The Abode of Yoga

Right as the public meditation ended, I got word that Guru wanted me at the house. The porch was crowded when I got there. Guru was in the other room apparently, and everyone welcomed me a little more warmly than usual. I sat down, but before I could truly settle in, the girls began filing out of the other room and onto the porch. One of them -- perhaps Savita, whom I had always admired -- told me that Guru wanted me. It became quiet and serious almost at once. Guru was sitting up straight in his reclining chair and he motioned for me to sit in front of him. "Let us meditate good boy," Guru said as he closed his eyes. We meditated together for two or three minutes before Guru asked me what was wrong. "Tell me everything that is bothering you, good boy." I told Guru the same thing that I had told him a few days earlier on the phone , and what I had told him in my goodbye note . This time, however, I wasn't at all emotional. "Guru, I've lost my aspiration...

"Yogaloy, Guru wants to talk to you." It was Ashrita. "Will you be at this number for a few minutes?" "Yes," I said, and then hung up. I hadn't expected this development. I took the phone downstairs to my new room. I had thought Guru wouldn't want anything to do with me once I'd left. Now I sat waiting for the phone to ring. I didn't have to wait long. Guru and I spoke for about ten minutes (maybe less). He did most of the talking while I listened with tears in my eyes. I told Guru frankly that my aspiration -- my hunger for the Divine -- had disappeared. I told him that I was quite sure it wouldn't return. While he went on at some length, in short Guru didn't accept my analysis of the situation. He told me in no uncertain terms that I was "destined for the spiritual life." I doubted that, but couldn't resist Guru's simple request: that I agree to go back to New York and talk to him face to face. He would let me l...

When I think back about how I felt hunched over my handlebars pedaling north along Monterey Highway towards San Jose, I always think of Curt Smith cruising through California in his convertible MG in this video for the Tears for Fears classic "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." Freedom. I was riding my racing bike north from Morgan Hill, where my dad lived, up to my old stomping grounds, about a 50 mile ride round trip. I had slipped away cleanly from New York, having left my goodbye note to Guru on the dresser in my old room in Queens. Perhaps at that very moment back in New York, Ketan or someone else had discovered the note in my abandoned room after I had failed to show up to work that morning. That was all behind me, though. God, to be free! I'd always felt free on my bike, but being away from the New York winter, the New York crime, the self-imposed discipline of the Center -- I'd never felt so free. As I rode through South San Jose, I passed my old high scho...

While I was secretly planning my getaway, there was another development: Guru had become extremely displeased with the New York boys' singing group, which was known simply as "Kanan's group," after our saintly leader . For his day job, Kanan ran a flower shop on Parsons Boulevard called " The Garland of Divinity's Love ." He's married to a nice woman named Hashi and happens to be that rare individual for whom nobody has an unkind word. The only cross he apparently had to bear in life was leading his singing group, and it was getting heavy (not that it was his fault at all). The singing group itself was made up of about 10 guys, all of whom had been in the Center significantly longer than I had. Unfortunately, at least half of them had a motivation problem when it came to learning and singing Guru's Bengali songs. Besides special sets of songs for each of the two annual Celebrations, we sang two or three songs each week at Guru's public medit...

I returned to New York from my Christmas and New Year's vacation a week or two before Guru and many of the disciples returned from their own. Ketan had gone on the trip with Guru and on one of his first nights back, we guarded the block together. Guarding the block consisted of sitting in a car all night parked in front of the disciple-owned stores on Parsons Boulevard to ward off potential vandals. It was brutal duty and, therefore, critical that your guard partner be a good one. Ketan was. Despite the fact that I'm generally taciturn, we could talk for hours. That night, Ketan asked me how my vacation had been. "You see any old friends?" "Yeah," I replied, "I went to a New Year's Eve party," I said hesitantly. I wasn't sure that it was a good idea to share this information. Over the previous year, my relationship with Ketan had become distant as I spent more of my free time training for triathlons and less time hanging out at the tenni...

Despite having written my goodbye note to Guru, I had no concrete plan in place to leave the Center when he and many of the disciples left town for the Christmas trip (1988). So, the note remained on my shrine. Though I had no plans to leave the Center just then, I did fly back to my dad's place in Morgan Hill, California for the holidays. I arrived a few days before Christmas and would stay for a few days past New Years. My dad gave me the use of one of his cars for my stay and on a lark, I called my old friend Dave Moretti . Later that day, we met at a local mall to do some Christmas shopping. Dave was then managing a fitness center and had been bodybuilding for the last few years. He was huge and it was great to see him. We caught up over lunch and he invited me to a New Year's Eve party planned for the following week. I don't remember spending much time with Jeevan or Nirbachita , who by then were living in San Francisco and attending the Center there. As I recall, t...

In the late fall (1988), I sat at my bedroom shrine for the first time in many months. It had been more than a year since the psychic flame which had sustained my spiritual life had been extinguished. I was in a somber mood. I folded my hands and looked at the picture of Guru which had started me on my spiritual journey seven years earlier . Though sad, I remembered from whence I had come -- who I had been before I took up the path -- and conjured a pure feeling of gratitude in my heart. Bowing my forehead to meet my folded hands in front of me, I offered my occult gratitude to Guru for everything he'd done for me. Then I picked up a piece of paper and a pen I had placed on my shrine for this purpose and wrote Guru a short goodbye. I no longer have the note, but I wrote the following (almost word for word): Dearest Guru, I am eternally grateful for everything you have done for me and for my brother and sister. It is a debt I will never be able to pay. Unfortunately, I have lost m...

To my mind, having a girlfriend was incompatible with remaining in the Center. Certainly, that was the explicit general rule: if you were single, then you were to remain celibate. Now, I wasn't completely naive. I knew that amongst the general population of disciples there were those who didn't follow all of the rules all of the time. And even amongst those who were wholly devoted to Guru and the Center way of life there were, at times, temporary exceptions to the general rule. If, for example, an otherwise devoted disciple was honest with Guru about an affair of some kind (or some other indiscretion), it wasn't necessarily a firing offense. There were no exceptions, however, to the marriage prohibition. In the 1970s, Guru not only permitted marriages, he actually arranged some between disciples. But by the time I joined the Center, marriage was verboten. If a disciple got married, he or she would have to leave the Center and could come back only after a three-year hiatus....

She was Vietnamese, about my age (23), and very pretty. She was my nurse. Trishatur had brought me to the emergency room the night before. After waiting more than six hours without being admitted, I had barged past the triage nurse in agony and was immediately shown a bed and administered an I.V. A short time later, the emergency room doctor told me that I appeared to be suffering from appendicitis. An operating room was being prepared for me, he said, and would be ready in an hour or so. A few hours later, the prospective surgeon appeared at my bedside. I told him I wasn't feeling any better, but neither was I feeling any worse. He suggested that we hold off on the surgery and reassess in a few hours. By midday, I was feeling slightly better and had been moved out of the emergency room. Some of my friends had visited me, including at least one of the " Annam Brahma " girls (I can't remember whether it was Nishtha, Pranika, or Shephali -- all of whom I have fond memo...

By late '87, I had run about 20 marathons and three or four ultra-marathons (including the 200 mile race ). I was beginning to burn out on running. So, I bought a road bike from a very nice guy named Sandhani . My plan was to start triathlon training. I got some help on the bike and local bike routes from another very nice disciple named Krandan -- a great character originally from England, then hailing from Switzerland. He took me on a number of 50-mile rides out to Oyster Bay that were breathtaking, in more ways than one. For help with swim training, I turned to three disciples who were training to swim the English Channel: Shraddha , Sunil , and Dhruva . A few nights a week, they would drive out to Hofstra University's Olympic-sized pool and seemingly swim forever. The first time they brought me out there, I remember walking out onto the pool deck in my baggy running shorts and being slightly embarrassed by the sight of the three of them in their Speedos. To put it mildly...

Now is the time, perhaps, to identify and provide some simple explanations for the labels Guru used for the various constituents of the human psyche. They are five: the body, the vital, the mind, the heart, and the soul. These are somewhat simplified versions of the labels Guru learned in the spiritual community in which he was raised: the Sri Auruobindo Ashram . ( Here is a Wikipedia description of the psychology of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga.) In later posts, I'll address the significant influence that Sri Aurobindo's writings eventually had on me, but for now let me just say that the following explanations of the five parts of the human psyche as categorized by Guru are my own. That is to say, they are my understandings of those terms and how I thought of them and their workings according to my own experience. And to be clear, my explanations are not necessarily Center orthodoxy. The body. Self-explanatory really. The body is the physical organism. For those readers...

By the spring of 1988, I had begun to panic. While still master of my domain , the psychic flame had been out for nearly six months, replaced by an ever present and increasingly powerful sexual desire. I struggled to keep it in check, but a confluence of factors worked against me. First, I was stressed at work. At that point, I had worked about two years straight with just two days off a month. Needless to explain, perhaps, the restaurant business was getting old. Plus, despite living a Spartan lifestyle, I couldn't even afford to buy a new pair of running shoes (instead Sundar , who sold shoes out of his barbershop for extra cash, extended me credit). This stress combined with my inability to meditate -- to immerse myself in the occult movement that had once owned me -- left me with little desire to attend Guru's regular functions. And it seemed my nascent sexual desire fed on this stress. The obvious implication of these developments -- that I would eventually leave the Cent...

Thanksgiving moved on to Christmas and the dead of winter. Guru and many of the local disciples were away on winter break, not to return until mid-January 1988. And the inner flame had not yet returned. I wasn't alarmed. All seekers could be expected to go through a dry spell, right? I was lonely, though. Without Guru and many of my friends around I suddenly found myself with lots of time on my hands in the evenings after work. It was then that something quite unexpected happened. Now, as any devoted fan of the hit series Seinfeld will tell you, hardly a day passes when I cannot make some reference to one of that show's episodes in reference to the everyday happenings of my life. For that reason, I try to keep such references to a minimum. For one thing, such references date me -- the show has been in syndication for 10 years. For another thing, I'm sure non-fans get tired of such references. In this case, however, I cannot resist. One night, while lying in bed in early ...

Do you know the story of the Earl of Stanhope? It is said that upon arriving at the palace of King Louis XIV, the French King met the Earl’s carriage and held the door to the palace open and said, “After you.” Without hesitation, the Earl of Stanhope said “thank you,” permitted the King to hold the door for him, and walked into the palace. The King replied, “Truly, you are the most polite man in Europe.” The moral of the story is that when someone offers you a courtesy – even if that someone is your superior, like the King in this case – the polite response is to accept gracefully. (A similar story is recounted here about the Earl of Stair.) This story comes to my mind often. Just the other day, while descending in the elevator on my way home from work, I told my fellow passenger “after you.” “No, no after you,” he insisted. In the meantime, the elevator doors began to close. I didn’t fight any further. Remembering the Earl of Stanhope, I said “thank you” and went on my way. Sundar ta...

I can't pinpoint the exact day, but sometime in the fall of 1987 the psychic flame went out. In fact, maybe it had gone out earlier -- that summer perhaps -- but I had only noticed it that fall. In any event, the retreat of the occult movement which just the year before had completed its annexation of my conscious being had occurred. I do remember the exact moment I realized that the psychic retreat had occurred: the day after Thanksgiving. Guru must have been out of town, because a disciple had invited me and a couple other guys to spend Thanksgiving day with him and his family in rural New Jersey. It turned out to be the best Thanksgiving I've ever had (before or since). Maybe that was because my expectations for it were so low. To start with: New Jersey? My experiences with the "Garden State" had been largely confined to drives to and from Newark (for the uninitiated, not a pleasant drive). Then there was Thanksgiving itself and the inevitable family issues that ...

Guru has said that there are grades of spiritual masters, just as there are different grades of doctors. In his analogy, the third grade of doctor merely makes a diagnosis and writes the appropriate prescription. One step up is the second grade of doctor, who goes a step further and will check up on the patient from time to time and, if necessary, encourage the patient to take his or her medicine. Finally, there is the first grade of doctor. According to Guru's analogy, the first grade of doctor will go beyond mere encouragement. If necessary, the first grade of doctor will put his or her knee on the patient's chest and force the medicine down. According to Guru, the same is true for spiritual masters. For spiritual masters, however, neither the diagnosis nor the medicine is physical. In the most generic and general sense, the diagnosis typically involves the disciple's ego and personal qualities associated with the ego. The spiritual master's prescription for such pro...

After the 7,000 pound lift , Guru began lifting people up, literally. A disciple named Unmilan fit Guru's sitting calf raise machine with a platform so that people -- like professional wrestler "Hillbilly" Jim Morris , me, and the young daughter of a disciple -- could stand on it and be lifted. Unmilan also fit Guru's one-arm press rack with a similar platform. Over the remaining years of his life, Guru would use this simple contraption to lift hundreds of dignitaries -- from Nobel laureates to heads of state. Guru didn't just lift dignitaries, though. He also lifted disciples. It was around the summer of 1987, shortly after I had returned from my two weeks on the Peace Run , that Guru made an unusual request: he wanted all disciples to be weighed on a certain day. I don't remember, now, exactly what Guru originally had in mind, but it was tied into his lifting in some way. In any event, he wanted all of the local disciples to get weighed on a certain day. T...

I'm not sure whose idea it was originally, but in 1987 the Center sponsored its first Peace Run -- a 50-state Olympic-style torch relay. Disciples had used running relays and other athletic events to celebrate certain Center causes and events for years. Peace Run '87, however, was on an altogether different scale. It started in April and would end in August, with the goal of running a flaming peace torch not just back and forth across the United States, but on a course that would wind its way through every individual state as well. It was a massive undertaking, and the Center had only one disciple capable of carrying it off: Shambhu . Shambhu is a man of action. Were he associated with the military, he'd be an operator (as opposed to a mere analyst). Shambhu gets things done. He's not only a professional musician , but also a world-class public relations man . To me, though, he is more than that. He's a friend and would become one of a small group of individuals wh...