We pull up to the front gate of the Ashram at 3:30 AM, right in front of the temple. As I’m getting out of the taxi, a young man in Western clothes and a wool hat steps out of the shadows and introduces himself—he is Arturo, a twenty-four-year-old journalist from Mexico and a devotee of my Guru, and he’s here to welcome me. As we’re exchanging whispered introductions, I can hear the first familiar bars of my favorite Sanskrit hymn coming from inside. It’s the morning arati, the first morning prayer, sung every day at 3:30 AM as the Ashram wakes. I point to the temple, asking Arturo, “May I . . .?” and he makes a be-my-guest gesture. So I pay my taxi driver, tuck my backpack behind a tree, slip off my shoes, kneel and touch my forehead to the temple step and then ease myself inside, joining the small gathering of mostly Indian women who are singing this beautiful hymn.
This is the hymn I call “The Amazing Grace of Sanskrit,” filled with devotional longing. It is the one devotional song I have memorized, not so much from effort as from love. I begin to sing the familiar words in Sanskrit, from the simple introduction about the sacred teachings of Yoga to the rising tones of worship (“I adore the cause of the universe . . . I adore the one whose eyes are the sun, the moon and fire . . . you are everything to me, O god of gods . . .”) to the last gemlike summation of all faith (“This is perfect, that is perfect, if you take the perfect from the perfect, the perfect remains”).
The women finish singing. They bow in silence, then move out a side door across a dark courtyard and into a smaller temple, barely lit by one oil lamp and perfumed with incense. I follow them. The room is filled with devotees—Indian and Western—wrapped in woolen shawls against the predawn cold. Everyone is seated in meditation, roosted there, you might say, and I slip in beside them, the new bird in the flock, completely unnoticed. I sit cross-legged, place my hands on my knees, close my eyes.
I have not meditated in four months. I have not even thought about meditating in four months. I sit there. My breath quiets. I say the mantra to myself once very slowly and deliberately, syllable by syllable.
Om.
Na.
Mah.
Shi.
Va.
Ya.
Om Namah Shivaya.
I honor the divinity that resides within me.
Then I repeat it again. Again. And again. It’s not so much that I’m meditating as unpacking the mantra carefully, the way you would unpack your grandmother’s best china if it had been stored in a box for a long time, unused. I don’t know if I fall asleep or if I drop into some kind of spell or even how much time passes. But when the sun finally comes up that morning in India and everyone opens their eyes and looks around, Italy feels ten thousand miles away from me now, and it is as if I have been here in this flock forever.
38
“Why do we practice Yoga?”
I had a teacher once ask that question during a particularly challenging Yoga class, back in New York. We were all bent into these exhausting sideways triangles, and the teacher was making us hold the position longer than any of us would have liked.
“Why do we practice Yoga?” he asked again. “Is it so we can become a little bendier than our neighbors? Or is there perhaps some higher purpose?”
Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as “union.” It originally comes from the root word yuj, which means “to yoke,” to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union—between mind and body, between the individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student, and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors. In the West, we’ve mainly come to know Yoga through its now-famous pretzel-like exercises for the body, but this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosophy. The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hip is aching, keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating, “Wow . . . my hip really aches.”
But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra—the repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga—your disciplined practices of sacred union—to get closer to Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Yahweh. During my time at the Ashram, I met devotees who identified themselves as practicing Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and even Muslims. I have met others who would rather not talk about their religious affiliation at all, for which, in this contentious world, you can hardly blame them.
The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man’s apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization’s needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: “Desire is the design flaw.”) The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: “You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.”
Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you. True Yogis, from their seat of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God’s creative energy—men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: it’s all God in disguise. But the Yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral—they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do have that chance.
“Our whole business therefore in this life,” wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, “is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.”
Like all great philosophical ideas, this one is simple to understand but virtually impossible to imbibe. OK—so we are all one, and divinity abides within us all equally. No problem. Understood. But now try living from that place. Try putting that understanding into practice twenty-four hours a day. It’s not so easy. Which is why in India it is considered a given that you need a teacher for your Yoga. Unless you were born one of those rare shimmering saints who come into life already fully actualized, you’re going to need some guidance along your journey toward enlightenment. If you’re lucky enough, you will find a living Guru. This is what pilgrims have been coming to India to seek for ages. Alexander the Great sent an ambassador to India in the fourth century BC, with a request to find one of these famous Yo
gis and return with him to court. (The ambassador did report finding a Yogi, but couldn’t convince the gentleman to travel.) In the first century AD, Apollonius of Tyrana, another Greek ambassador, wrote of his journey through India: “I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet not on it, and fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the richness of all men.” Gandhi himself always wanted to study with a Guru, but never, to his regret, had the time or opportunity to find one. “I think there is a great deal of truth,” he wrote, “in the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible without a Guru.”
A great Yogi is anyone who has achieved the permanent state of enlightened bliss. A Guru is a great Yogi who can actually pass that state on to others. The word Guru is composed of two Sanskrit syllables. The first means “darkness,” the second means “light.” Out of the darkness and into the light. What passes from the master into the disciple is something called mantravirya: “The potency of the enlightened consciousness.” You come to your Guru, then, not only to receive lessons, as from any teacher, but to actually receive the Guru’s state of grace.
Such transfers of grace can occur in even the most fleeting of encounters with a great being. I once went to see the great Vietnamese monk, poet and peacemaker Thich Nhat Hanh speak in New York. It was a characteristically hectic weeknight in the city, and as the crowd pushed and shoved its way into the auditorium, the very air in the place was whisked into a nerve-racking urgency of everyone’s collective stress. Then the monk came on stage. He sat in stillness for a good while before he began to speak, and the audience—you could feel it happening, one row of high-strung New Yorkers at a time—became colonized by his stillness. Soon, there was not a flutter in the place. In the space of maybe ten minutes, this small Vietnamese man had drawn every single one of us into his silence. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that he drew us each into our own silence, into that peace which we each inherently possessed, but had not yet discovered or claimed. His ability to bring forth this state in all of us, merely by his presence in the room—this is divine power. And this is why you come to a Guru: with the hope that the merits of your master will reveal to you your own hidden greatness.
The classical Indian sages wrote that there are three factors which indicate whether a soul has been blessed with the highest and most auspicious luck in the universe:
1. To have been born a human being, capable of conscious inquiry.
2. To have been born with—or to have developed—a yearning to understand the nature of the universe.
3. To have found a living spiritual master.
There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one. The universe will shift, destiny’s molecules will get themselves organized and your path will soon intersect with the path of the master you need. It was only one month after my first night of desperate prayer on my bathroom floor—a night spent tearfully begging God for answers—that I found mine, having walked into David’s apartment and encountered a photograph of this stunning Indian woman. Of course, I was more than a bit ambivalent about the concept of having a Guru. As a general rule, Westerners aren’t comfortable with that word. We have a kind of sketchy recent history with it. In the 1970s a number of wealthy, eager, susceptible young Western seekers collided with a handful of charismatic but dubious Indian Gurus. Most of the chaos has settled down now, but the echoes of mistrust still resonate. Even for me, even after all this time, I still find myself sometimes balking at the word Guru. This is not a problem for my friends in India; they grew up with the Guru principle, they’re relaxed with it. As one young Indian girl told me, “Everybody in India almost has a Guru!” I know what she meant to say (that almost everyone in India has a Guru) but I related more to her unintentional statement, because that’s how I feel sometimes—like I almost have a Guru. Sometimes I just can’t seem to admit it because, as a good New Englander, skepticism and pragmatism are my intellectual heritage. Anyhow, it’s not like I consciously went shopping for a Guru. She just arrived. And the first time I saw her, it was as though she looked at me through her photograph—those dark eyes smoldering with intelligent compassion—and she said, “You called for me and now I’m here. So do you want to do this thing, or not?”
Setting aside all nervous jokes and cross-cultural discomforts, I must always remember what I replied that night: a straightforward and bottomless YES.
39
One of my first roommates at the Ashram was a middle-aged African-American devout Baptist and meditation instructor from South Carolina. My other roommates, over time, would include an Argentinean dancer, a Swiss homeopath, a Mexican secretary, an Australian mother of five, a young Bangladeshi computer programmer, a pediatrician from Maine and a Filipino accountant. Others would come and go, too, as devotees cycled in and out of their residencies.
This Ashram is not a place you can casually drop by and visit. First of all, it’s not wildly accessible. It’s located far away from Mumbai, on a dirt road in a rural river valley near a pretty and scrappy little village (composed of one street, one temple, a handful of shops and a population of cows who wander about freely, sometimes walking into the tailor’s shop and lying down there). One evening I noticed a naked sixty-watt lightbulb hanging from a wire on a tree in the middle of town; this is the town’s one street-lamp. The Ashram essentially creates the local economy, such as it is, and also stands as the town’s pride. Outside the walls of the Ashram, it is all dust and poverty. Inside, it’s all irrigated gardens, beds of flowers, hidden orchids, birdsong, mango trees, jackfruit trees, cashew trees, palm trees, magnolias, banyans. The buildings are nice, though not extravagant. There’s a simple dining hall, cafeteria-style. There’s a comprehensive library of spiritual writings from the world’s religious traditions. There are a few temples for different types of gatherings. There are two meditation “caves”—dark and silent basements with comfortable cushions, open all day and night, to be used only for meditation practice. There’s a covered outdoor pavilion, where Yoga classes are held in the morning, and there’s a kind of a park with an oval walking path around it, where students can jog for exercise. I’m sleeping in a concrete dormitory.
During my stay at the Ashram, there were never more than a few hundred residents at any time. If the Guru herself had been in residence, those numbers would have swollen considerably, but she was never in India when I was there. I’d sort of expected that; she’d been spending a fair bit of time lately in America, but you never knew when she might show up anywhere by surprise. It’s not considered essential to be in her literal presence in order to keep up your studies with her. There is, of course, the irreplaceable high of actually being around a living Yogic master, and I’ve experienced that before. But many longtime devotees agree that it can also sometimes be a distraction—if you’re not careful, you can get all caught up in the celebrity buzz of excitement that surrounds the Guru and lose the focus of your true intention. Whereas, if you just go to one of her Ashrams and discipline yourself to keep to the austere schedule of practices, you will sometimes find that it is easier to communicate with your teacher from within these private meditations than to push your way through crowds of eager students and get a word in edgewise in person.
There are some long-term paid staffers at the Ashram, but most of the work here is done by the students themselves. Some of the local villagers also work here on salary. Other locals are devotees of the Guru and live here as students. One teenage Indian boy around the Ashram somehow really provoked my fascination. There was something about his (pardon the word, but . . .) aura that was so compelling to me. For one thing, he was incredibly skinny (though this is a fairly typical sight around here; if there’s anything in this world skinnier than an Indian teenage boy, I’d be afraid to see it). He dressed the way the computer-interested boys in my junior high school used to dress for band concerts—dark trousers and an ironed white button-down shirt that was far too big for him, his thin, stemlike neck sticking out of
the opening like a single daisy popping out of a giant flowerpot. His hair was always combed neatly with water. He wore an older man’s belt wrapped almost twice around what had to be a sixteen-inch waist. He wore the same clothes every day. This was his only outfit, I realized. He must have been washing his shirt by hand every night and ironing it in the mornings.(Though this attention to polite dress is also typical around here; the Indian teenagers with their starched outfits quickly shamed me out of my wrinkled peasant dresses and put me into tidier, more modest clothes.) So what was it about this kid? Why was I so moved every time I saw his face—a face so drenched with luminescence it looked like he’d just come back from a long vacation in the Milky Way? I finally asked another Indian teenager who he was. She replied matter-of-factly: “This is the son of one of the local shopkeepers. His family is very poor. The Guru invited him to stay here. When he plays the drums, you can hear God’s voice.”
There is one temple in the Ashram that is open to the general public, where many Indians come throughout the day to pay tribute to a statue of the Siddha Yogi (or “perfected master”) who established this lineage of teaching back in the 1920s and who is still revered across India as a great saint. But the rest of the Ashram is for students only. It’s not a hotel or a tourist location. It’s more like a university. You must apply to come here, and in order to be accepted for a residency, you must show that you’ve been studying this Yoga seriously for a good long while. A minimum stay of one month is required. (I’ve decided to stay here for six weeks, and then to travel around India on my own, exploring other temples, Ashrams and devotional sites.)