Quest Magazine

Printed in the Spring 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Boyd, Richard."President's Diary" Quest 103.2 (Spring 2015): pg. 74 -75.

At the beginning of October a now familiar scene replayed. My wife, Lily, and I boarded a plane, this time headed for an extended stay at Adyar. Within a couple of days of arriving in Chennai I was on call for the first of many ceremonial duties. While in the U.S. I had been contacted by the director of the Young Men's Indian Association (YMIA) to participate in the celebration of their hundredth anniversary.

My presence was deemed important because as president of the TS I represented a link with the YMIA's founder, Annie Besant. One hundred years earlier, Besant had seen a need for an organization to develop India's future leaders. In her typical fashion she emphasized a balanced development of spirit, mind, and a strong emphasis on physical fitness. In addition to founding the organization, she funded the construction of the large building that still serves as the YMIA's headquarters" Gokhale Hall. Various community leaders attended the meeting.

After a couple of weeks acquainting myself with the people and function of our Adyar headquarters, it was again airport time. This time I was headed for three areas in the north of India. The first stop was Bhubaneshwar in the state of Orisa. Dr. Deepa Padhi and her team of Theosophical Order of Service (TOS) workers had organized a series of events. The first was a conference on "Transformation through Service" at the Utkal University. This was followed by two local TS federation meetings. While in Bhubaneshwar, for the first time in this life I celebrated my birthday in India. While I was on stage presenting an award for service with about 300-400 people in the audience, some of the TOS team members managed to sneak a birthday cake complete with lit candles onto the table behind me. It was a pleasant and utterly unexpected surprise.

Tim with participants in the Youth Forum following the TS convention.

During our time in Orisa, Deepa and her team gave us a glimpse of the range of service activities they conduct and support. Within the TOS community their work on consciousness-raising around the issue of abuse of women has become well-known. While there, I participated in the inauguration of their most recent billboard on one of the main roads, which reads, "From the womb to the tomb women are abused." We also visited their day-care facility for the elderly, a home for abused and traumatized women, and an orphanage.

From Bhubanseswar it was on to Calcutta. My schedule had been worked out by Birendra Battacharya, a member who has been active with both TOS and TS functions in the area. Birenedra is remarkably devout and highly respected among all types of people and groups. My first function was participation in a gathering of about 600 people at Siddarth United Social Welfare Mission. Birendra and the founder of the center, Venerable Buddha Priya Mahathera, had collaborated in service work across religious boundaries. In fact one of the programs of the highly motivated monk was a school and orphanage for Muslim children. I gave a short talk, had a meeting with the organization's founder, and was piled high with gifts, garlands, and ceremonial scarves. Next was a journey by car, then boat to an island in Sundarban. The area is a noted nature region famous for its tigers. It borders Bangladesh. Through Birendra's efforts the TS has built and operates a vocational training center for women. It also has a TS lodge associated with it. Like many lodges in India it is named the Besant Lodge. The final activity in Calcutta was a brief talk and presentation of awards and certificates at the local lodge.

Tim with members and staff after setting up the Christmas tree at the Leadbeater Chambers dining hall in Adyar.

The next plane brought us to Varanasi (formerly Benares) and the headquarters for the TS in India. Once again I found myself following in the footsteps of Annie Besant. It is impossible to overstate the scope of her influence in the religious, political, and educational life of India. On the TS property in Varanasi four schools are operating today that track back to Besant's founding"”a primary school, high school, girl's intermediate school, and girl's college. The primary university in the area, Benares Hindu University, owes its existence to Annie Besant merging her Central Hindu College with it.

The city of Varanasi has grown up around the TS's twenty-acre compound. It is a tree-lined campus with housing, schools, a hall, and offices. While there, I stayed in the rooms where Besant stayed, sat at her desk, thought and meditated in her chair, spoke in the auditorium where she, Krishnamurti, Jinarajadasa, and other luminaries spoke. It was both humbling and inspiring.

Lily and I returned to Adyar in time for the day of remembrance for Radha Burnier's passing on October 31. At Adyar this year the day started out with a puja, a spiritual celebration, held at her home, Parsi Quarters. The ceremony was followed by a silent walk along the river to the Garden of Remembrance, where her ashes, along with those of other TS presidents, are interred. At lunchtime a special meal was offered for all residents, workers, and their families"”in all, about 300 people. It was served in shifts at Bhojansala, one of two kitchens on campus. The day ended with a program of remembrance at the Headquarters Hall in the evening.

Along with the usual work in my office, the month of November was a time of preparation for our convention in December. As the month came to an end, we were off to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family in New York City, and to continue a related I have been invited to speak at the New York Lodge. Given my new responsibilities, it was iffy whether I could come or not, but we were able to keep it going for at least one more year.

Tim at the Annie Besant School at the headquarters for the Indian Section in Varanasi.

From New York it was back home (home #1 or #2, I am no longer sure) to Olcott for a couple of weeks before returning to Adyar. I did not leave before celebrating with staff at our annual Christmas party, which is always a fun time, especially now with no less than three babies stealing all of our attention.

By mid-December I was back at Adyar with preparations in full swing for both the convention and the general council (GC) meeting. Anyone who simply attends the international convention can have no idea about the amount of work and the layers and layers of details involved in arranging for 1200 people to come and stay for a week. For most people the important feature is the talks and meetings. These involve coordination with more than thirty presenters and chairmen from around the world. Then there are the all-important food and accommodations. Temporary structures need to be built. Water, electricity, and sanitation facilities all have to be readied. This year we had the additional need to arrange to livestream all of the programs held in the Adyar Theatre, which went off without a hitch (to see the videos of each talk, visit Theosophical Society Aydar - Youtube).

On December 25, the day before the convention opened, the meeting of the general council was held. The Christmas meeting has been a tradition of unknown heritage for 128 years. Next year we will begin a new tradition"”not having the meeting on Christmas day. By the consensus of the council, the meeting and the annual convention will be moved five days to the right. The GC will meet on December 30, and the convention will open on December 31. One other piece of GC business was that the Subba Row Medal for outstanding contributions to Theosophical literature was awarded to past TSA president and international vice-president John Algeo. Congratulations, John.

Almost 1200 members from thirty-one countries attended the convention this year. We had three nights of high-level dance and music performances. Immediately after the close of the convention we had a youth forum with a lively international group. Already we are planning for next year's program. A few of the things on my wish list are an evening variety show with our own members, prayers by the children in our schools, motorized shuttles for our aging members, and a program during the convention presented by younger members. Stay tuned.

Tim Boyd

---

Printed in the Spring 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard."From the Editor's Desk" Quest 103.2 (Spring 2015): pg. 42.

We're going down to London to see a friend of mine. Want to come? The speaker ”Dave, an odd-looking man with a scraggly beard and extremely thick glasses”was a member of the Kabbalah group at Oxford to which I went faithfully every Wednesday evening. The year was 1978 or early 79.

I wasn't particularly eager to go, but in the interest of broadening my horizons, I decided I would. And so that Saturday five of us piled precariously into Dave's three-wheeled motorcycle, of the color the French call caca dâoie, and made the hour's drive from Oxford to London.

Our first stop was a large and seedy pub in northwest London, complete with all the stereotypical trimmings: etched-glass windows, dark furniture, the hazy smell of stale beer and tobacco, even a drunken old man singing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" to himself at full volume. Unwisely, I drank three pints of Guinness and cider in quick succession.

Then we proceeded to the neighborhood of Maida Vale, where we parked on a street lined with three-story brick buildings of flats and marched up to the top floor of one of them. When we were admitted, we went down the hall of a long, narrow flat and entered the kitchen, a room that I will always remember as both remarkably dingy and remarkably magical. The walls were a lifeless green, and the air was heavy with the smoke of roll-your-own cigarettes. A large image of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with Tarot cards affixed to the tree's paths, was painted on the near wall, half-hidden by a cluttered kitchen table. Seated in the corner, wearing a dark and not terribly clean sweater and producing the smoke that pervaded the room, was a man I shall never forget.

Although seated he did not get up to greet us it was clear that he was short and stocky. He had longish dark hair and a beard, black-rimmed glasses, and a broad face, kindly and shrewd to equal degrees, that somewhat resembled portrait busts of Socrates. Years later, when I saw The Empire Strikes Back, I wondered half-seriously whether the character Yoda was a cruel but very witty caricature of Glyn.

He was not, of course, rooted to that old armchair in the corner of his kitchen over the years I would see him in many settings but it was as if he were, as if he were a fixed and stable point around which the ever-changing world revolved. What he said to us all that afternoon is hopelessly lost in the back chambers of my memory. The Guinness-and-ciders did their work, and I nodded off occasionally.

We went home toward the end of the afternoon. It was a dark, dull, grey day, of a sort that's extremely common in England, and I don't remember being in a terribly good mood. Nor do I even remember what I thought about the experience at the time. No doubt it was something along the lines of "Well, if I'm in England, I may as well see as many corners of it as I can."

Nevertheless, I must have sensed something, because I went back to see Glyn say every two or three months during the rest of my time in England and I learned some important, and, I would say, necessary things from him. What these were would take far more than the space of this page to tell.

Glyn though it no doubt would have irked him to hear me say it was the closest thing to a Master that I have ever met. In the nearly three decades during which I knew him, I did not see him often. There would be five- or six-year stretches after my return to America when I had no contact with him. But up to the time of his death in 2007, I would make a point of seeing him whenever I went to England. More than once I went for that reason alone.

So on that grey day I had a life-changing experience. And I had no idea of it at the time. Usually you think that when you meet someone of a high spiritual caliber, the heavens will open and you will see the angels of heaven ascending and descending. Nothing of the sort happened. The whole excursion just seemed extremely odd to me.

What if I hadn't been able to see past appearances? What if I had gone by the stale and clich'd pictures of adepts that many of us have floating around in our heads? Even though I was intensely interested in the spiritual search, I would have seen nothing. I would have gone on my way to find somebody done up in one of the standard guru costumes.

So I went through an initiation on that day, complete with Guinness-and-ciders.

I know the readers of Quest well enough to understand that most of you are not beginners. Thus I suspect that many of you have had experiences of your own that were, in one way or another, very much like this one. If there's some kind of moral to be drawn from all this, it is that spiritual teachers, like life itself, will almost never match your expectations or look like your preconceived pictures. It's disturbing to realize this fact, but then it is one of the things that keep our lives fresh and vivid.

Richard Smoley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

Printed in the Spring 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch."Edgar Cayce: Ordinary Man, Extraordinary Messenger" Quest 103.2 (Spring 2015): pg. 66-71.

By Mitch Horowitz

The year 1910 marked a turning point in Western spirituality. It saw the deaths of some of the most luminous religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, including psychologist-seeker William James; popular medium Andrew Jackson Davis; and Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. These three figures deeply impacted the movements in positive thinking, prayer healing, and psychical research.

Their death that year was accompanied by the rise to prominence of a new religious innovator - a figure who built upon the spiritual experiments of the nineteenth century to shape the New Age culture of the dawning era. In autumn of 1910 The New York Times brought the first major national attention to the name of Edgar Cayce, a young man who later became known as the "father of holistic medicine" and the founding voice of alternative spirituality.

The Sunday Times of October 9, 1910 profiled the Christian mystic and medical clairvoyant in an extensive article and photo spread: "Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized." At the time Cayce (pronounced "Casey"), then thirty-three, was struggling to make his way as a commercial photographer in his hometown of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, while delivering daily trance-based medical "readings" in which he would diagnose and prescribe natural cures for the illnesses of people he had never met.

Cayce's method was to recline on a sofa or day bed, loosen his tie, belt, cuffs, and shoelaces, and enter a sleeplike trance; then, given only the name and location of a subject, the "sleeping prophet" was said to gain insight into the person's body and psychology. By the time of his death in January 1945, Cayce had amassed a record of more than 14,300 clairvoyant readings for people across the nation, many of the sessions captured by stenographer Gladys Davis.

In the 1920s, Cayce's trance readings expanded beyond medicine (which nonetheless remained at the core of his work) to include "life readings," in which he explored a person's inner conflicts and needs. In these sessions Cayce employed references to astrology, karma, reincarnation, and number symbolism. Other times, he expounded on global prophecies, climate or geological changes, and the lost history of mythical cultures, such as Atlantis and Lemuria. Cayce had no recollection of any of this when he awoke, though as a devout Christian the esotericism of such material made him wince when he read the transcripts.

Contrary to news coverage, Cayce was not illiterate, but neither was he well educated. Although he taught Sunday school at his Disciples of Christ church - and read through the King James Bible at least once every year - he had never made it past the eighth grade of a rural schoolhouse. While his knowledge of Scripture was encyclopedic, Cayce's reading tastes were otherwise limited. Aside from spending a few on-and-off years in Texas unsuccessfully trying to use his psychical abilities to strike oil - he had hoped to raise money to open a hospital based on his clairvoyant cures - Cayce rarely ventured beyond the Bible Belt environs of his childhood.

Since the tale of Jonah fleeing from the word of God, prophets have been characterized as reluctant, ordinary folk plucked from reasonably satisfying lives to embark on missions that they never originally sought. In this sense, if the impending New Age - the vast culture of Eastern, esoteric, and therapeutic spirituality that exploded on the national scene in the 1960s and '70s -  was seeking a founding prophet, Cayce could hardly be viewed as an unusual choice, but, historically, as a perfect one.

A Seer in Season

It was this Edgar Cayce - an everyday man, dedicated Christian, and uneasy mystic - whom New England college student and future biographer Thomas Sugrue encountered in 1927. When Sugrue met Cayce, the twenty-year-old journalism student was not someone who frequented psychics or séance parlors. Sugrue was a dedicated Catholic who had considered joining the priesthood. Deeply versed in world affairs and possessed of an iron determination to break into news reporting, Sugrue left his native Connecticut in 1926 for Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, which was then one of the only schools in the nation to offer a journalism degree to undergraduates. (Sugrue later switched his major to English literature, in which he earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in four years.)

As a student, Sugrue rolled his eyes at paranormal claims or talk of ESP. Yet Sugrue met a new friend at Washington and Lee who challenged his preconceptions: the psychic's eldest son, Hugh Lynn Cayce. Hugh Lynn had planned to attend Columbia but his father's clairvoyant readings directed him instead to the oldline Virginia school. (The institution counted George Washington as an early benefactor.) Sugrue grew intrigued by his new friend's stories about his father - in particular the elder Cayce's theory that one person's subconscious mind could communicate with another's. The two freshmen enjoyed sparring intellectually and soon became roommates. While still cautious, Sugrue wanted to meet the agrarian seer.

Edgar and his wife Gertrude, meanwhile, were laying new roots about 250 miles east of Lexington in Virginia Beach, a location the readings had also selected. The psychic spent the remainder of his life in the Atlantic coastal town, delivering twice-daily readings and developing the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), a spiritual learning center that remains active there today.

Accompanying Hugh Lynn home in June 1927, Sugrue received a "life reading" from Cayce. In these psychological readings, Cayce was said to peer into a subject's "past life" incarnations and influences, analyze his character through astrology and other esoteric methods, and view his personal struggles and aptitudes. Cayce correctly identified the young writer's interest in the Middle East, a region where Sugrue later issued news reports on the founding of the modern state of Israel. But it wasn't until Christmas of that year that Sugrue, upon receiving an intimate and uncannily accurate medical reading, became an all-out convert to Cayce's psychical abilities.

Sugrue went on to fulfill his aim of becoming a journalist, writing from different parts of the world for publications including The New York Herald Tribune and The American Magazine. But his life remained interwoven with Cayce's. Stricken by debilitating arthritis in the late 1930s, Sugrue sought help through Cayce's medical readings. From 1939 to 1941, the ailing Sugrue lived with the Cayce family in Virginia Beach, writing and convalescing. During these years of close access to Cayce - while struggling with painful joints and limited mobility - Sugrue completed There Is a River, the sole biography written of Cayce during his lifetime, now available in a new edition. When the book first appeared in 1942 it brought Cayce national attention that surpassed even the earlier Times coverage.

Documenting the Prophet

Sugrue was not Cayce's only enthusiast within the world of American letters. There Is a River broke through the skeptical wall of New York publishing thanks to a reputable editor, William Sloane, of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, who experienced his own brush with the Cayce readings.

In 1940, Sloane agreed to consider the manuscript for There Is a River. He knew the biography was highly sympathetic, a fact that did not endear him to it. Sloane's wariness faded after Cayce's clairvoyant diagnosis helped one of the editor's children. Novelist and screenwriter Nora Ephron recounted the episode in a 1968 New York Times article. "I read it," Sloane told Ephron. "Now there isn't any way to test a manuscript like this. So I did the only thing I could do." He went on:

A member of my family, one of my children, had been in great and continuing pain. We'd been to all the doctors and dentists in the area and all the tests were negative and the pain was still there. I wrote Cayce, told him my child was in pain and would be at a certain place at such-and-such a time, and enclosed a check for $25. He wrote back that there was an infection in the jaw behind a particular tooth. So I took the child to the dentist and told him to pull the tooth. The dentist refused - he said his professional ethics prevented him from pulling sound teeth. Finally, I told him he would have to pull it.

One tooth more or less didn't matter, I said. I couldn't live with the child in such pain. So he pulled the tooth and the infection was there and the pain went away. I was a little shook. I'm the kind of man who believes in X-rays. About this time, a member of my staff who thought I was nuts to get involved with this took even more precautions in writing to Cayce than I did, and he sent her back facts about her own body only she could have known. So I published Sugrue's book.

Many literary journalists and historians since Sugrue have traced Cayce's life. Journalist and documentarian Sidney D. Kirkpatrick wrote the landmark record of Cayce in his 2000 biography Edgar Cayce. Historian K. Paul Johnson crafted a deeply balanced and meticulous scholarly analysis of Cayce with the 1998 Edgar Cayce in Context. And the intrepid scholar of religion Harmon Bro"who spent nine months in Cayce's company toward the end of the psychic's life" produced insightful studies of Cayce as a Christian mystic in his 1955 University of Chicago doctoral thesis (a groundbreaking work of modern scholarship on an occult subject) and later in the 1989 biography Seer Out of Season. While Harmon Bro died in 1997, his family has a long"and still active"literary involvement with Cayce. Bro's mother, Margueritte, was a pioneering female journalist in the first half of the twentieth century who brought Cayce national attention in her 1943 profile in Coronet magazine: "Miracle Man of Virginia Beach." Bro's wife June and daughter Pamela actively teach and interpret the Cayce ideas today.

There exist many other works on Cayce"it would take several paragraphs to appreciate the best of them. But it was Sugrue, an accomplished print journalist who worked and convalesced with Cayce for several years, who fully - and this word is chosen carefully - captured Cayce's goodness.

Sugrue's historical Edgar Cayce is the man who grew from being an awkward, soft-voiced adolescent to a national figure who never quite knew how to manage his fame - and less so how to manage money, often foregoing or deferring his usual $20 fee for readings, leaving himself and his family in a perpetual state of financial precariousness. In a typical letter from 1940, Cayce replied to a blind laborer who asked about paying in installments: "You may take care of the [fee] any way convenient to your self - please know one is not prohibited from having a reading . . . because they haven't money. If this information is of a divine source it can't be sold, if it isn't then it isn't worth any thing."

Sugrue also captured Cayce as a figure of deep Christian faith struggling to come to terms with the occult concepts that ran through his readings beginning in the early 1920s. This material extended to numerology, astrology, crystal gazing, modern prophecies, reincarnation, karma, and the story of mythical civilizations, including Atlantis and prehistoric Egypt. People who sought readings were intrigued and emotionally impacted by this material as much as by Cayce's medical diagnoses. What's more, in readings that dealt with spiritual and esoteric topics - along with the more familiar readings that focused on holistic remedies, massage, meditation, and natural foods"there began to emerge the range of subjects that formed the parameters of therapeutic New Age spirituality in the latter twentieth century.

Esoteric Philosopher

Edgar Cayce

Cayce did more than assemble a catalogue of the dawning New Age. The spiritual ideas running through his readings, combined with his own intrepid study of Scripture, supplied the basis for a universal approach to religion, which, in various ways, also spread across American culture. Sugrue captures this especially well in chapter fifteen, which recounts Cayce's metaphysical explorations with an Ohio printer and Theosophist named Arthur Lammers. Cayce's collaboration with Lammers, which began in the autumn of 1923 in Selma, Alabama, marked a turn in Cayce's career from medical clairvoyant to esoteric philosopher.

Licking his wounds after his failed oil ventures, Cayce had resettled his family in Selma, where he planned to resume his career as a commercial photographer. He and Gertrude, who had long suffered her husband's absences and unsteady finances, enrolled their son Hugh Lynn, then sixteen, in Selma High School. The family, now including five-year-old Edgar Evans, settled into a new home and appeared headed for some measure of domestic normalcy. All this got upturned in September, however, when the wealthy printer Lammers arrived from Dayton. Lammers had learned of Cayce during the psychic's oil-prospecting days. He showed up at Cayce's photo studio with an intriguing proposition.

Lammers was both a hard-driving businessman and an avid seeker in Theosophy, ancient religions, and the occult. He impressed upon Cayce that the seer could use his psychical powers for more than medical diagnoses. Lammers wanted Cayce to probe the secrets of the ages: What happens after death? Is there a soul? Why are we alive? Lammers yearned to understand the meaning of the pyramids, astrology, alchemy, the "Etheric World," reincarnation, and the mystery religions of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. He felt certain that Cayce's readings could part the veil shrouding the ageless wisdom.

After years of stalled progress in his personal life, Cayce was enticed by this new sense of mission. Lammers urged Cayce to return with him to Dayton, where he promised to place the Cayce family in a new home and financially care for them. Cayce agreed, and uprooted Gertrude and their younger son, Edgar Evans. Hugh Lynn remained behind with friends in Selma to finish out the school term. Lammers's financial promises later proved elusive, and Cayce's Dayton years, which preceded his move to Virginia Beach, turned into a period of financial despair. Nonetheless, for Cayce, if not his loved ones, Dayton also marked a stage of unprecedented discovery.

Cayce and Lammers began their explorations at a downtown hotel on October 11, 1923. In the presence of several onlookers, Lammers arranged for Cayce to enter a trance and to give the printer an astrological reading. Whatever hesitancies the waking Cayce evinced over arcane subjects vanished while he was in his trance state. Cayce expounded on the validity of astrology even as "the Source""what Cayce called the ethereal intelligence behind his readings - alluded to misconceptions in the Western model. Toward the end of the reading, Cayce almost casually tossed off that it was Lammers's "third appearance on this [earthly] plane. He was once a monk." It was an unmistakable reference to reincarnation"just the type of insight Lammers had been seeking. In the weeks ahead, the men continued their readings, probing into Hermetic and esoteric spirituality. From a trance state on October 18, Cayce laid out for Lammers a whole philosophy of life, dealing with karmic rebirth, man's role in the cosmic order, and the hidden meaning of existence:

In this we see the plan of development of those individuals set upon this plane, meaning the ability (as would be manifested from the physical) to enter again into the presence of the Creator and become a full part of that creation.

Insofar as this entity is concerned, this is the third appearance on this plane, and before this one, as the monk. We see glimpses in the life of the entity now as were shown in the monk, in his mode of living. The body is only the vehicle ever of that spirit and soul that waft through all times and ever remain the same.

These phrases were, for Lammers, the golden key to the mysteries: a theory of eternal recurrence, or reincarnation, that identified man's destiny as inner refinement through karmic cycles of rebirth, then reintegration with the source of Creation. This, the printer believed, was the hidden truth behind the Scriptural injunction to be "born again" so as to "enter the kingdom of Heaven."

"It opens up the door," Lammers told Cayce. "It's like finding the secret chamber of the Great Pyramid." He insisted that the doctrine that came through the readings synchronized the great wisdom traditions: "It's Hermetic, it's Pythagorean, it's Jewish, it's Christian!" Cayce himself wasn't sure what to believe. "The important thing," Lammers reassured him, "is that the basic system which runs through all the mystery traditions, whether they come from Tibet or the pyramids of Egypt, is backed up by you. It's actually the right system. . . . It not only agrees with the best ethics of religion and society, it is the source of them."

Lammers's enthusiasms aside, the religious ideas that emerged from Cayce's readings did articulate a compelling theology. Cayce's teachings sought to marry a Christian moral outlook with the cycles of karma and reincarnation central to Hindu and Buddhist ways of thought, as well as the Hermetic concept of man as an extension of the Divine. Cayce's references elsewhere to the causative powers of the mind - "the spiritual is the LIFE; the mental is the BUILDER; the physical is the RESULT" - melded his cosmic philosophy with tenets of New Thought, Christian Science, and mental healing. If there was an inner philosophy unifying the world's religions, Cayce came as close as any modern person in defining it.

Cayce's "Source"

Religious traditionalists could rightly object: Just where are Cayce's "insights" coming from? Are they the product of a Higher Power or merely the overactive imagination of a religious outlier? Or, worse, are his phrases the type of muddle-fuddle produced by haunts at Ouija board sessions?

Cayce himself wrestled with these questions. His response was that all of his ideas, whatever their source, had to square with Gospel ethics in order to be judged vital and right. Cayce addressed this in a talk that he delivered in his normal waking state in Norfolk, Virginia, in February of 1933, just before he turned fifty-six:

Many people ask me how I prevent undesirable influences entering into the work I do. In order to answer that question let me relate an experience I had as a child. When I was between eleven and twelve years of age I had read the Bible through three times. I have now read it fifty-six times. No doubt many people have read it more times than that, but I have tried to read it through once for each year of my life. Well, as a child I prayed that I might be able to do something for the other fellow, to aid others in understanding themselves, and especially to aid children in their ills. I had a vision one day which convinced me that my prayer had been heard and answered.

Cayce's "vision" has been described differently by different biographers. Sugrue recounts the episode occurring when Cayce was about twelve in the woods outside his home in western Kentucky. Cayce himself places it in his bedroom at age thirteen or fourteen. One night, this adolescent boy who had spoken of childhood conversations with "hidden friends," and who hungrily read through Scripture, knelt by his bed, and prayed for the ability to help others.

Just before drifting to sleep, Cayce recalled, a glorious light filled the room and a feminine apparition appeared at the foot of his bed telling him: "Thy prayers are heard. You will have your wish. Remain faithful. Be true to yourself. Help the sick, the afflicted."

Cayce did not realize until years later what form his answered prayers would take"and even in his twenties it took him years to adjust to being a medical clairvoyant. As his new powers took shape he labored to use Scripture as his moral vetting mechanism. Yet he consistently attributed his information to the "Source"" another subject on which he expanded at Norfolk:

As a matter of fact, there would seem to be not only one, but several sources of information that I tap when in this sleep condition.

One source is, apparently, the recording that an individual or entity makes in all its experiences through what we call time. The sum-total of the experiences of that soul is "written," so to speak, in the subconscious of that individual as well as in what is known as the Akashic records. Anyone may read these records if he can attune himself properly.

Cayce's concept of the "Akashic records" is derived from ancient Vedic writings, in which akasha is a kind of universal ether. This idea of universal records was popularized to Westerners in the late nineteenth-century through the work of occult philosopher, world traveler, and Theosophy founder Madame H.P. Blavatsky.

A generation before Cayce, Blavatsky told of a hidden philosophy at the core of the historic faiths"and of a cosmic record bank that catalogues all human events. In Blavatsky's 1877 study of occult philosophy, Isis Unveiled, she described an all-pervasive magnetic ether that "keeps an unmutilated record of all that was, that is, or ever will be." These astral records, wrote Blavatsky, preserve "a vivid picture for the eye of the seer and prophet to follow." Blavatsky equated this archival ether with the "Book of Life" from Revelation.

Returning to the topic in her massive 1888 study of occult history, The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky depicted these etheric records in more explicitly Vedic terms (having spent several preceding years in India). In the first of her two-volume study, Blavatsky referred to "Akâsic or astral-photographs""inching closer to the term "Akashic records" as used by Cayce.

Cayce was not the first channeler to credit the "Akashic records" as his source of data. In 1908, a retired Civil War chaplain and Church of Christ pastor named Levi H. Dowling said that he clairvoyantly channeled an alternative history of Christ in The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. In Dowling's influential account, the Son of Man travels and studies throughout the religious cultures of the East before dispensing a message of universal faith that encompasses all the world's traditions. Dowling, too, attributed his insights to the "Akashic records," accessed while in a trance state in his Los Angeles living room.

Cayce, like Blavatsky, equated akasha with the Scriptural Book of Life. This was an example of how Cayce harmonized the exotic and unfamiliar themes of his readings with his Christian worldview. In a similar vein, he reinterpreted the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John, in which Christ heals a man who had been blind from birth, to validate ideas of karma and reincarnation. When the disciples ask Christ whether it was the man's sins or those of his parents that caused his affliction, the Master replies enigmatically: "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:3). In Cayce's reasoning, since the blind man was born with his disorder, and Christ exonerates both the man and his parents, his disability must be karmic baggage from a previous incarnation. Cayce made comparable interpretations of passages from Matthew and Revelation.

In another effort to unite the poles of different traditions, Cayce elsewhere associated his esoteric search with Mme. Blavatsky's. On four occasions he reported being visited by a mysterious, turbaned spiritual master from the East"one of the Mahatmas, or great souls, whom Blavatsky said had guided her.

The Legacy

Neither Cayce nor Sugrue lived long enough to witness the full reach of Cayce's ideas. The psychic died at age sixty-seven in Virginia Beach on January 3, 1945, less than three years after There Is a River first appeared. Sugrue updated the book that year. After struggling with years of illness, the biographer died at age fortyfive on January 6, 1953 at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York.

The first popularizations of Cayce's work began to appear in 1950 with the publication of Many Mansions, an enduring work on reincarnation by Gina Cerminara, a longtime Cayce devotee. But it wasn't until 1956 that Cayce's name took full flight across the culture with the appearance of the sensationally popular book The Search for Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein. Sugrue's editor Sloane, having since warmed to parapsychology, published both Cerminara and Bernstein.

Bernstein was an iconic figure. A Coloradan of Jewish descent and an Ivy League"“educated dealer in heavy machinery and scrap metal, he grew inspired by Cayce's career"partly through the influence of Sugrue's book"and became an amateur hypnotist. In the early 1950s, Bernstein conducted a series of experiments with a Pueblo, Colorado, housewife who, while under a hypnotic trance, appeared to regress into a pastlife persona: an early nineteenth-century Irish country girl named Bridey Murphy. The entranced homemaker spoke in an Irish brogue and recounted to Bernstein comprehensive details of her life more than a century earlier.

Suddenly, reincarnation"an ancient Vedic concept about which Americans had heard little before World War II"was the latest craze, ignited by Bernstein, an avowed admirer of Cayce, to whom the hypnotist devoted two chapters in his book.

In the following decade, California journalist Jess Stearn further ramped up interest in Cayce with his 1967 best seller, Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet. With the mystic '60s in full swing, and the youth culture embracing all forms of alternative or Eastern spirituality" from Zen to yoga to psychedelics - Cayce, while not explicitly tied to any of this, rode the new vogue. During this time, Hugh Lynn Cayce emerged as a formidable custodian of his father's legacy, presiding over the expansion of the Virginia Beach-based Association for Research and Enlightenment, and shepherding to market a new wave of instructional guides based on the Cayce teachings, from dream interpretation to drug-free methods of relaxation to the spiritual uses of colors, crystals, and numbers. Cayce's name became a permanent fixture on the cultural landscape.

The 1960s and '70s also saw a new generation of channeled literature - Cayce himself originated the term channel - from higher intelligences such as Seth, Ramtha, and even the figure of Christ in A Course in Miracles. The last was a profound and enduring lesson series, channeled beginning in 1965 by Columbia University research psychologist Helen Schucman.

A concordance of tone and values existed between Cayce's readings and A Course in Miracles. Cayce's devotees and the Course's wide array of readers discovered that they had a lot in common; members of both cultures blended seamlessly, attending many of the same seminars, growth centers, and metaphysical churches.

Likewise, a congruency emerged between Cayce's world and followers of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Starting in the 1970s, Twelve-Steppers of various stripes became a familiar presence at Cayce conferences and events in Virginia Beach.

Cayce's universalistic religious message dovetailed with the purposefully flexible references to a Higher Power in the "Big Book," Alcoholics Anonymous, written in 1939. AA cofounder Bill Wilson, his wife Lois, his confidant Bob Smith, and several other early AAs were deeply versed in mystical and mediumistic teachings. Whether they viewed Cayce as an influence is unclear. But all three works"the Cayce readings, A Course in Miracles, and Alcoholics Anonymous"demonstrated a shared sense of religious liberalism, an encouragement that all individuals seek their own conception of a Higher Power, and a permeability intended to accommodate the broadest expression of religious outlooks and backgrounds.

The free-flowing tone of the therapeutic spiritual movements of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had a shared antecedent, if not a direct ancestry, in the Cayce readings.

Sugrue provided an irreplaceable record of Cayce's development as a spiritual messenger and pioneer. The biographer captured the seer as the person who Cayce himself said he was: An ordinary man who struggled with his apparent psychical abilities and the universal religious ideas that travelled through him.

But Sugrue's work accomplished more than just that. His portrait of Cayce, in its own right, became a formative document of New Age spirituality. In exploring Cayce's career, Sugrue highlighted and popularized core themes from the Cayce readings"including pastlife experiences, alternative medical treatments, the imperative of the individual spiritual search, and the idea of religion as a practical source of healing.

Sugrue demonstrated how Cayce"a committed Christian, a Sunday school teacher, and, by his own reckoning, an everyday man"developed into the founding prophet of Aquarian Age spirituality. In capturing the drama and events of Cayce's journey, Sugrue elevated the clarity and endurance of the seer's message.

---

 

MITCH HOROWITZ is a PEN Award-winning historian and the author of Occult America and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. He has written on alternative spirituality for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Visit him @MitchHorowitz and www.MitchHorowitz.com.

This article is adapted from Mitch Horowitz's new introduction to the reissue edition of There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce by Thomas Sugrue (Tarcher/Penguin, 2015). Reprinted with permission.

 

---

Printed in the Spring 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Chambers, John."Riding the Waves of Karma: Memories of Muktananda's Ashram" Quest 103.2 (Spring 2015): pg. 61-65.

By John Chambers

The heart is the hub of all sacred places. Go there and roam.
-Sri Bhagawan Nityananda

It was like living in a cross between Dante's Purgatory and a Walt Disney animated feature film. A thousand faces filled the semidarkness. The air resounded with titters, groans, and guffaws. People rocked back and forth, assumed strange postures, thrust their arms up in the air. A steady buzzing like a swarm of bees came from the back of the auditorium. Over to one side a high-pitched cackle broke out. It was followed by a loud gurgling noise, and then the words, "Yum! Yum!"

A sock with a foot inside it brushed against my ear. The young man beside me was coming out of his headstand.

A small, dusky-colored man, about seventy years of age, wearing an orange ski cap, dark glasses, and a saffron robe, was advancing calmly through the cacophony. He moved quickly from person to person, stopping briefly to bop each one with a peacock-feather wand. Sometimes he lingered for a moment to pat someone's head as if he were testing the strength of the skull. Then he went on.

This man's name was Paramahansa Muktananda. Everybody called him Baba. He was one of the bestknown of the numerous spiritual teachers who spent time in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. This was the summer of 1979. I was in the meditation hall in Muktananda's ashram in South Fallsburg, high up in the Catskills sixty miles north of New York City. This big, sprawling collection of buildings, limned with fresh gardens and honeycombed with rooms large and small, was the headquarters of Muktananda's Siddha Yoga Dham (or "Home of Siddha Yoga") of America Foundation (SYDA).

I wasn't there for the sake of my soul. I'd come as a journalist covering New Age events. I also hoped to get rid of my smoking habit. I'd been told that if you chanted and meditated in the Siddha Yoga fashion, and especially if you spent time in Baba's ashram, you could expect to burn away bad attitudes and bad habits and make it as if they'd never existed.

This was my first weekend at the ashram. I would be staying for a month. Now I was huddled together with a thousand other attendees in a weekend-long intensive. The auditorium hadn't ceased to reverberate with bizarre and disconcerting sounds. Somebody screamed. Wild laughter broke out everywhere, cascading in merry waves across the hall. There was a sound like a steam whistle going off. Then there was a high-pitched wail. Abruptly the room was plunged in silence.

I fixed my gaze on Muktananda, who was advancing down the row where I was sitting. He was unperturbed as he made his way through this agitated, noisy throng. His peacock-feather wand flicked regularly up and down, while with one hand he reached out regularly to pat somebody's forehead. He strode forward with an oddly loose-jointed gait, shoulders thrust back, belly forward, as if he were a pregnant woman. But it was he who was doing the impregnating. I'd been told that the big circles, or "eyes," on a peacock feather were supposed to possess the power, not only to impregnate peahens from a distance, but also to seed the souls of men and women.

And that was what Baba was doing. He was sowing a seed in each of us. When he stopped and touched a head, it was to make sure the seed had fallen in the right place. In the language of Siddha Yoga, Baba was administering shaktipat; he was awakening the shakti, or "conscious energy," in each of us. That energy was coiled up snakelike at the base of the spine in a configuration called the kundalini. Baba's own kundalini had been brought to full maturity long ago, or so we had been told; by dint of years of meditation and chanting, it had mounted up through his spinal column until it reached his brain and then his soul. The shakti was alive in Baba from head to toe. He had become what is called in Siddha Yoga parlance â"firmly established in the Self"the greater, cosmic part of ourselves that the normal self, which has not known it since birth, seeks to reunite with. Muktananda was a fully realized human being, so brimming over with the bliss-bestowing conscious energy called shakti that he could awaken it in each one of us with a word, with a touch, with a look even with a thought! The peacock-feather fan was a conduit that the fire of Babaâ's shakti flowed through to reignite the guttering lamps of soul within us all.

It was the awakening of the kundalini that was causing all the commotion in the room. When the kundalini woke up, it found itself hemmed in by a mass of psychic debris. The way up the spinal column was only three feet long, but it was lined with psychic scar tissue samskaras, or "impressions" from your previous lifetimes. The kundalini had to fight its way through these samskaras through your bad karma, so to speak and they resisted powerfully and noisily; they liked it where they were, and were loath to cease to exist.

In that first intensive in the meditation hall, we all let off a tremendous amount of psychic steam. The awakening shakti assaulted, broke up, and forced out the hard, resistant, blackened accretions of many a badly lived lifetime. That was the reason for all the giggles, screams, guffaws, all the bizarre and unclassifiable sounds that erupted in the auditorium: people were disgorging "negativities"; they were letting go of bad karma; in the parlance of Siddha Yoga, they were "having kriyas."

I looked up. Baba was standing in front of me. I felt the light tap of his peacock feather. Then he was gone. Fifteen minutes later, Baba ended his rounds and strode resolutely toward the front of the auditorium. He bounded up the steps that led to the stage and strode across to his young, black-haired, undeniably beautiful Hindu translator Malti (who, a few years later, as Gurumayi Chidvilasanda, would become Baba's successor as SYDA's leader). Uttering a few words which his excited audience couldn't hear because it was sending up a tumultuous roar, Baba raised his arms high like a prizefighter who's just won a fight, and then strode, purposeful as always, off the stage and away.

Muktananda Paramahansa was born to wealthy parents in south India in 1908. His father was a rich landowner. His mother was a cultured woman and a devotee of the god Shiva. He broke her heart (as he tells us sadly in his autobiography Play of Consciousness) when he left home at age fifteen in search of nothing less than total Self-realization. She knew he would never return, and he never did, though she saw him again a few times.

Muktananda tells us that he sat at the feet of sixty gurus. Enlarged black-and-white photos of several of them hung on the auditorium walls. They were a vastly eccentric lot by Western standards. One, Zipruanna, spent his time sitting on piles of excrement, and yet exuded a fragrance so psychically exquisite that if you came close enough you found yourself taking a giant step forward on the path to Self-realization. Another, Harigiri Baba, loved to don the clothes of rich men and sometimes wore two hats and three coats, but he, too, gave off such an odor of sanctity that you could not pass near him without evolving significantly as a spiritual being.

Baba scarcely mentioned those gurus in the talks he gave every night. The only guru he liked to talk about was Sri Bhagawan Nityananda (1897—1961). Nityananda had the distinction, so the lore of the ashram went, of being a janma siddha, that is, of having been born fully realized. He was seven feet tall. He dressed sparingly, mostly in only a loincloth. He almost never spoke. Yet he must have been a natural leader of extraordinary power, because for many years multitudes of people flocked to his ashram in Ganeshpuri, India, from every part of the world. A myriad of seeming miracles occurred when he was around, and he put the considerable donations that came to the ashram back into the town of Ganeshpuri.

Nityananda was the leader of the Siddha Yoga movement when Paramahansa Muktananda came to him in 1947, at the age of thirty-nine. In 1956 Nityananda bestowed upon him the "grace-bestowing" power of administering shaktipat, which effectively made Baba the new leader of the movement.

Baba remained at Ganeshpuri for some time. Then he came to the United States and quickly became popular. He was open to all and freely granted interviews. The Siddha Yoga mantra was neither a secret nor was it different for everyone, as was the case with Transcendental Meditation at the time; it was om namah shivaya ("I bow to Shiva"'Shiva being one's own Self), and you were encouraged to chant it on every possible occasion. It was Baba Muktananda's gift to the world. For even while staying in the U.S., Baba traveled the whole world, and in 1974 he began to set up ashrams everywhere. The South Fallsburg center was one of the first and most important.

At the ashram that summer, every evening we were in the presence of Baba at darshan in the auditorium. The guru spoke for two hours, never using notes and never repeating himself. Afterwards we filed down one by one to a throne he sat in just below the stage, and he bopped us with the peacock-feather wand. This was a dramatic experience, somewhat different from that at the intensive: just two or three feet from Baba, most of us, myself included, felt a hot blast of energy strike us as the peacock feather descended. Perhaps this made up for the fact that we saw little of Baba during the day. But, as the reader will soon learn, much was always happening beneath the surface of the ashram day and night.

Along with darshan in the evening, many hours were taken up during the day with chanting and meditation, alone, and in groups, and with classes every morning and afternoon taught by the saffron-clad swamis who lived at the ashram (most of whom were American, and some of them ex—university professors). We also "did seva," which meant carrying out tasks for the ashram for three or four hours a day. These could be anything from planning programs to doing accounts to washing dishes to weeding gardens.

I shared a room with three other ashramites. Talking to them taught me more about Siddha Yoga and the extraordinary culture of the ashram than anything else. But doing seva was almost as instructive as kibitzing, because you were participating in the everyday life of the ashram.

Doing seva was no act of reverence toward Baba. He had made it clear at the intensive that we were not there to honor or worship him, but to honor or worship our Selves. There was a sense in which he, Baba, was not a real physical being, but rather a stand-in for our own Selves. Whenever we did seva' whenever we did any sort of service for the guru'we were actually doing service for our Self, since the guru was the Self. And that meant that every bit of seva we performed pushed us a little further along the path to self-enlightenment.

I did seva in the ashram kitchen, washing knives, forks, spoons, and pots for three hours every morning or evening. One evening I was bent over the sink when an angular, skeletally thin woman of perhaps eighteen entered the huge kitchen (this part of the ashram had been a hotel that could serve 500 people a day). Sadness was written all over her thin and bony face, and especially in her eyes. She made her way slowly across the kitchen floor and disappeared into a cubicle on the other side.

Swami Muktananda

My workmate Joey whispered in my ear, "See that girl? Her seva is cleaning one pot."

"One pot?" I exclaimed.

"I'll show you."

He led me across the floor to the cubicle door. We peered in. There rose before us a single, dented, silvery pot, monstrously large, four feet high and almost three feet across. The girl was on the other side, bent over so far into the pot that her head was almost lost from sight. She didn't notice us; she was scouring the insides slowly, firmly, evenly, with the utmost concentration.

She didn't notice us. We returned to our dish-laden sink. "She's been doing that for two hours every night for two weeks," Joey said to me. "Now that's seva!"

All of a sudden we heard gasps of surprise and joy just outside the door. We turned; the other ashramites in the kitchen were throwing themselves on the floor in various positions of prostration. And then Baba strode purposefully in, swift as a bullet, as smoothly as if he were rolling on castors. He crossed the floor to the cubicle door, looked in' and then, turning, strode back across the floor and was gone out the door just as suddenly as he had come in.

I hadn't had time to decide whether to prostrate myself or not. But Joey had thrown himself to the floor in a second, and now, scrambling back on his feet, he addressed me: "You see what I mean? That's seva that works!"

"He didn't even speak to her," I protested. "What was supposed to happen?"

"Wait and see," he said, in the tone of absolute certainty I often heard in the ashram.

I went about my business: classes, meditation, chanting, more meditation. It was very calming; but always, wherever you were, you regularly heard kriyas going off like rifle shots, sniffs, pants, shouts, and guffaws accompanying the sudden discharge of samskaras. I washed dishes every morning or evening. The girl scrubbed the pot every night; each time she left it looking as good as new.

On my last day at the ashram (many were leaving; a massive changeover of attendees was about to take place), I was sitting on a bench near the entrance when suddenly the usual signs'gasps of surprise, instant prostrations'signaled that Baba was just outside. There was the flash of an orange robe, a glint of sunglasses, a sudden rush of activity, aides scurrying forward'and then Baba strode swiftly, smoothly, and purposefully through the ashram entrance.

He stopped abruptly and turned in my direction. He strode rapidly towards me. And then I noticed (why hadn't I noticed before?) that my bench was occupied lifeby somebody else: the girl who scrubbed the huge pot every night.

Baba came up to her. He stood before her. She looked up in surprise. He reached down and took her hand. He swiftly removed his sunglasses and gazed down at her intently from eyes that seemed to me enormous.

She stared up timidly.

He held her hand. He spoke Hindi to her. Nobody moved; no translator came.

He gave off heat. Seated not three feet away, I could feel it, just as I could on the darshan line. It was if the door of an oven had been opened.

The girl softened in his gentle grasp. The corners of her mouth began to work. Joy swept across her face. Great round tears rolled down her cheeks, but all the time she was smiling happily.

Then he let go of her hand and was gone, as if his work was done'swiftly, into the depths of the ashram he had created.

Events like this took place at the ashram all the time. They were all we ever talked about. In our classes we learned about Kashmiri Shaivism, which was the philosophy behind Siddha Yoga. But outside class, all our talk was of karma, and especially of our personal karma. It was as if we were living a sort of karmic time in the ashram, not real time at all. Of course, bad karma could not be avoided, it had to be worked through; but we thought that if we truly became involved with Baba and all he stood for, if we meditated and chanted continuously in the ashram, Baba could take on our bad karma and burn it up in the fire of his own perfected being. What had to happen in your lifetime could happen in the ashram in a kind of compressed karmic time.

Or, at least, be launched. Your stay with Baba in the ashram was usually only the start. That period of "being with the guru" put mysterious karmic forces into play that, once you left the ashram, would make your life accelerate faster and faster, sometimes beautifully, often painfully, but in such a way that you would come out the other end a transformed, happier person.

One of my roommates, Ron, now a taxi driver, once a geologist, explained it all to me one night. Leaning back on the bed, scratching his lean, regular features and '50s crew cut, he told me that the year before he'd spent the summer at the ashram. And then:

"My life fell apart after I left the ashram. My wife left me in September. She was having an affair with my best friend. Then I couldn't find a publisher for my geology textbook. Then I lost my job."

"That must have been horrible," I muttered.

"It wasn't horrible at all. Just think what might have happened if I hadn't been at the ashram last summer."

"What might have happened?" I was genuinely puzzled.

He told me that it wasn't unusual for people's lives to fall apart after they'd spent time with Baba in the ashram; this was so their lives could fall back together again in the right way. It was truly amazing how fast everything happened once you got back to real life. "I was up to my ass in bad karma," Ron told me. "I was in a million situations I didn't like and that weren't good for me. If it hadn't been for Baba, my bad karma with my wife and my bad karma about being a scientist would have gone on forever."

Now he was driving a cab in the Bronx, living permanently in the Manhattan ashram, and seeing his eight-year-old son every weekend. "I listen to the Guru Gita," he said. "I drive my cab. I meditate. I get my soul in order."

I heard many stories like this at the ashram. I found them beguiling in their intimation of vaster dimensions in our lives which we can never really grasp but which play decisive roles. I heard stories of reincarnation and of how dipping into your past lives could give you strength in this one, or change it (or even change a past life!), and that being with Baba at the ashram was the catalyst that could make this happen.

A new friend of mine, Jim, a writer I talked to every day, told me that on the first day of class he'd noticed a woman whose luxuriant blond hair was utterly familiar to him. So were her shapely shoulders. So were her huge black eyes. He felt as if he'd known her all his life, though he'd never seen her before.

All this he observed from a distance. After class, he couldn't catch up with her. An hour later, while in a line waiting to get into the cafeteria for lunch, he looked down and there she was, standing beside him, head with its luxuriant growth of blond hair not quite coming up to his chin. She'd noticed him no more than he'd noticed her. Now she glanced up suddenly, stared at him, and said, "You remind me of the first boy I ever went out with."

They spent the afternoon walking and talking in the gardens. They were sure they'd been lovers in a previous lifetime. Nothing happened between them that afternoon, or in any of the days that followed, though both were unhappily married. They seemed to derive tremendous strength from this encounter, which really ended on that day. "It was like coming to an oasis in the desert," Jim told me. "It helped me a whole lot. And I know what to do about my marriage now."

Another of my roommates, Roger, told us one morning that he'd dreamt about us all that night. "We were soldiers in a kind of medieval German army," he said. "We had these strange, distinctive boots on. And we all hated each other. We were in the same army and we had a common enemy but we hated each other. We did awful things to each other."

That was all he could remember. He was sure the shakti had brought us together in this room this summer so we could move beyond that miserable, shared lifetime. And all of us had to admit that we'd felt strangely wary of each other when we'd arrived at the ashram, though now we were feeling much better.

It was these personal dramas'which seem to me to this day to have tapped into unique and unknown parts of the human soul'that gave us all the sense of a heightened life at the ashram. I recall that life more fondly today than I do the (nevertheless estimable) classes in spirituality and metaphysics I took there.

And I had my own personal drama. I'd hoped to leave my smoking habit behind at the ashram. Smoking was forbidden there, so I didn't smoke for four weeks. When I left, I not only no longer craved a smoke; I could hardly remember what a cigarette was. I can still hardly remember.

In early 1982, not long before Baba's death in November, scandal invaded the Siddha Yoga Foundation. Baba was accused of having sexual relations with young women. I didn't hear about this till November 1994, when I read about it in a story in The New Yorker.

At the time of the writing of the New Yorker story, twelve years later, it was still not clear what had really happened. Some argued that what Baba had engaged in wasn't really sex, but a sexualized form of spirituality. But there were those who left the Siddha Yoga Foundation on account of these rumors, and Baba's actions, whatever their true nature, cast doubt on his integrity and that of the movement as a whole, and were certainly counterproductive.

The scandals did not cease with that. The year before he died, Baba had designated, amidst some confusion, two cosuccessors to himself in SYDA: Malti, his interpreter and assistant for ten years, and Subhash, her younger brother, whom Baba renamed Nityananda. For three years, this sharing of the Siddha Yoga leadership seemed to work fairly well. Then, in 1985, Subhash/ Nityananda was cast out, and not without some violence. The New Yorker story provided many details; it seems as if for a while there were severe perturbations in the karmic space-time reality of the Siddha Yoga Dham. After that, Malti/Gurumayi Chitvilasanda assumed full leadership, and the Siddha Yoga Foundation quickly got back on an even keel. It is a great pity that, just before he died, Muktananda (out of generosity, and not a little indecisiveness) bestowed upon two people he loved, Malti and the younger Nityananda, immense power which, in the beginning, they not surprisingly had little idea how to handle properly.

In the summer of 2013, I paid a visit to the Siddha Yoga Center in San Diego, California. Services were conducted as they'd always been. The same portraits of Muktananda and Nityananda as had graced the walls of the auditorium at South Fallsburg in 1979 hung on these walls. A portrait of a strikingly attractive Gurumayi Chitvilasananda was the only addition.

The subject of the foundation's travails in the early 1980s did not come up. It was as if that drama had run its course and now could cease to exist.

For this writer, the moral of these stories of scandal is that gurus, like every other man or woman who attains to some degree of power, can, when they've gotten older, and especially when they're surrounded by adoring disciples, lose for a moment their grip on their better self and fall into the sin and folly and simple mistake-making that all human beings are always precariously near.

Before the scandals overwhelmed Paramahansa Muktananda, he had for many decades been providing essential help to thousands if not tens of thousands of suffering, yearning human beings. This writer is convinced that he was driven all his life by a profound and selfless desire to benefit humanity. In this, he succeeded to a degree matched only by a few, and to an extent that any indiscretions at the end of his life can surely be forgiven.

Beyond all colorful stories in The New Yorker, beyond all cynicism, beyond all irony, it was to mankind's suffering that Muktananda addressed his life. Often, leaving the auditorium stage after darshan in that summer of 1979 in South Fallsburg, he would raise his arms and ringingly repeat the mantric words sadgurunath maharaj kijay, which mean:

All hail the conquering guru.

This writer bows to that.

Sources

Harris, Lis. "O Guru, Guru, Guru." The New Yorker, 70:37 (Nov. 14, 1994), 92—109.
Muktananda, Swami. Play of Consciousness: A Spiritual Autobiography. South Fallsburg, N.Y.: SYDA Foundation, 1978.

John Chambers is the author of a number of books, including Conversations with Eternity: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor Hugo, which has been translated into seven languages; Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius's Hidden Life; and The Secret Life of Genius: How Twenty-Four Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds. His latest book, Isaac Newton: Rescuing the Soul of Man, will be published in mid-2015. He lives in Redding, California.

---