September 16. Saw Swami, at the convalescent hospital they have just moved him to. He says he is seeing Maharaj in his dreams, every morning early. Once they were sharing a bed. He also had an anxiety dream in which he was looking for Maharaj and couldn’t find him, and meanwhile George ran over someone in the car and cut off his leg!
January 10, 1967. We had supper with Swami. He seemed much better. He told us that he has been going to the shrine in the mornings lately, which is something he hasn’t done in a long while. “I was there one hour,” he told us, with satisfaction—and both Don and I noticed the utter unselfconsciousness with which he talks about himself.
* * *
In February, problems arose. Swami had arranged for a junior swami (Asaktananda) to be sent over from India; he was due to arrive shortly. Swami planned to train Asaktananda as quickly as possible, so that he would be able to act as assistant to Vandanananda, our assistant swami, when Vandanananda became head of the Center after Swami’s death.
Now, however, Vandanananda had just decided to leave Hollywood and return to India. So a second swami was needed, a senior. He would probably be hard to get; Belur Math didn’t like parting with its senior swamis. And if this senior swami was allowed to come, he, too, would be a stranger to American ways and would also have to be trained—with extra tact, because of his seniority. Swami would have his hands full.
“Well, Swami,” I told him, “this means that you’ll have to live another ten years at least.” He grunted humorously and protested, “Not ten!” But I did feel that he was accepting the obligation to stay with us for a while.
June 17. To the Center for Father’s Day lunch. Usually, it’s unpleasantly hot, but this year it was so cold that I was afraid Swami would get a chill, sitting outdoors. He had put on thick long underwear, he told me. He is looking wonderfully calm and happy these days and his health seems quite good, although he has to have a prostate operation in August.
In the middle of lunch he suddenly turned to me and said quietly but with great emphasis, “Give Don my love.” He took my arm and pressed it, as though he were actually shooting it full of love for me to pass on to Don by transfusion, later.
* * *
In 1966, Gerald Heard had had a stroke which paralyzed his arm. He recovered from this and had talked about it to all of us with his usual amused scientific objectivity, showing no anxiety about his future. However, this stroke had been followed by others. And now Don and I could visit him only occasionally, when the doctor allowed it.
August 3. Gerald is very weak now and speaks in a faint voice, though his articulation is fairly good. Our presence at his bedside seemed to amuse him; I felt that we were part of a profound metaphysical joke; the joke was that we were within maya and therefore absurd, but, at the same time, absorbingly interesting to him. (I’m paraphrasing what I think he said, because I couldn’t understand all the words.) He added, quite clearly, “It doesn’t alter one’s affection; indeed, it increases it.” We both felt his affection, strongly.
He kept laughing, rather wildly and weirdly; I could imagine Ramakrishna laughing like that, describing a vision he was having. He is very thin and looks much smaller, but seems relaxed and perfectly contented. And yet—what awful toil dying so gradually must be!
November 2. Yesterday I talked to a devotee who was much concerned because Swami, when he appeared on Les Crane’s television interview show on October 24, had publicly admitted that he has had the lower form of samadhi.
True, this admission can have meant nothing to the vast majority of the viewers. What worried the devotee wasn’t that he felt Swami had been indiscreet or a show-off, but that he was afraid Swami might be planning to die soon. He recalled how cagey Swami used to be about mentioning his spiritual experiences to outsiders, and cited the example of Ramakrishna, who only revealed his nature fully at the end of his life.
I asked Swami about this, when I went up to see him later. He laughed, and then apologetically explained that he had felt obliged to speak of his experience in order to make a distinction between it and the experiences of takers of lysergic acid and other drugs. “But I didn’t describe the experience itself,” he added.
People who keep imputing deep intentions to Swami understand him very little, I feel. As Don says, “He works on automatic, most of the time.” Of course, one may agree—in fact, I think one is forced to agree—that his sayings sometimes show an uncanny insight. But I don’t think he is always aware of this—I mean, I don’t think he chooses to be aware.
Some of the more sentimentally superstitious devotees love to find evidence of precognition and other extrasensory faculties in Swami’s most casual remarks. They coyly accuse him of having conveyed cryptic warnings to them about the conduct of their private lives, or even of foreknowing what the weather will be like two weeks ahead. I find this superstitiousness extraordinarily irritating—no doubt because I indulge in it myself, from time to time.
* * *
January 19, 1968. Swami telephoned this afternoon that Richard is dead, of a heart attack. It is such ages since I saw him that I didn’t feel a great shock. And yet I remember him so vividly as he used to be, when we were both living at the Center, twenty-five years ago. Swami sounded very sad. I suppose part of his sadness is because he still thinks of Richard as a monk gone to waste.
Richard’s funeral was on January 23, at Santa Barbara. I went up there for it and so did Webster, which seemed to please his parents very much.
Swami told me that Richard had been through a period of heavy drinking, which he had recently stopped. As soon as he stopped, he became noticeably changed and full of love. They found him dead in bed, lying as if relaxed in sleep, with his hair still neatly brushed; there were no indications of a death agony. The only odd thing was that two tears had trickled down his cheeks from the outer corners of his eyes. This, said Swami, might be a sign that Richard had died after an ecstatic spiritual experience; when you shed tears in ecstasy, they flow from the eyes’ outer corners. It was very much in accordance with Swami’s beliefs that Richard should thus “remember” his true nature and realize the truth of his guru’s teachings, just before leaving the body.
* * *
March 16. Swami has been quite seriously sick, but is being moved out of the intensive-care ward at Mount Sinai Hospital today or tomorrow.
April 11. Saw Swami yesterday evening. He said that he had expected to die, the first day of his illness. He had decided that, if he got better, he would spend much more time in meditation; that was what he wanted to do now.
He looked absolutely marvelous, a little thinner in the face, but not at all sickly. His face seemed to shine with lack of anxiety.
August 12. Yesterday we saw Gerald. The last few times, he has scarcely been able to speak at all. But he still seems perfectly aware of everything said in his presence. I notice that one can always get a reaction out of him if one mentions Chris Wood—who of course visits him regularly. If I make fun of Chris a little, Gerald utters a noiseless laugh. It is Love’s last faint signal.
October 23. Swami, in a wonderful exalted mood, said, speaking of Maharaj, “Chris—to think of it! I saw him!” His joy, the nowness of it, was so beautiful.
* * *
January 11, 1969. Got up at 5:30 and drove into Hollywood, to read at Swamiji’s breakfast puja. After I’d read, I went in to see Swami, who is still officially sick but actually quite himself. There he was, lying in bed, snugly tucked in, with me prostrating before him. He looked out at me over the edge of the bed as though he were in a boat and I were swimming alongside. Then he made an effort and raised himself a little, acknowledging my prostration.
The puja had turned me on even more than usual—I think because of George, who had somehow filled the shrine room with joy. I wanted to talk about this to Swami—to ask him to make me feel like this all the time, instead of once a year—but I couldn’t. However, as so often, he seemed to know what was in my mind, and said, “Just think, Chr
is, Swamiji himself appeared in that shrine!”
In March, the Mark Taper Forum of Los Angeles presented a stage adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s story “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God.” This adaptation had been made by me, with the help of Lamont Johnson, who was to direct it. A party from the Center, including Swami, went to see it. This sort of irreverent joking about Jehovah and Jesus was very much to Swami’s taste, so he loved the play. Would he have loved it if Krishna and Rama had been made fun of in the same manner? No.
May 31. Saw Swami this afternoon. He is in excellent health and spirits. He tells the same old stories, but every story is spiritually fresh each time. Today he told how Maharaj had come into the room, whispered in his ear the question Jesus asked Simon Peter: “Lovest thou me?” and then left the room again. This time, the story seemed extraordinarily spooky; it made my flesh creep and my eyes water. Swami wouldn’t have needed to explain, even to an outsider, that Brahmananda hadn’t meant, “me, Brahmananda.” Swami’s tone and manner made that obvious.
He told me also that he has come more and more to realize that Maharaj, Swamiji, Holy Mother, and Ramakrishna are “all the same.” He said it was a long time before he could really feel the presence of Ramakrishna but that now this comes to him very strongly.
September 1. While Swami and I were alone together, he giggled and said, “It’s a terrible profession, being a swami. Even I, in my old age—a woman wrote me and said, ‘You are the star in my blue sky.’ Imagine!”
October 21. A couple of weeks ago, when I came to see Swami, I took the dust of his feet. I don’t often do this, it was a sudden impulse. Swami said quickly, “What’s the matter, Chris—you aren’t ill?” Which struck me as wildly funny. It sounded as if he thought that a sudden anxiety about my health had made me extra pious.
January 3, 1970. I saw Swami yesterday. He told me that, when the palpitations came over him while he was up at the Montecito convent, he had felt quite detached, as if his body belonged to someone else. “I felt a flustering in my chest and I was like an observer.”
May 31. Swami called me on the phone because he wanted to read me a passage from a letter Vivekananda wrote to the Hale Sisters on July 31, 1894. He said, “I was reading it this morning and it made me cry.”
“Stick to God! Who cares what comes to the body or to anything else! Through the terrors of evil say—my God, my love! Through the pangs of death say—my God, my love! Through all the evils under the sun say—my God, my love! Thou art here, I see Thee. Thou art with me, I feel Thee. I am Thine, take me. I am not of the world’s but Thine, leave not then me. Do not go for glass beads, leaving the mine of diamonds. This life is a great chance. What, seekest thou the pleasures of the world! He is the fountain of all bliss. Seek for the highest, aim at that highest, and you shall reach the highest.”
July 15. Swami told me how he was lying in bed, not long ago, in the middle of the night, and his little finger began to twitch and suddenly the thought came to him: I have no control over this body, it is the Lord who controls it. And this made him ecstatically happy and he was awake for a long while, “having a wonderful time.” He also told me that often while he is meditating he imagines that he is in the Ramakrishna loka: “They are all there and I am their servant.”
August 17. Swami told me to try to make my mind a blank before meditating, and then to try to feel that I am in the presence of Ramakrishna, Holy Mother, Maharaj, and Swamiji. I asked, “Is it all right if I think of you there, too?” He said yes.
He also told me, as he has before, to say to myself that I am the Atman and that it doesn’t really make any difference whether I am aware of this or not. I am the Atman, and that’s that. This I do find helpful, because it makes all my fretting and fussing and fuming merely ridiculous.
September 20. My meditation is almost absurdly bad. Yet I am going through the motions regularly, twice a day, and isn’t that something? And I am living with someone who also practices meditation, which is a great blessing and encouragement.
October 21. Swami has been ill again. I always feel that this is partly because his illness helps us to exert pressure on the Belur Math to send us another swami. Now his doctor has written them a letter and several of us have sent cables, saying how urgent this is.
(Belur Math did finally send a swami—not a senior but a junior, and not until June 1971. His name was Chetanananda.)
Whenever I see Swami nowadays, I take the dust of his feet on arriving and leaving. I do this because by doing it I make it easier for myself to think of him impersonally, as the Guru, when I’m meditating.
Once he said, “You don’t have to do that every time.” So I explained why I was doing it. This seemed to amuse him.
December 30. In one respect, I find Swami much more wonderful than those direct disciples who had all known Ramakrishna and were able to live together, sustaining each other in moments of doubt and weakness. I have always felt, since I first knew him, how hard it must be for him, here in this alien land, and I suppose I thought it possible that he wouldn’t be able to bear it and would go back to India one day. But he’s still here, an old man and all alone—for, however much we love him, we can none of us be really close companions. And yet, lo and behold, his faith has grown and grown and is its own reward. What else need any of us do but meditate on his achievement?
January 29, 1971. Went to Mount Sinai Hospital and saw Swami, so tiny and bird-legged and so beautiful with his silver hair. He was attended by two nurses, one Thai, the other Japanese. He said, “They are my daughters”; and already they seemed somehow to have become devotees, without quite knowing of what.
The earthquake of February 9 was felt even more violently in Hollywood than by us in Santa Monica. Swami told us that, when it started, he got out of bed, put on his robe, and went to stand in the doorway of his bathroom. As he did so, he remembered a text in Sanskrit: “If Krishna saves, who can kill? If Krishna kills, who can save?”
February 21. I went to see Swami yesterday afternoon, having been told that I could, although he was feeling tired and his pulse was missing beats and he had slight asthma, which the doctor said was due to his heart condition.
I arrived early, so I went into the shrine room and sat up close in front of the shrine. I don’t know when I did this last—not in years. It is quite different, and not nearly so satisfactory from my point of view, to sit at the side—as I do when I read at the Vivekananda breakfast pujas. I often try to imagine myself sitting alone in front of the shrine when I’m meditating here at home.
It began working almost at once and without my making any effort. I just kept reminding myself that it was before this shrine that Swami had had his visions and Sister used to see “the light” and George had been chanting for nearly thirty years. I exposed myself to it as though it were some kind of medical radiation and I were the patient, but I did try to include Don in the exposure. However, just when I imagined myself to be open to it, without any resistance, one of the nuns came into the shrine room and whispered apologetically that Swami was ready to see me. So I got up and left, telling myself that he is a human shrine, and therefore much more extraordinary, and that he contains relics too, his memories of Maharaj and the other disciples.
I found Swami looking surprisingly well. He described his latest treatment in great detail and with obvious relish, as he always does, and then told me that the doctor had asked him, “Are you depressed?” and that he’d answered, “Oh no, I’m never depressed!”
This may not be literally true; Swami certainly has his gloomy moods. But the beautifully amused smile with which he said it did express what I think he meant: once you have known a Maharaj, you may still get upset about trifles, but you can never again become really depressed, because real depression is losing your faith that life has meaning.
May 5. Swami told me that he had just initiated a woman he thought was slightly crazy. He did it because her husband begged him to, but he didn’t like doing it. Sh
e smelled of garlic all over her body. (Could she have feared that Swami was a vampire, I wondered?) During the initiation, the figure of Krishna fell off the shrine and broke its pedestal, and Swami was so upset that he couldn’t think of a mantram to give her—at least, not for a long while; and she couldn’t make up her mind which chosen ideal to choose … This scene suggests to me the style of a new kind of religious farce.
May 11. At the end of the question period in the temple, Swami was asked, “Does the guru ever withdraw his love from a disciple?” The question sounded to me, and, I think, to most of us, subtly hostile and provocative. Swami answered, “I don’t know yet.”
The lazy good-humored tone of voice in which he said this was startlingly comic. It came out of his mouth so spontaneously, with such perfect timing, that everybody laughed and a lot of us clapped. It made me imagine a very relaxed Jesus, kidding and verbally sparring with Satan during the temptation in the wilderness.
August 4. We were talking about Hindus and Moslems, and Swami—to illustrate the fact that he had been on good terms with Moslems in his youth—told how, when he was on a train going to visit Maharaj, he sat down next to a Hindu priest. Suddenly the priest groped him, right up beside his crotch—Swami didn’t use those words but he indicated the position of the priest’s hand. “I felt very narvous,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was about.” Sitting opposite to him were three Moslems. They saw what was happening and invited him to come over and sit with them, which he did. They also offered him food, which he didn’t accept, although he appreciated their kind gesture.
(I couldn’t help thinking that what this story really illustrated was the height of the social barrier between Hindus and Moslems, if such a drastic situation was needed to break it down!)
* * *
On August 14, early in the afternoon, Gerald Heard quietly stopped breathing. Michael Barrie, his devoted friend and secretary, was at his bedside. Later that day, Gerald’s body was taken to the anatomy department of the medical school at the University of California, where it would be used for dissection or research and then cremated and buried without record. Gerald had made this arrangement many years previously and used to refer to it in conversation with his friends—some of whom, I believe, were slightly shocked.