You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
It was a scenic route, up from my office in town into the hills beyond.
Bunn Hill Road to
Fuller Hollow Road to
Brown Road and on
To Powderhouse Road to
Hagan Road to
Ingraham Hill Road to
Webb and State Line roads
to Eggs Ackley.
To think, this started beside the river.
ON MY RETURN FROM OHIO, Swami was talking to Mary Russell (a double Sagittarius), who asked, “When’s Jnana going to become a swami?”
“Oh, he’s got it all. He had to go through a long purification, though.”
Two hours later, as I was preparing brunch (guess that was in my tenure as head cook), Swami returned from a drive to the rock festival (we had set up tents the night before and fed the (200,000) freaks rice, soybeans), and asked, “Jnana, how’d you like to be a swami?’
To which I replied, “If it’s required.”
And, apparently, I didn’t even bat an eyelash.
That night, I worked nine hours heavily (no break) at Jerry’s Diner, washing dishes until 1:30 am … very pooped!
And now the responsibility. YOU MUST BE MORE HUMBLE THAN EVER BEFORE!
FROM MARY’S READING of my astrological chart:
MEDITATION TECHNIQUES:
And then sit tight.
As for Swami quotes?
To staff: “There’s only one person in the ashram who can pull himself around quickly when he’s down.”
Who’s that?
“Jnana-Devananda.”
You mean Levi-Devananda, don’t you?
“No, Jnana-Devananda.”
Reading my hand: “He’s so good-natured it almost hurts.”
And here I’d been feeling in a funk.
To me: “You’re giving out vibes now, but you must learn to receive them. I tried getting through to you last night, and you were like a brick wall.” (I was concentrating on my chakras, trying to get high. Don’t know how to accept them, tune in. Frustration!)
Yet on August 4, Swami imposed a two-week silence me – said she’s been watching me for two weeks, waiting for me to pull myself together. Been racing, withdrawing. Tired of guests seeking easy answers or asking questions, “Where’s the vacuum cleaner hose?” Too many words racing through my head: difficult to meditate.
OTHER BITS:
Eyes heavy: resentment.
Swami so obvious with Levi in front of guests.
Harmony loves clutter and noise.
Cedar so severe, rigid; sadomasochistic at times; fanatic’s eyes, yet at times wisdom from her lips
Levi is better dressed than the other swamis, always at her side. She is always asking what he thinks or if he will comment: in group wedding photo, he is betrayed: he looks only at Swami. Am surprised nobody picks up on it. Bhaktivananda did detect Swami’s worldly passions. He merely fingered the wrong one.
I would like to extend the silence, two months perhaps?
Sit in forest, on rock, quiet a long time. Start to move, see big black snake, neck and head upraised, alert / my own silent fear, sidestep quickly.
That movie: El Topo, the mole (underground man). Still haven’t seen it.
The newsletter: no wisdom. What Swami likes today, she’ll revile tomorrow; what’s too long, too heavy today is too short, too sugary tomorrow.
A spice rack as the arsenal of argument.
“Help me plant weeds,” Cedar tells the gardener.
When I’m speeding: don’t listen, don’t let people finish,
Why are people so self-destructive?
Because they want to be noticed, sez Swami.
The selfish man can never find happiness. Selfishness and happiness are mutually exclusive.
A caterpillar moves on middle legs, contracts the rear, and pushes / the front half of a caterpillar floats, doesn’t touch much, let’s the back half do the work / the strobic rhythm of fireflies / blips like the scratches on a worn cinema projection /
~*~
From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.
The next spiralbound notebook covers summer ’72, ashram, and well into autumn.
As I inscribed in the inside cover:
More tracings in the water
into Sannasyn, 8:VII:72 11:45 am
Much of the following was from a trip home for the funeral of my grandmother.
Regarding my mother: she slapped me when I stood up to her / “We are poor,” she kept saying / “Don’t touch girls” /
SHAME / too thin and ill-dressed in hand-me-down clothes or my three-a-year new too-short trousers
She was inwardly jealous of each girlfriend, waited up for her 22-year-old son, furious when I came home at 3 am …
Resented me, says I nearly drove her insane: two years all alone with me while Dad was working / an interference with her own depending on her own dad: her insecurities as a conceived out of wedlock and therefore overly protected child
Mom makes herself so unhappy: nobody is better / does more / has less / she thinks too much of herself, “How poor!”
I cannot return home: there’s no room to grow
In high school, R.R. so sexy / at 22, a skinny mother, so sexless.
Even the green beans become heavy and dull in their passions .
The one-eyed pacifier (TV).
(My diatribes) Trying to comprehend the outside world.
The Christian suffers constantly because he can never be as good as Jesus.
The silent grace of Hap and Pauline Moon, a meditation so strong in one minute a rush, you don’t know what hit you.
Everybody on 3rd street walks as if under a burden: dead and unhappy, unlike New Yorkers who exhibit style and confidence. Such a shock to discover I prefer New York.
Virginia at the Journal-Herald was into yoga with Mishra and Vitaldas 20 years ago, takes another drag on her cigarette and is cool.
Surprised by this entry of meeting with Jim Millikin, at this point assistant managing editor at JH.
“I didn’t recognize your face (the long hair etc.) but I recognized your eyes.” 400 applications on file & he said, “Look me up when you leave the ashram. If I can’t help you, I may know somebody who can. There are so few sensitive, creative people in the business.”
“Yeah, that’s why I came in to see you!”
“When a man if 50 is willing to uproot, he’s usually a wino or something.” (Many [more] desk jobs than reportorial [open].)
Down (very) on Gannett, where we both had worked. And his own “lame” desk as well as the “flak” reported rather than “story.”
Kathy Hoerstein (leo/virgo cusp): “Oh, I just read some of your letters!”
Grandpa: “And he had nine children and 42 grandchildren, just a regular army of (offensive term now deleted).”
Clifton Gorge: such a piddly canyon “But it’s all we got”
Rundown house in Yellow Springs, windows open, no screens / artifacts carefree & lazy / memories of Olaf and D-Man in our ghetto summer stoned in the mountains.
This constant drive to do more / never satisfied to rest, to be / ambition is a hunger that devours the host / an inner fire.
Midwestern women trained to be sweet, smiling, o my! Tight curls and cut, print dresses. Do the right thing and worry about neighbors.
On this trip] find girls looking at me with desire – a free, long-haired fantasy of unfathomable sensitivity
So difficult to be alone and not lonely
The attraction of HIGH art etc / genius /
Mother of myself
The attraction and repulsion of pornography
The women in my life get more beautiful.
Keep demons
in place
under rocks
~*~
~*~
From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.
It’s a remote land of icebergs, northern lights, puffins, and moose, the easternmost part of Canada. Now, for a few details.
While we’re at it, do note that the Rock has some eye-raising town names. Here’s a sampling, without explanation or commentary:
St. John’s, the provincial capital and largest city, is not to be confused with St. John, New Brunswick. Both are significant seaports.
The next volume, beginning Winter ’72, begins with our first week-long intensive seminar. Some really bizarre group action, both from the guests and the staff.
The volume also includes my trip to Ohio for Grandma’s funeral; she died June 21. 1972.
~*~
Afterward, reading my seminar notes aloud to Swami, Cedar flipped out. “You just kind of pass through my life, but from your reading, I realize I’ve had you completely wrong.”
Now I know why I write: it’s the way I can be me, release my inner voice.
In mid-February, Swami announced she was closing the place, sending us into a tizzy. On the 17th, I recorded: Swami sez I have so much hate. [My unspoken reaction, I’m guessing.] It is necessary energy arising from saturation, frustration; I am different, and anyone who tries to make me like them is desexing me, perverting my love.
On the 22nd, I noted a Binghamton trip, believe it was my first of manicotti (when I wanted pizza) and spending the night with Celeste. Among other things, she said she cannot kiss someone she cannot look in the eyes and know she’s communicating with. (She is so much more than her body, which is where I too often stop communicating.)
In bed, to me: “and we will never marry,” in a positive voice. “Sometimes I think you’re too self-critical.”
I TRY TO POSSESS BECAUSE I AM INSECURE
24 February went to Philadelphia with Swami to sell her diamond wedding ring. “Everybody is so slow (unlike NYC), but dead eyes, no smiles except a fleeting twinge …
In meditation: WE ARE ALL LITTLE FISHES IN A VAST OCEAN OF AIR.
“Truth can be reached only through a comprehension of opposites.”
Swami Sivananda was a fruitcake.
(2 days later: all of us here but Swami are fruitcakes)
Beware of the vegetables.
Ria (and others) said they like my hatha classes “because you give long rests”; tonight I gave a hold-the-position (once) class, and she (and they) said “you were like a drill master.”
25:III:72, after one of our spring break seminars, Swami laid it on me heavy; Levi said he felt apologetic in asking me to do anything – a reading fast, for one thing …
Sometime later, Swami: “Jnana, he’s solid. He doesn’t always look it, when he’s walking around here, looking like he’s not doing anything, but he’s like Levi. Don’t worry about it. Also, he can’t say what he’s thinking. What’s in his head is very beautiful, but it just comes out different. His tongue gets him in trouble. As I said, he’s solid and as much a part of the ashram as the stone. He won’t collapse until the stone does.”
Harmony talked about her being pimped experiences.
Cedar: Can’t you accept the idea that someone might be superior to you?”
“Very difficult.”
Swami: loud, crass, crude: nouveau riche. Wants to be a big shot. And we are her playthings.
A dream of climbing up a glacier (or frozen stream/gorge like Buttermilk Falls / years before Rainier! – one of our party slips and lands far below, not dead: Rainbow, nude, as usual. Johnny Cash comes up behind her, singing …
~*~
To continue:
Since we lowered our rates, the people who used to come and stay free (because “we have no money”) now pay; so now we probably come out about the same as before, except now everybody contributes.
36 people for brunch after everyone had left from a crowded weekend
On my trip to Grandma’s funeral, I slipped off to Quaker Meeting in Yellow Springs: such a high!
The members look weak and shaky, nervous and overly intellectual, almost ineffectual: but also strong in their vibrations!
“The other day, a 7-year-old Quaker came in the house and asked her mother, ‘Do we Quakers believe in God?’ After hemming and hawing a few minutes and saying essentially yes, the mother asked what brought this question on. ‘Oh, my pal at the playground says they don’t believe in God, they believe in revolution”
(Ten minutes or later:) Mention of a vigil at Wright-Pat the previous day and how a mocking bird singing from within the base reminded her of a verse about how out of the mud and mire a song always rises.
Next message: how many woes arise out of either/or thinking. There are so many more alternatives.
And finally: “Our Father! I am grateful for the world the way it is! For all of its riches, and for all of the problems we can apply ourselves to. Let us use our goods and riches for others, to make the best use of them, to share and multiply them. Bless our fellowship and interaction!”
Girl afterward: “I had given up on religion. I had tried everything, including Bahai, then last week I went to Meeting. I feel like I just smoked marijuana.” (Yep!) She thought I was in yoga; the straight back, closed eyes.
Nikki assumed art to be religion … were it so, artists would not be so fucked up, so neurotic and selfish! (Malcolm Frager’s wife told him his work as a pianist is no greater than anyone else’s work, including the janitor; that deflated him, until he saw its wisdom.)
Fay? “Kissin’ F, the Witch Goddess, the Lid … she stood me up the night before I left for IU …
Norman O. Brown: negation begins with the denial of being born, separated from the womb …
Mistake of many: the Good Life depends on things.
Susan Sontag: “Of course, a writer’s journal must not be judged by the standards of a diary. The notebooks of a writer have a very special function; in them he builds up, piece by piece, the identity of a writer to himself. … The journal is where a writer is heroic to himself. In it he exists solely as a perceiving, suffering, struggling being. … Solitariness is the indispensable metaphor of the modern writer’s consciousness.”
Paradox of self-hate: you can’t decide to get rid of it, that leads you to hate yourself for hating yourself. You must accept the self-hate. By loving it and yourself, you no longer hate yourself.
[Incinerated]
~*~
From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.
The next volume was undated, except one entry in late November.
The inside front cover was inscribed “Swami Jnana-Devananda into winter: ashram,” something added later.
Mostly quotes: Zen, Ginsberg, Hutterites, etc.
Includes Swami’s return from her first India trip.
~*~
Only Christ is arisen? Ignores the greater evidence of reincarnate lamas.
Swami, to disciple undergoing many tests (i.e., struggles): “Enjoy them!”
Traveling out, to support followers in “the world” and to distribute pamphlets about our programs:
WASHINGTON DC, a Tuesday in November
White House a surprise … zipping thru Georgetown and out, suddenly, turn corner, this ivory phantom! Expected much official buildings first, but just the monstrous ancient cake of Executive Office to prepare one for the icon itself
DC’s “42nd Street” just three blocks from the Executive Mansion
… what happens to the minds of the power elite who see all of these monuments at their command – the vast sweep of parks, White House tucked into one corner, Washington and Lincoln memorials in the middle, the Capitol on the other? A new Rome!
(encounter with York, Pa, and its oldness in rolling farmland)
Levi-Dev: When you try to find shortcuts to your meditation practice, you will miss some of the most delicious & precious steps in your spiritual growth.
In Japanese, prajana means wisdom!
~*~
Swami Lakshmy: I tell you India is a civilized country. America is uncivilized India is civilized because you can walk the streets at night without fear. You cannot walk the streets of an American city at night without fear. America is an uncivilized country because we do not respect human life, because we are a fearful people.
The falcon rips the wayward rabbit but cannot stop the cloud.
How do you write down the sound of your laugh, the taste of your smile?
Appenzell Lutheran, Reeders Methodist. Our neighbors.
Deer Park
Where Buddha sat
dogs now bark
The Swami/Levi relationship / mother/son oedipal stuff, statistically more aberrant than the homosexuality she calls sick? I judge, too!
Fern: Sometimes I wish I had known you before you came to the camp. You must have been pretty fascinating.
Swami: You write like the Wall Street Journal: very well but not colorful.
Beatrice: “It’s amazing how everyone has changed in a year. I wouldn’t have believed such a change is truly possible if I hadn’t seen it in the people at the ashram. Everyone is so much more remote, distant.”
[Incinerated]
~*~
From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.
The next volume was one of three notebooks from the Cornell Campus Store. These had a kraft cover but also, to my delight, wide left-side margins, 3½ inches.
I must have stocked up before shoving off from Binghamton.
There was nothing notable in this one: bad poetry drafts, early ashram experiences, mostly.
For whatever reason, half of the book was never used. After discarding the written pages, I’ve saved the blank lined pages for scrap-notes in the future.
~*~
How is it I had a stash of these varied campus notebooks?
In retrospect, so much transpired when I thought nothing was – the travels as the most conspicuous example.
[Incinerated]
~*~
From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.
Just consider:
Vol. 18 began at the onset of my ashram residency. 23:XI:71.
On the inside cover, I inscribe, I, Elektrik Blue, Uranian, incarnation of Sacred Self, continue this journey.
Not a lot of poetry here but it does include early attempts at my astrological charts and some personally deep ashram mud.
First of all, I was deprived of many of my usual supports: reading of books and magazines, recorded music (though I did have my violin and attempted Bach two-part inventions on piano), movies or other outings, favorite foods. My newly blooming romantic outlook was totally nipped (celibacy and then the brahmacharya rags that served as a jock strap), although I was very much attracted to L.G., 17, daughter of Hunter’s friend Dick, and we had more charming interactions than I had recalled – until the incident in the attic. (I first record her as “Lynn,” which led to complications in reconnecting the thread.)
I was heavily criticized for what I said (too bookish or lecturing), inattentiveness to others, negativity. I was also put on my first Silence.
My struggle included attempts to reconcile my idealistic expectations with the sloppy realities I was inescapably facing. Except for Levi, the rigorous, systematic scholarly framework I sought was absent (even in a Zen absurdist degree). Cedar had her brilliance and insights, but nothing sustained. Levi pointed out that he and I were there for the discipline (practice), unlike the others who saw more of a back-to-the-earth party household. (Sports editor Russ Warman had thought my reason for relocating was to taste “rural life” – how curious considering how many of my residences have been that: Eggs Ackley, such a contrast in group living to the ashram, and then the places I settled in returning to Bloomington, and then on to the orchard in Washington State, the pig farm in Iowa, and perhaps Dover, with our city farm.
What began as an attempt to understand “my problem” (the depression) now had me once again sensing I didn’t fit in. My goal of becoming naturally high, wise, and holy enough to win back Nicki remained a motivating factor, along with self-liberation and enlightenment – transcendence.
I’ve joked about taking up yoga because I couldn’t afford psychiatric therapy, but I now see that both have wound up forcing me to examine the darker sides of my inner workings.
The resentments and anger, especially, built up as I ran up against the lackadaisical airs, and sometime irresponsible or inconsiderate actions of the others.
Especially heavy was my having to shut down all of the newly released sexual freedom and ecstasy. More on that anon.
My notes overflowed with locker-room coaching kinds of exhortations to push, strive, not let up, in the practice. In essence, to fly over my problems, rather than turn them into compost. My verse was largely bombastic, polemic, didactic generalizations and diatribes contrasting our superior ways to the rest of society.
Well, this is kinda how I saw myself at the time. This image of Bharadwaja, seated on an antelope skin and surrounded by implements needed during his meditations, is from Wikimedia Commons.
All of this was intensified when Swami took off with Levi and Theo on extended travel to the Midwest (including Dayton). I was left as the sole resident male with three hippie chicks, at least that’s how we were seen on our trips out in public to the supermarket or diner. I noted that having a woman was my desire a year earlier but now? I perceived how inadequate these three were for my needs, even in celibacy.
Would it have helped to point out that I had to own up to my own demons? A year earlier, I never have considered that mumbo-jumbo.
Swami did point out that unlike us guys, the girls played games of their own invention, something that drove me further nuts.
This became extremely pronounced in trying to write an article for Mother Earth journal. Everybody had a different take, taking us further and further from what the editors wanted. In the end, the proposed story went off the rails.
Ria was the most complex case, I’m thinking. She had been involved in some of the more satanic streams – she “used to go with the guy who wrote Rosemary’s Baby, the infant with solid gold eyes, a tail, and long claws. [The author who wrote the bestselling 1967 novel was born in 1929 and divorced in 1968. The plot thickens.] We observed that what she really wanted was a home on a small pond with a rowboat.
After leading hatha and meditation one night, she turned to me, “Where were you? Your vibes were absent during the second half of our sitting.”
Theo (our seven-headed horse) usually appeared as the happy-go-lucky physical laborer counterbalance to Levi and me, though my early notes show him instead as intensely egotistical and “two-faced.” Ouch! He did teach me ways to ease off and loosen up, on the sly.
Our first, chaotic, week-long intensive session came over Christmas break, much earlier in my residency that I recalled.. Some of our actions I now must admit were offensive, even harmful, not that I could object at the time. Still, it was a huge opening in reshaping the direction of the ashram’s mission. One guest did mention hearing scandalous stories about our ordaining swamis under “questionable circumstances.”
Curiously, some of our guests – usually female – took me aside to say I was the only one in the community who understood and embodied our beliefs. That was tempting.
As for my response to the Zen koan, “What was your original face before your mother’s birth,” I noted: Close your eyes! (The koan really goes, “Show me your Original Face, the one you had before your parents were born.”)
Other bits:
“Last night in meditation, I saw Jesus – the dark, straight-nose, pointed jaw Jesus of the most popular portrait. He came into our circle and sat beside Cedar. [She’s Jewish.] Such a strange looking man.”
My other meditation entries were all about lights, warmth, feelings. Example: “Felt the flame burning up around my body but I, in the center, was cool. I see a little light, or merely cold light. I break my meditation to answer the phone and return without losing the high.”
“I am the center of my universe.” Well, in relationships, it could as easily have been, “She is the center of my universe.” Never, really, though, would I have said God or the like.
When L.G. asked about my parents, she laughed at my description: middle class, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t curse.
A country-western song idea: “Heaven is just a liquor store up in the sky.”
“Sometimes I think I’m more alive on paper than in person. A man of letters? A paper tiger.”
Also, mention of riding our horse Timely, English-style, “very high … like bareback, flying.” Also, 12:XII:71, Hunter’s asking if I’d like to hear some jazz, which led to Deer Head Inn at the Water Gap. Some very fine piano riffs. Nice, clean place: table cloths, nothing fancy but simple, art on the walls, some nice reproductions. With one of his friends, a freelance commercial artist.
Other musicians showing up that night were two bassists. One joined us at the table and told of quitting playing with a group at one famed resort. “They were in their 50s and so bad you couldn’t follow them; it sounded like church music.”
An ashram guest who had worked for a VD doctor said it was enough to put anyone off sex.
[Incinerated]
~*~
From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.
As you can see in my Binghamton “hippie” journals, there was nothing brash in my decision to quit my job, go without an income or health coverage, and relocate to study and practice a yoga life fulltime.
Yoga was definitely improving my emotional, mental, and physical life.
Economically, I was marginal, living in squalor (winter in that farmhouse must have been miserable, and getting to work through the snow often an impossibility).
My job wasn’t going anywhere, anyway, and for much of the preceding year before taking up yoga, I had been deeply depressed. As a professional journalist, my income was borderline near poverty despite working weird hours and Saturdays, which did nothing to alleviate my condition.
None of the stockholders, of course, appreciated any of this.
I’m still left wondering why I set a late autumn deadline for the move.
I suspect I felt that the summer would be one to remember, and it was, bringing a period of intense self-discovery and growth. The delay also allowed me time to have a better understanding of my teacher and the community. Was I overlooking something treacherous? In the years since, we’ve seen all too many incidents of financial and sexual scandals in the Eastern spiritual communities in America. As I’ve learned in subsequent years, that was true to some degree in my ashram, especially after my residency.
Crucially, I was single and unattached, even though my love life had certainly picked up.
And so, eight months after my introduction to yoga and then the repeated trips to my guru’s ashram on a former farm in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania more than an hour south of where I was living, I packed up and resettled.
As I would discover, the most important lessons in yoga were not about the physical exercises, hatha, but in the practice of meditation, ethics, and spiritual community.
The real lessons arose as back-to-the-earth skills, along with new people skills, too. I’ve come to think of this as my Master’s degree.
The experience has been abstracted and distilled into my novel Yoga Bootcamp and its earlier version, Ashram.
For me, it was ultimately positive. I wish there was something similar for lost youth today, though I’ve never seen myself in a position to offer that, either.
Jnana's Red Barn 