8
Devotion and the Guru
We come now, in our journey through all the many and varied routes to Brahman, to the path of bhakti yoga, or devotion— which means we’re going to be talking, among other things, about the ins and outs of gurus. We’ll talk about the method of the guru: how it works, what you do, and what the guru does or doesn’t do. And we’ll talk a lot about my guru, Maharajji—because, although you may not believe it, he is the man behind the scenes here. All this is really his trip; I’m just the windup robot.
Bhakti, by its nature, is not a practice that we can sit down and figure out intellectually. Devotion has to do with the heart, and there is something a little absurd in thinking about heart trips. Devotion is something experienced in a realm that is not necessarily conceptual, and so it doesn’t lend itself very easily to words. Hafez, the poet, said, “O thou who are trying to learn the marvel of love from the copy book of reason, I’m very much afraid that you will never really see the point.” 1 He’s telling us that to the extent that we try to think our way through the issue of devotion, we’re not going to get very far, because devotion isn’t thought about, it’s felt. And to feel it, we have to experience it directly: through doing japa, through singing kirtan, through ritual and mantra and prayer, through remembering— through all the practices of merging in love, and letting love happen to each of us. That’s the only way we will come to know about bhakti practices.
So if you want to know about bhakti yoga and you aren’t already doing devotional practices, you might want to take this as an opportunity to start exploring them. Do it, and see what it feels like. There are some suggestions in the syllabus for setting up a puja table and working with japa, for example; you can start with that, or find some practice of your own that feels right to you. Begin nurturing the quality of devotion within yourself. The devotion can be directed toward some form of God that draws you toward itself (which is what in India is called the Ishta Dev). It can be directed toward a guru. It can be directed toward Gaia, or toward the Void, or toward your pussycat. It can be directed toward whatever form of God it is that opens your heart. Set aside a little time every day and spend a few minutes doing some devotional practice in relation to that being. Sing. Pray. Offer a candle flame or some food. Begin opening your heart, cultivating feelings of love and appreciation.
The Gita is rooted in devotion. Although it mostly concerns itself with service to God and with the higher Wisdom, all of that is set within a framework of devotion. At one point, Krishna says to Arjuna, It is because of your love that I am allowing you to hear and see all this. The vision that Krishna bestows on Arjuna, the vision of the cosmic form of the universe, is the vision that comes when the third eye opens and we “see without looking.” It is incredible grace to be given that vision, and the awesome and aweful nature of that vision was bestowed on Arjuna, Krishna tells him, only because of his love, because of his devotion and the purity of his relationship to Krishna.
Tracing the sequence laid out in the Gita, we start with what we call lower knowledge, which leads to a certain kind of faith: the lower mind’s faith in the possibility that there might be something the higher mind knows, even though the lower mind doesn’t. That’s quite a leap of faith for the lower mind! That faith leads us to do practices, through which we start to open a bit, which allows us to have some visions or some direct immediate experiences, which in turn lead us to deeper practices, which ultimately bring us to the higher wisdom, the wisdom of Brahman. But that entire sequence, which involves jnana yoga and karma yoga and purification and all the rest of it, takes place within a context of devotion, which is the prerequisite for all the rest of it. The practices all bear fruit because of Arjuna’s love for Krishna.
Evening Kirtan in the Main Hall: In the evening there were sessions of kirtan, a devotional practice of singing the names of God or the Goddess. Kirtan is like a meditation practice that deepens with time, so a single chant would often continue for half an hour or more, repeating the same names again and again: Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai, Jai Ram or Kali, Durga, Namo, Namah. (The musicians here are Ganga Dhar Gerhard on tabla, Dwarkanath Bonner on harmonium, and Krishna Das on ektara and vocals.
In the literature about the practices that bring us to Brahman— what we would call the mystical literature—there are descriptions of what seem to be two very different categories of mystical experience. In one of them, the dominant feature is escape from the phenomenal world and all that conditions it—what in Buddhism is known as “attaining nibbana.” In the other, equally frequent, type of mystical experience, love is the central phenomenon. It’s characterized by the quality of being absorbed in an all-enveloping love. Those represent two alternative experiences of the Brahman.
Often times it may seem that there is a tremendous struggle going on between the jnanis and the bhaktis, between what we might call the head-trippers and the heart-trippers, between the people who say, “Don’t buy into all those emotional trips,” and the people who say, “It’s OK—drown in the ocean of love.” In the contrast, devotion can look pretty sloppy and mushy, while the intellect looks so clean and tight. But one of the sages in India, when he was asked to compare jnana and bhakti yoga said, “Jnana yoga is like a lamp; bhakti yoga is like a gem. The gem only glows by reflected light, while the lamp is its own illumination. But a lamp constantly requires attention—more oil, a new wick—while the gem goes on glowing without any effort on its part.”
The main objection jnanis usually raise about bhakti is that it is dualistic: there’s the gem, and there’s the light source. That’s the crux of their opposition to devotion—that devotion is, by its very nature, a dualistic practice. To be a bhakti, you have to be devoted to something, say the jnanis, and since eventually you’re going to have to give up subject-object distinctions, wouldn’t it be better not to get sucked more deeply into them in the first place? That’s a general outline of the way the argument runs.
That criticism of bhakti hinges on thinking that the vehicle for getting to the top of the mountain has to look like the mountaintop itself. A bhakti like me, on the other hand, would frame the question a different way; I would ask, “Can I afford to use dualism to get to nondualism?” It’s certainly true that dualism can be a trap, and that we can get hooked on the object of our devotion. Jnana can also be a trap, as we have seen; we can get hooked on our need to know. All methods are traps. We just have to choose our traps wisely, and hope they’ll self-destruct after they’ve served their purpose. A dualistic method, if it’s used with wisdom, can be a first-rate vehicle into nondualism. As the method works, you go beyond the method, and the whole thing falls away.
So we can acknowledge the problem, and still use the practices of bhakti yoga. Krishna says in the Gita, “It’s very difficult to go the route of merely identifying with the unmanifest.” That’s known as “the high path that has no railing.” It isn’t easy to make the leap from our individuality directly into nondualism. In order to come to the wisdom of the direct experience of Brahman, we have to be intensely one-pointed about where we are going. The lubrication that can grease that process, and so make the whole thing much easier, is an intense feeling of love for what it is you’re moving toward. Whether you call that a love of Truth, or a love of God, or a love of guru, or a love of the Mother, or a love of the Void—it doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens in your heart through that kind of intense emotional commitment to whatever it is.
We gravitate toward the experience of that kind of love, and it makes the opening of the heart happen very easily, very naturally. And that heart opening then allows us to break out of our identification with the manas, the lower mind, because we’re so busy focusing on thoughts of our beloved. Your thoughts turn naturally toward the one you love, don’t they? If you love someone, you can hardly stop thinking about them. If you’re in love with God, and your thoughts are constantly turning toward Her, they’re no longer trapped in the stuff of the ego. In the Psalms, David says, “Because my heart was enkindled, my reins were also changed.” He’s using the chariot image, as the Gita does, in which the reins are what control the mind. So David is saying,When my heart was opened, that made it easier for my mind to turn to God. That’s the way devotion bolsters jnani practices—it becomes easier to turn the mind in a certain direction, by using the reins of the heart.
My relationship to Maharajji is a relationship of the heart, a relationship of love. My love for him started out in a very dualistic place; I wanted to rub his feet and look at his form and be around him. Then, as time went on, it was not that the love grew less, but that the love grew different. It kept growing deeper and deeper, until I didn’t really care any more whether I was with his form or not. And then, as the love went deeper still, I was no longer relating at all anymore to “that man in India”; I was relating to the essence of “guru-ness,” and I began to experience it within myself, in relation to him. The whole quality of the relationship kept changing and changing, as I grew in wisdom, as my heart opened, and as my surrender went deeper. I’ve kidded about it by saying that I worshipped his form until I finally realized that it was just the doorpost to the real thing. I was rubbing the doorpost, worshipping the doorpost; and then I saw that it was just the doorpost, and beyond it . . . ahhhhhh!
That’s the way devotional practice works. We make use of the guru and of the love the guru awakens in us to bring us to the doorway. Then we look through—and what we see there draws us in, and in, and in. Devotion, as a method, takes us right back into the innermost part of ourselves, right back into the unformed—but it greases the skids for us. Practices like sacrifice or renunciation, which can seem really difficult if you’re coming at them in a rajasic, “I can do it!” way, become incredibly easy in the presence of love. Sure you’ll do it. Again, it’s like something we see in a powerful love relationship, when you care more about your beloved than you do about yourself. Your favorite food is brought to the table, and your main concern is that the other person gets enough of it, even if it means that you don’t; you are fulfilled by her eating it. It’s what you experience when you’re a parent; somebody says, “You do so much for your child—aren’t you the self-sacrificing one!” But to you, it doesn’t feel like sacrifice—it’s joy.
Well, it’s the same way with practices. Austerities, done with a dry heart, are heavy. But when done with love, you say, “Oh, yeah—I’ll gladly do this for my beloved. I’ll give that up, because that will get me closer.” When you’re eager to get close to your beloved, you can’t give things up fast enough: “That’s getting in the way—I don’t want to have anything more to do with that.” That’s the way bhakti yoga works. It’s the yoga of the heart, a yoga of loving openness to God, and it uses all our emotions to keep us working on the stuff that will eventually bring us to the Brahman.
It should be clear, I hope, that the love we’re talking about here is not romantic love. It isn’t at the level of “I love so-and-so because he has a great personality.” It’s a different species of love. It’s the place of love where you meet every other being in your heart of hearts. It’s what’s called conscious love, or Christ love, or agape. It’s the kind of love that, like the sun, shines on everything, whether it’s “lovable” or not. It doesn’t sit around judging whether it can afford to love this being or that being—it just loves everything, regardless. C. S. Lewis, in Perelandra, conveyed the spirit of that love; he said, “Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely superfluous. And your love shall be like His [meaning God’s], born neither of your need, nor of my deserving, but just bounty, plain bounty.”
When a being becomes love, everything that person touches is love; it all rests within the aura of love. Meher Baba described one of the qualities of that kind of love when he said: “Love has to spring spontaneously from within. It is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force; love and coercion can never go together. But though love cannot be forced on anyone, it can be awakened in him through love itself. Love is essentially self-communicative. Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. True love is unconquerable and irresistible, and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.”
Meher Baba’s comment that love is not amenable to any kind of coercion is true down to the subtlest levels, the little psychological coercions. Even when it comes out of the best of intentions, coercion still doesn’t work. Say I’m sitting with somebody, and I sense that that person’s heart is closed. What I want to say is “Open your heart—you need to love more,” but I know that won’t be heard. So I turn on the manipulation; I say, “Tell me about this or that in your life. How does that make you feel?” By coaxing out the emotions, I’m really trying to subtly coerce that person into opening his or her heart. And of course it doesn’t work. So after a while, I give up; I stop trying so hard. Instead, I just hang out with the person, and love her or him. I’m just there with the person in love. He may say, “Well, I still don’t feel anything!” but then he gets up to leave and he asks, “Can I hug you?” “Why do you want to hug me if you don’t feel anything?” “I don’t know. I just do.”
When people say to me, “I don’t feel any love. I don’t feel any of this stuff you’re talking about,” I think about that Thomas Merton quote from Seeds of Contemplation; he said, “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” It’s only when our despair reaches rock bottom that the opportunity occurs for the heart to open. So if someone says to me, “I feel nothing; I feel dead inside,”—that, to me, is a critical moment. It’s a moment when there is the possibility of the heart opening.
But that only works when the despair is deep enough. Sometimes I’ll see that it isn’t, that the person is still trying to think her or his way out. Then I’ll usually say, “Go away and suffer some more, and come back in about a year. You haven’t suffered enough yet.”
Often people don’t seem to think that that’s compassionate advice. That’s because it’s so hard for us to hear the truth of the matter: that suffering is grace. The suffering born of the feeling that our hearts are closed will ultimately open our hearts. Reason will never allow us to understand that one!
When we’ve got our troubles, our sorrows, our difficulties (which every one of us has), it’s hard for us to hear that all of that is a measure of grace that’s being given to us. It sounds so Pollyannaish, or so masochistic, or something. It’s only in the space of complete love and faith and trust that it starts to make sense to us. Maharajji said, “I love suffering. It brings me so close to God. You get jnana—wisdom— from suffering. You are alone with God when you are sick, you call on God when you suffer.”
Devotion is what brings us to the place where we can embrace suffering in that way, because our love is so strong. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might,” says the Bible. Now consider: Could that line possibly actually mean something? Could it possibly be talking about something real, something that is actually there for me to open to—loving God with all my heart and soul and might?
The history of devotional yoga is rich with examples of the most intense love, examples of beings for whom the love gets overwhelmingly powerful. In Isaiah, the Bible talks about those who are “drunken, but not with wine. They stagger, but not with strong drink.” There are beings like that in India, beings who are completely lost in love, totally drunk with it. They’re called masts, or Godintoxicants. In this country, people like that would probably be considered psychotic and sent to mental hospitals. However, there is a difference between psychosis and God-intoxication:The masts are not in the world, but all screwed up about it because of their anxieties, the way psychotics are; in a way, masts are no longer in the world at all. Their fifth chakra is wide open, and they are flooded with the experience of God. They have turned inward toward God, and they couldn’t care less about their bodies or their role in the social scene. All of that has just fallen away, and so they can’t keep their scene together anymore.
In India, it’s understood that people like the masts are undergoing a spiritual transformation. Meher Baba used to go around and bathe the masts; he’d build places for them to stay, and take care of them in ashrams. Nobody else wanted to be around them, because they were so crazy and flipped out and wild. When people are going through stages like that, it’s often inconvenient to have them around. We say, “That person is too neurotic; I wish he would go away.” But with our own quieting, a different sort of recognition comes, and we honor the fact that the person may be going through some sort of very profound spiritual awakening, and that he must be treated with a lot of love and compassion.
Ramakrishna had that kind of intense, devotional love. He said, “Cry unto the Lord with a longing and yearning heart, and then you shall see Him. People would shed a jug full of tears for the sake of their wife and children, they would drown themselves in a flood of tears for the sake of money, but who cries for the Lord?” Think about what you have cried for in your lifetime. Was it when somebody put you down? When you lost something? When you made a fool of yourself? Whatever it was, it probably wasn’t because you weren’t close enough to God. When you cry out for God with that same kind of desperate yearning, “then you shall see Him.”
There was a beautiful devotee of God, a sixteenth-century saint, born in Rajasthan. Her name was Mirabai, and she sang of her devotion, and created incredible bhakti love songs. Here’s an example of one of her poems: “Oh black vultures, eat away everything of this flesh—but discriminately. Leave these two eyes, for they still hope to see the Lord. Oh black vultures, pull out these eyes as well, and take them to His presence—only make an offering of them to the Lord before you devour them.” 2 That’s certainly an intense kind of love. In fact, if you look at it from a hardheaded place, it seems absolutely grotesque. But if you can imagine loving something so much that nothing else matters—nothing else—then you can experience what Mirabai is singing about. The body means nothing at all—just the love. Just the love.
Tulsidas was a Hindu poet who lived in Banaras (Varanasi) in the late sixteenth century. He was a great devotee of Rama; and he wrote a kind of folk version of the Ramayana, called Ramacharitamanasa; it is total, liquid, bhakti love. Just to give you the flavor of how drunk with love Tulsidas is, here he is talking about his beloved, about Rama: “I adore the Lord of the universe bearing the name of Rama, the chief of Raghu’s line and the crest jewel of kings, the mine of compassion, the dispeller of all sins, appearing in human form through his maya, his deluding potency. The greatest of all Gods, the bestower of supreme peace in the form of final Beatitude, placid, eternal, beyond the ordinary means of cognition, sinless, and all pervading. There is no other craving in my heart, O Lord of the Raghus: Grant me intense devotion to your feet, O Crest Jewel, and free my mind from faults.” You can feel his way of relating to God—just love and devotion and yum-yum-yum. The overwhelming outpouring of love.
The point of all the bhakti practices is to kindle that kind of love, and then to direct it toward God or toward the guru. One can connect it with some concept of a Supreme Being—the Lord God Jehovah, or Purushatma, or Krishna, or Rama. Or one can find some form on the physical plane to love, someone to use as a doorway and eventually, through the love, to pass beyond. Whatever the form, we open our hearts to it. We use singing, we use praying, we use chanting, we use remembering, we use any and all of the practices of bhakti devotion to fan the intensity of our love for that Being who has awakened our heart.
Guru Kripa, or the method of the guru, is one form of bhakti practice. It is the specific form of bhakti that focuses on the guru, and on the guru’s grace or the guru’s blessing. It happens to be the method I personally follow, although it’s kind of a strange one here in the West. We in the West generally don’t take well to the idea of gurus. A few years ago, I was asked to review a book by a couple of American social scientists who were writing about “primitive phenomena,” in which context they were discussing the guru. Here was the sentence where they lost me: “The Guru is a real or fantasy authoritarian figure whose basic function seems to be to represent a cultural sanction for the wanted or desired activity, and by his presence to help bring it about.” I guess that’s about as much as the intellect can ever understand about the guru, because that’s what the guru looks like from the outside in. And that is precisely the limitation of an objective view of the guru, because the relationship with the guru is totally an internal matter, and has nothing at all to do with that kind of intellectualized process.
Puja Table: Each student was encouraged to create a sacred space where she or he could do personal spiritual practices, including meditation, mantra, and puja. This puja table was one of the shrines created at Naropa. The background is a prayer shawl with the name of Ram inscribed on it. The large picture shows Ram, his wife, Sita, his brother Lakshman, and the monkey-god Hanuman. On the altar are pictures of Maharajji and Hanuman, flowers, a bell, and a bottle of water from the Ganges River in India.
The essence of a relationship with a guru is love: The guru is a being who awakens incredible love in us, and then uses our love to awaken us out of the illusion of duality. The relationship between the guru and the chela was beautifully described by Ramana Maharshi (see if you can catch this image): “It’s like an elephant waking up upon seeing a lion in a dream.” The elephant is asleep, and in its dream a lion appears, which jolts the elephant awake. Ramana Maharshi goes on: “Just as the appearance of the dream-lion is enough to wake the elephant, so also is the glance of Grace from the Master enough to waken the devotee from the sleep of ignorance to the knowledge of the Real.” 3 Notice the implications of that: that the guru, as a separate entity, exists only within the illusion of separateness, within the dream. The minute the method of the guru has worked, it’s awakened you, and it ceases to be anything at all. It has an automatic, built-in self-destruct mechanism. You use it until it opens you in a certain way, and then you see through it and let go of it. The guru becomes irrelevant.
I’ve mentioned the way my relationship with my own guru became less and less rooted in dualism as time went on. Sometime after I’d first met Maharajji, I was sitting across the courtyard from him, and I thought to myself, “What am I doing here? That body sitting over there isn’t what it’s all about.” At that moment, Maharajji called an old man over, and said something to him, and the man came running over to me and touched my feet. I asked him, “Why did you do that?” He said, “Maharajji told me, ‘Go touch Ram Dass’s feet. He and I understand each other perfectly.’ ” Just at the moment when I thought, “That guy in the blanket isn’t it,” Maharajji responded by saying, “Good! You got it. Go, go, go!”
Now none of that detracts one bit from the incredible love I feel for Maharajji. Once the awakening begins, you can’t help but feel profound love for all the beings who have helped you along the way. But my neurotic need for love has diminished, and what has replaced it is a kind of conscious, present love, in which every time I love you, I am loving Maharajji, because he is everyone and everywhere.
When I talk about Maharajji, someone will usually ask me, “How will I know if someone is my guru? How do I know when I’ve met her or him?” Somebody asked Maharajji that question and he said, “Do you feel he can fulfill you in every way spiritually? Do you feel he can free you from all desires and attachments? Do you feel he can lead you to final liberation? When you feel all these things, then perhaps you have found your guru.”
I think my own short answer to that question is “If you’re not sure, it isn’t.” When it is, there won’t be any doubt. You can never intellectually decide, “Well, this person fits all my rules of guru-hood, therefore she will be my guru.” The real guru will always undercut all of your expectations. You may decide, “That shoddy slob! I wouldn’t have anything to do with him!” Invariably, that turns out to be your guru.
The other question people usually ask is “Does that mean that I have to have a guru in order to get to God?” Well, it’s certainly useful to have an external teacher to help you cut through your stuff, but The Guru, that which beckons from beyond, is God/Guru/Self as one. You may find your path through relating directly to God, you may find it through a guru, or you may find it by going deep enough into your Self. Maharajji said, “The guru is not external. It is not necessary for you to meet your guru on the physical plane.” If a guru presents her- or himself to you, wonderful. If not, then that isn’t your path, and you’ll need to work with some other practice.
While it may be given to only a few of you to pursue the path of Guru Kripa, that doesn’t mean you won’t have gurus along the way. Hindus make a distinction between what are called upagurus and what are called satgurus. A satguru is what we’ve been talking about here as the guru; it’s the one who is the doorway. The satguru may take many forms, but there is ultimately only One of it.
Along the way, however, there are the upagurus. They are teachings for us; they are there like marker stones along the road that say, “Go this way, Go that way.” I think, in fact, that it is much more productive to look at those beings that way—as teach ings rather than as teachers. That way, we can take a teaching here and a teaching there and then go on, instead of getting hung up in deciding, “Is this really my teacher?” The whole teacher-trip leads us into making The Big Commitment, and then we sit around judging and comparing and worrying whether we’ve made the right choice. None of that intellectual analysis is conducive to getting the bhakti juices flowing.
The more our inner wisdom develops, the more we see that we are not being left alone to deal with our situation. We look around and see that we are being guided, protected. Even while we thought we were doing it all ourselves, there were these beings nudging us along. Besides the satgurus and upagurus on the physical plane, there are astral guides, beings on all those other planes as well. We’re sitting in the midst of all the many levels of relative reality, with physical beings and astral beings all helping us along in their various ways. We are surrounded by a web of well-wishers, all wanting to help us get free.
Mount Analogue, by René Daumal, is a lovely metaphor about climbing the mountain of consciousness. First, the travelers have to deduce the existence of the mountain, and then they have to figure out how to get there. Finally, they start to climb the mountain, and the narrator says: “By our calculations, thinking of nothing else, by our desires, abandoning every other hope, by our efforts, renouncing all bodily comfort, we gained entry into this new world. Or so it seemed to us. But we learned later that if we were able to approach Mount Analogue, it was because the invisible doors of that invisible country had been opened to us by those who guard them. . . . Those who see us even though we cannot see them opened the door for us, answering our puerile calculations, our unsteady desires, and our awkward efforts, with a generous welcome.”
So although an external guru is not necessary, assuming that one happens to have one, what does one do with him or her? That is, what is the practice of Guru Kripa all about? To begin with, I would suggest that the very essence of the relationship between a guru and a devotee is a sense of complete, utter trust. You trust that whatever the guru does will be for your good. I know that may raise some hackles, and bring up images in our minds of Jim Jones and the Kool-Aid, but the truth of the matter is, it’s only that quality of absolute, trusting openness that allows us to receive the transmission from another being. It was my love for Maharajji, and through that love my total opening to him, that allowed the blessings to come through. It’s like the Grace is flowing in a continuous stream, and as each person opens in love . . . ahhhhh, then it comes through. The moment you open to it, it just pours into you.
But once you’ve opened that way, there’s absolutely nowhere to hide. Your life is completely transparent. I remember one time when I went to stay at an ashram, at a “rent-a-cave.” You could rent a cave for eighteen rupees a week; you’d pay your eighteen rupees, and the attendants would show you to a cave. They’d close you in and pass food in to you through a little opening. It’s a way to do some really intense inner work. It was summer in India, and it was very, very hot in the cave, so I stayed naked the whole time. Usually, you’re supposed to wear at least a loincloth when you’re meditating, but I was too hot to care; I was all alone, I was very hot, so I was naked. Afterward, when I went back to Maharajji, one of the first things he said to me was “It’s good not to wear any clothes.” “Oh yeah, Maharajji? Thank you.”
I went to Bombay for a while. I was visiting the home of the president of the board of trustees of an ashram, and I was a yogi. The first evening I was there, the man said to me, “The doctor has said that for my heart, I have to take a little Scotch every night.” I said, “I understand.” Then he said to me, “Perhaps you’d join me?” Now, in India it’s not considered good form to drink alcohol—certainly not for yogis and ashram board members.
But this was medicinal, after all, so, being accommodating, I said, “Sure,” and we adjourned to his room. I expected him to bring out a little medicine glass of Scotch, but what appeared instead was an ice bucket, a soda dispenser, a bottle of Scotch, and two large tumblers. And I suddenly remembered the days when I used to really love Scotch and soda. So he poured a hefty shot for himself, and another for me. He asked, “Would you like some soda water?” He filled the glasses with ice and soda, and he handed me one. Well, I drank my Scotch and soda, and I got completely crocked. I stumbled my way through dinner—I couldn’t even find the table without help; his wife was feeding both of us. And that was on just one drink. The next evening, we started a little earlier . . . and so it went.
After about three days, I went back north to Vrindaban, to Maharajji’s ashram. The evening I got back, he called me up to his tucket. He started talking to me about this yogi who had gone to America, and who was being taken care of there by some very devoted women. Maharajji said, “He’s with women.” I said, “Yes, I know, Maharajji.” He said, “What does he call them?” I said, “He calls them his mothers.” “Oh? How old are they?” I said, “Well, one is twenty years old.” “Mothers!!?” he said. Then he asked, “Do you know what his mothers give him?” I said, “No, what do they give him?” He said, “They give him milk.” I said, “That’s wonderful, Maharajji. ‘Mother’s milk’—that’s perfect.” He said, “Every night they give him milk.” I said, “Isn’t that nice.” Then he leaned up really close, and said in this conspiratorial way, “Do you know what they put in the milk?” I said, “No, Maharajji, what do they put in the milk?” He looked me right in the eye and said, “Liquor!” Then he laughed and laughed.
So where am I going to hide? You think now, because he’s not in a body, that it makes any difference? Not if he is who I know him to be! When you can’t hide, it’s all out in the open; and if it’s all out in the open, well . . . here we are. I’ve got to be whatever I am; I can’t make believe I’m something else—who am I going to fool?
The way I see it, the minute you know that there’s somebody who knows it all, you’re free. You’re done hiding—what a relief! All your secrets become absurd, because somebody already knows everything about you, and that somebody is saying, “Yeah, right. Just look at all that horrible stuff. And here we are.” Maharajji knows about all my dirty laundry, and he still loves me.
Those qualities of being known and loved, of trusting and opening, are what the relationship with the guru looks like to me, the devotee. But what does it look like to the guru? If the guru is the “finished product,” what might it look like from inside the guru when he or she is sitting with a devotee? I’ve heard it said, “Though the master and the disciple appear as two people, the master alone enjoys himself under the guise of the two.” It’s like a flower turned into a nose to smell its own fragrance. That is to say, from the guru’s point of view, nothing at all is happening. I used to sit in front of Maharajji, and the best way I can describe it is that I felt like I was Charlie McCarthy. I felt like he had created me out of his mind in order to play with me. You say, “But why would he do that?” Well, you’ll have to ask him. I have no idea.
Although to the guru nothing at all is happening, the laws or processes that are manifesting through the guru call forth certain actions from him. Sometimes those actions include the use of what are called siddhis, or powers. Maharajji used a certain kind of siddhi with me when he told me, the first time I met him, how my mother had died a few months earlier—something he had no “rational” way of knowing.
We have to understand that when those powers are used, it’s not like the guru is sitting there thinking, “I’ll use this power and blow his mind.” It’s that a being like Maharajji is so totally a statement of the laws of dharma, the laws of the universe, that at an appropriate moment, with a particular person, he will say or do something that causes a certain flip to happen, which leads that person to the next new stage. The guru is just there, doing whatever the dharma of the moment demands.
Most of the time, gurus use siddhis to break a person loose at the point where he or she is ripe for a certain change to happen. Ramakrishna said: “Dislodging a green nut from its shell is almost impossible. But let it dry, and the slightest tap will do it.”
If you hang around these beings, you’ll notice the way they’re tuned in to some kind of readiness in people. Hundreds of people would come to Maharajji, and touch his feet; he would ignore them, and go on talking. They would be given food, and they would leave the temple. Then somebody else would come. That person, by my standards, would be someone who should just be given food and sent away; he didn’t fill the bill at all. But Maharajji would stop what he was doing, and turn to the person; he’d carry on a long conversation with him, give him a special blessing and everything. I had to realize how unfathomable it was for my rational mind to comprehend what the guru was doing to whom or why. Somehow, he had sensed in that person a moment of ripeness, a readiness for that little tap.
Sai Baba from Shirdi, who was born in India around the middle of the nineteenth century, was a “siddhi baba”; that is, he was known for having incredible powers. He was the one who would go down to the stream and pull out his stomach and intestines and wash them in the water, then hang them over the trees to dry.
An old couple once came to see him. They were crying because all their money had been stolen and so they wouldn’t get to see the holy Ganges River before they died. Sai Baba said to them, “Don’t worry about it.” He raised his foot, and the Ganges started to pour out of his toes.
Sai Baba would wander around from town to town. He came to one little village, and because he seemed kind of weird, the people shunned him at first and wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He ran out of oil for his arti lamp one day, so he couldn’t do his rituals. He went from door to door in the village, begging for oil, but no one would give him any. So he gave up on them. He took some water, and blessed it, and poured that into his arti lamp. And it burned. Well, that convinced the villagers that something was going on, and they started to honor him and to come to him for his teachings. At that point, they were ready to hear what he had to tell them. You get people shaken up a bit, and they are open to new possibilities. That, roughly, is the way siddhis are generally used.
There’s another story about Shirdi Sai Baba that gives us an interesting insight into the question of when powers are used. A woman’s young son was bitten by a cobra, and she begged Sai Baba for some sacred ash to save him; but he wouldn’t give it to her, and the child died. The woman was grief-stricken; she was weeping and wailing, and one of Sai Baba’s devotees begged him, “Please, Baba, for my sake, revive her son.” Sai Baba replied, “Don’t get involved in this. What has happened is for the best. Her son’s soul has already entered another body, in which he can do especially good work—work that he could not do in this one. If I draw him back into this body, the new one he has entered will have to die in order for this one to live. I might do it for your sake, but have you considered the consequences? Have you any idea of the responsibility, and are you prepared to assume it?”
See, that’s an example of the guru’s true compassion in the exercise of powers. The devotee was seeing only the death and the mother’s grief. Sai Baba’s was the compassion that comes from seeing a bigger picture than the one defined by our human emotions.
Siddhi stories feed our faith by reminding us that there’s more going on than meets the eye. Swami Nityananda, Swami Muktananda’s guru, was a really beautiful yogi, and also quite a colorful character, like Sai Baba. Thousands of people would come to see him every day; Nityananda would just sit there, humming to himself, paying no attention to any of them. People somehow learned to interpret his movements, though, so they would come up to him and say, “Shall I buy this stock, Baba-ji?” “Hummmmmmmm.” They’d say, “Baba says I should buy it.” They’d buy it, and they’d make a killing.
Nityananda used to put up the money to have the roads paved in the areas around his ashram. The workmen would come, and they’d dig and grade and spread gravel, and at the end of the day Nityananda would say to them, “Go home now, and on your way home, pick up any rock you like, and your pay will be there.” Two rupees a day. So the men would start for home, and they’d pick up any rock along the way, near or far, whichever one struck their fancy, and there would be their two rupees, always in crisp, new rupee notes. There wouldn’t be rupees under any other rock; you couldn’t pick up a second rock and find two more rupees—you’d already been paid.
Well, after a while, the situation came to the attention of the authorities, and they were, to say the least, curious. It’s a little delicate to go to a guru and ask him where his money comes from, but finally they felt they had no choice but to look into the matter, and the police—an inspector and his sergeant—went to the ashram to see Nityananda. They said, “Uh, Baba-ji, we’ve come because we’re a little concerned about where all those brand-new rupee notes are coming from.” Nityananda said, “Oh, no—I certainly don’t want you to be concerned. Come along. I’ll show you where they come from.” Nityananda took off into the jungle, with the two policemen trailing along behind him. He led them deeper and deeper into the jungle, and finally brought them to a lake, which was infested with crocodiles. Nityananda went wading into the water. The policemen were standing on the bank, looking anxious, saying, “Please be careful, Guru-ji!” Nityananda ignored them. He motioned to one of the crocodiles, and it came paddling over to him. He pried open its jaws, reached in, and started pulling out handfuls of crisp, new rupees. The police went running out of the jungle and never bothered him again. They’d met their match.
Gurus must enjoy playing with our fixations on money, because there’s a money story that’s told about Maharajji, too. A sadhu came to the ashram and began berating Maharajji, saying that he was too attached to possessions. Maharajji just kept nodding and heard him out. Then he said to the sadhu, “Give me the money you have tied inside your dhoti.” The sadhu said, “What do you mean? I don’t have any money.” Maharajji said, “Give me that money inside your dhoti!” The sadhu reluctantly pulled out some rupee notes, crumpled inside a corner of his dhoti. Maharajji took them, and threw them into the fire. Then the sadhu started to berate Maharajji all over again, this time for destroying the possessions of a sadhu. Maharajji said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I didn’t know you were so attached to the money,” and he reached into the fire with a pair of tongs and started drawing out fresh ten-rupee notes. He looked at the sadhu and said, “All the money in the world is mine.”
These siddhi stories are so much fun, and they give us the kind of tangible evidence that our minds love that the guru really is who we think he is. But as much fun as they may be, the stories are finally just words, not experiences, and it’s in the practices of bhakti that the feelings of devotion are cultivated. For the devotee, the essence of yoga is doing whatever bhakti practices it takes to keep the heart and the thoughts focused on the guru. And to do that, we use all our different devotional strategies.
Swami Muktananda’s method of relating to his guru, his practice of Guru Kripa, was a form of meditation. He meditated on his guru. In his autobiography, Muktananda described how he would do it: “Meditating on the Guru, install him in all parts of your body, from the toes up to the head. Thus installing the Guru throughout the body, finally begin to meditate, feeling you are yourself the Guru. The Guru is in you, and you are in the Guru. Meditate daily in this manner, without the slightest doubt.” 4 As he kept doing that meditation, Muktananda got to the point where he started to fully identify himself with Nityananda, his guru. Muktananda would get so flipped out that most of the time during his sadhana he wasn’t even sure which one he was.
A meditation practice like that is a technique for bringing ourselves into identification with the guru. It’s a way of turning our consciousness around, of arriving at the place where we are no longer separate from the guru. It’s a meditation, but it’s a meditation rooted in devotion, and it’s the love that drives the entire process.
So you take a being like Nityananda, a being like Maharajji, a being that’s formless, a being you can’t pin down anywhere, and you start to incorporate him into yourself. It’s a lot like the way a child identifies with a parent. You incorporate this other being more and more fully, until there is no difference between you. You can do that with Christ, you can do that with Buddha, you can do that with Muhammad, you can do that with Maharajji, you can do that with whoever opens your heart. Just imagine that being sitting right there in front of you, and then slowly begin to draw him into yourself; draw him bit by bit into each part of your being, until, in a certain way, he has replaced you.
That kind of meditation is a very powerful practice. And yet for me, the practice of Guru Kripa is really nothing at all like that. For me, it’s simply a process of hanging out with my guru, moment to moment, and seeing my life reflected through his consciousness. I can’t tell you how many times a day I encounter him. I have pictures of him everywhere: in my puja room, on the dashboard of my car, by the refrigerator, above the toilet. I really dig hanging out with this being!
Ram Dass Offering the Arti Light: The ceremony of arti is performed daily in Hindu temples. A puja hymn is sung, and there are offerings of flowers and incense to the deities and holy beings represented on the puja table. The light of a butter-lamp is offered, after which the lamp is passed among the worshippers so they can “take light”—i.e., draw the sanctified light into themselves. Afterward there is generally a distribution of prasad—a sweet or a piece of fruit that has been consecrated during the ceremony.
My love for Maharajji is my way of opening myself. Maharajji is constantly there, constantly reminding me. When I’m talking to someone, she turns into my guru. When I get mad at someone, he turns into my guru. Moment by moment, I’m just hanging out with this incredible being: this being of consciousness, of love, of light, of presence.
My love for Maharajji is a process of surrendering. I’m willing to let go into whatever he thinks is best for me. I surrender to his version of my story line in place of my own. Saint John said, “He that sent me is with me, he hath not left me alone. I do always the things that please him.” And gradually that practice of surrender is changing me. It’s turning me into him.
I think that what I found in Maharajji was something that satisfied both my intellect and my heart. There was an intense degree of love, an oceanic love feeling that pervaded the space around Maharajji. There was an aura; there was a presence so powerful that you felt bathed and purified just by being anywhere near it. Even now, as I bring him into my heart, it does the same thing. I feel bathed in his presence.
That’s the essence of my relationship with Maharajji: to love him, to open myself to his presence, to surrender to him. That’s my bhakti practice, a practice of Guru Kripa. But those qualities of love and openness and surrender are the essence of every bhakti practice. We find some being that draws our heart: it could be Maharajji or Anandamayi Ma, Christ or Krishna, Allah or G-d. You pick the name. Then we invite that being in. We install that being in our hearts, and we offer ourselves to it: We sing to it, we chant to it, we pray to it, we bring it flowers. We love and we love, and we open and we open. And then we watch, as slowly, slowly, but surely, surely, we love our way into becoming it.