cross-legged, place my hands on my knees, close my eyes.
I have not meditated in four months. I have not even thought about meditating in four
months. I sit there. My breath quiets. I say the mantra to myself once very slowly and
deliberately, syllable by syllable.
Om.
Na.
Mah.
Shi.Va.
Ya.
Om Namah Shivaya.
I honor the divinity that resides within me.
Then I repeat it again. Again. And again. It's not so much that I'm meditating as
unpacking the mantra carefully, the way you would unpack your grandmother's best
china if it had been stored in a box for a long time, unused. I don't know if I fall asleep or
if I drop into some kind of spell or even how much time passes. But when the sun finally
comes up that morning in India and everyone opens their eyes and looks around, Italy
feels ten thousand miles away from me now, and it is as if I have been here in this flock
forever.
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"Why do we practice Yoga?"
I had a teacher once ask that question during a particularly challenging Yoga class, back
in New York. We were all bent into these exhausting sideways triangles, and the teacher
was making us hold the position longer than any of us would have liked.
"Why do we practice Yoga?" he asked again. "Is it so we can become a little bendier than
our neighbors? Or is there perhaps some higher purpose?"
Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as "union." It originally comes from the root word yuj,
which means "to yoke," to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And
the task at hand in Yoga is to find union--between mind and body, between the individual
and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and
student, and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors. In the
West, we've mainly come to know Yoga through its now-famous pretzel-like exercises
for the body, but this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosophy. The ancients
developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles
and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for
many hours, after all, if your hip is aching, keeping you from contemplating your
intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating, "Wow . . . my hip really
aches."
But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study,
through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra--the
repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather
Hindu in their derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus
Yogis. True Yoga neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use
your Yoga--your disciplined practices of sacred union--to get closer to Krishna, Jesus,Muhammad, Buddha or Yahweh. During my time at the Ashram, I met devotees who
identified themselves as practicing Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and even
Muslims. I have met others who would rather not talk about their religious affiliation at
all, for which, in this contentious world, you can hardly blame them.
The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which
I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.
Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for
man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it
ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian
tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the
inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my
friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: "Desire is the design flaw.") The Yogis,
however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're
miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws
and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute
our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We
don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is
eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before
you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely
expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear
God within you, poor wretch, and know it not."
Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that
experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your
attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying
about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you
may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of
even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you. True
Yogis, from their seat of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God's
creative energy--men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: it's all God in disguise.
But the Yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human
form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur. The turnips, the
bedbugs, the coral--they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do
have that chance.
"Our whole business therefore in this life," wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, "is to
restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen."
Like all great philosophical ideas, this one is simple to understand but virtually
impossible to imbibe. OK--so we are all one, and divinity abides within us all equally. No
problem. Understood. But now try living from that place. Try putting that understanding
into practice twenty-four hours a day. It's not so easy. Which is why in India it is
considered a given that you need a teacher for your Yoga. Unless you were born one of
those rare shimmering saints who come into life already fully actualized, you're going to
need some guidance along your journey toward enlightenment. If you're lucky enough,
you will find a living Guru. This is what pilgrims have been coming to India to seek for
ages. Alexander the Great sent an ambassador to India in the fourth century BC, with a
request to find one of these famous Yogis and return with him to court. (The ambassador
did report finding a Yogi, but couldn't convince the gentleman to travel.) In the firstcentury AD, Apollonius of Tyrana, another Greek ambassador, wrote of his journey
through India: "I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet not on it, and
fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the richness of all
men." Gandhi himself always wanted to study with a Guru, but never, to his regret, had
the time or opportunity to find one. "I think there is a great deal of truth," he wrote, "in
the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible without a Guru."
A great Yogi is anyone who has achieved the permanent state of enlightened bliss. A
Guru is a great Yogi who can actually pass that state on to others. The word Guru is
composed of two Sanskrit syllables. The first means "darkness," the second means
"light." Out of the darkness and into the light. What passes from the master into the
disciple is something called mantravirya: "The potency of the enlightened
consciousness." You come to your Guru, then, not only to receive lessons, as from any
teacher, but to actually receive the Guru's state of grace.
Such transfers of grace can occur in even the most fleeting of encounters with a great
being. I once went to see the great Vietnamese monk, poet and peacemaker Thich Nhat
Hanh speak in New York. It was a characteristically hectic weeknight in the city, and as
the crowd pushed and shoved its way into the auditorium, the very air in the place was
whisked into a nerve-racking urgency of everyone's collective stress. Then the monk
came on stage. He sat in stillness for a good while before he began to speak, and the
audience--you could feel it happening, one row of high-strung New Yorkers at a
time--became colonized by his stillness. Soon, there was not a flutter in the place. In the
space of maybe ten minutes, this small Vietnamese man had drawn every single one of us
into his silence. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that he drew us each into our own
silence, into that peace which we each inherently possessed, but had not yet discovered or
claimed. His ability to bring forth this state in all of us, merely by his presence in the
room--this is divine power. And this is why you come to a Guru: with the hope that the
merits of your master will reveal to you your own hidden greatness.
The classical Indian sages wrote that there are three factors which indicate whether a soul
has been blessed with the highest and most auspicious luck in the universe:
1. To have been born a human being, capable of conscious inquiry.
2. To have been born with--or to have developed--a yearning to understand the nature of
the universe.
3. To have found a living spiritual master.
There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one. The
universe will shift, destiny's molecules will get themselves organized and your path will
soon intersect with the path of the master you need. It was only one month after my first
night of desperate prayer on my bathroom floor--a night spent tearfully begging God for
answers--that I found mine, having walked into David's apartment and encountered a
photograph of this stunning Indian woman. Of course, I was more than a bit ambivalent
about the concept of having a Guru. As a general rule, Westerners aren't comfortable with
that word. We have a kind of sketchy recent history with it. In the 1970s a number of
wealthy, eager, susceptible young Western seekers collided with a handful of charismatic
but dubious Indian Gurus. Most of the chaos has settled down now, but the echoes ofmistrust still resonate. Even for me, even after all this time, I still find myself sometimes
balking at the word Guru. This is not a problem for my friends in India; they grew up
with the Guru principle, they're relaxed with it. As one young Indian girl told me,
"Everybody in India almost has a Guru!" I know what she meant to say (that almost
everyone in India has a Guru) but I related more to her unintentional statement, because
that's how I feel sometimes--like I almost have a Guru. Sometimes I just can't seem to
admit it because, as a good New Englander, skepticism and pragmatism are my
intellectual heritage. Anyhow, it's not like I consciously went shopping for a Guru. She
just arrived. And the first time I saw her, it was as though she looked at me through her
photograph--those dark eyes smoldering with intelligent compassion--and she said, "You
called for me and now I'm here. So do you want to do this thing, or not?"
Setting aside all nervous jokes and cross-cultural discomforts, I must always remember
what I replied that night: a straightforward and bottomless YES.
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One of my first roommates at the Ashram was a middle-aged African-American devout
Baptist and meditation instructor from South Carolina. My other roommates, over time,
would include an Argentinean dancer, a Swiss homeopath, a Mexican secretary, an
Australian mother of five, a young Bangladeshi computer programmer, a pediatrician
from Maine and a Filipino accountant. Others would come and go, too, as devotees
cycled in and out of their residencies.
This Ashram is not a place you can casually drop by and visit. First of all, it's not wildly
accessible. It's located far away from Mumbai, on a dirt road in a rural river valley near a
pretty and scrappy little village (composed of one street, one temple, a handful of shops
and a population of cows who wander about freely, sometimes walking into the tailor's
shop and lying down there). One evening I noticed a naked sixty-watt lightbulb hanging
from a wire on a tree in the middle of town; this is the town's one street-lamp. The
Ashram essentially creates the local economy, such as it is, and also stands as the town's
pride. Outside the walls of the Ashram, it is all dust and poverty. Inside, it's all irrigated
gardens, beds of flowers, hidden orchids, birdsong, mango trees, jackfruit trees, cashew
trees, palm trees, magnolias, banyans. The buildings are nice, though not extravagant.
There's a simple dining hall, cafeteria-style. There's a comprehensive library of spiritual
writings from the world's religious traditions. There are a few temples for different types
of gatherings. There are two meditation "caves"--dark and silent basements with
comfortable cushions, open all day and night, to be used only for meditation practice.
There's a covered outdoor pavilion, where Yoga classes are held in the morning, and
there's a kind of a park with an oval walking path around it, where students can jog for
exercise. I'm sleeping in a concrete dormitory.During my stay at the Ashram, there were never more than a few hundred residents at any
time. If the Guru herself had been in residence, those numbers would have swollen
considerably, but she was never in India when I was there. I'd sort of expected that; she'd
been spending a fair bit of time lately in America, but you never knew when she might
show up anywhere by surprise. It's not considered essential to be in her literal presence in
order to keep up your studies with her. There is, of course, the irreplaceable high of
actually being around a living Yogic master, and I've experienced that before. But many
longtime devotees agree that it can also sometimes be a distraction--if you're not careful,
you can get all caught up in the celebrity buzz of excitement that surrounds the Guru and
