RAM DASS

Richard Alpert (born April 6, 1931), also known as Baba Ram Dass, and later simply as Ram Dass, is a contemporary spiritual teacher who wrote the 1971 bestseller Remember, Be Here Now.  He was born to a prominent Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts.  His father, George Alpert, was one of the most influential lawyers in the Boston area and president of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, as well as one of the leading founders of Brandeis University and of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The youngest of three boys, Richard started out his high school career at the Williston Northampton School, graduating in 1948 as a part of the Cum Laude association.  He then went on to receive a bachelor's degree from Tufts University, a master's degree from Wesleyan University, and a doctorate from Stanford University.  His doctorate was in psychology.

After returning from a visiting professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Alpert accepted a permanent position at Harvard, where he worked with the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service, where he was a therapist.  Research contracts with Yale and Stanford followed.  Perhaps most notable, however, was the work he was doing with his close friend and associate Dr. Timothy Leary.

Soon after obtaining his pilot's license, Alpert flew his private plane to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Leary first introduced him to teonanácatl, the "magic" mushrooms of Mexico.  By the time Alpert made it back to America, Leary had already consulted with Aldous Huxley, who was visiting at M.I.T., and through Huxley and a number of graduate students they were able to get in touch with Sandoz, which had produced a synthetic component of ergot rye fungus called LSD.  Alpert and Leary brought a test batch of both substances back to Harvard, where they conducted the Harvard Psilocybin Project, and experimented with LSD relatively privately.

Harvard formally dismissed Leary and Alpert from the university in 1963.  According to Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, Leary was dismissed for leaving his classes without permission or notice, and Alpert for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate.  By this time, however, Alpert had already become disillusioned with academia and even described himself as feeling trapped in a meaningless game.  Leary had left the university some weeks earlier.

The two soon relocated and continued their experiments, unsupervised, at a private mansion in Millbrook, New York owned by Billy Hitchcock, an heir to the Mellon fortune.  Famous poets, musicians and intellectuals of the time, such as Allen Ginsberg, Maynard Ferguson, the Grateful Dead, Marshall McLuhan and Ken Kesey, came from across the country to be part of what was going on there.

While they remained life-long friends, Leary and Alpert eventually parted ways, spiritually and philosophically.  Leary continued to spread his mantra of "turn on, tune in, drop out", while Alpert increasingly found his purpose in the Hindu ethic of serving others.

In 1967 Alpert traveled to India, where he met the American spiritual seeker Bhagavan Das.  As he guided Alpert barefoot from temple to temple, Bhagavan Das began teaching him basic mantras and asanas, as well as how to work with meditation beads.  After a few months, Bhagavan Das led Alpert to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, or as he was better known in the West, Maharaj-ji.

Maharaj-ji soon became Alpert's guru and gave him the name "Ram Dass," which means "servant of Lord Rama."  Under the guidance of Maharaj-ji, Ram Dass was instructed to receive teaching from Hari Dass Baba.  Hari Dass Baba taught in silence using only a chalkboard.  While in India, Ram Dass also corresponded with Meher Baba.  His primary focus, though, was on the teaching of Hari Dass Baba.

Hari Dass Baba trained Ram Dass in raja yoga and ahimsa, among other things.  It was these life-changing experiences in India that inspired Ram Dass to write the aforementioned spiritual classic Remember, Be Here Now, in which he teaches that everyone is a manifestation of God and that every moment is of infinite significance.

In 1969, Alpert decided to return to the United States, where he founded several humanitarian organizations including the Hanuman Foundation and Seva Foundation.  He went on to tour for many years, giving lectures to raise funds for both of these organizations.

His talks inspired conversation about a wide variety of spiritual traditions and practices, including guru kripa, or grace of the guru; bhakti yoga which focused on the Hindu spiritual deva Hanuman; meditation in Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, including Tibetan and Zen; karma yoga; and Jewish studies.

Ram Dass was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award in August 1991.

In February 1997, he suffered a stroke which left him with expressive aphasia, difficulty speaking.  However, he interprets his stroke as an act of grace and continues, as his health permits, to travel giving lectures.

When asked if he could sum up his life's message Ram Dass replies, "I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people.  To me, that's what the emerging game is all about."

Ram Dass is a vegetarian, and has also acknowledged his bisexuality.  In the 1990s, he became more forthcoming about sexuality but avoided labels.  He pointed out that who we are "isn't gay, and it's not not-gay, and it's not anything--it's just awareness." 

"Ram Dass Fierce Grace" is a 2002 American biographical film, directed by Micky Lemle.  It tells the story of Ram Dass’ transformation from Harvard psychology professor to spiritual student/devotee and back again to teacher, a spiritual teacher this time, in spite of his debilitating stroke.  It was named by Newsweek as one of the Top Five Non-fiction Films of 2002.

WAYS OF SALVATION IN VEDANTA AND BUDDHISM

There are three ways of salvation in Hinduism (Vedanta).  Karma Marga or the Way of Works, Jnana Marga or the Way of Knowledge, and Bhakti Marga or the Way of Devotion.

The Way of Works is a quite old way, and though it is held in least regard by Hindu philosophers, it is followed by a vast majority of the people.  It has the triple advantage of being practical, of being understandable, and of enjoying the sanctity of age-old custom.  Not particularly emotional, and even less so intellectual, it is simply a methodical and hopeful carrying out of rites, ceremonies, and duties that add to one's merit, i.e. favorable karma.

With the Way of Works, the belief is that by sacrificing to the gods, and to one's ancestors, by revering the rising sun, by keeping the sacred hearth fire alight, and by performing impeccably the rites and ceremonies that are appropriate at a birth, a death, a marriage, or a harvest, a person can acquire enough merit to pass at death into one of the heavens.  Or a person will be reborn as a Brahmin with a real predisposition toward achieving final union with the Absolute, Brahman.

The Way of Knowledge, on the other hand, holds that salvation is based on the reasoning in the Upanishads.  The premise is that the cause of human misery and evil is Ignorance, called avidya.  This is to say that man is so deeply ignorant about his own nature that all his actions have the wrong orientation.  Not moral transgression, then, but mental error is the root of human suffering and evil.

However, there is considerable disagreement in the Way of Knowledge as to what constitutes the mental error in the Ignorance.  The best known view, that which is found in the Upanishads, is that man's troubles stem from his persistence in his seeing himself as a real and separate self, when such is not the fact.

The truth is that Brahman-Atman is the sole real being, in whose unity there exists no duality; man is in reality Brahman-Atman, not a separate being.  Furthermore, all created things, all the "appearances" which commonsense accepts as being exactly as they seem, are also Brahman-Atman.  They all have reality, but it is the reality of Brahman-Atman.  Knowing this with certitude is the objective of the Way of Knowledge, and it comes typically by an ecstatic flash in the midst of deep meditation.  For it to occur requires long preparation and self-discipline, i.e. rigorous spiritual practice, called sadhana, which is the approach of Vedanta.

The Way of Devotion is defined, meanwhile, as "ardent and hopeful devotion to a particular deity in grateful recognition of aid received or promised."  It often assumes the form of an intense love of the deity, whether god or goddess.  It is characterized by surrender of self to the divine being and acts of devotion in temple worship and in private life and thought.

The Way of Devotion emerged at a comparatively late period, but it brought with it a sense of ancient faith.  From primitive times the common person sought the favor of gods and goddesses and could not be made to believe that devotion to deities did not bring salvation.  

Experience suggested that the world was filled with powers greater than the individual from whom saving-help may come.  Those following this path have nothing against those choosing the Way of Knowledge, or, for that matter, the Way of Works.  Indeed there are those who incorporate some of all the paths in their spiritual practice.

By contrast, Buddhism teaches that a person's salvation depends upon himself, upon his own powers, following a set, psychological prescription that the Buddha put forth.  It especially rejects the Way of Devotion.  It agrees that the universe abounds in gods, goddesses, demons and other nonhuman powers and agencies, but without exception, these beings, like humans, are subject to death and rebirth. 

Praying to these other beings therefore, is to no avail.  For similar reasons Buddhism dismisses the performance of rituals, as in the Way of Works.  Nor does it accept going to the Brahmins as priests.  And insofar as it is speculative philosophy and only speculative philosophy, the Way of Knowledge is similarly rejected.  All one needs to save oneself is oneself.

THE VIEW OF MYSTICS

What is the nature of Reality, that which ultimately IS?  How much is our picture of it, what we know of it, or what we think we know of it, dependent upon what, with our limited range of perception, we are able to see of it?  Might it not be at least a possibility that, if our range of perception were enlarged, we would see it quite differently?

Mystics have been found in all ages, in all parts of the world and in all religious systems.  Out of their experience and their reflection on that experience have come the following assertions:

1. This phenomenal world of matter and individual consciousness is only a partial reality, and is the manifestation of a Divine Ground in which all partial realities have their being.

2. It is the nature of us humans that not only can we have knowledge of this Divine Ground by inference, but also we can realize it by direct intuition, which is superior to discursive reason.

3. Our nature is not a single but a dual one.  We have not one but two selves, the phenomenal ego, of which we are chiefly conscious and which we tend to regard as our true self, and a non-phenomenal eternal self, an inner person, the spirit, the spark of divinity within us, which is our true self.  It is possible for us, if we so desire and are prepared to make the necessary effort, to identify ourselves with our true self and so with the Divine Ground.

4. It is the chief end of our earthly existence to discover and identify ourselves with our true self.  By doing so, we will come to an intuitive knowledge of the Divine Ground and so apprehend Truth as it really is.  Not only this, we will enter into a state of being which has been given different names, such as eternal life, salvation, and enlightenment.

All this rests on two fundamental convictions:

1. Though it may be to a great extent atrophied and exist only potentially in most of us, we possess an organ or faculty which is capable of discerning spiritual truth, which is as much to be relied upon as are our other sense organs.

2. In order to be able to discern spiritual truth, we are, in our essential nature, spiritual; in order to know spiritual truth, we are partakers of it.  Potentially at least there is kinship between it and our soul.  This is to say, we are not creatures set over against it.  We participate in it; we are, in a real sense, "united" with it.  

PEMA CHODRON: CONTEMPORARY TIBETAN BUDDHIST

Among the many contemporary Tibetan Buddhists of note, there is Pema Chodron.  Ane Pema Chodron ("Ane" is a Tibetan honorific for a nun) was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, in New York City.  She attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught as an elementary school teacher for many years in both New Mexico and California.  Pema has two children and three grandchildren.

While in her mid-thirties, and following a second divorce, Pema traveled to the French Alps and encountered Lama Chime Rinpoche, with whom she studied for several years.  She became a novice nun in 1974 while studying with Lama Chime in London.  His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to England at that time, and Ane Pema received her ordination from him.

Pema first met her root guru, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (the Vidyadhara) in 1972.  The term Vidyadhara means literally "awareness holder," that is, one who constantly abides in the state of awareness.  Lama Chime encouraged her to work with Rinpoche, and it was with him that she ultimately made her most profound connection, studying with him from 1974 until his death in 1987.  At the request of the Karmapa, she received the full bhikshuni (female monastic) ordination in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong.

Pema served as the director of Karma Dzong in Boulder, Colorado until moving in 1984 to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to be the director of Gampo Abbey.  The Vidyadhara gave her explicit instructions on running Gampo Abbey.

She first met the prominent Buddhist nun Ayya Khema (1923-1997) at the first Buddhist nuns conference in Bodhgaya, India in 1987, and they were close friends from that time until Ayya's death.

The success of Pema's first two books, The Wisdom of No Escape (1991) and Start Where You Are (1994), made her something of a celebrity as a woman Buddhist teacher and as a specialist in the Mahayana lojong (mind training) teachings.  She and Judy Lief, also a teacher and author of Buddhism, were instructed personally by the Vidyadhara on lojong, "which is why I took off with it," she explains.

At Gampo Abbey each winter she taught the traditional Yarne (Tibetan rainy season) retreat for monastics.  She spent the summers in Berkeley teaching on the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.  It was in California that Pema was appointed by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche as "acharya" (senior teacher).

In 1996 she published When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, and in 2002, The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.

She is a member of the The Committee of Western Bhikshunis which was formed in the autumn of 2005.

In late 2005, Pema Chödrön published No Time to Lose, a commentary on Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.  Her subsequent publication was Practicing Peace in Times of War (2006).  She went on to study with Lama Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, spending seven months of each year in solitary retreat under his direction in Crestone, Colorado. 

In 2016, she was awarded the Global Bhikkhuni (Bhikshuni) Award, presented by the Chinese Buddhist Bhikkhuni Association of Taiwan. 

LIMITATION OF THE THINKING MIND

When you pursue a line of inquiry with the thinking mind all you come to is a conclusion.

MATTHIEU RICARD: CONTEMPORARY TIBETAN BUDDHIST

Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, an author, translator, and photographer.  He has lived, studied, and worked in the Himalayan region for over forty years.

The son of French philosopher Jean-François Revel and artist Yahne Le Toumelin, Matthieu was born in France in 1946 and grew up among the personalities and ideas of Paris’ intellectual and artistic circles.  He earned a Ph.D. degree in cell genetics at the renowned Institut Pasteur under the Nobel Laureate Francois Jacob.  In 1967, he traveled to India to meet great spiritual masters from Tibet.

After completing his doctoral thesis in 1972, he decided to concentrate on Buddhist studies and practice.  Since then, he has lived in India, Bhutan, and Nepal and studied with some of the foremost teachers of that tradition, among them Kyapje Kangyur Rinpoche (1897-1975) and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910-1991).

He is the author of many books including The Monk and the Philosopher, a dialogue with his father; The Quantum and the Lotus, a dialogue with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan; Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill; and, The Art of Meditation.  His books have been translated into over twenty languages.

Living in close proximity to Tibetan teachers and culture has enabled him to capture on camera the spiritual masters, landscapes, and people of the Himalayas.

Henri-Cartier Bresson said of his photographs: "Matthieu's camera and his spiritual life are one, and from this spring these images, fleeting yet eternal."

Since 1989, Matthieu has served as the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama.  He is a board member of the Mind and Life Institute, an organization dedicated to collaborative research between scientists and Buddhist scholars and meditators.  His interest is the effect of mind training and meditation on the brain.  He has researched at universities in the USA (Madison, Princeton, and Berkeley), Europe (Zurich) and Hong Kong.

Matthieu donates all proceeds from his books, and much of his time, to forty humanitarian projects, including clinics, schools, bridges, orphanages, and elder care.  He is involved in vocational training in Himalayan areas, and in the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage. 

When he is not traveling, Matthieu resides at Shechen Monastery in Nepal.

HOW IT WORKS

We make the world something that it is not but convince ourselves that it is.

VEDANTA REVISITED

Vedanta is described as "the loftiest of Vedic knowledge."  Its teachings are based on the mystical experience and the philosophical expression of the ancient sruti or "revealed" truth.  Vedantists are often termed nonsectarian since they do not worship any particular deity.  

Many of India's scholars and distinguished persons at the forefront of public life, such as the Nobel Prize poet Rabindranath Tagore, and Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India's learned President from 1962 to 1967 who once taught Comparative Religions at Oxford, have expressed deep reverence for Vedantist thought.  As the accepted philosophy of intellectual Hinduism, Vedanta has also attracted to it in recent times a number of Western thinkers and artists.

Vedanta emphasizes Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, the "One-Without-a-Second," which is infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent and incomprehensible, from which the universe eternally evolves, appears and disappears.

Although conceived far back in the early Upanishadic schools of philosophy, Vedanta today is the result of a continuous process of development.  At the same time, the ideas embodied in the rather general term "Vedantism" have never been combined in one fixed system.  They are, as Dr. Radhakrishnan has said, "simply the thoughts of the wise, not always agreeing in detail, and presented as independent utterances, each with its own values."  

An example of this deliberate absence of theological systematization can be found in a volume of general essays, Vedanta for the Western World, edited by author and novelist Christopher Isherwood, and published in the United States in 1946.

Distinguished Western contributors included Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, John Van Druten, and again Christopher Isherwood, along with many eminent Hindu swamis and sannyasins, persons who have renounced their lives as ordinary citizens to live the holy life.

Among the many approaches to God possible in the different Vedantist schools there might be briefly mentioned two forms designated as "the method of the monkey," and "the method of the cat."  In the latter concept a person is "saved" by God without participation or effort on his part, just as a kitten is carried to safety by the scruff of the neck.  In the former, a person wishing salvation must turn and cling to God as a baby monkey clings to its mother.

The highest types of Vedantist training are concerned with shifting the attention from the exterior to the interior world.  In a sense it might be claimed that Vedanta offers its followers a map and guidebook to the unknown inner world from which alone, in its view, the mysteries of the so-called objective world may be understood and put in proper perspective.

Dr. Radhakrishnan has written: "From the outward physical fact, attention shifts to the inner immortal self, the Atman, situated at the back of the mind, as it were. We need not look to the sky for the bright light; the glorious fire is within the soul," the Atman.

Specific exercises are considered essential to bring about this direct apprehension of Atman/Brahman in its pure form.  Training includes the study of certain religious texts, sessions with an approved teacher, a guru, who listens to the aspirant, and who also, significantly, exchanges discussion with him in an analytical manner. 

These first stages are to be followed by ever more profound reflection and a deepening of meditation until the aspirant has arrived at a certain one-pointed inner concentration "beyond the sphere of argument or reasoned thought."

The daily meditation which forms so essential a part of a Vedantist's discipline finds ultimate realization in the phrase: Tat vam asi, "That art Thou."  In other words, a person's hidden self or soul, the Atman, is identical with Brahman, the World Soul, so called. 

Regarding Brahman, a modern Vedantist, Swami Nikhilananda, who lived and taught in the West, adds: "Brahman does not exist as an empirical object, for instance, like a pot or a tree, but as Absolute Existence, without which material objects would not be perceived to exist.  Just as a mirage cannot be seen without the desert, its unrelated substratum, so also the universe cannot exist without Brahman."

JUST WATCHING

Something is watching my thoughts.  But who is it that is doing the watching?  I conclude that I am doing the watching.  But this “I” is just another thought.  No one is doing the watching, therefore.  Buddhists say there is just watching.

REINCARNATION IN BUDDHISM

There is no permanent self that reincarnates from one life to the next, Buddhism teaches, as compared to Vedanta where there is such a self, the Atman.

Buddhism acknowledges, however, that something must reincarnate, in light of the Law of Karma.  That something is, in fact, karma.

Only karma passes from one life to another, since a person is merely the five skandhas comprising him, body, consciousness, sensations, cognition, and mental constructions that initiate actions, which disperse when the person dies.

Reincarnation where there is no transfer of a self was likened by the Buddha to the flame of a candle passed from another candle.  It is the same flame but different candles.
  

There is, however, no psycho-mental element transmitted between lives, the reborn person having no memory of his previous life, or of any of his past lives.

Buddhism underscores, meanwhile, the extreme rarity of human birth, a slim coincidence, indeed, when it happens, and an even slimmer coincidence should it be a Tathagata, a Buddha.

A person ceases to be reincarnated when all of his karma has been worked through, and he experiences Nirvana.

MUDRA FOREST

A stand of hands.

REINCARNATION IN VEDANTA

According to the Hindu sage Adi Shankaracharya, the world, as we ordinarily understand it, is like a dream, fleeting and illusory.  To be trapped in samsara, the rounds of birth and death, is the result of our ignorance of the true nature of our existence.  It is ignorance, avidya, of one's true self, the Atman, that leads to ego-consciousness, grounding one in desire and a perpetual chain of reincarnation.

The idea is intricately linked to action, karma, a concept first recorded in the Upanishads.  Every action has a reaction, the force of which determines one's next incarnation.  A person is reborn through desire: he desires to be born because he wants to enjoy a body, which, it so happens, can never bring deep, lasting happiness or peace, ananda.

After many births every person becomes dissatisfied and begins to seek higher forms of happiness through spiritual experience.  When, after spiritual practice, sadhana, a person realizes, by intuitive insight as opposed to merely intellectual understanding, that the true self is the immortal Atman rather than the body, or the ego, all of his desires for the pleasures of the world, all of his wanting to have this, to do that, or to be that, vanish.  Worldly pleasures and ambitions seem insipid compared to spiritual ananda.

When all of his desires have vanished the person will no longer be reborn.  When the cycle of rebirth thus comes to an end, a person is said to have attained liberation, moksha.  All schools agree that moksha implies the cessation of worldly desires, the result of which is freedom from the cycle of birth and death, but the ultimate end differs among them.

Followers of the Advaita Vedanta school believe that they will spend eternity absorbed in the perfect peace that comes with the realization that all of existence is One, namely Brahman, and that Brahman and the Atman are identical.  Dvaita schools do not believe in particular that Brahman and Atman are one.  They are two distinct entities in their view.  Moksha means spending eternity in a spiritual world or heaven, loka, in the blessed company of Vishnu.  Vishnu is the “preserver” in the Hindu trinity that includes Brahma and Shiva.

ROWS OF ROOMS

There are rows of rooms, rows and rows of rooms, but which room am I?

KRISHNAMURTI MEETS PRABHAVANANDA

Christopher Isherwood describes a meeting between philosopher and spiritual teacher J.Krishnamurti and Vedanta's Swami Prabhavananda.  It took place on October 10, 1944 at the newly-opened Vedanta Center of Southern California at Montecito, just south of Santa Barbara.  The Swami had come up from his Hollywood Vedanta Center to conduct a class.  The Swami and Krishnamurti had never met before.  As it happened, Krishnamurti lived just down the road in Ojai.

Isherwood noted that the Swami had always been prejudiced against Krishnamurti because Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society had generated much publicity on Krishnamurti's behalf many years before in India.  As a youth, the Swami had been outraged when Mrs. Besant announced that Krishnamurti was an avatar. Later she used to annoy Brahmananda, Head of the chief monastery of the Ramakrishna Order in India, by trying to involve him with the Theosophical Movement.  The Swami, then a monk at the monastery, had had standing orders not to admit her to the monastery when Brahmananda was there.

As it happened the 1944 meeting between Krishnamurti and Prabhavananda was a huge success.  Krishnamurti sat quietly and modestly at the back of the class.  And when the Swami was through, Krishnamurti came over and they greeted each other with the deepest respect, bowing again and again with folded palms. 

And then they had a long chat, becoming very cheerful and Indian, and “laughing like schoolboys,” as Isherwood put it.  Isherwood went on to say, "Some of Krishnamurti's followers, who had sneaked in, knowing in advance that he was coming there--which we didn't--stood eyeing us (Vedantists) a bit suspiciously.  But within fifteen minutes we had begun to fraternize.  So a small but useful bridge was build."

PASSING BY OURSELVES

We pass by ourselves in the Bardo Plane, ships passing in the night.

RENUNCIATION AND AUSTERITY

In his book My Guru and His Disciple, Christopher Isherwood describes a situation where spiritual lecturer Gerald Heard, an early follower of Swami Prabhavananda, decided to resign his association with the Swami's Vedanta Society of Southern California.  His reason for doing so, as Heard stated in a letter to Prabhavananda, was that the Swami's way of life there in California violated the monastic standards of austerity.  It was too social, too comfortable, too relaxed.

This was to say, the Swami had Hindu notions of hospitality and often invited guests to lunch--some of them not even devotees, but just their relatives or friends. Appetizing meals were served--that is, if one liked curry--and they were not necessarily vegetarian.  The Swami had a car at his disposal.  He chain-smoked, which set a bad example for those who were struggling with their own addictions. The women, nuns, waited on him hand and foot and he accepted their service as a matter of course.  His relations with them--though doubtless absolutely innocent--could easily cause misunderstandings and suspicions among outsiders. For, after all, he WAS the only male in a household of females.

Even if Heard's letter was tactfully worded, it hurt Pravananda's feelings deeply, and he later answered Heard indirectly in an article entitled "Renunciation and Austerity," which he wrote for the Vedanta Society magazine.  It read in part, "You would identify the life of renunciation with a life of poverty and discomfort and you would say that if a spiritual teacher lives in comfort and in a plentiful household he is inevitably not living the consecrated life.  Your view is too simple.  A man of true renunciation concerns himself neither with poverty nor with riches.  If the poor man hugs his few trivial possessions, he is as much attached and as much a worldly man as the rich man.  Only, the poor man is worse off--because of his envy.  Mere outward austerity is a degenerate form of ritualism.  A spiritual soul never makes any demonstration of his renunciation."

According to Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, another of Prabhavananda's early followers, was distressed over this rift.  It was a disaster, Huxley said, when two sincere practitioners of the spiritual life fell out with each other--especially since there were so few of them.  "Judge not that ye be not judged," he murmured to himself several times--which suggested that he thought Heard was wrong.  Heard had his own style which others might well disagree with too, he seemed to be saying; Heard could be seen as too much of a "life-hater," as Isherwood put it, and a task master. 

This, however, was not the end of the Prabhavananda and Heard relationship.  The spiritual college that the latter went on to build in the Trabuco Canyon south of Los Angeles was not as successful as Heard had hoped.  As a result, he eventually turned it over to the Swami and the Vedanta Society with whom it had a brighter future, ironically as a monastery.

DR. W.Y. EVANS-WENTZ AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (February 2, 1878 – July 17, 1965) was an anthropologist and writer who was a pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism.  He was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and as a teenager read Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, and The Secret Doctrine and became interested in the teachings of Theosophy.  

He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats.  He then studied Celtic mythology and folklore at Jesus College, Oxford.  There he adopted the form “Evans-Wentz” for his name.  He travelled extensively, spending time in Mexico, Europe, and the Far East.  He spent the years of the First World War in Egypt and later travelled to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and India.  He reached Darjeeling in 1919 where he had first-hand access to Tibetan religious texts.

Evans-Wentz is best known for four texts translated from the Tibetan, especially The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  He credited himself only as the compiler and editor of these volumes, the actual translation of the texts performed by Tibetan Buddhists.  The principal translator was Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup (1868–1922), a teacher of English at the Maharaja's Boy's School in Gangtok, Sikkim who had also done translations for Alexandra David-Neel and Sir John Woodroffe. 

Evans-Wentz was a practitioner of the religions he studied.  He became Dawa-Samdup's “disciple,” his own term for it, and wore robes and ate a simple vegetarian diet.  He met Ramana Maharshi, the notable Hindu sage, in 1935, and meant to settle permanently in India, but returned to the U.S. when World War II compelled him to do so.  He passed his final twenty-three years in San Diego, and provided financial support to the Maha Bodhi Society, Self-Realization Fellowship, and the Theosophical Society.  His Tibetan Book of the Dead was read at his funeral.

THE BARDO THODOL OR TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

According to Tibetan legend, one or more highly-trained lamas, who died and later returned, reported their experience. It has been kept for centuries in the sacred lore of Tibetan Buddhism, and especially in the Bardo Thodol or the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Described by Dr. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, and Tibetan scholar and linguist Kazi Dawa-Samdup, the "forty-nine symbolic days" spent by the psyche of a person on the Bardo plane afford an interesting comparison with the forty-nine days of testing common to several world teachers.  These include Jesus in the desert, and the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree.

There are also a number of intriguing connections with the doctrine of purgatory, certain long-neglected Christian books on the art of dying, the ancient Greek mystery rites, and more recent records as kept by the British Society for Psychic Research, and other accredited groups investigating so-called "spiritualism."

The Tibetan Buddhist "science of dying" stresses, however, that all the Bardo experiences, similar in nature to dreams and nightmares, are in reality merely the dead man's own thought forms.  The phenomena he experiences in the after-death state are related to his own development, tastes, habits, desires and thoughts during his lifetime.

"The deceased human being," writes Dr. Evans-Wentz, "becomes the sole spectator of a marvelous panorama of hallucinatory visions; each seed of thought in his consciousness-content karmically revives, and he, like a wonder-struck child watching moving pictures cast upon a screen, looks on."  He is unaware, though, of the source of the phenomena unless he has been previously prepared, through training and contemplative exercises, to understand the "non-reality of what he sees."

It is understood, of course, that not all human beings will experience exactly the same phenomena in the after-death state, any more than the living do in their real life or in their dreams.

MADAME ALEXANDRA DAVID-NEEL AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM

Alexandra David-Neel (1869-1969) was a convert to the Tibetan form of Buddhism.  She spent some thirty years in Asia after completing studies in Sanskrit at the Sorbonne and in Belgium.  As a child she was extremely precocious, interested in oriental and occult subjects.  She wanted "to go beyond the garden gate in search of the Unknown."

One of her many trips took her from India to China across vast mountain passes and plateaus no European had seen previously.  She went to Tibet to do research in the various forms of religion that became Lamaism.  Lamaism borrowed doctrinal and ritualistic elements from Bon, Tantrism, Shamanism, and other Altaic and northern religions that had infiltrated Tibet over the centuries.

Madame David-Neel's visit to Tibet included trips to Lhasa and Shigatse, normally barred to foreigners.  She was permitted to interview both the Dalai and Tashi Lamas.  Her stay grew to fourteen years, two of which were spent in a cave in the Tibetan side of the Himalayas where she lived as a hermit.

As a professed Buddhist, she enjoyed many of the psychic experiences, called siddhis, that she described in her writings, although she usually spoke of them in the third-person. Madame David-Neel spoke all of the dialects of Tibet.

Among her seventeen books, translated into many languages including English, the three most famous are My Journey to Lhasa, Initiation and Initiates in Tibet, and, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, also known as With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet. The latter is probably her most famous work.

Her frequent traveling companion, a young Tibetan monk named Yongden, she adopted as her son.  Madame David-Neel spent her last years at her own lamasery, Samten Dzong, at Digne in France's Maritime Alps, where she died at the age of one hundred.

TRANSCENDENTAL EYE

The Eye with which I see God is the same Eye with which God sees me.

                                                                                     -----Meister Eckhart

MORE ON SWAMI PRABHAVANANDA

In his book My Guru and His Disciple (1980), Christopher Isherwood provides the following biography of Swami Prabhavananda:

He was born on December 26, 1893, at Surmanagar, a village in Bengal near the town of Bankura, northwest of Calcutta.  His name, during the first twenty years of his life, was Abanindra Nath Ghosh.

Abanindra's parents were normally devout Hindus.  He accepted their religious beliefs, but he wasn't a deeply meditative or reclusive boy.  He liked playing football and other games, and had plenty of friends.

However, by the time he was fourteen, he had read about Ramakrishna, the holy man already regarded by some as an avatar.  Ramakrishna had been born in a village not very far away, and had spent his adult life at a temple just outside Calcutta.  Abanindra had also read about Ramakrishna's chief disciples, Vivekananda and Brahmananda, who had founded the Ramakrishna Order of monks after Ramakrishna's death in 1886.  He felt a mysterious power of attraction in their names.

Then one day, by seeming chance, Abanindra met Sarada Devi.  She had been Ramakrishna's wife and was now regarded by his disciples as their spiritual mother--"Holy Mother," they called her.  One of her attendants told Abanindra who she was; otherwise, he would have taken her for an ordinary countrywoman, sitting barefooted, without the slightest air of self-importance, outside a village inn.  When he approached and bowed down to touch her feet in reverence, she said, "Son, haven't I seen you before?"

When Abanindra was eighteen and a student in Calcutta, he visited the Belur Math, the chief monastery of the Ramakrishna Order, which is beside the Ganges, on the outskirts of the city.  He wanted to see the room in which Vivekananda used to stay; since his death in 1902, it had been maintained as a public shrine.  When Abanindra left the Vivekananda Room, he found himself for the first time face to face with Brahmananda.  And Brahmananda also said to him, "Haven't I seen you before?"

The effect of this encounter upon Abanindra was far too powerful and subtle to be described in a few words.  He longed to meet Brahmananda again.  So, a few months later, he impulsively spent the money he had been given for tuition fees on a ticket to Hardwar, because he knew that Brahmananda was visiting the monastery there.  He arrived in the middle of the night, unannounced, but Brahmananda didn't seem at all surprised to see him.  He allowed Abanindra to stay a month, accepted him formally as his disciple, and then sent him back to Calcutta to continue his education.

Although Abanindra felt such devotion to Brahmananda, he wasn't yet intending to become a monk.  At college he came under another strong influence.  Organized militant opposition to British rule was now growing, and many students were involved.  Abanindra decided that his first duty was patriotic.  He must devote himself to the cause of India's freedom; in order to be able to do this single-mindedly, he vowed not to marry until it was won.  He joined a revolutionary organization and wrote pamphlets for it, which were secretly distributed.  

Because he looked so boyish and innocent, his comrades entrusted him with some revolvers which had been stolen from a British storehouse; he hid them in his room.  These young men were mostly untrained--they were risking their lives just as much as the veterans of the movement.  One of them threw a bomb at the Viceroy and had to escape from the country.  Another, who was Abanindra's close friend, was arrested and died in prison, probably as the result of being tortured.  The authorities called it suicide.

Abanindra was now studying philosophy.  He began coming regularly to the Belur Math because one of the swamis there could instruct him in the teachings of Shankara.  His instructor kept urging him to become a monk, but Abanindra would argue with him, saying that the monastic life was escapist, a refusal to accept one's political responsibilities.

During the Christmas vacation, Abanindra stayed at the Math (monastery) for a few days.  It was then that another extraordinary incident took place.  Here is Abanindra's account of it, written many years later.  ("Maharaj" was the name by which Brahmananda was known familiarly in the Order; its approximate meaning is "Master.")

‘One morning, as usual, I went to prostrate before Maharaj.  An old man was also in the room.  Suddenly he asked Maharaj, "When is this boy going to become a monk?"  Maharaj looked me up and down, and his eyes had an unforgettable sweetness as he answered quietly, "When the Lord wills."  That was the end of my political plans and ambitions.  I remained at the monastery.’

During the years which followed, Abanindra was at the Ramakrishna monastery in Madras.  He attended Brahmananda whenever he was allowed to, which was not often, because Brahmananda had to travel from one monastery to another in the course of his duties as Head of the Order.  However, Brahmananda was present when, in the autumn of 1921, Abanindra took his final vows (sannyas) and became Swami Prabhavananda.  (Prabhavananda means "one who finds bliss within the Source of all creation"; ananda, meaning "bliss" or "peace," is the suffix usually added to a swami's given name.)

In 1922, Brahmananda died.  In 1923, Prabhavananda was told by his seniors that an assistant swami was needed at the center in San Francisco and that they wished him to go there.  There were already several such centers, founded by Vivekananda during his second visit to the United States, 1899-1900. These centers were often called Vedanta societies, meaning that they were dedicated to the study and practice of the philosophy which is taught in the Vedas, the most ancient of the Hindu scriptures.

Since Brahmananda's death, Prabhavananda had been hoping to be permitted to lead a contemplative life, practicing intensive meditation, at a monastery in the Himalayan foothills.  He felt quite unfitted to teach anybody.  In his own words, "I was barely thirty, I looked like twenty, and I felt even younger than that."  But his seniors rebuked him for his lack of confidence.  How could he presume to imagine that success or failure depended on his own efforts?  Had he no faith that Brahmananda would help him?  "How dare you say you cannot teach?  You have known the Son of God!"

When Prabhavananda lectured for the second time at the San Francisco Center, he was suddenly at a loss for words and had to excuse himself and walked out of the room.  But this was only beginner's stage fright.  He soon became an effective speaker, as well as an efficient assistant to the swami in charge.  Within two years he was sent to Portland, Oregon, to open a center there.

While he was living in Portland, Prabhavananda was invited to Los Angeles, to give a series of lectures on Vedanta philosophy.  It was then that he got to know Mrs. Carrie Mead Wyckoff.  Thirty years earlier, as a young woman, Mrs. Wyckoff had met Vivekananda while he was in California.  Later she had become a disciple of Swami Turiyanada, another of Ramakrishna's direct disciples, and he had given her the monastic name Sister Lalita.  “Lalita” was one of the handmaidens of Krishna. Henceforth, people usually called her "Sister."

Sister Lalita was now a widow and she had just lost her only son--it seemed natural for the elderly lady and the youthful swami to form a kind of adoptive relationship.  She returned with him to Portland and kept house for him at the center.  Then, in 1929, she offered him her home, 1946 Ivar Avenue, to be the center of a future Vedanta Society of Southern California.  They moved into it as soon as arrangements to carry on the work in Portland had been made.

At first the Society was very small.  The living room of the house was easily able to hold Prabhavananda's congregation.  An Englishwoman whom they called Amiya came to live with them; later they were joined by two or three other women.  They had barely enough money to live on.

Then, around 1936, the congregation began to expand.  Prabhavananda had become well known locally as a speaker.  It was now only rarely that anyone would telephone to ask if the Swami would draw up a horoscope or give a public demonstration of psychic powers!  In fact, he wasn't a swami in the usual California sense, the word was now, but a teacher of religion whose title had the same significance as "Father" in the Catholic Church.

And then donors appeared with enough money to pay for the building of a temple.  It was finished and dedicated in July 1938. 

Over time, branch centers were started in Santa Barbara, Trabuco Canyon, San Diego, and South Pasadena.

SURFACE OF GOD

God is like an iceberg.  What is above the surface is what we know, or think we know, about Him, while below the surface is what actually is. 

RAMAKRISHNA PARAMAHAMSA

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-86) was a Bengali mystic.  He was born of a brahmin family in rural Bengal, where his father was the village priest.  Ramakrishna received virtually no education, but from childhood was known for the depths of his spirituality.  At the age of seven he experienced his first divine ecstasy.  When he was sixteen he joined his brother in Calcutta in doing priestly work for private families.

In 1855 Ramakrishna was appointed temple priest at the newly founded Kali shrine at Dakshineswar, on the banks of the Hooghly, a branch of the Ganges.  There he began to experience visions of Kali, Sita, and other forms of the Divine Mother, as well as of Rama, Krishna, Muhammad, and Jesus.  He easily fell into samadhi, moved by such prosaic and diverse sights as that of a lion in a zoo or a prostitute on a street.

At the age of twenty-three his family married him to a six-year-old girl named Sarada, who, however, did not come to live with him for another thirteen years.  Meanwhile he experimented with a range of ecstatic and devotional sects.  For instance in 1861 he joined a tantric Vaishnava group under the guidance of a brahmin woman.  

He participated in Vedanta sadhana (spiritual practice) and a melange of bhakti (devotional) practices.  His ecstasies and samadhis subsequently became constant: "When I reached the state of continuous ecstasy, I gave up all external forms of worship," he said. 

Sarada joined him in 1872.  The couple, while much devoted to each other, lived in continence.

Three years later Keshab Sen, one of the leaders of the elitist Brahmo Samaj, "discovered" Ramakrishna.  Dakshineswar soon became a center of devotion for Westernized and educated Bengalis.

Among such new followers was the agnostic Narendranath Datta, later known as Vivekananda, who in 1884 placed himself under Ramakrishna’s spiritual guidance. 

Ramakrishna died in 1886.  He was regarded a saint, and today is considered an avatar.  A number of books have been published by his disciples, including biographies and collections of his sayings.  A good biography is Christopher Isherwood's Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965).

VIVEKANANDA

Born Narendranath Datta, Vivekananda (1863-1902) was a Bengali intellectual educated in English schools in Calcutta.  Although an agnostic, he joined the reformist Brahmo Samaj, and was introduced to the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna.

He soon attached himself as a disciple to Ramakrishna.  When Ramakrishna died in 1886, Swami Vivekananda took sannyasa (spiritual withdrawal) and with some disciples spent six years on pilgrimage in India.  

In 1893 he attended the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, soon gaining an American following.  He increased his Western flock of disciples in London, where he spent much time.  

Back in India in 1897, he made a triumphal tour of Colombo (Sri Lanka), Madras, and Calcutta.  In the same year he organized the Ramakrishna Mission, which was to be highly successful in promulgating his version of the saint's teachings.

A second trip to the United States and England brought him more fame and success.  

One of the Swami's early and most important converts was the Irishwoman Margaret E. Noble, who followed him from London to India in 1898.  He called her Nivedita (the Dedicated One), the name by which she has been known since.

Nivedita became his biographer, the collector of his sayings, and the editor of his writings.  Her own works are a reflection of Vivekananda’s ideas. 

The Swami died at Belur, Bengal, at the ashram he founded there in 1898.