The Light of the Self (Excerpt 3)
A Memoir of a Spiritual Awakening (Chapter 3)
Chapter Three: One Way to the Father
The first two chapters of The Light of the Self are available in earlier posts here on Outtakes and Fresh Starts.
I was weeding the tomato field beneath the temple when the swami who led the ashram came down the side of the hill and asked me if I wanted to go with him and a party of devotees to chant Hare Krishna and sell Back to Godhead magazines at a rock festival in Atlanta. Happy to get away from the sweaty, dirty work of the ashram and eager to see the outside world again, I ran into the farmhouse and quickly packed my backpack for a week’s journey.
The swami had set up the ashram a couple of years earlier to escape the noise and temptations of city life, which traditional Hindus see as a coarse symbol of Kali Yuga, a recurring Iron Age of decay and immorality in cyclical Indian cosmology that began its current run when Krishna left the earth in 3102 BCE. Prabhupada taught that a new Vedic civilization would rise from the rural ashrams founded by his disciples as an alternative to the decadent civilizations of Kali Yuga, which still must run for hundreds of centuries until the dawn of the next Satya Yuga, or Golden Age. But the ashram was too poor to buy food and tools, so the swami took parties of devotees out into the glare of the Iron Age to chant on college campuses and on city streets while he sold incense to head shops, and we distributed magazines and incense for donations while chanting and dancing on the streets. Although we had renounced the outside world, it still had its uses, and venturing out into it for money and food remained a necessity.
We left late in the afternoon, just when the other devotees were going down the side of the ridge to bathe in the pond at the bottom of the hollow. We talked about Krishna while we walked, and the swami—or Swamiji—as we respectfully addressed him in the traditional manner—pointed out wildflowers and told us their names. Above us, a ceiling of thick foliage blanketed long stretches of the road in darkness, despite the days of trimming and cutting that I was putting in on the road crew. I showed the swami where we had been working with the chainsaw, and it pleased him to see that light was reaching the road, transforming mud into a surface hard enough for the wheels of a car or a truck. The signs of our work lined the trail: here a pile of rocks dragged up from the streambed at the bottom of the hollow, waiting to be pounded into gravel for the road; there, a stack of locust logs for fence posts, and, further on, a tangle of branches and felled trees that we would pick through for firewood in the piercingly cold mornings of the coming winter.
The woods were alive with a life that was indifferent to us, even as it embraced us, and it made me happy to live in that tranquil setting. The sound of a stream as it pounded over the rocks rose through the undergrowth, and the sharp cries and haunting calls of birds colored the air. When we passed a neighbor’s pasture, we heard the lazy, melodious clatter of cowbells, a gentle sound that suggested a tranquil world of light and peace hiding behind the world of the senses.
At the end of the trail, we boarded the swami’s white van, which was parked beside an abandoned schoolhouse. Red letters swirling like flames on both sides of the van announced the purpose of its riders:
THE INTERNATIONAL SANKIRTAN PARTY
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare
Sankirtan, the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra in public places by bands of Krishna devotees, dates to the sixteenth century, when the Bengali saint, Sri Krishna Chaitanya, who is believed by his followers to have been an incarnation of Radha and Krishna in loving embrace, led parties of ecstatic devotees onto the streets and roads of India. He made numerous converts, both through ecstatic displays of love for Krishna and through intellectual dueling with leading religious thinkers. He predicted that the Krishna-consciousness movement would spread far beyond his native land and that Krishna’s name would be sung “in every town, country, and village.” So, as we drove to Columbus to collect a few more devotees from the temple there, we were confident that Krishna had foreordained our missionary activities.
When we got to the Columbus temple, which was in a small, run-down house near the Ohio State University campus, I decided that I was ready to have my hair shaved—a step that indicated a deeper commitment to the monastic discipline of the movement and one that I had delayed taking. I stared intently at a wall while a devotee clipped my long hair. Then he took a razor to my scalp, leaving it bare and smooth, except for the shikha, a lock of hair that devotees leave on the back of the head, so that, as devotees believed, Krishna can snatch them out of the material universe at the moment of death. By submitting to the ancient monastic custom of the tonsure, which has been practiced with minor variations by Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian monks for millennia, I was signifying to the world from which I was fleeing that I had utterly renounced its values.
When I looked in a mirror, I was dismayed at what I saw: prominent blue eyes staring out of a sunburned face capped with a milk-white scalp. A wave of anxiety surged through me, and I wondered if I could maintain the monastic discipline of the Krishna-consciousness movement. But the devotees were ecstatic and began to shout, “Victory to Shri Krishna! All glories to Shrila Prabhupada!” Swamiji smiled gracefully and said, “Now, you look like a devotee.”
Afterwards I went out onto the porch to chant on my mala, a rosary made of sandalwood beads, before going to sleep. As I watched twilight descend upon the dilapidated neighborhood, a subtle spiritual energy ran through my body and radiated in silvery waves through my mind. I was overcome with a powerful sensation of the insubstantiality of the world, and I mocked the shimmering illusions of maya, the deluding but creative energy of Krishna. I reviled the whine of jet engines overhead and the roar of traffic in the street. I dismissed the passing students and the knowledge taught in their university. I renounced the patterns of sound and colors that pressed seductively against my flesh.
Although I had hesitated to shave my head and was unsure of my ability to live as an ascetic, I had no doubts about the truth of the gospel of Krishna consciousness. I was convinced that the history of the world was bending towards the future that Sri Chaitanya had prophesied and that soon people everywhere would gladly surrender to Krishna’s gentle rule. In a mood of elation and self-congratulation for being on the forward edge of Krishna’s purposes in history, I rolled out my sleeping bag in the temple room and instantly fell asleep.
Columbus still slept when we rose from the hard floor to dance quietly before the images of the Lord. We danced ourselves into a warm mood of devotion and then, just as the first streaks of sunlight began to brighten the sky, we set out for Atlanta in the sankirtan van. This was the first time I had been off the ashram since I had arrived there, and I was wary of the outside world. As we rode in a van loaded with incense and magazines, I felt sorry for the people in the cars on the highway. I thought of them as lost on the endless wheel of rebirth, or samsara, and as wasting the opportunity of a human birth by following the lead of the senses. Proud with the self-righteousness of a convert, I wanted to save them from rebirth by giving them enlightenment with a glance and by telling them about the love of Krishna, which is sweeter than all the illusory pleasures of the world.
When we arrived late that night at the festival, we drove through vast crowds of partying young people until we found a place near the stage, where we parked and slept, ignoring the partying, because we had turned away from the counterculture and no longer wanted to take part in its indulgences. At dawn, we wrapped ourselves in our dhotis and spent a meditative hour chanting the Hare Krishna mantra while looking at the Woodstock generation sleeping in after a night of psychedelic extravagance.
When they began to wake up, we loaded stacks of magazines and reeking packages of incense into shoulder bags imprinted with the Hare Krishna mantra and walked through the slowly thickening throngs of young people selling magazines and incense and collecting donations. Dressed in radiant dhotis that billowed gently in the morning breeze and with shaved heads, we stood out among the hippies, who were dressed in the exuberant costumes of the psychedelic generation—paisley Nehru shirts, tinted granny glasses, tie-dyed T-shirts, fringe moccasins, and cowbells.
The scene surrounding us was like a state fair without adults or police. On the midway, hippie artisans hawked their wares to the stoned youths who pushed against their booths. Various kinds of drugs—LSD, peyote, mescaline, marijuana, and amphetamines—were available everywhere at the festival. Dealers walked through the crowds shouting the names of drugs with impunity. One dealer was selling hits of acid from the back of a panel truck, and a shouting knot of nearly naked, sunburned youths swirled around the dealer, pushing bills toward him. He handed tabs of acid to the young people with one hand and, in the other, he grasped a bundle of fives, tens, and twenties. My shoulder bag was bulging with quarters and singles, but I saw a larger opportunity. I pushed through the crowd and shouted, “Hare Krishna!” which the young people shouted back delightedly while the dealer shot an annoyed glance at me. Keeping my mind on business, I asked for a donation to our temple, so that we could “spread love of God.” The dealer told me to get lost, and the crowd surrounding him howled with laughter. But with a newly shaven head and wrapped in a monastic robe, I felt backed up by the whole universe as I suggested bluntly that he make a donation to Krishna’s movement in order to burn off some of the bad karma earned by selling drugs.
He lurched backwards into the truck as if he had been hit when I said this. Bending closer to him while the young people, now completely silent and focused on me, watched breathlessly, I promised him that making an offering to Krishna would liberate him from the bad effects of his actions and get him of the wheel of samsara, the wheel of birth and death. The dealer pushed three twenty-dollar bills into my hand, which I dropped into my bulging shoulder bag. “Chant Hare Krishna and stay high forever!” I shouted the countercultural slogan of the early Krishna-consciousness movement and walked away. The crowd laughed hysterically, and the dealer went back to selling drugs.
As the heat of the day increased, the sun burned my bare head, and I felt faint. So I went for salt tablets to a first-aid tent run by Jesus People—hippies who had turned to Jesus, but who didn’t want to leave the counterculture for a conventional church. An intense young man with a full beard and very long hair came from inside the tent when he saw me and said that he once also had been a Hare Krishna devotee. I saw that he was carrying a large, leather-bound Bible, and behind him trailed a group of intensely smiling Jesus People who focused upon me as if eternity were in the balance. To the accompaniment of emphatic cries of “Amen” and “Hallelujah” from his companions, he told me that he used to think that Krishna was the answer to his problems. But he had grown up in an evangelical Christian home, and one day he decided once and forever that the Bible is right when Jesus says in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John that he is the only way to the Father, to God. Immediately after making that decision, he left the Krishna-consciousness movement and exchanged Krishna for Jesus and the Bhagavad Gita for the Bible.
Using this turnabout in his biography as a chance to make a convert, he now asked me if I wanted to accept Jesus as my lord, but I told him to chant Hare Krishna, and I took the salt tablets and got away from him and the other Jesus People as fast as I could. I was perplexed, and I wondered how a devotee could leave Krishna to become a Christian. I set the problem before the swami, who had been in the movement longer than the rest of us. He said that the only way to answer the question about which of the many available ways to God is the right one is to desire to be only where God is. If you only go where God is, he counseled, you will never lose God. He confided in me that because he had been raised as an evangelical Christian, he had struggled with this problem himself, and that if he thought that God was not in the Krishna-consciousness movement, he would leave today and return to being a Christian. “But God is here,” he asserted with the intensity of someone who had long considered the question, and, he concluded, “the proof is in the result: Krishna’s devotees are loving and serving God and telling others how to love and serve God.”
This counsel quieted my doubts. It would have been perverse of God, I thought, to answer the swami’s prayer to always be with God by letting him get tricked into joining a false religion. A reasonable and caring God wouldn’t damn sincere seekers just because they failed to figure out which of the many available religions is the only true one—if, indeed, there is only one true religion. If people could be damned because they didn’t manage somehow to select the right religion from the many religions that call for our attention, then there could be no spiritual security, I thought. And sincerely wanting to serve God would be less pleasing to God than finding the right system of beliefs, which, given the number of religions that are available, would be as difficult as picking the winning numbers on a lottery ticket. If God were arbitrary in this way, I thought, then being good at guessing would be more useful spiritually than being good at prayer. So, it seemed more reasonable to think that a loving God would be as pleased with devotion from Hindus as from Christians. After all, didn’t Krishna himself say in the ninth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita that he is in everyone’s heart and that those who worship other deities are actually worshipping him, even if imperfectly? I felt that this was a more generous view than thinking that people who worship other divinities than Jesus are eternally damned.
This first real encounter with evangelical Christians and the swami’s advice that it is more important to serve God than stubbornly to remain loyal to any particular name of God and teaching about God inspired me to offer a prayer to what I visualized as the supreme God beyond all gods to guide me along the true path. As I sat quietly alongside a lake crowded with hippies swimming in the nude, I assured God that I would be willing to follow God anywhere that God led me—even if that meant becoming a Christian, though I couldn’t imagine such a sudden change in the direction of my spiritual life.
On the morning after the festival ended, most of the hippies vanished, leaving behind empty cans and bottles, half-eaten food, torn clothing, and crumpled newspapers strewn over the trampled field. A few stragglers cooked over open fires, smoked joints, listened to blaring radios, and wondered where to go next. With the prim self-satisfaction of a teetotaler on a New Year’s morning, I helped load the van while keeping my attention focused inwardly on the divine presence. More than ever, I was in love with Krishna and the path of spiritual renunciation.
After a day of intensive chanting while driving back to the ashram, we left the van for a midnight walk up the dark road to New Vrindaban. We changed from dhotis into jeans because it had been raining, and the road was full of mud. It was with a rising sense of satisfaction that we climbed the side of the ridge to Krishna’s country in America. The road and woods took on a haunting glow in the silvery light of a full moon. We boasted as we walked about our exploits in the realm of maya, or illusion, and painted with enthusiastic talk pictures of that radiant future when rivers of spiritually famished people would flow up the trail to New Vrindaban in search of the knowledge that transforms the material sky of this painful and imperfect world into the spiritual sky of Krishna’s radiant paradise.
When we came to a clearing at the bend in the road where New Vrindaban first becomes visible, we stopped for a moment and gazed gratefully across the dark pastures toward the temple of Radha and Krishna, where a single light had been left burning, welcoming us home.