by Sister Gargi
Swami loved Mount Rose, but he had to be content with summer visits to those Himalayan-like areas. He always took his brother monks on picnic excursions up the mountain. Jo prepared the food and, with several holy passengers in her car, carefully maneuvered the winding road, braking hard on every curve. Those were festive days, and the bountiful picnics, spread out on plaid blankets, were a delight.
We usually picnicked at the foot of the peak in a small, hidden valley, a grove where a stream flowed and birch trees grew. It was very beautiful and protected, unlike the rest of the mountain. It came into view suddenly around a bend in a narrow dirt road off the highway. That summer would be one of our last to enjoy that leafy, shaded setting. Several years later, coming upon that little valley, we found to our horror not a sylvan dell, but total havoc. It was as though a giant hand had crushed it—devastation. The trees were uprooted. Branches lay strewn all over the ground. What a shock it was, a tragedy. Swami felt very bad about it. Thereafter we had our picnics beneath ancient, wind-twisted and gnarled juniper trees situated on an otherwise barren bluff overlooking the lake far below.
August 22, 1957
Jo phoned me around 2:30 p.m. to ask if I wanted to go to Mount Rose with her and Swami. I said sure. She said she did not know when they would come but asked me to be ready. I figured that they would be half an hour at least. I had just returned from a long, dusty walk, so I took a quick dip in the lake. Then I waited for the rest of the afternoon for them to pick me up. At 5:30 they stopped by on their way back from Mount Rose—they had missed me while I was swimming in the lake! I rushed into my cabin and cried bitterly. I had been miserable and lonely down here in my dingy cabin anyway.
August 24, 1957
I complained to Swami about where I live. I also complained about God.
Swami: Just wait at the Lord’s door, even if it is closed. Wait like a cow. (He made a face like a cow waiting patiently at the master’s door.) You have seen cows? You meditate a little and then throw your arms and legs around and tear out your hair because you don’t see God. Don’t do that.
(I said my case was hopeless.) That is a trick of the mind. Hundreds of people before you have said, “My case is hopeless, so I might as well return to the world.” (Sternly) If you return to the world, every hair will be pulled from your head.
Me: I haven’t that alternative.
Swami: Very good. I am glad to hear it. If you don’t like where you live, why don’t you spend more time at Ediben’s?
Me: It is clear that she doesn’t want me.
Swami: She does—she has shown you so much affection, and now you begin to doubt. Assume that you are wanted.
August 25, 1957
To our delight, Swamis Vividishananda and Pavitrananda, heads of the Seattle and New York Vedanta Societies, respectively, have arrived as Swami Ashokananda’s new guests.
Swami (to Swami Vividishananda): Do you like Mrs. Burke?
Swami Vividishananda (smiling): What a question!
Swami: Answer it. Do you like her?
Swami Vividishananda: I do not want to embarrass her by praising her. She is the very personification of gentleness.
Me: Oh, no. There is another side.
Swami: Yes, she is gentle, but sometimes she protests.
Me: Oh, I have changed completely overnight. I am a completely different person today.
Swami Vividishananda: In what way are you different?
Me: I feel as if something has fallen off.
Swami: It is good to feel that way, but one must be cautious not to allow the other to come back. One can become careless.
Me: You have also said that one should put a damper on elation, or there will be a reaction. How does one do that?
Swami: By doing it. Once a young man asked me how he could have willpower. I told him, “By having it.” He did not like that answer. One cannot tell another how to do things like that.
Me: Yes. One must feel it out for oneself.
We went to Mount Rose for a picnic—the three swamis, Ediben, Jo, Mara, Dorothy Peters, Nancy Jackman, and myself. I rode in Jo’s car with Swami Pavitrananda, Dorothy, and Nancy, the last of whom we picked up on the way.
August 26, 1957
Mara is also living at a place by the lake. Swami asked me to take her for a drive. On the way, we stopped at King’s Beach for tacos. We were parked at right angles to the curb, happily eating tacos. I was sitting sprawled, with one arm hanging out the car window with a cigarette in my hand. In my other hand was a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Up beside the car drove Ediben and Swami. I turned to encounter Swami’s huge and furious face, close up to mine.
Swami (with disgust): Couldn’t you find a worse place to debauch? Where will you go next? (He told Ediben to back out and drive on. They were on their way to Mount Rose.)
Later, having taken Mara back to her own place, I was walking along the road when Ediben and Swami, on their way back from Mount Rose, drove up alongside me.
Swami (very sternly, his eyes cold): You can do what you want. From one point of view, it is an innocent pleasure to eat tacos and drink Coca-Cola. But if you expect your mind to settle down at the same time, you are mistaken. Besides, I told you not to eat out. (Ediben, seeing my chin quivering, made mothering sounds; Swami scolded her for interfering and they drove on.)
Notwithstanding my humble quarters and occasional tribulations, it was a blissfully long summer at Lake Tahoe in 1957. When Douglas and Anne Soulé left for San Francisco in early September, I moved into Ediben’s cabin with a sigh of relief.
Swami Ashokananda’s high blood pressure, dangerously high at 220/110 when we arrived, had fallen into the normal range before we left the retreat in late October. Back in San Francisco, Swami would resume his crushing schedule of lectures and appointments, along with the supervision of the three Vedanta centers in and around San Francisco as well as the Olema retreat, which he had built up.
An emergency greeted his return.
October 28, 1957
Yesterday, Virginia and John Varrentzoff ate poisonous mushrooms. They were rushed to a hospital. John had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. Virginia was in better shape. The doctors worked over John all night. In the morning, Anna Webster took over. I did not hear about it until this morning. Swami was in his office, looking worse than I have ever seen him. He was wearing his clerical suit and had been out somewhere. Now he was waiting for Anna to phone to tell him how John was. It was around one o’clock. Swami was planning to go to see John, but said he did not think he could go out anywhere. “If only I knew how he is . . .” He sat in his chair, leaned back, and fell asleep waiting for the phone. Evidently he had had no sleep at all the night before, worrying about John and, I think, working for him as hard as the doctors had. Anna finally phoned. John was all right. Swami went upstairs.
November 2, 1957
Swami (to Marilyn Pearce): Define life.
Marilyn: Oh, Swami.
Swami: What is “Oh, Swami”?
Marilyn: I can’t define life.
Swami: Life is the force which makes one look for the concrete, isn’t it? Life makes the senses want to see, touch, hear the concrete. It makes one have a concrete body. That is very simple. I can’t understand why you couldn’t define it.
November 22, 1957
Swami: Progress—back and forth, back and forth. One must expect this. It is like crossing a rapid stream. Sometimes the current is too swift. One must go with it until one finds a place to cross. One should not expect spiritual life to be joyous all the time. Joy is not a measure of success. But there comes a time when there is a sense of great joy in battling the mind. One knows that one will triumph. That is a very advanced state. It is the kind of joy a hunter feels tracking down his quarry, or a fisherman fighting a big fish. He knows he will win.
November 24, 1957
I was
telling Swami about my having a dim, wispy sense of being independent of body and mind.
Swami: Always be obedient to the guru. In that way you won’t become egotistical.
Me: Whenever I feel that inner joy, it is not long before I am knocked down. I see the purpose now.
Swami: There is a rhythm. But also there is a purpose.
10
FIASCO
April 1958
Swami was telling us that one cannot escape all evil in this world—even Swami Vivekananda had fallen prey to crooks. “If one lives in San Francisco,” he added, “one must take the foggy days with the sunny days; there is no escaping it. The thing is to transcend both, not to succumb.”
Me: You have said that God looks out for His devotees.
Swami: Yes, he looks out for His devotees, but not in the sense of making life easy for them. He makes His devotees strong by giving hard blows if necessary. He makes them ready to receive His grace—one must be strong to sustain that experience—but He never lets go His hand, like a mother who holds her child with one arm and spanks it at the same time. God will never let His child fall. (Swami went through the gestures of holding a child lovingly and firmly in one arm and spanking it with the other hand—one could almost see a mother adoring the child while disciplining it.)
Sally: Why should God single out His devotees?
Swami: Didn’t your parents give special care to you? Or did they buy food and clothes for every child on the block?
Sally: I don’t like to think that God is like my parents—so partial.
Swami: There is no equality in the relative world, not even in respect to God. It is only when you have transcended the relative that you will find God is equally in everyone. (To me) Have devotion. Devotion is essential in every path, whether one is a devotee or a jnani. Devotion is intense yearning to realize the ideal.
May 1958
Me: I have not meditated well for the past two days.
Swami: Don’t pay any attention to that. Sometimes meditation is good; sometimes it is not good—just go on. Be like a steamroller: when a steamroller comes to a depression, it doesn’t stop and worry about it; it just pushes on and levels out everything. Just push on. After a time, an evenness will come.
Besides, when have you got time to worry? I thought you had a lot of work to do. “Work in itself is a means to salvation,” Swamiji said. Do everything as though it were the only means to salvation, as though your salvation depended upon it. Work will help your meditation. It will keep your mind on a high level.
May 1958
On being asked how it happened that a certain highly advanced person had flaws in character, Swami explained that those tendencies must be worked out deliberately and separately. “Look at S—— for instance,” he said. “She is such a good person with so many good qualities, and she is a real devotee; yet she has a side that is bad. She once looked at me with such poisonous hatred in her eyes that I was stunned. I could not look at her for months.”
May 4, 1958
Today was the first Sunday that Swami was too sick to lecture. He went, nevertheless, late in the afternoon to the new temple and stayed until seven o’clock. When he returned to the Old Temple, exhausted, he talked with Luke, Kathleen, Mara, and me in the back office about the ancient methods of Indian medicine and of how he had been cured of malaria. This led him to talk of his days in school. So rarely does he talk of his own life! He talked to us until it grew dark. After eight o’clock when he started to stand up, he seemed to be in pain too great to move. It did not show on his face, but we all held our breath during the long interval between his first move to rise and his final standing.
May 16, 1958
Swami came downstairs this afternoon for about half an hour, after having been given strict orders by his doctor to take complete bed rest for two months and also to drink half-and-half every two hours for his duodenal ulcers. But he wanted to talk to Anna Webster about the base for Sri Ramakrishna’s statue for the new temple’s altar. Nancy, Ediben, and I were asked to participate in the discussion.
Swami looked so much better—his skin clearer and lighter and his eyes luminous—but he was thin and had a delicate, weak look. Sitting in the library, he asked me a question, which I did not answer exactly correctly. He called me “scatterbrained” and said, “Throw her out of the room.” I tried to explain. He said to me, “Shut up,” and to others he commanded, “Throw her out; she will give me acidity.” “I will go,” I said and walked out stiffly. In a few minutes he called me back, and we proceeded from where we had left off.
“One should have reverence for everything one does, even if it is an extraneous thing,” Swami told us. Then, quoting Swami Vivekananda, he continued, “As Swamiji said, ‘Do everything as though it were the means to salvation.’” He also praised a recent article of reminiscences about Swami Vivekananda in Udbodhan [the Bengali-language magazine of the Order] that described how Swamiji, toward the end of his life, had not just a few pets but a whole menagerie and how, when he fed them, an indescribably beautiful expression came over his face. The article also mentioned that Swamiji never grew angry.
“What about the blasts he gave his brother monks?” I asked.
“He blasted them, but never in anger,” Swami replied.
“Yes, I understand,” I said—for have I not again and again seen Swami Ashokananda himself scolding people with terrible and prolonged blasts that can turn one inside out, and yet never in anger?
May 20, 1958
I went to dinner at my sister Leila’s house. My brother-in-law, Holloway, asked how it could be that Swami had ulcers, since ulcers are the result of worry and nervousness. How could a spiritual man have ulcers? I explained that Swami had taken on an immense responsibility. He could have lived in a cave in perfect serenity, but he had not chosen that path. Moreover, it wasn’t that he worried but that his body had worn out. I added that Swami Vivekananda himself had worked so hard that his body had worn out.
Leila (a Christian Scientist) looked very skeptical, and neither did Holloway seem to understand. The horror of their insistence that a spiritual man must remain physically healthy while laying down his life for others—the ingratitude and smugness of it—filled me with grief. I could have cried, but I said no more. They have no conception of what Swami Ashokananda accomplishes, the enormous load he carries for others.
May 21, 1958
I reported this conversation to Swami. He smiled.
Swami: I see I have to make excuses for myself. Tell your brother-in-law that, in the first place, it is not medically correct to say that worry is the only cause of ulcers; that hasn’t been proven. And tell him that if a man who was not spiritual—a worldly man—did as much as I have done, he would long ago have had a hundred ulcers. In fact, he would long ago have been dead.
And it is not true that I worry—I don’t worry; it is the pressure. Every day there is so much to attend to, both big things and small things, and they are unavoidable. The body cannot stand that, but it is only the body; my mind has not broken, has it? Each day is too full. It is like pumping more into the body than it can hold. The pressure is too much for my body but not for my mind.
(Swami then asked me if I had had a good dinner at my sister’s and, when I replied “Yes,” asked what I had eaten. I recited the menu.) There will come a time when you will have to give up all meat.
Me: Can I do that now?
Swami: No, not yet. Your body needs some meat. A time comes in spiritual life when the body doesn’t need much food.
May 27, 1958
An unbound volume of New Discoveries has arrived from India. I have asked Mrs. Roundtree, a devotee, to bind the loose pages into a book for Swami as a surprise. I think he guessed it long ago, though I have kept it a secret.
As soon as the package came, I phoned Mrs. Roundtree, but her line was busy and remained busy. In a frenzy o
f impatience, I drove to her house with the loose folios but she was not home. I finally reached her, after repeated calls, at six o’clock. She invited me to dinner, and we talked about bookbinding.
When we looked through the book carefully to be sure all was clean and in order, we discovered a terrible error: the text specified Isabelle McKindley as the recipient of a letter from Swami Vivekananda written to “Dear Sister” on March 17, 1894, but the photocopy of the envelope for this letter that appeared in the book was addressed to Harriet McKindley. Because of this discrepancy, should those pages be torn out? No, because some, perhaps many, books had already been distributed in India. Should I tell Swami? No, because then he would know that the unbound book has arrived and that will spoil his surprise gift.
May 29, 1958
Swami went to the doctor today. His ulcers were better and he will graduate soon from half-and-half to regular food (I learned this from Ediben), though he has been overdoing, not resting as he should. He had much on his mind, including, it appeared, the delay in receipt of New Discoveries.
Swami: Now you must write to India right away and find out why the book hasn’t come. I got an invoice saying they had sent it.
Me: What book? The book for me, or the other, or both?
Swami: That unbound copy you wanted. The invoice is for that.
Me (realizing that I had to tell him): It came.
Swami (looking astonished, but smiling): You mean it came, and you didn’t say anything?
Me: Yes.
