Her guru was strong enough to stop his own heart—but was there a more frightening aspect of his power?
DISCUSSED:
Swami Rama, Living with the Himalayan Masters, Biofeedback, The Menninger Foundation, Exquisite Control, Sanskrit, Guru-hood, Child-Memory, The Smell of Cigarettes and Cologne, Palo Alto, Ayurveda, A Fucked-Up Zen Koan, Yoga Journal, Katharine Webster, Sexual Violence, Shiva, Logical Contortions, Pandits, The Rubric of Desirability.
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Baba didn’t want it known where his ashes were scattered when he died—he didn’t want anyone to make a shrine to him. But when he died we didn’t call it that: we said “left his body.” He had done it before, when he was younger: had changed bodies while keeping his soul intact. “When you tear your shirt, do you cry? Get a new shirt,” he said. He didn’t worry about mending it. He wore a white T-shirt under the rough maroon robe of an enlightened one; the robe smelled like cigarettes because he could control every aspect of his body and could choose not to die of cancer. He died—left his body—in India, because he did not want to return to America. Of the allegations that surrounded him, one had led to a lawsuit against his organization, and he refused to heed the summons to appear in court. In exile, he maintained his silence around the subject, into death.
I have no memory of meeting Baba for the first time, of not knowing him. Likely because I was so little—only five—and because I grew up hearing and believing stories about him that elevated him to the level of myth, the times I actually spent with him stretched over the times I didn’t. Baba, we all called him, which means “father.” When I was nine, he initiated me in India at his ashram. In my family, the honor of becoming my guru was one he bestowed only on me. On the balcony of his suite I offered him fruits and flowers that my parents had bought for the occasion. In Sanskrit I repeated back the words he offered to me, promising in my heart to be obedient to him, to follow his teachings, to trust him with the care of my soul. He gave me a mantra in my ear. He wrote it down for me but it was secret, and I told it to no one. I still remember it, though it has been at least a decade since I reached for it.
Baba visited me in my dreams, could read my thoughts, wanted only what was best for me. He was the symbol of a world that made sense, one in which our family was chosen, special, protected. But there was another side to Baba, or there was another world, one less magical, at once more dangerous and mundane. For years, I lived joyously in the first world, until slowly, then all at once, I arrived in the second.
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In the spring of 1989, my father had a spiritual revelation. He had been in the Santa Cruz Mountains attending a talk by Dr. Usharbudh Arya, the founder of the Meditation Center in Minneapolis, who was on a national lecture circuit to spread his knowledge about yoga. Dr. Arya was a serious scholar, fluent in not one but two ancient languages—Pali, the language of the Buddha, as well as Sanskrit—and was a former professor of South Asian studies at the University of Minnesota. An autodidact, he received no formal schooling until enrolling at the University of London, where he earned his BA and also an MA; he then earned a LittD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. To me, he always looked a little like a brown Robin Williams, with a square, friendly face bedecked with ’80s dad-glasses, and, for much of my childhood, a white beard that also reminded me of Santa Claus’s. When my dad approached Dr. Arya after the lecture was finished, they looked at each other. My father, deeply moved by the power of this gaze, vibrating with the distress from the conflicts that had driven him to seek spiritual solace, laid his head on the shoulder of his future guru, and began to cry.
This encounter, of two souls meeting in a state of immediate, profound knowing, is reserved for romantic love in Western culture. In our spiritual tradition, however, the instant connection felt between guru and future disciple pointed to a spiritual certainty: that the two had known each other in different lifetimes, and that they had work to do together in this one. Dr. Arya was a disciple of Baba—Swami1 Rama—whom he had met years earlier in a similarly dramatic encounter. Already an accomplished scholar of Sanskrit and a meditation teacher, Dr. Arya took Baba immediately as his guru when they met in 1969.
The guru–disciple relationship is a bond of intense spiritual significance, formalized by the initiation ceremony, after which the disciple is “their guru’s responsibility,” says my mother. “You make this resolve that this is the person who will guide you, and you will follow him unquestioningly. And the guru will do whatever is necessary for your spiritual well-being, which might involve putting you through difficulties and pain. Just like parents, who might ground you for your own good, which you might not like.” The guru figure can be both parent and trickster, someone whose antics would disturb their disciple’s complacency with the illusion of the material world, their attachments, or their self-conception. My mother remembers this aspect of Baba and Dr. Arya’s relationship: times when Baba would belittle Dr. Arya in front of their disciples, cut him down to size—acts that Dr. Arya always took with good humor, my mother reports, accepting them as lessons in shrinking the ego. No matter what: the disciple owes her guru absolute obedience. The guru owes his disciple nothing less than the safeguarding and the development of their soul.
When Dr. Arya took Baba as his guru, he joined the ancient lineage Baba represented, and began to see himself as a vessel for its knowledge. In the dedication to a book about the Yoga Sutras, Dr. Arya writes, in Sanskrit (as translated by my mother): “The tradition that started with the golden source of the creation, continued by Ved Vyas and other sages, and ending at the feet of Sri Swami Ram[a], I bow to that unbroken guru lineage.” When my parents were initiated by Dr. Arya, he echoed this idea: “It is not me who is initiating you. This is the lineage of Swami Rama that comes straight through me,” my mom reports him saying. If my parents’ guru was the most significant spiritual leader in their lives, then the guru of my parents’ guru, Swami Rama, was ever more powerful, almost unimaginably so. Even in absence, even before we met him, he was a constant presence in our lives. I didn’t dream then that the honor of initiation that had been bestowed on Dr. Arya by Swami Rama could also be given to a child—to me.
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