TWO SALINGER LETTERS

In 1952, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, translated by Swami Nikhilananda and Joseph Campbell, the novelist J. D. Salinger experienced a transformation. He was greatly impressed by Sri Ramakrishna's explanation of nondualistic Vedanta, Advaita Vedanta. He also liked his view of karma, reincarnation, celibacy for seekers of truth, and detachment from worldliness, including family.

When Salinger passed away in 2010, the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Center of New York allowed access to a few of the novelist's letters to Swami Nikhilananda, the founder of the Center, and Nikhilananda's successor, Swami Adiswarananda.  It is not known how Salinger came to know them.

After hearing of Nikhilananda's failing health, Salinger wrote the following to him:

"It may be that reading to a devoted group from The Gospel of Ramakrishna is all you do now, as you say, but I imagine the students who are lucky enough to hear you read from The Gospel would put the matter differently. Meaning, I've forgotten many worthy and important things in my life, but I have never forgotten the way you used to read from, and interpret, the Upanishads, up at Thousand Island Park."

(The Center maintains a summer cottage, the Vivekananda Cottage, at Thousand Island Park, New York, on the St. Lawrence River.)

Salinger wrote the following to Swami Adiswarananda:

"I read a bit from the Gita every morning before I get out of bed, Swami Nikhilananda's annotated version, (it seems such a reasonable pleasure to imagine that Shankara would have approved unreservedly of Swami's inspired intelligence, devotion, and authority. How could he not?)

When 'Vital Steps to Meditation' is completed (but completed is very probably the wrong word), perhaps you will consider bringing out a collection of the pieces. I greatly hope so.  I would love to own such a book, and I can't imagine anyone who would not."

SWAMI NIKHILANANDA

Born Dinesh Chandra Das Gupta in 1895, Swami Nikhilananda was a direct disciple of Sri Sarada Devi. In 1933, he founded the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York, a branch of the Ramakrishna Mission, and remained its head until his death in 1973.

Nikhilananda was considered a brilliant speaker and was invited to lecture at different universities, churches, and synagogues, and to participate in inter-religious conferences East and West.  He made important contributions to the literature of the Ramakrishna movement, attracting along the way distinguished disciples, including Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of President Woodrow Wilson, the comparative mythologist Professor Joseph Campbell, and Chester Carlson, inventor of the xerographic process.  Philosopher Lex Hixon was Nikhilananda's disciple.

Joseph Campbell was, for a number of years, the president of the New York Center.  He also worked on various translations with Nikhilananda, and helped with the editing of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by Mahendranath Gupta aka "M," a direct disciple of Ramakrishna's.  The Nikhilananda edition included a foreword by novelist Aldous Huxley, an initiate of the Vedanta Society of Southern California.

INEVITABLE AWAKENING

Due to the Atman's attraction to its source the Brahman, it is inevitable that all persons will one day awaken into Brahman, be liberated.

BRAHMAN AND THE WORLD

Brahman is a-causal, meaning it was not caused by anything; it had no beginning.  It is also beyond space/time.  Brahman caused and witnesses the relative world that is in space/time, but does not interfere with it.  Brahman does not know what is going to happen in the relative world.  What happens is determined by the Law of Karma.

THINKING OF GOD

"Whenever you think of God, He thinks of you."  This sounds like it is from Meister Eckhart, except that it is from Swami Prabhavananda.  The statement would not be unusual in Christianity, but when it is made in Vedanta it has a special meaning. 

God in Christianity is a supernatural, supreme being, who is separate from creation.  God in Vedanta is also supernatural and supreme but is not a being, and is not separate from creation. 

God, "Brahman" in Vedanta, is everything.  There is nothing that is not Brahman.  Therefore, when Prabhavananda says "Whenever you think of God, He thinks of you," what he is really saying is, "Whenever you think of God, everything thinks of you." 

NEED FOR MEDITATION

Meditation is like opening a window in your life.  If you don't do it regularly, your life gets stuffy.

BEING THE MOMENT

We always feel that we should do something or get something, when really we should be something.  Being something means being what is, as opposed to being what is expected of us, doing and getting.

We should just be, be present, be what is this moment.

SOMETHING BETTER

Dispassion, or nonattachment, is possible when we get hold of something better, the saying goes. 

Termed vairagya in Yoga philosophy, dispassion comes of discrimination, as in Shankara's Crest Jewel of Discrimination.  It is when we differentiate between that which is non-eternal and that which is eternal. 

When we see this manifested world for what it truly is, a phantasm, a mirage, a dream, hence undependable, illusive, unreliable, we see that it is not worth attaching ourselves to.  It is not worth our clinging to, even though clinging to it is what we have been conditioned to do, and have done, our entire lives. 

When we see the futility of such grasping, it leads us to that which is unchanging, dependable, reliable.  It leads us to the eternal.  God is eternal.  God is something better.

EGO

Ego is "I"-consciousness, awareness of a separate individuality from Atman, or God.  Sri Ramakrishna liked to distinguish between two kind of ego, which he termed "unripe" and "ripe."  The unripe ego is worldly, arrogant, and self-centered.  The ripe ego considers itself a child, servant, or devotee of God, incapable of injuring anyone.  The ripe ego is also known as the ego of knowledge or devotion, and is the ego used by those illumined souls who teach spirituality to others.

GRACE OF YOUR OWN MIND

There is the grace of the guru, the grace of the devotees, and the grace of God.  For the lack of one grace, though, a person ruins himself.  So says a Vaishnava saint.  And what is that grace?  It is the grace of your own mind.  Unless you have the grace of your own mind, you cannot have divine grace.  Although there is the breeze of divine grace blowing, you cannot catch that breeze until you have the grace of your own mind.  This grace is self-surrender.  It is giving up your ego to God.

LIMITS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Take the word "karma," for instance.  Karma can mean a deed, the consequence of a deed, the law of cause and effect operating in the moral world, or the sum of consequences resulting from an individual's actions in this and previous lives.  It is for this reason that Vedanta translators and teachers retain a large number of Sanskrit and Bengali terms in their work.

THE KARMA PART

Behavior that leads a person to the realization of Brahman, to awakening into Brahman, produces good karma. Behavior that leads a person away from the realization of Brahman, away from awakening into Brahman, produces bad karma. The amount of good and bad karma a person carries determines how his or her life will go. The process is impersonal.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY

"Only through God's grace may we obtain those three rarest advantages--human birth, the longing for liberation, and the discipleship of an illumined teacher.

Nevertheless, there are those who somehow manage to obtain this rare human birth, together with bodily and mental strength, and an understanding of the scriptures, and yet are so deluded that they do not struggle for liberation.  Such persons are suicides.  They clutch at the unreal and destroy themselves.

For what greater fool can there be than the person who has obtained this rare human birth, together with bodily and mental strength, and yet fails, through delusion, to realize his or her highest good?"

                        -- The Crest Jewel of Discrimination by Shankara.

ISSUE OF GRACE

When we look back on our lives and see all the uncanny experiences, the seeming coincidences, and apparent intervention, direction, and protection, we are left wondering whether there isn't a personal God after all.  Vedanta calls such intervention divine grace, without saying whether the source of the grace, God, is personal or impersonal.

Swami Prabhavananda asks, though, how can there be grace from a God that is impersonal?  Such a God would be like an automaton, a mechanism, an abstraction.  To begin with, what is God?  The scriptures tell us that He is consciousness itself.  Such consciousness, infinite consciousness, cannot be a mechanism, an abstraction.  Those who have realized God hold that He is personal, but not in an anthropomorphic way; He is also impersonal, but not an abstraction.  In the end, He is beyond both personal and impersonal, Prabhavananda says, adding that Sri Ramakrishna used to say:  "Never finitize the infinite."

What is interesting about grace is that it occurs outside the Law of Karma, which is entirely impersonal.

ALL THESE KNOTS

"There is really no problem, no difficulty.  Why do we tie ourselves in all these knots?"--Christopher Isherwood.

AVOIDING FUTURE PAIN

"There are three kinds of karma:  the karma that has already been created and stored up, so that it will bear fruit in some future life, the karma created in the  past or in some previous life, which is bearing fruit at the present moment, and the karma which we are now in the process of creating by our thoughts and acts.  Of these, the already existing karmas are beyond our control; we can only wait until they have worked themselves out, and accept their fruits with courage and patience.

But the karma which we are now creating--'the pain which is yet to come'--can be avoided.  Not by ceasing to act--that would be impossible, even if it were desirable--but by ceasing to desire the fruits of action for oneself.  If we dedicate the fruits of action to God, we shall gradually unwind the wheel of karma and thus avoid its pain."

--Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood commenting on The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali

ONLY TRUE HAPPINESS

"'Pleasant' and 'painful' are only relative terms.  From the standpoint of the person of spiritual discrimination, all experience is painful, insofar as it binds us to this world and renews our sense-cravings.  The only true happiness is in union with the Atman.  All other 'happiness' is relative, temporary, and therefore false."

--Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood commenting on The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali

AS INTENDED: A SHORT STORY

He always had an interest in machines that did something but achieved nothing.  Making such a machine himself would be entertaining for him, he felt.  He would make it like an automobile engine that had no drive train, or a clock with no hands.  It would just sit there and spin.

Yet to maintain his interest, he decided that it would need to do something more than simply do something and achieve nothing.  It then occurred to him that with all its gears, belts, levers and switches, he could make it an object of contemplation.  He would have it represent the universe as a whole which also did somethng, did lots of things, and achieved nothing, or so it appeared. 

If he believed in a higher power, the question changed, naturally.  What did this higher power intend with this universe, assuming that this higher power created it?  (It may not have, but the odds were that it did.)  The answer to what it intended he could not know, of course, at least not until he joined the higher power somehow.

But how could he join the higher power?  He would have to take up religion, it looked like, as the higher power intended.  So much for his machine.

AHIMSA LESSON

What are we to do when, following an afternoon rain, a bunch of little snails come crawling out onto the sidewalk where we are taking our late-afternoon stroll?  Vedantists, Buddhists, and Jains hold to the principle of ahimsa, which is to not harm other sentient beings.  We are, accordingly, to avoid stepping on the snails, even picking them up and putting them out of harm's way, so no one else with crush them after us.

But we can only be responsible for those snails directly in our path, the principle has it.  Jain monks, for example, carry staffs with them when they walk through a forest, tapping as they go along to chase from danger any creatures close underfoot, but they do not go out and search the forest for all the critters whom they might potentially accidentally step on.

Yet, what about the matter of karma?  What if those snails, or at least some of them, had bad karma and were meant to be stepped on?  Christopher Isherwood describes a situation that he and a friend were in where karma was possibly an issue:

"Denny found a sea gull with a broken wing and amputated it, which made the bird more comfortable but didn't solve his problem.  I followed it up the beach and saw how the other gulls pecked at it, and how it couldn't fly or swim and would almost certainly starve.  So I killed it.  This  made me feel horrible all day.  I asked Swami (Prabhavananda), did I do right?  And Swami said no, one shouldn't interfere with the karma of any creature."

So is our sidestepping the snails on the sidewalk a case of our interfering with their bad karma, that they were meant to die unpleasantly at our feet?  No, the evidence is that it is good karma that the snails had, for they happened to cross the sidewalk just as a person who adhered to the principle of ahimsa walked along.

LONG WALKS WITHIN

How many of us have taken long walks on an empty beach at sunset, eyes cast on the red crashing waves, thinking somehow, hoping somehow that we will have a revelation from God.  If we are disappointed in the end, it is because we are walking in the wrong place.  Better to walk within ourselves where there are no red crashing waves, only God.

NOTHING IS INSIGNIFICANT

For everyone and everything, all events throughout the day, no matter how seemingly insignificant, are significant, important.

PRESENCE

Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, emphasizes the power of the present moment, what he calls "presence."  Presence, he says, is the stillness between words and thoughts, outside the "noise of thinking."  Presence he describes further as spaciousness, and finally as God, although he rarely uses the term God, he says, because it means many different things to many different people.

Tolle notes that the Buddha called presence the "unborn," the "unmanifested," "emptiness," and "voidness."  Regarding the latter, the Japanese Buddhist scholar Hajime Nakamura states that, "Voidness . . . is . . . that which stands right in the middle between affirmation and negation, existence and nonexistence . . . .  The Void is all inclusive.  Having no opposite, there is nothing which it excludes or opposes.  It is a living void, because all forms come out of it, and whoever realizes the void is filled with life and power and the . . . love of all beings."

Be the presence more than the person, is Tolle's teaching.

GRACE AS SYNCHRONICITY

In his lecture "The Mystery of Consciousness," spiritual teacher Depak Chopra describes divine grace as synchronicity, a term coined by psychologist Carl Jung in the 1920s. 

In his book Synchronicity (1952), Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event:

"A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since."

After describing more examples, Jung wrote, "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them—for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."

MAYA CLARIFIED

Maya is defined as illusion.  The world of the senses is an illusion.  This is not to say that what is seen is nonexistent, but only that we take it for what it essentially is not.

WHAT IS LEFT?

Swami Prabhavananda asked, "Take away God, and what is left?"  By "take away God," he was referring to our living exclusively as our egoic selves with no regard for God.  Ironically, never for one instant are we without God, Prabhavananda noted, for the Atman in each of us is God.  But what is left when we ignore God?  Hollowness is left, going through the motions only is left, walking in the dark is left.

RICHARD HITTLEMAN

Richard Hittleman (1927-1991) wrote numerous books on Hatha (physical) Yoga, and several on the Yoga philosophy of Advaita Vedanta.  He had an M.A. degree in Oriental Mysticism from Columbia University, and was a friend of Alan Watts.  His "Yoga For Health" TV programs ran for many years.  Indeed, in New York "Yoga for Health" ran for more than four-and-a-half years without a break.

Hittleman was a student of Ramana Maharshi in the late 1940s and regarded Maharshi as his guru. He also had an interest in Zen Buddhism, and Buddhism generally. He and his daughter were said to be working on a re-interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time of his death from prostate cancer.

Hittleman's chief teaching was that ultimately all is only the divine Self, Atman/Brahman.  "'Self'' is another word for 'God,'" he wrote.  "This is the God who is the Absolute, who is immutable, without qualities, pure awareness, without beginning or end. . . . It is dependent upon nothing and is not affected by, nor does it react to, any occurrence in the phenomenal world.  It is further characterized as having the qualities of bliss and knowledge."

DHARMA DUTY

The duty that is imposed upon a person by his own nature is called, in Vedanta, dharma.  This is the lesson of the Bhagavad-Gita.  In the Gita, Arjuna is a member of the warrior caste who has accepted the responsibilities of a military leader.  He is to lead his men in a civil war against the army of his foster brother, who has tricked him and his natural brothers out of the kingdom they should have inherited.

However, seeing that the opposing army is comprised of many of his kinsmen and old friends, Arjuna decides that he would rather die himself than kill them.  He begs the advise of Krishna, who is living on earth in human form, and who has agreed to be his charioteer.  Krishna tells him that he, Arjuna, must fight because this is his dharma, the duty his own nature has imposed upon him.

Arjuna cannot now impulsively disown his dharma, Krishna says, cannot now try to obey some other idea of duty.  A dharma that is not naturally his own will lead him into spiritual confusion, Krishna explains, adding, "If you say 'I will not fight,' your resolve is in vain.  Your own nature will drive you to the act." 

This applies equally to a person whose nature is spirituality.  He will quite possibly go through life in all sorts of other capacities than is his true nature would have, but in the end he will yield, he will become that aspirant or monk or priest or spiritual teacher, for so is it meant to be.  And just as Arjuna entered the battle and was victorious, so too will be the spiritual person in his course, and for the same reason.