My kirtan-leader warned me not to expect that everybody at Yogaville would be walking around in blissful samadhi trances with beatific smiles on their faces. She said this was a place where people came to work on their problems.
A chief problem for ashram residents was controlling their egos, as it is for almost everyone. Ego control is a frequent theme in both Buddhism and Hinduism, and was one of Swami-ji’s favorite topics. Often his sermons dwelled on the perils of an out of control ego, especially one getting in the way of spiritual practice. Swami-ji taught that an attitude of selfless service to others was the best cure for egotism. "Selflessness" was usually among the hardest things for us to achieve.
The ashram itself was filled with many opportunities to get caught in subtle ego traps, especially over spiritual matters. The receiving lines that devotees formed when Swami-ji entered or left an event are a perfect example. His path would snake between lines of followers on either side, all with hands joined in the prayerful “namaste” gesture and hoping that Swami-ji would stop for a moment to talk to them, pat them on the shoulder, or at least smile as he passed. Of course, he did stop and talk to some people. Understandably, he chatted with old friends he had not seen for a long time. Indian visitors would get special attention. Anyone holding a baby usually rated a stop and often a blessing. Senior members who worked on ashram boards and projects got a lot of attention, but often at the expense of others who saw Swami-ji less often.
Hoping for attention was a huge ego game, one that automatically left most players defeated, since there was no way Swami-ji could give everybody in the line personal time without making us stand there all night. Maybe that was the lesson (it should have been), but everybody would be back in line the next time Swami-ji was around. Hope springs eternal in the human ego.
Sri Swami Satchidananda, working his way down a line of eager devotees, circa 1985. The location is an outdoor pavilion built for summer satangs, as the group had outgrown the hunting lodge.
I sometimes played the attention game myself, until I found a way to short-circuit those lines at satsang when I really felt a need to talk with Swami-ji. There were usually a few minutes between the end of the arati prayer and when Swami-ji rose to leave. He would still be sitting in his huge chair, munching on on a bit of prasad and watching the congregation. That was when I zoomed in to kneel in front of him and ask a question that I felt was too personal for the “magic box”. I did this only a couple of times when I really needed advice. Usually I stayed in sociologist-mode, and just watched the interesting processes unfolding around me.
In general, ashram residents did their best to treat everybody with respect and compassion. But being human, they sometimes failed, and some folks could become quite prickly, myself included. Even the swamis had their share of emotional baggage. Swami-ji compared his ashram to a rock polisher, where the rough edges on stones would be smoothed away by banging into other stones. In the same way, egos were supposed to be smoothed out by rubbing them together.
There were occasional ashram controversies that got everybody’s nickers in a twist. One major flap was a ban on rock-and-roll music Swami-ji tried to impose on his followers. He felt that the intensity and beat of the music was disturbing to spiritual practice. He probably wasn’t too keen on lyrics celebrating sex and drugs either, but I don’t remember this being mentioned. Strange that this came from Swami-ji, who had been on the stage at Woodstock, and also numbered several well-known rock-and-roll stars among his followers.
Not surprisingly, this proclamation provoked a lot of grousing and hunting for loopholes from his followers, such as “What about ‘My Sweet Lord’, Gurudev? That’s rock-and-roll. Does it count?” Finally Swami-ji made his point and everybody calmed down, or least some of them calmed down.
At the next satsang, someone kicked over the whole bucket of worms again when they stood up and publicly asked Swami-ji, “What did you mean last week by ‘No rock-and-roll’?” In response he thundered back, “I meant no rock-and-roll!” As with most ashram controversies, the rock-and-roll flap eventually blew over. Since the ban was pretty much unenforceable, almost everybody except the monks and nuns went back to playing their Jimmi Hendricks albums.
Working on one’s ego was usually far from the minds of many people who came to live at the ashram. For most, the best reason to live at the ashram was to do spiritual practices such as meditation or hatha yoga in a supportive atmosphere. That was one of the main reasons Swami-ji founded Yogaville. Others came to raise their children in a safe and healthy environment, in theory free from temptations like Pepsi Cola and Hershey bars. Of course the attraction of a real-live Hindu guru was also a major draw.
On the down side, some people came because they couldn’t fit into wider society, and had no other place to go. There were hints of drugs, horrors of the Vietnam war, broken families and even suicide attempts lurking in several members' back-stories. Some dealt with their problems and then moved on to “normal” lives in the wider world, often still associated with Swami-ji and his organization. Others never left. One of my favorite sociologists notes that alternative religious communities like Yogaville can provide not just a haven for “lost souls”, but an opportunity and a safe path to re-integrate slowly into society. For some members, re-integration extended no farther than the ashram itself, but that was enough to give them a measure of peace and a social role as a valued member in a spiritual family.
I’m not sure where I fell on the “lost soul” spectrum. I certainly had been adrift because of my divorce and my military work situation. Yogaville definitely allowed re-integration for me, but I also came there to learn. I also enjoyed the “spiritual glamour” from living with a guru (a private ego trip for sure, but not one I lorded over anyone else). I suspect that most other members also had multiple reasons to be at Yogaville.
One very astute lady who had spent years with Swami-ji once said to me, “We’re all mad here. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t mad.” Indeed, Swami-ji sometimes joked that his ashram was a mental asylum, and he had all the keys.
My introduction to ashram lunacy happened the first time I visited for a week-long retreat. One of the swamis asked if I would perform a service for Swami-ji by driving into town to pick up a can of “blood-red” enamel paint. She went on to explain that Swami-ji wanted the rocks around the garden at his quarters painted red because visitors sometimes drove off the gravel and onto the plants. Of course I was excited to go, and assumed that everything had been arranged, so all I would have to do was pick up the paint and sign a payment chit. How wrong I was!
I arrived at the paint store and asked the manager about the paint ordered by Yogaville. Nobody had made any such order, and his store didn’t even stock “blood red” enamel paint. Now the manager, an obvious born-again, demanded, “And what does His Holiness want with blood-red paint?”, perhaps thinking of Ringo’s plight in the Beatles' movie HELP. Then he rounded on me, warning that I was risking Hell by fooling around with “that cult”. Heard that before! I got on the phone to the swami who had sent me on the errand. She told me Swami-ji had changed his mind about the paint, and that I should come right back. (Sigh!)
If these stories seem like I can only remember the controversies and failings, you are partly right. Remembering exactly what Swami-ji said is difficult at this point. I could barely remember most of what he said when his words were still fresh. A friend and I regularly had a greeting dialogue that went something like this:
“I don’t know, Ace. I just don’t know.” (We called each other “Ace” all the time).
The other replied, “I don’t know either, Ace. I just don’t know.”
Then one night after a particularly great satsang with Swami-ji, the conversation shifted. “Ace, I know! I know!” he said.
“I do too, Ace. I know!”, I replied. But then added, “But by tomorrow morning, Ace, I will have forgotten.”
“Yeah, me too, Ace. Me too,” was his sad response.
That is not to say we weren’t uplifted and changed by the ashram experience and Swami-ji’s teachings. His magic worked slowly, a little bit at a time. It was a long-term growth experience.
I suspect that most disciples of gurus and other spiritual teachers suffer from the same problem. Only a few particularly meaningful high points from the teacher’s sermons stick, though the overall experience can be life changing. Look at Jesus’ poor disciples, who just really didn’t “get it” until he was gone. The only reason we have such a detailed record of Sri Ramakrishna’s last years is because his Boswell, Mahendra Nath Gupta (or “M”, as he modestly styled himself), had a near perfect memory, took notes, and spent hours writing down everything he could remember into his diary as soon as he got home. That diary was later translated, edited and published as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, and remains a popular spiritual classic.
Naturally, living at an ashram that emphasized hatha yoga, I eventually took an introductory class to learn the basic asanas (poses). Integral Yoga Hatha, as taught by Swami Satchidananda and instructors trained in his method, is intended to be simple and easy to do. There is no pulling joints from their sockets, baking in hot rooms, hanging from ropes, or any other extreme practices, just gentle bends and stretches.
Being born with seriously limited joint motion, I was never too good at most poses. One instructor told me I wasn’t even doing savasana (“corpse pose”) correctly. How you can screw up laying there like a dead person I don’t know, but apparently I couldn’t even get that one right. Still, I tried for several years and was pretty faithful at doing my asanas almost every morning.
Hatha came to an abrupt end for me while doing a fairly basic pose called ardha matsyendrasana (“half spinal twist”). As I assumed that pose, a searing pain swept across my back from my right waist to my left shoulder. For the next two weeks I hobbled about, bent into the “this-hurts-too-much-to-stand-up-straight” asana. No more hatha for me after that, but bhakti and kirtan had always been my sadhana anyway.
My biggest ashram nuts0 experience happened the day of our Guru Purnima celebration (a day to honor our guru, and all other gurus as well). Because Shivananda Hall, Yogaville’s present dining hall and assembly room, was still unfinished, the ashram rented a community building in a nearby town. Residents with automobiles were asked to offer rides to others who lacked transportation. I signed up to take one adult and possibly one child in my little Toyota truck.
On the morning of the event I was approached by one of the swamis who asked if I could carry Swami-ji’s huge chair in my truck. No problem, and I was quite honored. An hour later, the same swami asked me if I would also take a "few" boxes of decorations for the hall. Again no problem; the truck was empty except for my sleeping bag and a large box holding jumper cables, tie-down ropes and other tackle. Just before lunch she hit me with yet another request. Instead of waiting to take a passenger, would I mind driving down “just a bit early” so there would be time to arrange the decorations? “Just a bit early” meant right after lunch--like in an hour. Again, no problem, but now I was starting to feel trapped in what is known in management-speak as “zero-point escalation”, where a situation grows from almost nothing to a huge headache.
Oy, what a headache it was! When I arrived at the pick-up point by the hunting lodge, I was gobsmacked by a huge pile of stuff. Besides Swami-ji’s chair there were two more chairs and box after box of decorations and other things. The pile looked like it was as big as my truck itself. I protested to the swami who was in charge, saying it wouldn’t all fit, and that I need first to go to my quarters and unload my own stuff. He overruled me with “We can make it fit”, and over my protests he and his helpers began cramming everything into the little truck. They did manage to get it all in, filling the camper shell right up to the roof. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see out of the rear view mirror, or the right side mirror either, since they had also filled up the passenger side of the cab. Somebody even wedged in an upturned chair into the cab, so I could barely reach the gearshift. Finally I pulled away for the 20-mile trip to the site.
Just a mile or so down the road I began to smell something burning, and wisps of smoke were floating past my eyes. Then I spotted the problem. That chair in the cab had been shoved up against the cigarette lighter which was now glowing like Sauron’s evil eye. I managed to stop and pull out the lighter before the dashboard burst into flames, but the heat had melted the area around the lighter socket like Salvadore Dali's watch.
When I arrived at the event site, I was in a livid rage, one of those rare mads I very occasionally get that no amount of wisdom, meditation or deep breathing will cure. After the truck was unloaded, I considered blowing off the whole event and going back to the ashram, but realized I would be expected to drag all the boxes and furniture back when the program ended. It wouldn’t be fair (or "yogic") to leave that job for someone else. Instead I retreated to the building’s basement, and sat brooding through the evening in semi-darkness so as not to spoil the event for anyone else.
When I came up for air at the end of the celebration, most of the stuff had already been whisked away by other drivers. I was left with just Swami-ji’s monster chair and box or two of decorations.
One of Sri Ramakrishna’s favorite folk tales (told with my usual dry humor) offers a solution to this:
THE SWAMI AND THE NAGA
A FABLE ABOUT SNAKES FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SAY "NO"
Once upon a time, a huge naga (cobra) took up residence under a tree near a village. The snake terrorized anyone who walked down the road that ran past HIS tree.
One day a holy man visited the village, and told his hosts he would soon be leaving by the road that passed the cobra’s tree. The villagers pleaded, “Oh, Reverend Sir, please don’t go that way. A terrible naga lives under a tree. If he bites you our whole village will get bad karma.” The swami reassured the worried villagers he had a mantra that would protect him from the snake.
As the swami reached the tree, the cobra rose up ready to bite the holy man. But the swami spoke his mantra at the last moment, and the snake fell docile at his feet. “Oh, Snake," he asked, "why do you frighten these villagers and try to bite them?”
The serpent replied, “Maybe you haven't noticed, but I'm a snake. Biting things is what we snakes do for a living. It’s our nature.”
“I can show you a higher nature. I can teach you to see God, but you must promise never to bite anyone again.”
The snake responded, "God? I heard the villagers calling for somebody named 'God' when I chased them. I'd like to know more about this God person."
The cobra promised to reform, so the swami initiated him into spiritual life, teaching the snake his precepts, giving him a mantra and showing the serpent how to meditate. As the swami left, he promised to check on the snake’s progress when he returned in a month or so.
The naga kept his word, and even gave up eating little animals. He lived on fallen fruit, herbs, nuts and roots, which made him very thin. He stopped harassing the villagers and they began to use the road again.
One day some naughty boys saw the cobra meditating under his tree. They picked up rocks and began to pelt the snake, causing many wounds. The cobra tried his best to ignore the rocks and continued chanting his mantra. Then one of the boys grabbed the snake by the tail, swung him over his head and bashed the poor reptile against the tree. Thinking the snake was dead, the boys went off to harass some other unfortunate animal. The serpent crawled slowly into his den and resumed his meditation.
When the swami returned he called for his disciple, who painfully dragged himself from his snake hole. The swami was shocked. “Oh, you poor creature, what has happened to you?”
“Well, Master, I stopped eating little animals," the snake responded. "I’m a vegan now, so maybe I lost a little weight.”
“But I see you are covered in wounds,” observed the swami. ‘How did this happen?”
“Oh, those were from the village boys. They didn’t know I had changed. But I kept my promise and didn’t try to bite them.”
“You poor fool,” said the swami. “I told you not to bite anybody, but I never said you couldn’t hiss!”
Sometimes I just needed to hiss “NO”, but that was always a tough call for me to make at the ashram.
