was an actual incarnation of the Divine. It has a warts-and-all feel, a very human picture which, for me, made it all the more difficult to consider the idea that this man could be a “capital I” Incarnation. I mean, this was a man who shamelessly guilted some of his married followers into living away from their wives and children for months at a time; who was unschooled, perhaps close to illiterate, and who spent the first years of his adult life weeping at the feet of Kali, sometimes without clothes on, demanding that God actually appear before him, live and in person.

Who can measure up to that standard? Do I want to literally see God, if such a thing were possible? Sure, I’m driven to do whatever it is I am doing – I sometimes feel like a carcass and an intellect being dragged along by this drive of mine – but to weep for it? To stand naked in a temple and demand a Visit? To threaten to kill myself if God didn’t seem interested in complying? It isn’t just that my passion isn’t strong enough to follow Ramakrishna’s example, to disregard all inbred societal norms. If I’m very honest, I’m not so sure I would choose to see God even if I believed such a thing were possible.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the terrifying passage where God finally revealed just part of Itself to Arjuna, made me not so certain any of us really would choose to see the Divine if we could. That awe-filled description takes my breath away. I was clear on this point: at that moment I felt wholly incapable of even imagining myself ever having the courage required to have that kind of desire, that absolute and laser-beam faith. Alone, for days of silence with Ramakrishna, the mountain of faith felt too sheer, too high to climb, without better spiritual equipment than I had.

Perhaps it’s enough, in any given moment, to act on faith “indifferent to results, content with whatever happens.” Or take the actions of a faithful person just to find out something I might not learn otherwise.

When reading Ramakrishna got too much, I wandered around the woods, following overgrown paths wherever they led. At one point, so many branches had fallen, the path was impossible to follow. Clearing the ones I could move, I wondered if it was possible my purpose might be just that, to clear those branches on that particular day so that some modern day Ramakrishna might be able to find his or her way to their bodhi tree, to their epiphanous spot, and it was just my job to move those branches without ever knowing the effect. Could that be enough? Would it matter if it wasn’t?

By the time Saturday morning came, I was packed up in my ice-coated car, waiting for the caretaker down at the men’s retreat center to open the gate at seven in the morning, the moon still high in the early morning sky. I was going to meet Huston Smith. When I got to an area where my cell phone had reception, I was relieved to find no message canceling our visit.

Huston Smith!

I found him at last!

Lands across the planet have become our neighbors, China across the street, the Middle East at our back door. We hear that East and West are meeting, but it is an understatement. They are being flung at one another. When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take another seriously.

Huston Smith
The World’s Religions

Two days after I sent the letter to Huston Smith, I was driving on a freeway, wondering when it might be proper to follow up with a call when my cell phone rang. A blocked caller.

“Hello?”

“This is Huston Smith calling for Marley.”

His voice was dignified, precise, his inner force rising to overcome the wear and tear of time.

“Professor Smith? I can’t believe it! Thank you so much for calling me so promptly. I cannot tell you how much this means to me.”

“Well, I read your letter and I’d be happy for you to stop by but I want you to know that, if you want me to read a manuscript, I must tell you I am just too busy and so my answer must be no. But if you want to stop by, the answer is yes.”

He was eighty-seven. He got a letter from a complete stranger asking to visit. He called back as soon as he got it. And, he said yes.

If there were other cars on the road, I no longer saw them. “Oh that’s terrific, Professor Smith. That would be just great.”

“Let me give you my fax number so we can finish up all the details that way. My hearing isn’t great this year - it will be much better next year - so I can’t do much over the phone but I’m much better in person. Please take this fax number and we’ll work out the details that way.”

While driving on the freeway, I’m sorry to say, I took the number down, afraid to risk losing him even in the small amount of time that pulling to the side of the road might have taken.

A couple of faxes and phone calls later and we were set. After the silent retreat, I was to stop by his house.

22 January 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.”

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

Fake

Children – they force you to deal, don’t they?

Do any action you must do,
since action is better than inaction;
even the existence of your body
depends on necessary actions.

The whole world becomes a slave
to its own activity, Arjuna;
if you want to be truly free,
perform all actions as worship.

Bhagavad Gita 3.8-3.9

Luke, Matt, and I sat at the breakfast table eating. I told them all about the Kali puja and the overwhelming display of food at the Swaminarayan New Year’s celebration.

“Well, Mom,” Matt offered, “I’m sure when you get through with your spiritual quest you’ll know what religion to choose.”

From the other side of the table, Luke attacked: “She’s not on a spiritual quest. She’s on a fake spiritual quest. Maybe once she’s done, then she’ll start to figure it out.” Luke turned to me for verification, “Right, Mom?”

I said nothing at all back.

And the vacuum was filled with fraternal verbal swordplay over whether what I’m doing is real or fake and what real or fake means anyway and whether the other could possibly understand anything at all in the first place and getting words in “edgewise” and who was interrupting whom.

I was taken aback by Luke’s words. It was almost like he was asking me to reassure him I wasn’t actually on a personal spiritual search but just engaged in a safe exercise in journalism - the look on his face, his full blue-eyed question, the morning light on the tiled floor, on the corner of the yellow table cloth, the complete momentary pause in the conversation.

Why can’t I answer? Is what I’m doing fake? And what could fake possibly mean when I’ve dropped everything in my life to do this and only this?

I have to admit I’m on some kind of personal search. If “fake” means I don’t know whether I’ll get anywhere, if “fake” means I might not get to any definitive place, any definitive faith by the end of this, if “fake” means I might find out I don’t have the ability to be what people call “spiritual” within me, then I guess I must accept that label as possible. What I’m doing is nothing more than what every single human being, aware of their own mortality, must go through in one form or another.

But I want something more from this than digging up my own personal belief system. I want to understand what’s happening in a world beset by violence that claims religious doctrine as its source and that obsession of mine is very real. And, whether global or just personal, I do have faith that my effort will be worth something in the end even if I can’t know right now in what way precisely. That faith isn’t fake. That faith I have. That faith is real.

Seeing God...

This passage of the Bhagavad Gita freaked me out when I read it. Don't judge, just read and imagine what it describes...

Arjuna said:
Tell me now, in detail,
the divine manifestations
by which you pervade these worlds
and grace them with so much splendor.

How can I know you, Krishna?
Which of your many forms
should I visualize, Lord of Yoga,
as I focus my thoughts on you?

Give me some further examples
of your glorious manifestations;
for I never can tire of hearing
your life-giving, honey-sweet words.

The Blessed Lord said:
All right, Arjuna, I will tell you
a few of my manifestations,
the most glorious ones; for infinite
are the forms in which I appear.

I am the Self, Arjuna,
seated in the heart of all beings;
I am the beginning and the life span
of beings, and their end as well.

Of the sky gods, I am Vishnu;
of the heavenly lights, the sun;
Marichi, chief of the wind gods;
among stars, I am the moon;

of the Vedas, I am the hymns;
Indra among the gods;
the mind among the six senses;
the consciousness of all beings;

of the storm gods, I am Shiva;
of demigods, Kubera;
Agni among the bright gods;
and Meru, highest of mountains.

Know, Arjuna, that among
priests I am Brihaspati;
of generals, the war god Skanda;
of waters, I am the ocean;

of the great seers, I am Bhrigu;
of words, the syllable Om;
of worship, I am the mantra;
of mountain chains, Himalaya;

of trees, the sacred fig tree;
of divine sages, Narada;
of the high celestial musicians,
Chitraratha; of saints,

the wise Kapila; of horses,
Ucchaishravas, Indra’s
favorite, born of the sea foam;
of elephants, Indra’s winged

Airavata; of men,
I am the king; of weapons,
Indra’s thunderbolt; of cows,
Kamadhuk, the wish-granter;

Kandarpa, the god of love;
the king of reptiles, Vasuki;
of divine serpents, I am
Ananta, the cosmic serpent; Varuna

among the gods of the ocean;
of the blessed forefathers, I am
Aryaman; of the controllers,
Yama, the god of death;

of demons, the devout Prahlada;
of things that compel, I am time;
the king of animals, the lion;
Garuda among the birds;

of purifiers, the wind;
of warriors, I am Rama;
of sea monsters, Makara;
of rivers, the holy Ganges;

of creations, the beginning and the end
and the middle as well, Arjuna;
of knowledge, knowledge of the Self;
of orators, I am the speech;

of letters, the first one, A:
I am imperishable time;
the Creator whose face is
everywhere; death that devours all things;

the source of all things to come;
of feminine powers, I am
fame, wealth, speech, and
memory, intelligence, loyalty, forgiveness;

of chants, I am the great Brihat;
of poetic meters, the gayatri;
of months, Margashirsha,
the first month; of seasons, the flower-lush spring;

of swindles, I am the dice game;
the splendor of the high and mighty;
determination and victory;
the courage of all brave men;

of the Vrishi clan, I am Krishna;
of Pandavas, I am Arjuna;
of the sages, I am Vyasa;
of poets, the sublime Ushanas;

of punishers, I am the scepter;
the astuteness of the great leaders;
the silence of secret things;
and I am the wisdom of the wise.

I am the divine seed
within all beings, Arjuna;
nothing, inanimate or animate,
could exist for a moment without me.

These are just a small number
of my infinite manifestations;
were I to tell you more,
there would be no end to the telling.

Whatever in this world is excellent
and glows with intelligence or beauty –
be sure that it has its source
in a fragment of my divine splendor.

But what need is there for all
these details? Just know that I am,
and that I support the whole
universe with a single fragment of myself.

Bhagavad Gita, 10.17-10.40

It's October, Happy New Year!

Now, this was something to see. I had no idea what Annakut was and, frankly, I didn’t bother to look it up because, if Hemu invited me, that was enough for me so I didn’t bring my camera. But I did find a few pictures on line... just wait.

By worship you will nourish the
gods and the gods will nourish you in turn;
by nourishing one another
you assure the well-being of all.

Bhagavad Gita 3.10

When I got to the Whittier BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir (temple) in Whittier, Hemu was easy to find. Although crowds of people were talking in small happy groups or wandering in out of the hot late fall sun, I had now her cell phone number and she had mine. I was by her side in a moment and, when I bent down to touch her feet – or at least show some effort to get down there while we were standing on the black macadam- she grabbed me and laughed, “No, wrong person. I should be the one doing that to you!”

That wasn’t true, of course -- the student always bows to the person with the knowledge -- but we settled for a quick hug. Hemu is one of the only people who makes me feel tall. Her neat, shiny hair was parted in the middle and she was wearing yet another elegant sari in honor of the festive occasion. She said, “You know, I really feel like I’ve always known you.”

I knew exactly what she meant. “Me, too, Hemu.”

“Come. Let me show you something.”

I’d finally learned that you never come to a temple empty-handed so I’d brought flowers which, Hemu gently pointed out, was a perfectly fine offering on most days and was even perfectly fine that day as well but, on Annakut, the first day of the new year, what people were supposed to bring was food. As we walked in to the mandir, I found out why.

There are not enough excessive words to describe what was in that room. The entire length of the altar was blocked by a wooden, stepped platform covered with hundreds of individual plates of food, perfectly presented, as if ready for a commercial photo shoot. A second showcase for still more plates was actually a fountain with four separate sprays of water, each lit a different color by underwater lights. The variety of the food was astounding.

I asked Hemu, “What's this all this about?”

“This is the first day of the new year,” Hemu said, “and we are offering all this food to God so he will give it back to us all year. The target was like nine-hundred to twelve hundred items.”

“How many did you bring?”

“I brought like seven or eight.”

“I’ve never seen so much food put out like this.”

“It’s our way of saying thank you to Lord Ganesh for everything he will provide this year. There are about seven hundred items here today.”

And it turns out, seven hundred plates of food requires two rooms, two enormous stepped platforms to display because there was even more food, on an even larger stepped platform, in the main prayer hall where people were sitting, watching a video transmission of the sadhus officiating the service in the other hall – there were just too many people there to use just one.

I loved being there with Hemu, loved that she'd thought to invite me but I struggle in the midst of big pageants like these. It's hard for me to respond in anyway other than as an observer, a parade-watcher, a gawker. I'm certain I'd have a much different feeling about all of this had I stayed up, night after night, probably with family members, making one special dish after another to contribute to the offering. It'd be a family ritual, then, like decorating our Christmas tree or our nearly annual attempt to make a gingerbread house. (It's a good thing ours aren't ever meant to be on display.) But I think Annakut offers more than just annual ritual, if you're open to it.

So much of Hinduism involves treating whatever your idea of God is kind of like a revered corporal figure. Most of these rituals involve the symbolic feeding, bathing and clothing of whatever form of God you worship so there's an opportunity to develop an intimate, on-going relationship - not so easy when I find myself truly incapable of imagining any form that might even serve as a stand-in for the Divine. Not only that, I think I have a hard time with the display portion of organized religion. It might just be that I haven't had enough experience with it to feel comfortable but there may be more to it than that: the moments I've had in my life where I've felt something I might identify as the first rumblings of the sacred have always occurred in quiet, in solitude or something close to it, only on occasion in the midst of an event and usually those events involved a story that made me see things a different way - events like plays or movies, even songs.

I do know I was so much more comfortable being there with my current frame of mind than the one I've lugged around with me all of my life. I sat next to Hemu while she translated the service in in my notebook just trying to understand and to appreciate, to find what I could in it that might have meaning for me while accepting that whatever might not resonate still was beautiful and possibly moving to others. Boy, that hasn't been my natural state until recently. If I'd ended up some place like this decades ago I would have tried to soothe my feelings of dislocation and fear by cataloguing all that was "weird" instead of just taking the time to understand more. What a sad way I've lived some of my life.

As the service continued, I began to wonder if any of the sadhus I was seeing on the big screens (although they were just one hall away)was the one who’d read and written his reactions to my project. I pointed to one and asked Hemu, “Is that the one who answered my email?” Why I needed to see the face of the monk originally shocked by project, shocked by me, I didn't know but I did. I guess I wanted to see the face of someone my upbringing could shock.

Hemu answered, “No. That isn’t him.”

“Is the one who answered here?”

“Yes, I’ll show him to you.” We watched the screen showing the ritual in the other room for a while when all of a sudden Hemu said, “That’s him. He was the one just singing. He was born here.”

Just before the camera panned away, I caught a glimpse of a tall, thin man with a close-cropped beard, probably in his mid-thirties, possibly forty, but I doubted it. He didn’t seem all that shockable but, as alien as Hinduism was for me, my upbringing outside of any faith and practice must have been alien – and even shocking – to him.

I sat on the floor next to Hemu who, without discussion, had taken my notebook and was busily translating whatever was said. Around her right wrist were at least five of the magenta puja strings like the one she'd tied on mine at my very first "puja" or worship service, the string she’d told me was supposed to symbolize our devotion to God. Hers were all different shades: some new and bright, one pale and about to break. My single strand had frayed and faded a bit but was still, more than a month later, strong on my wrist. Hard to believe but, in all this time, no one had asked me about it or even seemed to notice it; it was just a piece of cotton kitchen string tied to my wrist and slowly losing its once uneven shade of magenta. I’d been wondering what I was supposed to do about it. Was I supposed to cut it off or what? But it felt strange to just call Hemu up to ask.

Now I had my answer: it's supposed to stay on until it falls off.

Well, okay.

22 October 2006

More Annakut pictures from various BAPS Swaminarayan mandirs around the country....

Cleveland & Houston....














Boston and New Jersey...

Email from Hemu

Jai swaminarayan
Marley

I hope you are doing well.
It’s been a while since we communicated.
I am inviting you to the New Year's day - Annakut celebrations which will be on Sunday, October 22. The festivities will begin at 11:00 am in the morning.

I hope you can make it. Looking forward to seeing you on Sunday.

Jai swaminarayan
Hemu

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...)