My Guru & His Disciple (24 page)

All this was only part of an astonishing and mysterious transformation. For Gerald's health had greatly improved, and he seemed less dyspeptic, less puritanical, warmer, merrier. He could now be persuaded to accept an occasional glass of sherry and would sometimes even eat meat. One happy result of this transformation was that he and I resumed our old friendship, with Don included in it.

*   *   *

These are two dreams which I had about Swami during 1953:

August 21. I was sharing a bed with Swami in a house which I knew to be a male whorehouse. (I knew this but I don't know how I knew it; there were no other people in the dream, and the room was an ordinary, quite respectable-looking bedroom.) Except that we were sharing a bed, our relations were as they always are. I was full of respect and consideration for him. We were just about to get up and I suggested that he should use the bathroom first. He didn't react to this. But he said, “I've got a new mantram for you, Chris. It is: ‘Always dance.'” “What a strange mantram!” I said. Swami laughed: “Yes, it surprised me, too. But I found it in the scriptures.”

December 16. This dream was a kind of companion piece to the other, for Swami and I were again in a bedroom. This time, I didn't know that we were in a whorehouse. My vague impression was that this was a hotel and that we were there because we were making a journey together. I was helping Swami get undressed to go to bed. I felt eager to attend to all his wants and was very respectful, as before. When I tried to help him put on his bathrobe, we found that it had somehow got entangled with mine—the sleeves of my robe were pulled down into his. Swami said, “Oh, so you have a bathrobe? I was going to give you mine.” And I said, “But I can throw mine away.”

The mood in both these dreams was joyful, but there was more fun in the first of them and more sentiment in the second. My bringing Swami into a whorehouse suggests to me a desire to introduce him to another part of my life, in which he had no share. (Actually, I had had very little experience of whorehouses myself; and that had been years earlier.) This dream whorehouse, where no boys are visible, seems symbolic, anyhow. Sharing a bed with Swami represents a situation of absolute chastity. Perhaps this was inspired by a memory of my sensations while using Swami's bedroom, when he was away from the Center, in 1943.

The dream mantram, “Always dance,” makes me think of something which hadn't yet happened at the time of my dream; shortly before Maria Huxley's death, in 1955, she told a woman friend, “Always wear lipstick.” This was a remark which beautifully expressed Maria's particular kind of courage—taking care to look your best, even when you are sick and afraid of dying, in order to spare the feelings of those who love you. “Always dance” could have a similar meaning. But it also seems to me to refer to Ramakrishna's dancing in ecstasy. Since this is described throughout
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,
Swami could truly say that he had “found it in the scriptures.”

In the second dream, Swami's bathrobe, with the sleeves of my bathrobe pulled down into its sleeves, seems an image of the guru's involvement with his disciple. Hindus believe that it is risky to wear other people's clothes or use their personal belongings. If you do, you may to some extent inherit the consequences of the former owner's thoughts and actions. But your guru is an exception. His cast-off clothes and belongings cannot bring you anything but good.

The nuns at the Center had enthusiastically adopted this belief. They would carry off, to keep or distribute, almost anything which Swami had owned and now didn't want. As the Vedanta Society grew, and Swami got more and more birthday and other gifts, the turnover became rapid, and devotees treasured mementos of Swami which he had barely had time to use or even touch.

*   *   *

Through the next two years, my diary keeping has many lapses. Here are my only diary entries about Swami in 1955:

March 2. After supper, Swami had a class in the living room. He was asked what it was like to live with an illumined soul—specifically with Brahmananda and Premananda. He answered, “What attracted me was their wonderful common sense.” Then he said how few people bothered to come and see Ramakrishna while he was alive, though most of them became ardent devotees after he was dead. I couldn't help thinking that this applies to Swami and myself, nowadays, and I hoped he wasn't thinking the same thing. Later, when we were alone together in his room, he talked about U.

(This was an old lady who had just died, while staying at the Center. In her youth, she had known Vivekananda and some of the other direct disciples.)

Swami recalled how terribly afraid she had been of dying. “And then, when it happened, she didn't feel anything. How very merciful they were to her!”

June 20. On Father's Day, Swami passed on to me a shaving brush he'd just been given but didn't need, because he uses an electric razor. I gave him a bottle of sherry, which had to be hidden from a party of visiting Hindus, who were severely orthodox.

(Swami sometimes drank a glass or two before meals. Alcohol was approved by his doctors as a relaxant, especially in view of the prostate trouble he suffered from in later life. Swami wasn't being hypocritical when he refrained from drinking in the presence of those who would have been shocked by it; he simply tolerated their prejudice, which he anyhow found unimportant.)

August 25. I called Swami and asked him for his blessing on my birthday tomorrow. He said, “Live many years and I'll watch you from heaven.”

September 14. This evening I was up at the Center. Swami looked very well and happy. He said, “I get so bored with philosophy nowadays—even Shankara.” Then he told me that this morning, in the shrine room, he had been intensely aware of the presence of Swamiji and Maharaj. “If there hadn't been anyone else there, I'd have bawled.”

He says his favorite chapter in the Gita is chapter 12, on the Yoga of Devotion. He says, “I used to want visions and ecstasies—now I don't care. I only pray to love God. I don't care to lecture, now. But when I start talking, I enjoy myself. I enjoy talking about God.” (I thought to myself: He's like a young man in love.)

Swami said, “Webster came to me the other day. He said to me, ‘Swami, it's your fault that I left the Center. You should have used your power to stop me.' I asked him if he was meditating and making japam. He said, ‘No. You must make me do it.' I was very touched. Such devotion!”

(On several other occasions, I had heard Swami rebuke devotees who took Webster's attitude and asked him, so to speak, to do their praying for them. He told them that they were just lazy. So I was all the more impressed by his belief in Webster's sincerity.)

*   *   *

In October 1955, Don and I left for Europe, to visit Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, and England. We got back to Los Angeles in March 1956.

In my diary, I note that “Swami, with his usual persistence, brought up the question of the Ramakrishna book again.” This means that I hadn't kept my part of the bargain made in the Trabuco shrine room three years earlier. Now that my novel was long since published and our traveling was over for the present, I had no more excuses to offer. I knew I must start writing
Ramakrishna and His Disciples
at once. Wanting to do this on an auspicious day, I picked April 1. This year, it was both All Fools' Day and Easter Sunday.

*   *   *

After our return from Europe, I began to see a good deal of one of the monks at the Hollywood Center. As John Yale, he had become a monastic probationer in 1950. We had met from time to time during the past six years, but not often, because of my various absences from Los Angeles and his journey to India in 1952–53, visiting the Ramakrishna monasteries there—this he later described in his book,
A Yankee and the Swamis,
published in 1961. By 1956, he had taken his first vows (brahmacharya) and been renamed Prema Chaitanya. (
Prema
means “ecstatic love of God.”
Chaitanya,
“awakened consciousness,” is always added to the other given name of a brahmachari of the Ramakrishna Order.)

Prema was then still in his thirties, slightly built but tough and energetic. He had dark hair and a pale handsome face which sometimes showed great inner suffering but was nevertheless youthful-looking. Before joining the Order, he had been a successful publisher in Chicago. Now he was working to build up the business of the bookshop at the Center, and doing this so efficiently that its mail-order earnings were becoming an important part of the Vedanta Society's assets. He also helped edit our magazine, which would begin printing my Ramakrishna book, chapter by chapter, as it got written. Thus Prema and I found ourselves in constant collaboration.

I often thought that, if Prema and I had arrived at the Center at the same time and begun our monastic life together, we might have been a real support to each other. Certainly we had much in common. We had both revolted against the moral precepts of our upbringing. We both had severe standards of efficiency and were apt to be impatient of the sloppy and the slapdash. We both suffered from self-will and the rage which it engenders. He was more desperate than I, and his desperation might have taught me his courage. I was more diplomatic than he, and might have saved him from offending many people by his outspokenness.

As things turned out, however, our relationship had its frictions. The Chris whom Prema met must have been a disappointment to him. No doubt he had expected a good deal from the part-author of the
Gita
translation which had renewed his religious faith when he had first read it, back in the nineteen-forties. But now I had become a worldling, no longer subject to monastic discipline. My visits to Swami were like those of a Prodigal Son who returns home again and again, without the least intention of staying, and is always uncritically welcomed by a Father who scolds every other member of the family for the smallest backsliding. I know that Prema was drawn to me, as I was to him, but I must have seemed a creature of self-indulgence and self-advertisement, with the easy modesty of the sufficiently flattered and a religion which was like a hedged bet on both worlds. Prema often envied me and sometimes hated me. He confessed this with touching frankness.

*   *   *

April 14, 1956. With Swami, George, and Prema to a meeting at a women's club, where Swami had to speak for twenty minutes to open a prayer-discussion group. Swami in a gray suit with a pearl-gray tie. He must always seem, at first sight, so much less “religious” than the sort of people who introduce him on these occasions; more like a doctor or even a bank manager than a minister. The stage was hung with blue velvet curtains; on one side, the flag. The audience chiefly composed of women in very small hats, many of them with folded-back veils in which tiny spangles sparkled.

June 15. This afternoon, Swami came to tea, along with George and Prema. Don was pleased because I told him that serving a meal to a swami would probably save him 500 rebirths. After they had left, he drank the remains of Swami's tea as prasad. I think that reading my 1939–44 diary has made him much more interested in everything to do with Vedanta.

June 22. Don and I went to tea at the Center. Swami said to Don, as we were leaving, “Come again—every time Chris comes.”

July 15. Swami called today, much worried because Maugham had sent him an essay on the Maharshi, and all the philosophy in it was wrong! Now we have to concoct a tactful reply.

(The Maharshi, a famous holy man, had died only a few years before this. Maugham had met him during a trip to India in 1936. I can't remember what mistakes Maugham made in expounding the Maharshi's philosophy. Our letter, pointing them out, must have been sufficiently tactful, for Maugham replied gratefully and made the suggested alterations in his essay “The Saint.” This was published, with four others, in
Points of View,
in 1959.)

October 25. This morning, I went to see Swami. He was in his most loving mood. He seemed entirely relaxed by love, as people are relaxed by a few drinks. He just beamed.

We were talking about the possible number of inhabited worlds. Swami said, “And, only think, the God who made those thousands of worlds comes to earth as a man!” Something about the way he said this—his wonder and his absolute belief, I suppose—made my skin raise goosepimples. I said, “How terrifying!” and that was exactly how I felt. It's quite impossible to convey in words the effect made on you by a situation like this—because what matters isn't what is said but the speaker himself, actually present before you and giving you, in some otherwise quite ordinary sentence, a glimpse of
what he is
.

He told me that one of his ambitions is to found a boarding school, one half for boys, the other for girls, where “they would be given the ideal”—first on the high-school level, later on the university level. He remarked that boys always seem more restless than girls. They always feel that they ought to do something or get something. Swami would tell them, “You have to
be
something.”

He repeated what he has so often told me, that he feels in all his work responsible to Brahmananda. When he initiates disciples, he hands them over to Brahmananda or to Holy Mother. He would like to stop giving lectures, but if he tries to shirk any duty, he finds that he loses touch with Brahmananda: “I can't find him; then I know he is displeased.”

Going to see Swami is like opening a window in my life. I have to keep doing this, or my life gets stuffy. It doesn't matter what we talk about. He said, “Come again soon. I like seeing you, Chris,” and I told him I think about him all the time and have conversations with him in my mind. I was moved, as we parted, and felt shy.