So I went to the chant the next morning, all full of resolve, and the Gurugita kicked me down a twenty-foot flight of cement stairs--or anyway, that's how it felt. The following day it was even worse. I woke up in a fury, and before I even got to the temple I was already sweating, boiling, teeming. I kept thinking: "It's only an hour and a half--you can do anything for an hour and a half. For God's sake, you have friends who were in labor for fourteen hours . . ." But still, I could not have been less comfortable in this chair if I had been stapled to it. I kept feeling fireballs of, like, menopausal heat pulsing over me, and I thought I might faint, or bite somebody in my fury.
My anger was giant. It took in everyone in this world, but it was most specifically directed at Swamiji--my Guru's master, who had instituted this ritual chanting of the Gurugita in the first place. This was not my first difficult encounter with the great and now-deceased Yogi. He was the one who had come to me in my dream on the beach, demanding to know how I intended to stop the tide, and I always felt like he was riding me.
Swamiji had been, all throughout his life, relentless, a spiritual fire-brand. Like Saint Francis of Assisi, Swamiji had been born into a wealthy family and had been expected to enter the family business. But when he was just a young boy, he met a holy man in a small village near his, and had been deeply touched by the experience. Still in his teens, Swamiji left home in a loincloth and spent years making pilgrimages to every holy spot in India, searching for a true spiritual master. He was said to have met over sixty saints and Gurus, never finding the teacher he wanted. He starved, wandered on foot, slept outside in Himalayan snowstorms, suffered from malaria, dysentery--and called these the happiest years of his life, just searching for somebody who would show God to him. Over those years, Swamiji became a Hatha Yogi, an expert in ayurvedic medicine and cooking, an architect, a gardener, a musician and a swordfighter (this I love). By his middle years, he had still not found a Guru, until one day he encountered a naked, mad sage who told him to go back home, back to the village where he had met the holy man as a child, and to study with that great saint.
Swamiji obeyed, returned home, and became the holy man's most devoted student, finally achieving enlightenment through his master's guidance. Ultimately, Swamiji would become a Guru himself. Over time, his Ashram in India grew from three rooms on a barren farm to the lush garden it is today. Then he got the inspiration to go traveling and incite a worldwide meditation revolution. He came to America in 1970 and blew everybody's mind. He gave divine initiation--shaktipat--to hundreds and thousands of people a day. He had a power that was immediate and transformative. The Reverend Eugene Callender (a respected civil rights leader, a colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. and still the pastor of a Baptist church in Harlem) remembers meeting Swamiji in the 1970s and dropping on his knees before the Indian man in amazement and thinking to himself, "There's no time for shuckin' and jivin' now, this is it . . . This man knows everything there is to know about you."
Swamiji demanded enthusiasm, commitment, self-control. He was always scolding people for being jad, the Hindi word for "inert." He brought ancient concepts of discipline to the lives of his often rebellious young W............
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