August 21. George has been suddenly subjected to a stoppage of the bladder. I visited him in hospital today. He was lying doubled up, in great pain. Being with him was marvelous, not because he was suffering nobly and patiently—he was grunting and muttering to himself like any normal impatient patient—but because of the atmosphere he had created around him in the room. After staying there about ten minutes, during which we hardly spoke, I felt so uplifted that I went into the hospital chapel and knelt for a while before its hideous arty modernistic altar.
August 22. Talked to Swami today about the ultimatum from Belur Math; they won’t send another swami until Swami agrees to separate the monks and nuns more completely.
Swami seems to have accepted this fairly calmly. However, he remarked that it was such a pity I wasn’t a swami, because then I would have been able to help a lot during this interim period. So I said, smiling, “Perhaps in my next lifetime—”
“What do you mean—next lifetime?” he exclaimed indignantly. “You will not be reborn! You will go straight to the Ramakrishna loka!”
“Well, Swami, if I do, I’ll be sitting right at the back.”
August 28. I had almost forgotten this when, yesterday, Swami phoned and said—picking up our previous conversation, as he so often does—“In God’s eye, it is all the same.” He then went on to assure me that, in God’s eye, there is absolutely no difference between me and George and himself.
It’s easy to accept this theoretically, but, as far as I’m concerned, it’s only theoretically convincing. I can grasp the idea that the Eternal sees nothing but the Eternal in everyone and everything. To Swami, this is a fact, because Brahmananda told him that he sometimes saw everybody as God, playing in various forms.
I think, however, that Swami was perhaps saying this to me as a gentle rebuke to my overindulgence in humility, in my relationship with him. He is fond of telling other people how humble I am about my literary reputation. But he must know perfectly well what my humility really is—the other half of my vanity. It is so cozy and relaxing to play at being the lowest of the low, within his circle—which only tends to make me feel all the more sophisticated and superior in my attitude toward uninitiated outsiders, especially when they are literary intellectuals.
December 31. When we went to see Swami on the 26th, to bring him a crystal drinking glass for his birthday, he amazed us by at once peering at Don—his sight is now very poor—and saying, “There’s something different.” He had noticed what nearly everybody, including Don’s parents, has failed to notice—that Don has cut his mustache off.
Twenty
During the first months of 1976, I was working under pressure to finish Christopher and His Kind. This made me give up my diary keeping, and thus there is no record of our last visits to Swami. We saw him at least fifteen times before we left for New York and England, on May 21.
On May 29, while staying at the Montecito convent, Swami had a slight stroke and a fall. He was brought back at once to the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, where he was put into intensive care.
On May 31, Chris Wood died. When we had seen him, just before leaving Los Angeles, we had wondered if this might not be for the last time. Chris had already had several strokes and had turned into a skinny little bent-up man. But he hadn’t lost his dry-toned, slightly amused self-possession. “I’m perfectly happy at present,” he had told us. “When I stop being, I shall be quite ready to go.”
On June 1, Swami was taken out of intensive care but remained under cardiac observation. A few nuns from the Center were with him throughout much of the day. He remarked, “Tomorrow I’ll be normal.”
Nevertheless, this day was like a rehearsal of dying. Sometimes, Swami’s expression was indrawn, or he gazed into space with a fixity which seemed visionary. Sometimes, his face had a wondering, blissful smile on it and his hand was slightly raised in a gesture of blessing. This is preserved in a photograph which George took.
But, most of the time, he was in a state of normal consciousness. When they tried to make him more comfortable by screwing his adjustable bed up and down, he declared every position to be the wrong one. A nurse turned his bed toward the window, so that he should have a view of the Hollywood hills. He grumbled, “I’ve seen the Himalayas, I’ve seen the Alps—so what do I need this view for?”
Another nurse came to check the instrument which monitored Swami’s heartbeats. “Hi,” she greeted him. “Hi, honey,” he replied. When she told him, “Goodbye,” his answer was “Okay.” After she had left the room, he said, “Okay’s the only word they know here.”
He also spoke in Sanskrit or Bengali, which some of the nuns understood. He said, “Ananda mrtu,” meaning “blissful death.” Also, something about a chariot—how it comes to take away the departing soul. Then, in English, “You remember, ‘Swing low, sweet chariot’?”
He began to chant his mantram, which, of course, they had never heard before. He told them, “I’m saying the mantram out loud—this is a sign of death.” He made them all chant with him, as loud as they could, and he waved his arms vigorously like a conductor, although they urged him not to exert himself.
A disciple who had just come into the room exclaimed:
“How beautiful you look!” And Swami, as if standing aside and regarding himself, said, “I look beautiful in my death.”
Then he said, “Tell my children to come.” So the nuns phoned the rest of the monastics, who were already waiting near their telephones for news, to come to the hospital. About thirty-eight of them came. The nurse who had given permission for Swami to be visited was horrified when she realized, too late, how many had been admitted. But Swami’s manner, at that time, had such authority that nobody could refuse him. He spoke to each monastic privately, giving him or her a few words of instruction for the future.
On June 2, just as he had predicted, he was much better.
On June 3, Don and I, in London, got a belated cable which had been sent on June 1 to warn us that Swami was gravely ill. We immediately phoned Los Angeles and were told that he was out of danger. So this seemed to me to be yet another of Swami’s dramatic crises and recoveries. I was no longer seriously worried, and we decided not to return home earlier than we had planned, unless we got another warning. We never did.
On June 18, Swami was well enough to be brought back to the Center, where he would have trained nurses in attendance.
On June 21, he asked, “Is it July the first?” as if in expectation of some event.
On June 29, he began taking daily walks, supported by a nurse.
On July 3, he was weaker but could nevertheless be helped to walk around the temple. This was shortly after seven in the morning, because the garden was deserted at that time and there was no danger that he would be accosted by well-wishers.
That afternoon, he had a heart attack. He said firmly, “I don’t want to go to the hospital.” Later he said, “I am dying.” One of the nuns began to chant softly, “Hari Om, Ramakrishna,” but Swami stopped her, saying, “Don’t remind me now.”
That evening, he said, “Maharaj, why do you let me suffer?” Also, “Maharaj, I will come” or “Maharaj will come”—they couldn’t be sure which.
About an hour after this, he asked, “What time?” and was told eleven-fifteen. He said, “No, too soon—it must be midnight.” (It is generally agreed that Swami wished to wait until July 4, because that is the day on which Vivekananda left his body, in 1902.)
Just before midnight, Chetanananda was called. Swami’s lips were moving and his eyes were turned upward. Those who were in the room stood well back from the bed, for Swami’s breathing had become labored and they wanted to let him have as much air as possible. The window shades had been opened so that those who were gathered outside in the garden could see in.
Just after midnight, Chetanananda touched Swami’s head and began chanting, “Om, Hari Om, Ramakrishna.” With the first “Hari Om,” Swami gently exhaled and died.
A di
sciple who was a doctor had been called, but the message reached him too late. When he finally arrived, he said he was glad of this because, if he had come earlier, he would have felt obliged, as a medical man, to try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, although, as a disciple, he would have realized it was presumptuous to do so, since Swami had obviously wished to die exactly when he did.
After the prescribed interval of two hours, Swami’s body was dressed in monastic robes. And now the disciples began to keep a vigil in his room, which continued on into the morning. (After Don and I had got back to Los Angeles, some of them described to us what they had experienced: “We none of us wanted to leave. Swami was such a presence there. You felt such power, such awe. One of the nurses said, ‘I’ve seen so many people die, but with him it was different. I couldn’t feel he was dead.’”)
In the afternoon, when the morticians had come, Swami’s body was carried three times around the temple and then placed outside its open doors, with the head pointing toward the shrine, before being taken away to be cremated.
* * *
In October of that year, George flew to India with Swami’s ashes. Some of them were put into the Ganges opposite the Belur Math. Then George went up to Hardwar, to which Abanindra had run away from college to be with Maharaj, sixty-five years earlier. There George left the rest of the ashes, in waters which are held to be especially sacred, where the river comes down out of the great mountains.
Three Years Later
The reader may ask: Now that your Swami is dead, what are you left with?
I am left with Swami. His physical absence doesn’t make nearly as much difference to me as I had expected it would. I think about him as constantly as I ever did. What I do seem to be losing touch with is Swami’s Hindu pantheon of gods, goddesses, and divine incarnations. My Occidental consciousness is in the process of rejecting them, it seems, as imperfectly transplanted, culturally foreign bodies. Meanwhile, Ramakrishna, Brahmananda, Vivekananda, and Holy Mother remain to inspire me as powerfully individual figures—though Swami used to tell us that they are “all the same.”
Toward the end of his life, Swami seemed to identify the Divine Mother, God’s female aspect, almost completely with Holy Mother. He had one of the photographs of her enlarged and hung in his room. I meditate before a print of that same photograph—partly because I associate it particularly with Swami; partly because I need a mother figure through whom I can feel a more loving acceptance of my own mother, now that she is dead and my hostility toward her has left me.
I have had no visions of Swami since his death; no dreams of him, even, which were memorable. I have found myself saying to myself, “He knows everything about me, now”—which merely means that I no longer feel guilty when I do something that I wouldn’t have wanted him to know about during his lifetime. But this is child’s talk. I am only referring to Abanindra Nath Ghosh. The contact I sometimes think I feel isn’t with him but with what I believe he has now become, the Guru, a being who exists only to help his disciples. While the Guru was still within the body we called Prabhavananda, he gave us our mantrams. It is when I am saying my mantram that I very occasionally feel I am in communication with him. The mantram was a gift of his love, and love is communication. The mantram is all I have of him and all I need.
Such moments reassure me that “the real situation” does indeed exist and that an acceptance of it is my only safety. I recognize this in a flash of sanity from time to time. Then I lose it again.
Now that I am nearly seventy-five, I am mindful that death is near. I no longer avoid the thought of it; indeed, I dwell on the thought, as Vivekananda advises. My fear, insofar as I feel any, is of the manner in which death may come—or, worse still, of the manner in which it may be painfully, tediously delayed.
In the old days, I often said to myself that I should feel no fear if I could actually die in Swami’s presence. Suppose that I can somehow feel his presence right at the moment of death, and so die fearless—only to find that death is total extinction? Well, I see nothing terrible in that possibility.
There is a second possibility—that there is life after death, but not the kind of life Swami promised us. Eternal hell, for instance, with torments. Or an endless limbo of boredom, loneliness, regrets.
But here I suddenly feel on firm ground. Quite irrationally, I find I have faith in Swami’s faith, to this extent: if death isn’t the end, then I believe that the life to come will be more or less what he led us to expect. There will be “the real situation” and there will be the many who are still unable or unwilling to accept it. There will be a continuity of individual problems which remain to be worked out.
My own problem will be, presumably, that I find myself in the Ramakrishna loka—and how my individualistic ego shrinks from that prospect! I remember how often, despite my love for Swami, I used to draw a breath of relief when I left his room. I was like a child escaping from the presence of an elder, simply because he needs to breathe a less rarefied atmosphere, to feel himself free to chatter and be silly. How could I endure the combined presence of Ramakrishna, Holy Mother, Maharaj, and Swamiji? Well, I suppose that is what the concept of purgatory is all about. You hate it until you slowly and painfully learn to love it, and when you do, it automatically becomes paradise. Don, of course, would be arriving there too, before very long. And that would help me enormously.
Meanwhile, my life is still beautiful to me—beautiful because of Don, because of the enduring fascination of my efforts to describe my life experience in my writing, because of my interest in the various predicaments of my fellow travelers on this journey. How I wish I were able to reassure them that all is ultimately well—particularly those who are quite certain that it isn’t; that life is meaningless and unjust! I can’t reassure them, because I can’t speak with the absolute authority of a knower.
All I can offer them is this book, which I have written about matters I only partially understand, in the hope that it may somehow, to some readers, reveal glimpses of inner truth which remain hidden from its author.
Books by Christopher Isherwood
NOVELS
A Meeting by the River
A Single Man
Down There on a Visit
The World in the Evening
Prater Violet
Goodbye to Berlin
The Last of Mr. Norris
(English title: Mr. Norris Changes Trains)
The Memorial
All the Conspirators
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
My Guru and His Disciple
Christopher and His Kind
Kathleen and Frank
Lions and Shadows
BIOGRAPHY
Ramakrishna and His Disciples
PLAYS (with W. H. Auden)
On the Frontier
The Ascent of F6
The Dog beneath the Skin
TRAVEL
The Condor and the Cows
Journey to a War (with W. H. Auden)
COLLECTION
Exhumations
TRANSLATIONS
The Intimate Journals of Charles Baudelaire
(and the following with Swami Prabhavananda)
The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali
Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination
The Bhagavad-Gita
Copyright © 1980 by Christopher Isherwood
All rights reserved
Library of Congress catalog card number: 80-638
Published in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto
eISBN 9781466853300
First eBook edition: August 2013
Christopher Isherwood, My Guru and His Disciple
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