My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  At other times, man remains identified with the thought waves.

  It will be seen that a great deal of explanation has already become necessary here. In ancient times, a teacher would repeat each sutra from memory and would then explain it in his own way. Often, these explanations would be memorized by his students and passed down to later generations. Thus a large and growing body of commentary attached itself to the original work. Vivekananda himself had made a commentary on Patanjali while he was lecturing in the United States, and Swami quoted from this extensively.

  When I started work, my intention was simply to polish Swami’s commentary and perhaps revise its phrasing, here and there. But comment inspires comment. Additional explanations and illustrations kept occurring to me and being slipped into the text. Furthermore, I found myself writing for an audience of my own, those of my friends who knew almost nothing about Vedanta and needed to have Patanjali explained to them in Occidental terms. Through all this, I had the support of Swami’s approval. Still, I am more aware now than I was then that our editorial “we” had to represent two audibly different tones of voice, the Bengali and the British.

  (Our Patanjali was published in 1953. The publishers had asked us for a special title, to distinguish it from other translations of the sutras, and in an uninspired moment I had suggested How to Know God, which was enthusiastically accepted. The title now makes me think of all those books which tell you how to fix the plumbing, plant a vegetable garden, cook on a barbecue, etc., and embarrasses me so much that I avoid saying it aloud, if I possibly can.)

  November 6. Master, be with me specially at such times. Help me to remember you constantly and let me feel your presence. You aren’t shocked by the camping of the publicans and the screaming of the sinners. You didn’t condemn—you danced with the drunkards.

  This was written after a party which my diary describes as a “massacre.” It had left me with an unusually bad hangover and, no doubt, a sinkful of dishwashing to be done. Such a situation was apt to arouse my puritan resentment against the life I was allowing myself to lead. Only, this time, it seems that my reaction was more positive. If we had to have such parties, why not mentally invite Ramakrishna to join us? He couldn’t refuse.

  Ramakrishna had been known to get out of a carriage to dance with drunkards on the street. The sight of their reeling inspired him because it made him think of the way a holy man reels in ecstasy. He danced with his friend G. C. Ghosh, a famous dramatist and actor, when Ghosh was drunk, and encouraged him to go on drinking. Ghosh took advantage of Ramakrishna’s permissiveness and visited him at all hours of the night, sometimes on the way home from a whorehouse.

  Ghosh became a kind of patron saint for me—I felt closer to him than to any other member of Ramakrishna’s circle—but I wasn’t worthy to be his disciple. I failed to go the whole hog, as he had, either in debauchery or devotion. Ghosh dared to reveal himself shamelessly to Ramakrishna, thereby making a sacrifice of his own self-esteem and self-will and submitting totally to Ramakrishna’s guidance. That was his greatness. I am sorry, now, that, throughout my long relationship with Swami, I never once came into his presence drunk. Something wonderful might have happened.

  * * *

  On March 1, 1949, I went up to the Center to take part in Ramakrishna’s birthday puja. Webster was there. He had left the Center not long after I had. I think he was already married, or engaged to be.

  At first he was a little awkward and on the defensive with me. Then we settled down into the mood of old alumni, and joked about the new building schemes—the temple is to have enlarged wings. The old place certainly has changed. Nearly all the girls are now up at Montecito, and there are several new monks here. George took flash-bulb photos throughout the puja. This bothered some people, but it’s his privilege, granted by Swami.

  They have recently bought another house, the one that stands behind 1946. There is a room in it which Swami says is for me. It rather scares me, the way he waits. Shall I ever find myself back there? It seems impossible—and yet—

  While Swami was in Arizona the other day, as the guest of some devotees, he was taken to Taliesin West, where he met Frank Lloyd Wright. Swami—who had never heard of Wright—and whose previous ideas of architecture were limited to domes and lots of gold—was greatly impressed. “Mr. Wright,” he said, “you are not an architect, you are a philosopher.” And he added that, at Taliesin, you felt yourself “not in a house but protected by Nature.” I couldn’t help laughing when Swami told me this, because the cunningest flatterer couldn’t have buttered Wright up more completely than Swami had, in his utter artlessness. Needless to say, Wright was enchanted.

  July 26. Today I went to the Center to attend Sister’s funeral—or rather, the part of it which took place in the temple. I think her family organized another ceremony elsewhere.

  Sister died last week in Montecito. I saw her there on the 20th, I drove up for lunch. She had had pneumonia then, and an attack of uremia, but she seemed better that day. The dark plum-colored rash which had broken out in several places on her body was clearing. She apologized for it with her usual courtesy. She didn’t want me to touch her hand, which was smeared with salve. She had known me as soon as I came into the room. “It’s so nice to see old friends,” she said. After a few minutes she drowsed off. Amiya and Swami told me that, much of the time, she thought she was back in Honolulu, where she lived during her youth. Swami also told me that she had had difficulty in urinating but was able to do so after he’d given her a drop of Ganges water. (How this would horrify some people I know!) I came away with a feeling that she was going to recover this time.

  Today was a hot morning. I arrived at the temple in a bad mood, having been horrible and unkind to Caskey before I left the house. Some people arrived with flowers, which I hate at funerals and never bring if I can avoid it. There were women in various degrees of elegant mourning. Swami sat on the sofa in the living room. You couldn’t exactly say his face looked tragic, but the brightness had left it and it was almost frighteningly austere.

  He took my arm and led me into his bedroom, where he told me about Sister’s death. Just before it happened, Swami found himself “in a high spiritual mood,” and then they called him into her room, and at that moment the breath left her body with a faint puff, through the lips.

  “She was a saint,” Swami said. He believes that she passed into samadhi at the end. He said how, recently, she had told him that she never left the shrine until she had seen “a light.” She thought this quite normal and supposed that everybody saw it. In fact, she was apologizing to Swami because, in her case, it often took quite a long time and made her late for meals and kept people waiting.

  Came away in a calm happy “open” mood, and felt a real horror of my unkindness to Caskey and of any unkindness to anyone. Thinking of Sister, I remembered how I asked her, once, what Vivekananda had been like. She answered without hesitation, “Oh, he was like a great cat—so graceful.”

  * * *

  By gradual degrees, Gerald Heard had become disinclined to go on living at Trabuco. No doubt, as he grew older—he was now sixty—he felt the strain of being the central figure in this group, and of all the talk and letter writing and planning that it involved. This year, he came to a decision: Trabuco ought to belong to an organization which could make more effective use of it. Gerald easily persuaded his fellow trustees to agree with him, as soon as he had made it clear that he himself was determined to retire. And so Trabuco, which had never been the property of an individual, was offered to another non-individual, the Vedanta Society.

  It so happened that a number of young men had joined the Center during the past months. Swami sent several of them to live at Trabuco. It was officially opened as a Vedanta monastery on September 7.

  In October, Swami left for India with George and three of the nuns. They returned in May 1950. I saw Swami fairly often after his return, but I have no record of our meetings. My diary keeping almost stopped, th
at year, because of misery-sloth induced by the Korean War and the gradual breakdown of my relationship with Caskey. We were both aware of this breakdown but wrongly blamed it on the pressures of life in Los Angeles, so we decided to move down to Laguna Beach. Once settled into a house there, we soon began to jar upon each other again. My few diary entries of 1951 are mostly self-scoldings—for giving way to feelings of helplessness, for being “criminally unhappy,” for trying to impose my will on Caskey under the guise of “reason.” I now began to spend more and more time away from him, staying in Los Angeles.

  * * *

  August 22, 1951. Today I had lunch with Swami, who is at Trabuco. He urged me, more strongly than ever before, to come back and live with them. He said, “It must happen. I’ve wanted it and prayed for it so much.” I answered evasively, as usual.

  Gerald Heard and Chris Wood came to visit him later, and I returned with them to Laguna and had tea. I asked Gerald what he thought I should do about Trabuco. He said that I should obey Swami and go to live there. He said that he knew Swami was “deeply disturbed” about me, and that he was disturbed himself. If I didn’t do as Swami told me, “something terrible” might happen to me.

  I asked, “What?” Gerald said that I might lose my faith entirely and cease to believe that God exists. He then became very mysterious, saying that he feared I was being followed by “something” which was trying to possess me, and even hinting that he had had a glimpse of it. I asked him to describe what it looked like. He gazed at me solemnly for a moment and then answered sternly, “No.”

  I was hugely impressed by the dramatic power with which Gerald delivered his warning, but I simply couldn’t take it seriously. I felt that this was his literary self speaking—especially since he had just written an excellent supernatural thriller in which a man performs a black-magical ritual to destroy his enemy, and consequently gets haunted by a familiar spirit in the form of a fox. The Black Fox was the title of Gerald’s novel.

  It wasn’t that I pooh-poohed the idea that one could be possessed by a familiar. I had a wholesome respect for the dangers of dabbling in black magic and would never have done so under any circumstances. What I didn’t believe was that one could fall into its power without somehow cooperating. My recent life had been sex-absorbed and drunken and angry, but certainly not devilish; I was sure I had never done anything to deserve the attentions of a black fox. As for losing my faith, the opposite was true. In my present dilemma, it was actually getting stronger. Indeed, I was beginning to think that it might drag me back to the Center, against my will.

  August 23. This morning, on a sudden impulse, I drove to Trabuco and saw Swami and talked to him about the possibility of coming to live up there, or in Hollywood. I was careful not to commit myself but of course Swami now takes it for granted that I’m coming.

  He said that both Gerald and Aldous had come to him and told him things about the way I am living, and asked him to remonstrate with me. Swami had answered, “Why don’t you pray for him?”

  I was touched and delighted by Swami’s reaction, which I interpreted as a rebuke to Gerald and Aldous. Wasn’t he telling them, in effect, “You’d do better to love Chris more and criticize him less”? That was what I wanted him to have meant. It did annoy me that the two of them had spoken to Swami behind my back—and yet, what else could I have expected? They regarded me as an irresponsible child. You don’t interfere with the doings of other people’s children, you go to the parent. When I asked Swami what it was that they had told him, he said vaguely that I’d been seen “in some bad place”—the nature of the place didn’t seem to interest him. It could only have been a homosexual bar. But who could have seen me there? Obviously neither Gerald nor Aldous in person. No doubt it was some miserable demi-devotee with a foot in both worlds; just like myself, six years ago. He must have feared that I’d recognized him at that bar, and relieved his own guilt by reporting me and my improper behavior.

  I found it much easier to forgive Aldous for his interference than Gerald. Aldous didn’t know any better, he was essentially a square. Happily, my resentment against Gerald was to disappear before long, because of a profound change he made in his own outlook.

  August 29. I have to admit that I’m hardly meditating at all under my present living conditions, and that I would do far more at Trabuco. But Trabuco is what I shrink from. I dread the boredom of the place and the isolation. I shouldn’t be a good companion for the boys. And I remember all the difficulties of my life at the Hollywood Center.

  What I now dimly begin to see is that there must be no more categorical relationships, as far as I’m concerned. I believe that’s what went wrong between Caskey and me, and the Center and me—trying to ensure permanence by getting yourself involved, that’s no good. No good saying, “Now I’m married” or “Now I’m a monk,” and therefore I’m committed.

  Without some awareness of God and some movement of the will toward Him, everything else is madness and nonsense. It’s far better to feel alienated from God than to feel nothing. I shrink from “the spiritual life” because I immediately visualize the circumstances which usually surround it—the intense-eyed seekers coming to ask questions after lectures, the puttering at the pujas, the dreadfully harmless table humor. But all this is aesthetic snobbery—and unnecessary. If you don’t like gymnasiums, don’t go to them. You can exercise anywhere. Yes, but mind you do exercise.

  An appalling confession: during the past years, I’ve very very seldom prayed for Caskey.

  I don’t remember breaking the news to Swami that I wasn’t going to rejoin the monastery, after all. Probably I let things drift and said nothing. And soon I was excused from giving him an immediate answer by an unexpected development in my worldly life. John van Druten had decided to make a play (I Am a Camera) out of certain parts of my novel Goodbye to Berlin. In the fall of 1951, I left California for New York, to sit in on the play’s rehearsals. Later I visited England and Germany and Bermuda, remaining away from Los Angeles until April 1952.

  * * *

  While in New York, I stayed for a time with Auden. We had met often during my earlier trips East, but that had nearly always been in the presence of other people. Now we were alone together in his apartment and able to have long, intimate talks, as in the old days.

  We talked a great deal about Wystan’s Christian beliefs without getting into any arguments. And I showed him entries in my diary describing my life at the Vedanta Center. He shook his head over them, regretfully: “All this heathen mumbo jumbo—I’m sorry, my dear, but it just won’t do.” Then, in the abrupt, dismissive tone which he used when making an unwilling admission, he added: “Your Swami’s quite obviously a saint, of course.”

  Fourteen

  May 12, 1952. At Trabuco. I’ve been here since the 4th and plan to stay till the 21st. The Patanjali aphorisms are practically finished.

  Now I’m trying to finish part one of my novel before I leave here. I feel very calm and in a way unwilling to leave. But I don’t for a moment seriously consider becoming a monk again. I don’t consider anything except how to get my novel written. My only worries are financial—how much of my “Camera” royalties should be set aside for income tax?

  J., one of the monks, describes this group as “six individualists all going different ways.” Yet they are wonderfully harmonious with each other, and all likable. “Too many people around here,” says J., “are scared of the Old Man” (meaning Swami) “or they’ve got him figured all wrong. He’s the only person I ever met in my life I like everything about.”

  I try to fit in unobtrusively and not get in the way of their routine. Am not getting much—or indeed anything, consciously—out of the meditation periods. But I often feel very happy. Hardly any trouble with sex, yet. I think that’s mostly middle age. Anyhow, I certainly needed a rest!

  I feel sympathy and liking for these boys, but their problems aren’t very real to me, because their situation is so utterly different from mine. They are stuc
k here. They plod around in their heavy work boots, much of the day, doing outdoor chores. Life here is much more physical than it was at the Hollywood Center. The place demands to be constantly maintained and they are stuck with it, like soldiers with a war. I’m like a correspondent, visiting the front for a few days only.

  The chores I do are voluntary and therefore pleasurable—pulling weeds out of the vines or raking the kitchen garden in the blazing sunshine. The hot courtyard with the dark-leaved fruit trees has a sort of secret stillness; one feels hidden away, miles from anywhere. At night we look through the telescope, at Saturn, or at the ranger station on the top of the mountain.

  May 19. Shall be going back to Santa Monica the day after tomorrow. I’ve done wonders of work since I arrived here. Finished Patanjali, finished part one of my novel and made a promising start on part two, worked over some Vedic prayers Swami wanted translated, written lots of letters, and pulled up lots of weeds.

  When I typed out the title page of the Patanjali this morning, I wrote “by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood,” and Swami said, “Why put and, Chris? It separates us.”

  It’s impossible to convey the sweetness and meaning with which he said this. All day long, he fairly shines with love. It was the same when he was here earlier, at the beginning of my stay, and told us: “If you have a friend and do good things for him for years and years, and then do one bad thing—he’ll never forgive you. But if you do bad things to God for years and years, and only one good thing—that He never forgets.” What strikes me, again and again, is his complete assurance, and his smiling, almost sly air of having a private source of information.

  I asked Swami how it is that he can always end a meditation period so punctually. He said it’s like being able to sleep and wake up at a certain time, no matter how deeply you become absorbed. The notion that meditation periods should be of varying length, according to mood, is “romantic,” he said.