My Guru & His Disciple (25 page)

November 8. Went to see Swami—today being the 16th anniversary of my initiation (and the 10th anniversary of my becoming a U.S. citizen!). Swami said that drugs could never change your life or give you the feeling of love and peace which you got from spiritual visions. Drugs only made you marvel—and then later you lost your faith.

In May 1953, having volunteered to be a subject for the psychiatric researches of Dr. Humphry Osmond, Aldous Huxley had taken four tenths of a gram of mescaline. Early the next year, he had published
The Doors of Perception,
an account of his experiences under the drug. Since then, Aldous and Gerald had been meeting occasionally with a few friends, either to take mescaline or lysergic acid or to talk about the insights they had obtained from them. It should be emphasized that the talking was far in excess of the taking; these were all prudent people of high intellectual seriousness, not thrill seekers on a spree.

At the height of the psychedelic-drug craze in the nineteen-sixties, it wasn't unusual to hear a taker claim casually that he or she had been in samadhi. It was generally accepted that all spiritual states could be drug-induced. To Swami, this was a deadly heresy, and he regarded Aldous and Gerald as its originators. Actually, their statements on the question varied slightly from time to time and left their hearers or readers with differing impressions.

Swami himself had had only one experience with any kind of hallucinogen; while he was still a young monk in India, he had been given by his fellow monks, as a practical joke, a liquid prepared from hemp. Not knowing what this was, Swami had drunk a lot of it and had had disagreeable psychic visions followed by a long period of spiritual dryness, during which he had lost his faith altogether. My diary account of his story continues:

I asked him, hadn't he considered leaving the monastery at that time? “NO!”—Swami can say that word with more emphasis than anyone I have ever known—“Why should I do that? Because I had stopped believing in God, that did not mean that I believed in the world.”

But I wasn't ready to accept Swami's condemnation without experimenting for myself. I had asked both Aldous and Gerald to let me join in a drug session and had got evasive answers. Then I was told, by a third party, that they had agreed I was too unstable emotionally to be a suitable subject. I was indignant, and at once decided to try mescaline on my own. In 1955, it was still legal. I had bought some tablets while Don and I were in New York, about to sail for Europe.

On our way there, while stopping off in Tangier, we had had an unexpected opportunity to try hashish. Puffing at kif cigarettes and gobbling majoun with the overeagerness of beginners, we launched ourselves into a nightmare adventure. Don became paranoid; I discovered claustrophobia. Looking back, twenty-four hours later, I had felt that this had brought Don and me even closer together; it was like a shared physical danger. I had reacted to it by making japam. But I might equally well have done that if we had been on a small boat in a storm. The adventure itself couldn't be described as spiritual.

About four months after this, in London, I took one of the mescaline tablets, alone; we had agreed that Don should remain an objective observer of my behavior. In general, the effects were very much as I had heard them described. I felt exhilarated. My senses, particularly my sight, seemed extraordinarily keen. Certain patches of color were almost scandalously vivid. Faces on the street looked like caricatures of themselves, each one boldly displaying its owner's dominant characteristic—anxiety, vanity, aggression, laziness, extravagance, love.

I told Don that we must take a taxi to the Catholic cathedral in Westminster, “to see if God is there.” God wasn't. His absence was so utter that it made me laugh. So we went on to Westminster Abbey. Here the situation appeared even more comic to me. I had to go into a dark corner and stay there until I could control my giggles.

The Abbey's old rock-ribbed carcass was greatly shrunken; I felt I was inside a dead dried-up whale. And it was full of ridiculous statues—the one of Sir Cloudesley Shovell was especially pleasing. No God there. Nothing alive at all. Even the poppies around the tomb of the Unknown Soldier were artificial.

I had taken mescaline twice more after this, later in 1956, with almost exactly the same effects. I still didn't feel sure enough of the nature of the experience to be able to agree wholeheartedly either with Swami or with Aldous and Gerald. I therefore said as little as possible whenever the subject was being discussed by either party.

*   *   *

During November 1956, a young man whom Swami and I both knew was arrested and charged with sexual solicitation in a men's washroom. Swami's reaction was: “Oh, Chris, if only he hadn't got caught! Why didn't he go to some bar?”

This was one of the times when Swami's unworldly worldliness made me laugh out loud.

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November 22. Have just returned from seeing Swami. He talked about grace—how Maharaj had told them that there are some people who just get it. “God can't be bought.” Even if you do all the japam and spiritual disciplines, you still can't command enlightenment. It's always given by grace.

Swami's younger brother went into samadhi while being initiated by Swami Saradananda. Then, as he grew older, he became an extremely avaricious lawyer. But, no matter what he does, he is liberated. On his deathbed, he'll “remember.”

Fifteen

January 23, 1957. Swami took us to the little house in South Pasadena (309 Monterey Road) where Vivekananda stayed for a few weeks in 1900. Went upstairs to his bedroom, which has been made into a shrine since the Vedanta Society took the house over. Sat there with Swami, while the other guests chattered loudly downstairs. Swami meditated and I tried to concentrate on his meditation. What a privilege—to be with him in Vivekananda's presence! Felt a keen elation. I was so safe with him. I tried to hold this feeling. I want some of it for when I'm dying. How could I be afraid then, if I felt he was with me?

On February 12, I discovered a small tumor on the side of my lower abdomen. It hadn't been there the previous night when I went to bed. Even on first examining it, the doctor didn't think it was malignant, though he said it must be removed at once, to make sure. So I went through three days of dread, this being my first cancer scare. What really shocked me was how suddenly such a growth can appear.

During the waiting period, I saw Swami. Without telling him about the tumor, I got him talking on the subject of death.

He said he now isn't afraid of dying at all—though of course he would prefer to avoid pain. This life seems to him “all shadows.” He was very convincing, and I believed in his belief. But there is one problem which he doesn't have—the extra pain I would feel in parting from Don, knowing that he isn't a devotee. I certainly don't want to go to the plane of existence, the loka, where the devotees of Ramakrishna are said to go, unless I could believe he'd be following me there.

(The tumor did prove to be non-malignant.)

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February 21. I feel a new or renewed relationship to Swami. This has been growing for months. It's as if he were exposing me to stronger and stronger waves of his love—yet, all the while, making almost no personal demands on me. I saw him last night—still, as he said, “floating a little,” after an operation he had had on a cyst. He was like a small adorable animal with ruffled fur as he sat on his bed telling us about the early days in the monastery in India. I don't feel he is altogether a person any longer.

March 3. This evening, we drove up to the Center in time to catch the end of the vespers of the Ramakrishna puja and be touched by Swami with the tray of relics. It was Don's own idea that he should come with me and do this and I was very happy that he suggested it. (When we went to vespers at the Brahmananda puja on February 1, he didn't come forward to be touched—because, I suppose, he didn't want to commit himself and perhaps get in too deep.)

April 10. I've just been up to the Center. Swami told me that he dreamt he was handing out copies of my book on Ramakrishna to crowds of people, and he was saying, “Chris's book!” I was there, too, in his dream.

Swami is very excited about the book and wildly over-optimistic. He says it will be “a turning point in the growth of the Society.”

And now for the first time I dimly get a new conception of the book. I want to introduce some autobiographical material, telling how I myself got to know about Ramakrishna. I mentioned this to Swami this evening. He said, “However you write it will be all right.”

June 12. To see Swami. When I put out my hand to shake his, he first made me bend down and gave me his blessing. He seldom does this. He told me, “Whenever you think of God, He thinks of you.”

August 23. Swami told me that George is going to India to take the vows of sannyas sometime next spring. That got us talking about him. How, from being a comic figure, he has developed during these past fifteen years. He's still cantankerous and obstinate, but he's so devoted and so full of love that Swami feels he is turning into “a great soul.”

September 13. Not to be sly—this is the essence of a revelation Prema feels he's had, as the result of cooking for Swami at a cabin camp up in the Sierras. Prema says he used to be ashamed of Swami because he sounded off and yelled at people and banged the table; but now he sees that it's wonderful not to be afraid to show one's feelings. “We must be bold,” Prema said. “We mustn't be conservative.”

He told me that Swami spent most of his time shut up in his cabin, and that his mood seemed continuously indrawn.

September 18. Saw Swami for the first time since he got back from the Sierras. I remarked that Prema had told me he had spent most of his time in his cabin, and he said, “Yes, I was having such a wonderful time with the Lord.”

It is a measure of my psychological double vision that I can both accept this statement as literally true and marvel that such a statement, made by anybody, could ever be literally true.

I realize, more and more, that Swami is my only link with spiritual life. But that's like a San Franciscan saying that the Golden Gate Bridge is his only link with Marin County. What more could I ask for?

I was very much moved as we sat together and Swami told me that he wants to have this joy not only occasionally but always. “Then I can pass it on to you all.”

“It's all Maharaj,” he said. “Everything he told me is coming true. I didn't understand him at the time. Now I begin to know what he was talking about.”

Swami keeps repeating that Maharaj matters most to him—more than Ramakrishna, because Swami actually knew Maharaj. “And that's how I feel about you,” I said. “Ah, but, Chris, I am like a little pebble against the Himalayas.” “I have absolute confidence in you, Swami,” I said, with tears in my eyes but still aware how funny it sounded.

September 25. Swami told me about Swami Sankarananda, who is now president of the Ramakrishna Order. He used to be Brahmananda's secretary. Sankarananda became officious in the performance of his duties and took it upon himself to decide which visitors should be allowed to meet Brahmananda and which should not. When Brahmananda found out what was happening, he got very angry. He sent Sankarananda away to live in another monastery and refused to see him for years. In fact, Brahmananda waited until he himself was dying before he allowed Sankarananda to come back, and forgave him.

I have accepted the idea that Brahmananda's scoldings, even when they were unjustified, could be spiritually beneficial. But his behavior, in this instance, really puzzles me. Swami defends it by saying that it gave Sankarananda an opportunity to show his greatness of character by remaining in the Order and not bearing Brahmananda any ill will. He also says that Brahmananda lent people strength to endure his displeasure. However, Swami does admit that he was shocked, at that time, and even protested to Brahmananda against his seeming cruelty. So this is maybe one of the things Swami was referring to the other day—the things he has only come to understand lately, about Maharaj.

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On October 8, Don and I began a journey which would take us right around the world. We flew to Japan, spending two weeks there, then on to Hong Kong, from which we took a boat to Singapore and Bali and back to Singapore. Then we flew to Bangkok, with a side trip to Angkor. Then, on November 30, we flew from Bangkok to Calcutta.

Visiting Calcutta and its neighborhood was the reason for our whole journey, from Swami's point of view. I had told him that, before I wrote the final draft of my biography, I wanted to see the places associated with Ramakrishna. There are not many of them—the villages of Kamarpukur (his birthplace) and Jayrambati (the birthplace of Holy Mother), which are about three miles apart from each other and seventy from the city, and also a few buildings within the Calcutta area, notably the temple at Dakshineswar, where Ramakrishna spent nearly all of his adult life.

I arrived in Calcutta suffering from the ill effects of some bug picked up in Bangkok. This made the necessary sightseeing depressing for both of us, although it was well organized by some of the swamis of the Order, chiefly Vitashokananda. After four days we were invited by them to leave our grand but dirty hotel and move into the simple clean guesthouse of the Belur Math. While we were there, we briefly met Sankarananda, now a massive stately courteous old man whose health was failing.

On December 9, we flew from Calcutta to London, and on January 12, 1958, from London to New York. We got back to Los Angeles on January 30.