June 14. An absurd situation arose when I came into Swami’s room. As usual, I prostrated and touched his feet with my forehead. As I started to get up again, I saw his hand extended over me. In my dumb vague way, I thought he was holding out his hand for a handshake, so I tried to take it. Immediately he raised his hand a little, out of my reach. So I reached up for it, rising slightly to do so. He raised it still higher—which was quite awkward for him, since he was still seated in his armchair … And then at last I realized—he was blessing me! I was terribly embarrassed, but he didn’t laugh.
June 23. Swami’s Father’s Day lunch. The emergence of Swami from his room, into the garden, was particularly ceremonious this year; the procession included Pavitrananda from New York, George, Asaktananda, Chetanananda, and me. I had been in Swami’s room with the others and tried to slip around and join the crowd. But Asaktananda grabbed my arm and held me firmly. So we took our turn in facing the clicking and flashing cameras of the massed devotees. It was as if we had just gotten married.
At last we were all seated amidst the flowers at the central table, under the colored parachute-silk awnings spanned from the tree limbs—like saints in a farcical heaven. Swami reproved the monks because some of them had started to eat before he did. He was in that kind of a mood. Then came some very tough meat and the usual blush-making songs.
And then Swami spoke. His speech was dismayingly long and rambling—a history of our Vedanta Society, told chiefly in terms of the sums of money donated for various building projects, in Hollywood, Montecito, and Trabuco. Swami also alluded to Heard, Huxley, and me—saying that, as he put it, “although I am nothing,” these famous men had sat on the floor in his presence! There was a vanity in this which Don and I both minded, not because it was vanity but because it seemed so senile. I have never heard Swami talk in this tone before. When it was over, he was obviously exhausted. He went to his room, saying that he wanted to be alone.
October 11. When we went to see Swami yesterday evening, we had already heard rumors of what had happened to him at the Montecito temple, on the 6th. Swami told us the whole story, in his objective way, as though he were describing a sudden attack of appendicitis.
It was during the celebration of the Durga puja. While Swami was offering a flower at the shrine, he was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion, realizing how gracious Mother had been to him. He burst into tears. Chetanananda had to help him out of the shrine room and into the little office room at the back of the building. Chetanananda said to Swami, “This is a sign of the great grace Mother is showing you”—at which Swami began to cry again and couldn’t stop for some time. He begged Chetanananda not to mention Mother’s name to him again. When he had regained control of himself, he went back into the temple and blessed the congregation, lest they should think he was sick. After this, he became “very jolly.” The nuns told him that his face looked changed; it was flushed.
Swami seemed very well when we saw him, though perhaps a bit tired. Now they are getting ready to celebrate the Kali puja here. One of the nuns came in to speak to Swami about the hiring of a boat—to take the worshipers out after the puja is over, so they can drop the statue of Mother Kali into the sea. Swami immediately got angry: “I don’t want to hear about that. It’s like arranging the baby’s funeral before it is born.”
(After a statue has been worshiped in the shrine room, it must either be disposed of at once or else worshiped daily from that time forward. Perhaps Swami’s indignation was due to the intensity of his experience at Montecito, making him more than ever convinced that the Divine Mother actually enters and is present within the material object which represents her.)
December 5. This evening, Swami asked me if I had had any “experiences.” That’s the word I always use when I ask him the same question. I found myself instantly in a state of strong emotion. I told him that I hadn’t had any experiences, but that that didn’t matter, because at least I know now that, if I hadn’t met him, my life would have been nothing. My voice was shaking and tears ran down my face. Swami didn’t say anything but his face became aloof in that way it does when he is in a spiritual mood—“deserted,” one might call it, because one feels that he is “out of himself.” We were silent for a long time.
December 27. Yesterday was Swami’s eightieth birthday. Before lunch, talking to the monks from Trabuco, he really gave forth power. He retold the “lovest thou me?” story about Brahmananda, and then added: “And I didn’t love him.”
Despite all my years of indoctrination, my reactions are so conventional that I was puzzled and shocked, and I asked him almost indignantly, “What do you mean?”
And Swami answered, in that matter-of-fact tone in which he sometimes talks about the deepest mysteries:
“How many of us can love God? How many of us can return that love? It’s too big for us. We can’t understand it. He loves all of us, everybody, without any motive. How can we understand that?”
After lunch in the dining room, he signed to me to take his arm to help him walk back to his room. However, on the way there, he had to stop and receive the pranams of every single monastic member who was visiting the Center that day. My first instinct was to withdraw my hand, but he held it firmly under his left arm. So there I stood, like an inferior Siamese twin, attached to this being, through whose right hand Brahmananda’s blessing was conferred, again and again, on these bowed heads! All I could do was to keep my eyes lowered and try not to seem to participate outwardly in the giving of the benediction. It was an absurd and embarrassing and beautiful situation to be in.
January 14, 1974. I read the Katha Upanishad at Swamiji’s breakfast puja. Asaktananda did the worship but Swami felt well enough to come into the shrine room and sit on a chair.
When the breakfast tray was brought in, Asaktananda made mudras in formal style over the food, before pouring the coffee and lighting the cigarette. Swami objected to this strongly. He was so concerned that he got out of his chair and down on his knees behind Asaktananda and reproved him, telling him that this isn’t a ritual offering like others and that one shouldn’t make mudras—“because Swamiji is alive.”
I felt that Swami shouldn’t have corrected Asaktananda like that. It embarrassed him in front of all of us. I saw that Asaktananda was deeply hurt. He showed this at breakfast by becoming silent and very Asian. He wore his scarf over his head with his cap on top of it, which reminded both Don and me of women wearing snoods under their hats, during the forties. This, too, seemed somehow a kind of protest.
Perhaps Swami himself felt that he had been unkind. When we saw him later, he indirectly defended his behavior by saying that Sister never used to make mudras at this puja. She simply served the breakfast, as she had served it to Swamiji when he was physically present.
February 11. Yesterday I saw Swami, who is leaving with George and Len to stay at a house near the Montecito convent. Len describes Swami as being “testy.” To me he seemed only rather remote. He made me think of an animal which waits passively—until it either feels better or stops living.
Then, with sudden nervous energy, he began instructing a somewhat intimidated junior nun how to pack his bag. She was told to put in his winter socks and his black-and-white scarf. (It is black and gold, but she didn’t dare to point this out to him.)
George was there, too, unflappable, getting scolded and taking it as a grace. Why should he ever worry about anything, any more? He has it made.
Swami asked me, when I go to New York, to visit the swami who is now running Nikhilananda’s former center. I remarked that I have never yet seen the inside of that building—I never once visited Nikhilananda there. Swami seemed pleased, although I certainly hadn’t meant it as a declaration of my loyalty to him. He smiled and said, “Nikhilananda was always jealous of me, because of my disciples.” This touched me because the memory seemed to come from such a long way back—it was like an old woman remembering the suitors of her girlhood.
February 24. To the vespers
of the Ramakrishna puja. Swami came into the shrine room to have the relics touched to his forehead before it began. He is very frail. Seeing him shuffle back to his room and totter up the steps, I thought to myself: There goes all that’s left of the boy who met Brahmananda on the balcony at the Belur Math.
March 14. Last night, we saw Swami briefly. He complained that his pulse was too rapid but admitted that the doctor hadn’t been able to find anything particularly wrong with him. I could see that it was a strain on him, just trying to attend to what we said. When Don said something and then I said something, his head jerked back and forth painfully; he was like an old animal being teased by two people competing for its attention.
Most of the nuns and monks who are looking after Swami agree that this is the beginning of the end. “Swami isn’t gaining any ground,” they say. “He is failing.” This must be true, but I much prefer the attitude of Chetanananda, who says, “Swami is becoming more and more indrawn.” Chetanananda sees Swami as deliberately preparing himself for his departure, not just passively “failing” physically.
April 10. After describing the new diet the doctor has given him, in the most minute detail, Swami suddenly began to speak ecstatically about Rama. The room was filled with his joy. I forget everything he said—the words didn’t matter. I went into the kitchen afterwards, and George was there. I loved him because I knew he would have felt what I had been feeling. I might have talked about it, but other people were present. All I could find to say to him was, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you!” George seemed to understand immediately; he must somehow have guessed what had been happening to me. We beamed at each other in delight.
May 8. I asked Swami if he had had any experiences and he answered no. “If I have another one, it will be the end of me.” He said this quite casually, with a certain amusement. “I couldn’t stand it,” he added.
May 22. Swami talked about Ramakrishna and Girish Ghosh. They once had a competition to find out which of them knew the bigger number of risqué words. (It was amusing to hear this corny French adjective pop up out of Swami’s vocabulary.) After they had both said all the risqué words they knew, Girish bowed down and told Ramakrishna, “You are my guru in this also.”
June 16. Yesterday, we went up to the Center for the Father’s Day celebration. This year, there was no lunch, lest it should be too tiring for Swami. Only a kind of darshan, with fruit punch and cookies, in the puja hall. Swami told several stories about Maharaj.
This morning, Swami phoned me and came nearer than he has ever come to giving me a bawling out. He said he had been “shocked” by two questions I had asked him while he was speaking yesterday. “You were not yourself,” he said—as if he were accusing me of having been drunk.
The worse of my two offenses was as follows: when Swami told how Maharaj had jokingly asked someone, in the presence of a number of young women, “Which one do you like best?” I had asked Swami, “Did Maharaj say that to you?”
My question had shocked Swami because it suggested that Maharaj could conceivably say such a thing, even in joke, to a boy who was then already a monk. Actually, he was speaking to Ramlal Dada, Ramakrishna’s nephew, who was a married man. Swami said that he had made this point absolutely clear, and I have no doubt that he did. The heat was stupefying inside the puja hall and I wasn’t attending properly and indeed only asking these questions to encourage Swami to continue telling stories. Prompting Swami on such occasions is one of my functions, because the majority of people are unwilling to ask him anything in public. Anyhow, I can’t see anything shocking in the idea that Maharaj should make a joke of this kind, even to a young monk. Surely, purity such as his gives one a great deal of license?
My other offense: when Swami told us that Maharaj was able to inhibit his sense of smell completely, I asked, “Do you mean he did that permanently?” Admittedly, this was sheer idiocy on my part—also due to the heat. I asked him to forgive me, and he laughed and said, “How should I not forgive you? You are my disciple and my child.” “A very silly child,” I said. “Oh no, Chris, you are the most intelligent of all my children.”
Right after our conversation was over, I felt that his scolding had truly been a blessing. But already, such is egotism, I am beginning to indulge in resentment, because I am certain that someone at the Center must have commented on my mistakes to Swami and thus put the idea of scolding me into his head. He has become much more suggestible lately, I suspect.
June 23. This morning, I drove up to Montecito. I saw Swami briefly in his room, constipated and uneasy. He now dislikes spending a night anywhere except in his room at the Hollywood Center.
He gave his lecture seated and wearing Western clothes. He says he is apt to trip over his gerua robe while walking from the car into the temple. At the end, he blessed us all. Then he made a gesture toward the shrine—as if of acknowledgment—and said, “Who spoke through me.” It seemed perfectly obvious that he meant, “It was He who spoke through me.” But several people who talked to me later were puzzled. They had taken Swami’s statement as a question, “Who spoke through me?” Meaning, I suppose, that Swami was uncertain whether he had been inspired by God or the Devil! Maybe such apparent stupidity isn’t stupidity at all, but an obstinate desire for mystification. How they love to be puzzled!
August 21. When I went up to the Center, Swami didn’t feel like seeing me; he felt too weak, he told them to tell me. This may also have been because he didn’t want me to ask him any questions about spiritual matters—he had told the girls that he mustn’t talk about such things, and had turned on the radio and started listening to the news. He has been very cantankerous about his food lately, complaining that it isn’t cooked just right. And then he says, “I don’t scold you for now but for after I’m gone.”
A., in her dry, matter-of-fact, hospital nurse’s tone, told me: “Yesterday morning, he said something that didn’t sound so good. He said, ‘I’ve been dancing with Maharaj.’”
Although I realized how she meant “didn’t sound so good,” and how serious its significance might be, I very nearly burst out laughing—because it reminded me of Mistress Quickly describing Falstaff’s death in Henry V: “I bid him a’ should not think of God, I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.”
(Incidentally, this was one of Aldous Huxley’s favorite Shakespeare quotations.)
November 13. This afternoon, when they were getting the shrine room ready for the Kali puja tonight, Swami came in to look at the image and said, “My hair is standing on end.” Then he prostrated in front of the image, lying down full length on the floor. Then, coming out of the temple, he said to some people who were in the garden, “You are all Shiva.”
“But,” said A., after telling us this when we arrived to see Swami, an hour later, “he’s quite all right now.”
December 11. In three days, we leave for New York. Today we went to say goodbye to Swami. He was in good spirits. He talked with scorn about some new regulations concerning the giving of brahmacharya. They have been proposed by someone at the Belur Math. One of them was that every candidate for brahmacharya must have a recommendation from his guru, stating that the candidate is devoted to God.
“What nonsense!” Swami exclaimed. “As if one can say that anyone is devoted to God! It is only when you feel that you are not devoted that you are devoted!”
However illogical and inconsistent this remark might seem to an outsider, Swami’s indignation made it beautiful.
* * *
January 29, 1975. Swami told how, long ago, two of the male devotees played a joke on him—sending him a fake letter from a girl which said that she was in love with him and wanted him to call her at a certain number. Swami said that he recognized this number as belonging to one of these devotees, so he wasn’t fooled.
I said, “I suppose you must have had a lot of trouble with women, while you’ve been in Hollywood?”
“Oh yes,” he answered, frowning and shaking his h
ead comically, “terrible—you have no idea.” Then he added, with truly sweet simplicity: “You see, Chris, I used to be very handsome.”
February 26. Before I saw Swami this evening, they told me that he had had another spiritual experience while he was at Montecito the other day. He was quite ready to speak about it himself. It was a vision while he was sleeping. He was feeding Holy Mother and he began to weep.
“I could have wept myself to death,” Swami told me. “When the doctor examined me, he said, ‘You have had a shock.’ It was like a heart attack … When I wish to die, I can die. Whenever I wish. But I don’t want to die yet—not until this place is saved.” (Meaning, not until a senior swami is sent by Belur Math to succeed him.)
Then he talked about the lower samadhi—how doubts still remain, even after you have experienced it. “Do you still have doubts, Swami?” I asked. “Oh yes—well, not doubts, exactly. It’s what you call ‘divine discontent.’ You know, Maharaj used to tell me, ‘What’s wrong with you is, you’re too contented here. You shouldn’t be contented in spiritual life. You should always want more.’ Well, now I always want more—more!”
June 5. When I saw Swami yesterday, he told me that he had refused the application of a lesbian who wanted to be a nun. Put like that, the statement sounded bluntly sexist, and I suppose my face showed my disapproval. Today he phoned to assure me that he hadn’t refused to take the girl because she was a lesbian but because she had got into a fight with one of the nuns and was, anyway, over the prescribed age limit for joining the convent.
Then why did Swami even mention that she was a lesbian, in the first place? Probably because that made her my fellow tribesperson. For a long time now, he has been treating me as a sort of official representative of all the homosexuals he comes in contact with; my opinion on tribal matters has to be consulted, even if it is overruled!