You might be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage
You may be a businessman or some high-degree thief
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
—Bob Dylan
There is an expression that when the flowers open, the bees come uninvited. Maharaji was the flower. We were two of the bees—the expanding group of young seekers who had come from everywhere around the world. Girija and I moved into a small white detached stucco house that hugged the hills across the river from the ashram. We shared the “White House” with four or five other devotees of Maharaji. For the next several months we settled into the ashram routine.
Most days began with arti in the early morning, followed by some combination of chanting, praying, meditating, reading scriptures, darshan with Maharaji, napping, drinking tea, and eating sweets and deep-fried food. Days usually concluded with another darshan just before evening, when those who had to catch the bus for Nainital and the hotels left the ashram. Those of us who did not have to catch the bus stayed as long as Maharaji let us.
No two days were the same. Tuesday was Hanuman’s day, and with it came the chanting of the Hanuman Chalisa and a light fast. All grains were prohibited, but we were allowed to eat sweets and fruit, so it wasn’t a very demanding fast. We studied the Ramayana, especially the Sunderkand, the chapter on Hanuman. On other days we might read the Mahabharata—the great Indian epic of the battle between good and evil, especially the chapter that has come to be known as the Bhagavad Gita, the “Song of God.” We were avid readers of a variety of spiritual texts: the I Ching, the Koran, the Bible, the Tao Te Ching, the Buddhist Dhammapada. Someone around the ashram was always reading the The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Practitioners of every stripe, Muslim, Sikh, and Jain, came through as well.
Maharaji took responsibility for me the way a parent takes responsibility for a child. I had gone from skeptical observer to devotee; I had become his chela.
One evening, Maharaji called to me. “Doctor America, I have a headache. Do you have medicine for me?”
I knew that he liked Tiger Balm, a pungent ointment Indians thought alleviated muscle pains. It came in a small round red tin with Chinese characters on it. I handed it to him. He took it, balanced it on his head, and laughed. “I feel much better. My headache is gone. See, Doctor America has fixed my pain.” With an impish smile, he looked at me, the red tin balancing on his bald head, and giggled. He asked me whether everything was okay. “Girija okay? Food okay? Do you want to run away from the ashram again?”
Maharaji, I quickly discovered, loved to play. He laughed continuously, saw humor in everything, even the most serious relationships between guru and chela, doctor and patient, God and human.
Indians call this play leela. It’s something like the manifestation of the divine in a human performance. Rama, an emanation or Avatar of the god Vishnu, plays out his leela in the Ramayana. Krishna plays one leela in the Mahabharata. I think of Jesus and his parables, the lessons of which have lasted millennia. Gurus have their own kind of leela. It is their way of teaching. Maharaji taught in parables, through leela and joyful improvisation. It felt like a divine version of how Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm and Ken Kesey and the Pranksters improvised performance art, filling a gray day with paisley, tie-dye, and rainbows—the leela of the counterculture. Maharaji imparted wisdom by keeping us off balance. I never knew what to expect.
One morning after prayers, we gathered around Maharaji for darshan as usual. He was sitting on his tucket, wrapped in his usual plaid wool blanket, surrounded by a dozen Western devotees. He was deep in concentration, his eyes half closed, while he silently mouthed the name of God, Ram, Ram, Ram. Girija and I sat down, which seemed to wake him with a start. He smiled and said, “Doctor America, Doctor America, my good friend Lama Govinda is ill. Please go visit him and care for him.”
Lama Anagarika Govinda was one of the spiritual heroes for my generation. Born in 1898 in Waldheim, Germany, as Ernst Lothar Hoffmann, he became a Buddhist at the age of eighteen. He studied in Sri Lanka, traveled with the poet Rabindranath Tagore, and spent nearly two decades in Tibet, where he studied the habits of Tibetan lamas, many of whom he described as being able to fly or walk across the entire country in one night. On the Hog Farm buses, we had passed around his spiritual memoir, The Way of the White Clouds, marveling at the supernatural tales.
Maharaji’s driver, Habibullah, drove Girija and me to Almora, where Lama Govinda lived with his wife, Li Gotami, a Parsi artist. It was about a one-hour drive northeast toward the white caps of the mountains—just up the street in the context of the Himalayan foothills. Almora was home to decades of English eccentrics, mystics, and writers during the British Raj, their simple hill station houses lined up along a hilltop known affectionately as Crank’s Ridge. It became part of the Hippie Trail in India after Timothy Leary reportedly ran naked across the clearing, and was later dubbed Hippie Hill. Among the many visitors to Lama Govinda were Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, and Gary Snyder. When we arrived, Li Gotami stood in front of the gate trying to shoo Girija and me away, but I told her that Neem Karoli Baba wanted me to check in on Lama Govinda. She was surprised that Maharaji knew Lama Govinda was ill.
Together, we walked up the hill to the modest old British house. Gray-bearded, thin, and slightly stooped, Lama Govinda got up slowly from a chaise longue. He had a long nose, high cheekbones, pale skin, and a serious mien that exploded into a wide grin at the best moments. He wore a pointy Tibetan pundit’s maroon hat, with earflaps that made him look sweet and impish. He wore several malas, or Tibetan prayer beads, around his neck; a dark maroon shawl was wrapped around his shoulders. Li Gotami was dressed in colors matching Lama’s—maroon hat, shawl, and a blouse of yellow cotton or wool.
A few days earlier, Lama Govinda had become dizzy and fallen. His arms and legs were weak, his blood pressure inconsistent. His description of the light-headedness and brief loss of consciousness matched the symptoms of a transient ischemic attack, a “warning stroke” as it used to be called, caused by a momentary tiny clot in the cerebral arteries that dissolves within a minute or two. The experience is usually very alarming, but Lama Govinda seemed quite at peace. He didn’t want me to fuss over him. Instead, he wanted to talk about Maharaji and Girija’s and my spiritual path. I examined him under protest. His pulse was good, his heartbeat sound. He was a little dehydrated, which could have contributed to his dizziness.
I wanted to take him to Delhi, where he could get a full checkup, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I gave him the phone number of the teashop across the street from the ashram in Kainchi and promised to return in two weeks.
After the examination, he served us dark, bitter, salted Tibetan tea, thick with sour yak milk. “What is Maharaji teaching the Westerners, Larry?” he asked. “What kind of meditation? What kind of bhakti [devotion]? Are you all reading the Bhagavad Gita and the stories of Hanuman?”
Yes, I told him, and we were also reading his book The Way of the White Clouds. He laughed and encouraged us to read the works of his friend Walter Evans-Wentz, especially his translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and of the works of the great Tibetan saint Milarepa.
Soon, it was time to go. “But I have not paid you for the house call,” Lama Govinda said to us.
“I have never taken payment for a house call, let alone one for a lama. I didn’t do anything anyway,” I replied.
“Well then, let me bless you,” he responded.
I stood in front of him. He put his left hand on Girija’s head and his right hand on mine and started to chant. As he repeated his prayer, all I could catch was Om mani, padme hum, softer and softer. I felt pulled into a meditative state in which we were there and nothing was there at the same time. It was pure bliss, pure consciousness, pure being, completely free of time and space. It was the second time since I had come to the Himalayas that a spiritual teacher had unexpectedly opened my heart.
We remained in silence. Girija’s eyes lit bright with joy.
We drove back to the ashram from Almora—we felt so light we seemed to fly—and reported on Lama Govinda’s health to Maharaji. I mentioned we’d gotten the better of the bargain, a routine house call in exchange for one of Lama Govinda’s blessings. Maharaji laughed and pulled my beard and kept repeating to everyone who came for darshan: “Look at this! Doctor America has healed Lama Govinda.” I realized then that we were the ones being healed; Maharaji had sent Girija and me to experience Lama Govinda’s blessing.
Every day after that I found myself trying to figure out how the gentle touch of my guru or Lama Govinda could unleash something that opened my heart so expansively to the world. In those moments of dissolution, I loved everyone; I was love, unconditional and unlimited, full of compassion. I wanted to ease the suffering of everyone. Was this what it had been like for Ram Dass, a love so pure it fundamentally changes what we were trained to think of as reality? I wanted to spend the rest of my life in pursuit of this feeling, willingly throwing myself into its wonderful addiction, while at the same time trying to figure out how to put such an explosion of love into practice, in life, in the world. It was different from the experiences I had with LSD and psilocybin.
When Maharaji requested that Ram Dass give him a strong dose of LSD, Ram Dass remained in his presence for an hour. He expected some reaction from Maharaji, but nothing happened. Maharaji seemed unaffected by it. Maharaji called LSD “yogi medicine,” and many people say he told them variations on the same theme about it: “LSD puts you into the room with God or Christ. It allows you to bow down to Christ, but you are there like a thief sneaking into the presence. It will wear off and you will be back where you started.” Other times he asked, “Why sneak in to the presence of God like a thief when you cannot stay? Why not earn your way in through spiritual practices?”
Maharaji taught us that there are many paths to God, many forms of yoga—the “yoking” of one’s soul to God—and that all paths are equal. About the different religions, Maharaji often said Sub ek, all one, “there is only One. All religions are the same. You should think there are no differences between Ram and Christ. God allows them to serve in different ways. They all lead to one-pointedness.” But the Hindu belief that all yogas and paths to God are equal is complemented by the belief that there is a path best suited to every soul. Your individual fate, your karma, determines your customized path, your own way to God, your own dharma, your own unique path to enter into the kingdom. Through a combination of study, practice, and discussion, we would each discover our own way.
Maharaji was sometimes gone from the ashram for reasons that were mysterious to me at the time. During those periods, we read, studied, meditated, chanted, and talked about dharma. At other times he sent us off as pilgrims during the autumn, when it became too cold in Kainchi, to visit other famous spiritual masters near his winter ashram in Vrindavan: Sai Baba and Krishnamurti, Muktananda, the Dalai Lama, Ananda Moyi Ma, and Pugal Baba (Crazy Baba). Girija and I took S. N. Goenka’s Buddhist meditation course in Benares and visited Maharaji’s devotees in Allahabad.
On one of his long periods away from Kainchi, we spent a month in Orissa and rented a house by the Bay of Bengal in a town called Puri. We swam in the ocean, hired a car, and spent a couple of weeks touring the tribal communities. We met the native inhabitants of India, called the Adivasis, the First People—the Ho tribe, the Santhals, and the Gonds. As successive invaders had come to India—Aryans, Mughals, and British—these dark-skinned peoples had been pushed into more remote and hostile lands, like our own Native Americans or the Aborigines in Australia. The Adivasi were among the poorest people in India. On one trip to a village, Girija and I visited gatherers who lived off only what they found or foraged. They smashed nuts and berries and then mixed them with water. They did not have a word for cooked food; they used the same word for “eat” and “drink.” Their life expectancy was about thirty years. Half their children died before the age of five from diseases that held no mystery for modern medicine; many women died during childbirth. There was nothing noble or mythic about their lives. The suffering was overwhelming.
Ram Dass tells the story of visiting Benares, where he came across lepers, beggars, amputees, and children with twisted, deformed bodies. He asked himself what a good person does when confronted with such suffering, how one can allocate resources, deciding, in a hell realm like this, who to help, who should receive the largesse of a few coins from one’s pocket. He started giving out rupees and quickly realized that the suffering was an unquenchable fire. No matter how many rupees he gave out, it wouldn’t make a difference. It was like the spiritual contest between Wavy and Trungpa. One needs a spiritual grounding to figure out, as Ken Kesey had said, how to put one’s own bit of good where it will do the most good.
Watching the Adivasi children die from common diseases triggered something in me. I found myself thinking like a doctor again. The mystical experiences had reawakened the certainty that God was real and that I had some duty to find out how I could both serve God and keep that feeling of love I had experienced. I wanted to ask Maharaji for guidance toward some service, some action, something I could do for the people who were suffering in service to them and my soul. I needed to find my own dharma, my own customized path. But I was in no hurry.
When we returned to Kainchi, we discovered that Maharaji had decamped to his winter ashram in Vrindavan, so we turned around and headed back to the lower and warmer environs between Agra and Delhi. As at Kainchi, the highlight of every day was the same—to spend as much time as possible sitting with Maharaji in darshan and asking him questions. He had given different members of the satsang quite different instruction. To some he said they should deepen their meditation practice: “Worldly people go outward, but you must go in like the tortoise, withdrawn, within your shell.” And to others he said they should always keep their thoughts only on God: “If you remember God, then He takes care of everything. He who knows God knows everything.” And when he was asked, “What is the best form to worship God?” he answered, “Every form.” As we sat on the veranda where Maharaji’s tucket was placed, I would try to sit up straight, slipping in and out of meditation, in and out of sleep if it was a hot day. Maharaji would start to give darshan to Westerners, handing them apples or oranges or flowers. Sometimes, seeing me trying to meditate, especially if I had nodded off, he threw apples to me or at me—aimed just at my testicles, it seemed. I felt confused.
A few days later, Girija and I were drinking tea in the rear of the temple complex. Maharaji sent his translator to get us. We came quickly to the veranda where Maharaji was sitting, wrapped in his blanket on his tucket surrounded by several Indian devotees. We pranam-ed, palms together, bowing low.
“Doctor America!” Maharaji yelled. “How much money do you have?” He turned toward me and looked up at the heavens, peeking at some invisible timeline that stretched through permutations and combinations of events into a possible future that I could not see.
“Doctor America,” he repeated, louder this time, “how much money do you have?”
“I have about five hundred dollars,” I answered in Hindi.
“Doctor—Doctor America! Five hundred dollars! Is that all you have? Jut ne bola? Is this not a lie? Are you telling the truth? How much money do you have?”
“Five hundred dollars. That’s it.”
“Oh, you mean that’s all you have in India, right? How much money do you have in America?”
I figured how much money I had left from my internship and the movie caravan and the weekends I had worked as an emergency room doctor in Los Angeles.
“I have another five hundred dollars back in America,” I said.
“Hare bo! [Wow!],” he said, laughing in a singsong kind of way. “That is not much money for a doctor. Five hundred here, five hundred there. You no doctor. Doctor America is no doctor. No doctor.”
He smiled at Girija. “Will you have to get a job?” he asked me.
A job? No one in the satsang held a job in any conventional sense. And how could we get work permits? I could not practice medicine in India even if I wanted to. We were expats, living in an ashram, on tourist visas. Our work was being with Maharaji.
“You are no doctor,” Maharaji said in English, putting the back of his hand up to his forehead, impersonating a carnival fortune-teller, giggling, rocking from left to right.
“You are no doctor, you are no doctor, you are no doctor, you no doctor, you-en-oh doctor, you-en-oh doctor . . . ah . . . you-en-oh . . . Doctor America is going to go to work for the you-en-oh and be a doctor for the United Nations. You will go to the villages and give vaccinations.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. “You want me to give a shot to someone here?”
He began chanting again. “Doctor America is going to become you-en-oh doctor, you-en-oh doctor. United Nations Organization doctor.”
Ahh. U-N-O. What we call the United Nations—U-N in English. Much of the rest of the world calls it UNO, pronounced “you-en-oh.” United Nations Organization signs were all over India.
“You will work for the United Nations,” he said. “You are going to go to villages and give vaccinations against smallpox.”
“Smallpox?”
“Smallpox, this terrible disease, this mahamari, this great epidemic, is killing our children. You will go to Delhi, join the United Nations, go to villages and give vaccinations against smallpox. It will be unmulan, eradicated from the world. This is God’s gift to humanity because of the dedicated health workers. God will help lift this burden of this terrible disease from humanity.”
Throughout India and Nepal, I had seen people with terrible disfiguring scars from old smallpox. I’d never seen an active case and only dimly remembered something about Edward Jenner and cowpox and a vaccine in the eighteenth century. But I did remember giving smallpox vaccinations to Wavy and the Medicine Ball Caravan crew. I also remembered driving by the WHO building in Delhi, across from the Yamuna River. I presumed that’s what he meant by UN or UNO, the specialized agency of the United Nations, the World Health Organization.
My mind traveled like crazy. My mind could go to work for the United Nations, for smallpox, to give vaccinations—but I couldn’t. It would have been easier to accept Maharaji’s saying I would fly on a magic carpet or be in two places at once than his telling me that I would work for the United Nations. I had no experience in public health.
This crazy idea took my breath away. Later that night, Girija and I walked back to our room, through the peacock gardens, toward the old city of Vrindavan. It was all we could talk about. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to start—so I decided to ignore what Maharaji had said, hoping he’d eventually forget about it.