My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  Gerald’s life had always seemed to me to have the aspect of an artistic performance, expressed in a language of metaphors and analogies. I now asked myself the question: Did his performance still seem valid, as true art must, in relation to the terminal mystery? I felt that it did—that our glimpses of him, undergoing this searching five-year test, had been powerfully reassuring. I believed that he had indeed been able to see his temporary state of dying in the context of what is both now and always “the real situation,” and that therefore one of his favorite metaphors, “taking a look around the corner,” had now become a description of his actual experience.

  That day, I wrote in my diary:

  I am only just beginning to realize that it has happened, at last. My chief feeling at this moment is that I would like to get on the air and tell the brute stodgy thick-skinned world that it has lost one of its few great magic mythmakers and revealers of life’s wonder.

  Swami said that Gerald had been able to come through this test so triumphantly because of the many hours he had spent in meditation. Michael Barrie had been tested, too. Toward the end, he had nursed Gerald single-handed, month after month, seldom leaving the house, being determined to spare him the one ordeal Gerald dreaded, a move into a hospital. Now Michael looked years older than his age, gray-faced and emaciated. Luckily, he still had enough stamina to make a recovery. Swami arranged for him to live at Trabuco. He stayed there several years.

  * * *

  September 22. Swami talked about grace and was so beautiful, so shining. He said that he didn’t feel he had ever gone through any particular spiritual struggles; Maharaj had made everything easy for him. “All those visions I had, Chris, I never felt I had really earned them.” As Swami said this, he positively shone with grace, he was the lucky one and his luck was adorable. When I left, I made an extra-long prostration until he said, “Get up now.” Maybe he was embarrassed, feeling that I was worshiping him. And I was, but it wasn’t him. October 1. When Swami spoke of Maharaj last night, it was as if he had seen him only a few moments before. These weren’t like the boyhood memories of an old man. I realized, more vividly than I usually can, what Swami means when he keeps saying that Maharaj is present with him.

  Just before I left, he said in his unaffected childlike way that he was hungrier than he thought, and he phoned the kitchen and asked for a lamburger to be fixed for his supper. What seems childlike is that he never apologizes for showing appetite or otherwise taking pleasure in something “worldly,” as “holy men” are expected to.

  October 27. Saw Swami for five minutes—all that the doctor allows. He was sitting up in a chair in his room, having been told not to sit with his legs crossed, as that interferes with the circulation. (What can Americans know about Bengali circulation, I couldn’t help thinking; Bengalis are practically born cross-legged.)

  He seemed pleased to see me but was very quiet and withdrawn. Somehow he had an air of having been deserted. I asked him if he had had any spiritual experiences and he said, rather forlornly, “No—you see, Chris, I couldn’t eat anything. When you don’t eat you can’t think. I realized for the first time what it means in the scriptures when it says that food is Brahman.” He also told me that there were “gray waves” before his eyes when he looked at anything, because of his cataracts.

  November 11. They are giving Swami tests to find out if his almost continual dizziness is due to bad circulation, or what. George and Len both sleep in his room, now—Len, as a former pharmacist’s mate in the British Navy, knows how to keep check on Swami’s pulse at intervals, during the night. Swami complains that this overcrowding makes the room become “smelly.” But he says that he can nearly always go to sleep by telling himself that Holy Mother’s feet are touching his head.

  January 5, 1972. Swami told me that he had made only one big mistake in his life. This was in Madras, while Maharaj was still alive. Maharaj was about to leave the monastery and go elsewhere. He instructed Swami to visit various places of pilgrimage and meditate there. When he had finished doing this, he added, “I shall miss you.” This was when Swami feels he made his big mistake. He believes that he should have said, “I’m coming with you,” and that, if he had said this, and insisted, Maharaj would have agreed.

  In that case, they would have been together for more than a year—the rest of Maharaj’s life. Swami believes that, during this period, Maharaj might well have taught him certain special spiritual disciplines which Maharaj had learned from Ramakrishna and had never taught to anyone. But, as it was, Maharaj left Madras without Swami and they never met again.

  February 16. Yesterday we went to the vespers of the Ramakrishna puja. Swami was in the shrine room when we arrived. He looks much better, almost his old self. He had initiated someone that morning and someone else the morning before.

  Asaktananda was doing the worship. Before he had finished, Swami stood up to leave the temple and return to his room. But then, on a sudden impulse, he stopped and began talking to all of us.

  He told us how, immediately after he had joined the monastery, he had been present at the Ramakrishna puja with Brahmananda, when Brahmananda had had a vision of Ramakrishna. There were musicians in the shrine room and Brahmananda had asked one of them to move his instrument a little, because it was touching the robe of the figure of Ramakrishna, which Brahmananda but nobody else could see.

  Having had this vision, Brahmananda had declared that anybody, anywhere, who on that day took the name of Ramakrishna would be liberated. Swami ended by saying that he was sure that this was still true, and he made us chant Ramakrishna’s name.

  After we had been touched by the relics, we went to Swami’s room. (Being touched by the relics raises a tricky question of protocol, if Don and I are both present. Since I am one of the oldest householder devotees, Asaktananda has taken to calling me up into the shrine room immediately after the male and female monastics have made their prostrations. Thus I save maybe as much as twenty minutes of hanging around, waiting my turn amidst the rest of the congregation. But this time saving is of no use if I then have to wait for Don, so I’ve persuaded him to follow right in my footsteps, just as married couples make their prostrations one after the other. No doubt this causes a lot of ill feeling. It must seem to anti-homosexuals that our relationship is thus receiving a sort of sanction by the Vedanta Society. But I refuse to be embarrassed.)

  We found Swami on the telephone, trying with great difficulty to cut short a torrent of long-distance conversation from a well-wishing devotee. Don and I knelt and took the dust of his feet and he blessed us with his free hand, while still phoning. Then, as we sat on the floor in front of him, he insisted on our taking prasad—a big fat-making slice of rich cake each, and coffee for Don and tea for me, and then two tangerines each to take away with us.

  March 8. This evening, when Don and I were in Swami’s room, one of the senior nuns asked me to help them do something to discourage the personality cult of Swami, which, according to her, is getting more and more feverish and ridiculous. Since Swami has been isolated for quite long periods by his various illnesses, he has become a rarity—no longer someone whom everybody can easily get to meet. So now there are young girls who actually weep whenever they do see him, and people who stand around in the garden outside the door to his room, hoping they’ll get a glimpse. When he’s able to go out for a walk, quite a lot follow him in a procession.

  Don told me later that he had agreed with what the nun said—also that he had felt Swami hadn’t liked hearing it, although he hadn’t made any kind of protest. My own feelings are mixed. On the one hand, I agree that the cult exists and that it has gotten much stronger lately. And even when I first came to the Center I was disgusted by the way some devotees gushed over Swami. It is true that a post-mortem cult of Swami might make it very difficult for whoever has to succeed him. And then again, as Don pointed out, this is, officially, a Vedanta Society first and foremost; the cult of Ramakrishna is only practiced by those members who wish
to practice it. Vedanta, in its purest form, negates all cults, even cults of divine beings.

  On the other hand, I personally am a devotee first and a Vedantist second. I flatter myself that I can discriminate—bowing down to the Eternal which is sometimes manifest to me in Swami, yet feeling perfectly at ease with him, most of the time, on an ordinary human basis. My religion is almost entirely what I glimpse of Swami’s spiritual experience. I still firmly claim that this isn’t a personality cult.

  Nevertheless, it is possible that I have encouraged others to practice a cult of Swami. Because, when I talk to people about him, I am nearly always talking about him as the Guru, not as Abanindra Nath Ghosh. Therefore, I am apt to say, for example, that I believe—and I do believe it—that it is a tremendous privilege to set eyes on Swami even once and that a single meeting might have incalculable effects upon an individual throughout the rest of his life … I suppose that’s certain to be understood as cult talk.

  Nineteen

  June 1, 1972. Swami told us that people sometimes ask him for a Brahman mantram when they are initiated, but then usually want to exchange it later for a mantram containing the name of some divine personage. The Impersonal God nearly always proves unsatisfactory as a subject for meditation.

  July 14. Swami told how Gerald, shortly before his illness, had had a dream in which he was at Belur Math, and Ramakrishna was also there, surrounded by his disciples. As Gerald walked past them, Ramakrishna pointed to him and said, “That one belongs to me.” Swami had heard this from Michael Barrie.

  July 16. We have been told—as though this were something shocking—that Swami made a scene while he was staying at Trabuco recently: he sent back his piece of chicken to the kitchen, saying that it was undercooked, and that if there was no one who could cook his chicken properly for him he would have to return to Hollywood.

  Okay, so the holy man flew into a tantrum. How dreadful! But don’t monks (and nuns) need discipline?

  July 20. Swami’s eyes are getting worse; he strained them by too much reading and writing. His doctor is against letting him have a cataract operation, because of his weak heart.

  Swami told us how some young girls who were Krishna devotees once began worshiping Brahmananda as the Baby Krishna. This caused him to go into samadhi. They brought milk and tried to feed it to him as one feeds a baby, but he couldn’t swallow it, having lost outer consciousness; it dribbled down his chin … Swami hadn’t included this story in The Eternal Companion because he felt that Western readers might find it too exotic.

  August 3. Supper with Swami at the house in Malibu which a devotee has lent him for his summer holiday.

  Once again—nearly thirty years after the event!—Swami referred to Ashokananda’s accusation that we had insulted Vivekananda, and to his own reassuring vision of Vivekananda which had followed it. This time, however, he added something to the story which I had never heard before—astonishing us by remarking, almost casually, that, just before he had the vision, he had been considering suicide: “How could I live if I had insulted Swamiji?”

  “Surely,” I said, “you couldn’t have considered killing yourself and leaving your work unfinished? That isn’t like you.” From my point of view, this had to be either just a bit of Indian hyperbole or a staggering revelation of the depth of his devotion. Well, maybe I don’t take his devotion seriously enough, even after knowing him all these years.

  Glancing along the bookcase in Swami’s bedroom, it seemed to me at first that his hostess had carefully stocked it with exclusively religious reading matter. But accidents will happen. In between The New Testament in Modern Speech and St. Francis de Sales’s Treatise on the Love of God, I came upon Myra Breckenridge.

  September 15. When we were alone with him in his room, Swami told us that he can read very little now, because of his cataracts. I asked, “Don’t you miss it?” and he answered, with the sweetest significance, “I don’t miss anything.”

  He came into the dining room, to eat supper with the nuns and us. When we’d finished eating, he began to talk about Maharaj and Premananda: “When you were with them, you were in another world.” He described how Maharaj would call for his water pipe, take a few puffs, and then become absorbed in meditation—“he’d go away somewhere else.” Having remained in this state for a long while, he would “come back” and exclaim with surprise that his pipe had gone out.

  The nuns have a microphone fixed in a flower vase on the dining table, so that Swami’s words can be unobtrusively tape-recorded when he is in the mood to talk. Swami was certainly in the mood this evening, but his talk soon left the spiritual heights and became gossip about the progress of the various Vedanta centers in the United States—which swamis had made a success of their work and which had flopped. Swami has followed all this with an interest which would shock some of the more sentimental devotees. I have always realized that he is keenly competitive where the swamis of his own age group are concerned and determined to believe that our Center is the Best in the West. I found him funny and charming in a hard-boiled way, like a veteran actor reminiscing about show biz.

  October 4. Swami asked me about my meditation. I said I was finding it helpful to keep reminding myself how near my death may be. Swami then told me that Vivekananda had said: If you are trying to know God, you must imagine that death is already gripping you by the hair. If you are trying to win power and fame, you must imagine that you will live forever.

  December 27. Don and I went to the vespers of the Holy Mother puja. Asaktananda was doing the ritual, and he seemed to be behaving with an informality which was surprising and impressive, considering that he has such a serious devotional character. There was a lot of laughter from the monks and nuns inside the shrine room, I don’t know what about. When it was my turn to be touched with the relics, Asaktananda said, “Chris, I thought you were still in New York!” and his tone was like that of a host at a party.

  February 23, 1973. Swami described a meeting he had had with one of his disciples, whom he hadn’t seen for some time. They had had some friction in the past and now the disciple had asked him, “Are you still angry with me?” Swami told me he had answered, “The guru in me was never angry with you—only the man. If the guru had been angry, then nothing in the three worlds could have saved you.”

  This reply startled and jarred on me; I was shocked by its seeming arrogance. But then Swami explained that “the guru in me” wasn’t himself at all; it was the Lord. He added, “I never feel that it is I who am initiating a disciple; it is the Lord.”

  April 6. I asked Swami, did he fear death. He said no, not at all. But he then repeated a story he has told me before: how, when he was going to have a double-hernia operation and had to fill in a form relieving the surgeon of responsibility in the event of his death, he had felt afraid and had prayed to Maharaj for release from his fear. It had left him immediately.

  April 18. Something reminded me that Gerald Heard had once told me, back in 1939, that Swami had talked of arranging for him to take sannyas. I asked Swami if this was so. Swami said that it was, and added: “And you too, Chris—even now—why don’t you come back to us?” I said, “I’m not fit to,” and he answered, “Only the Lord can judge who is fit.” We looked at each other and he giggled.

  He giggled again at supper when he told the nuns, “Chris is going to become a monk.” I laughed, and the girls laughed, too, watching my face uneasily to see if this really was only a joke. It was very odd and disturbing. Doesn’t Swami accept my present way of life, after all? I had begun to believe that he did.

  (This was, in fact, the last time that Swami made such a suggestion to me. What had moved him to do it? It was just one of his mysterious impulses.)

  At the question period last week he was asked, “Should one regard the guru as being the same as God?”—to which he unhesitatingly answered, “Yes.” Then he added: “But I’m not that kind of guru.” “What kind of guru are you?” someone asked. Swami answered, “I am the dust
of the feet of Maharaj.” Then he smiled: “There is some holiness even in the dust.”

  May 2. When I went to see Swami I got a very powerful vibration from him. It began when I asked him what he does all day, now that he can’t read. He said that he feels the Lord’s presence. I asked him if he meditates. He said no, not in the daytime. When he meditates, it is either on the Guru in the center of the brain or on the Lord in the center of the heart.

  Then he began to recite the formal meditation on the Guru, partly in English and partly in Sanskrit: “He is making with the right hand the sign which dispels fear and with the left hand he is bestowing his blessings on me. He is calm and he is the image of mercy and he is pleased with me…”

  This recitation was interrupted by the arrival of George, to help Swami get dressed to go to the temple for the class. (This is one of George’s prerogatives and I know, without Swami’s ever having had to tell me, that I must never help him dress, even if George arrives late.)

  Then Swami took my arm for the walk to the temple. (This is my prerogative.) I always try to meditate on the Guru while we’re walking, but my vanity at being Swami’s attendant and entering the temple with him in front of all those people usually spoils my concentration.

  This evening, just as we were about to go into the temple, Swami suddenly continued his recitation with the words, “He is pleased with you, smiling, gracious…” I don’t know if he said “you” instead of “me” intentionally, but I couldn’t help taking it personally and feeling that the Guru was speaking to me through Swami. It was an extraordinary moment.

  June 7. Swami told us that he hadn’t slept more than two hours the night before. I asked, “So you made japam nearly all night?” And he answered, with a sort of comic ruefulness, “What else should I do?”