This post is the second chapter from The Light of the Self: A Memoir of a Spiritual Awakening. In the first chapter, I described an unexpected spiritual awakening in early 1970 that sent me on a long path of spiritual discovery leading through the Hare Krishna Movement, various forms of Christianity, different schools of Buddhism, and the Advaita Vedantic nondualism of Sri Ramana Maharshi. In this chapter, I recall my first days at New Vrindaban, a rural ashram established in the early years of the Hare Krishna Movement (ISKCON) in the US.
Back to Godhead (Chapter 2)
I was awakened before dawn by the sound of softly chiming karatalas and the hushed chanting of Hare Krishna devotees in the living room of the farmhouse, which had been converted into a temple for Radha and Krishna. I dressed quickly without light in a bedroom above the temple room. Outside, the moonless sky was ablaze with stars. Only the chanting of the worshippers broke the silence while the birds still slept in the invisible trees. The sudden brightness of the temple room was blinding when I entered, but a devotee pointed to a line in a book of chants, and my tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar syllables:
kiba shankha baje ghanta baje baje karatala.
I didn’t know what the words meant, but by chanting them I felt less of an outsider. As we danced before the burnished images of Radha and Krishna, we prayed that transcendent light from the deities would dispel the darkness of our hearts. Then I sensed the light of Krishna washing over my consciousness, sending a wave of bliss through me. It darted from a hidden depth and rose as a joyous song through my body and mind to the transcendent planet of Krishna. I sensed that this delightful feeling was a gift of God, and to experience more of it, I believed that I would be willing to sacrifice everything. I was caught up in a holy mood of aspiration and surrender, and, inexperienced as I was in the spiritual life, I thought that these sensations would last forever and that I had now attained a permanent condition of enlightenment.
As the earth slowly brightened outside the windows, the bliss faded, and I started worrying about the rigors of ashram life. Could I get used to getting up at four o’clock in the morning? Could I live without eating meat? Was I up to chopping down trees, hauling rocks, laying brick, digging ditches, and stringing fences? And if I weren’t, would I have to go back to Brooklyn? Thinking of Brooklyn made me homesick, and I wondered what crazy impulse had lured me to this alien religious commune. Icy fingers of anxiety spread through my stomach, and panicky thoughts about getting on a bus back to New York cancelled the blissful feelings that I had been enjoying. Then a calming inner voice spoke clearly: “Stay here a few weeks—you can always go back to Brooklyn. If you go back now, it’ll be as if you had never left. But if you stay awhile, you’ll gain.” I surrendered to the voice, and my anxiety subsided.
After breakfast, I went out to the barn where a shapeup was in progress. A devotee in overalls who was giving work assignments for the day sent me up to the top of the ridge to help Phil, another recent arrival at the ashram, lay a foundation for a cabin. We worked quietly until the middle of the morning, when Phil dropped his trowel and said that he could use a beer. He pointed to a shack on the ridge across the hollow. “That’s a bar,” he said. “Should be open right about now.” A pickup raised a cloud of dust as it passed the saloon, and I was tempted when Phil suggested we hike over and drink a couple. Laying cinder blocks had made me thirsty. But a tugging in my chest reminded me that I had come to New Vrindaban to be a devotee of Krishna and that I wouldn’t have needed to leave Brooklyn to drink a beer. I told Phil that I would pass, and we worked again in silence.
The sun was high and hot when a gong echoed through the hollow announcing the main meal of the day. We dropped our tools and walked the dusty trail to the farmhouse. Devotees were already eating in the shade of a willow tree when we got to the serving line. A mother offered a wailing baby pieces of laddu, an Indian sweet, and a ragged collie begged for samosas, a spicy vegetable pastry. I sat down beneath the tree after being served, but I hesitated to eat the unfamiliar food, which was quite different from the Sunday-feast meals at the Hare Krishna temple in lower Manhattan: a stack of chapatis, tortilla-like circles of unleavened whole-wheat bread, a mound of yellow rice, and a bowl of dal, a pungent brown soup with floating bits of lightly fried chilies. Taking Phil as my guide, I spread rice on a chapati, rolled it like a burrito, and dunked it into the dal. I took a bite and gagged. Phil laughed at my delicacy and went up to the serving line and brought back a bowl of dal without the chilies, which I gratefully but sheepishly ate.
After eating, I chose a nap over memorizing Sanskrit scriptures in the temple. When the gong summoned us to work a half-hour later, I struggled to stand, but I was weighed down by an undigested lump of rice and chapatis, which sat like a rock in my stomach. Disoriented by sudden awakening, I struggled to remember where I was. Then it hit me: I was at New Vrindaban, and a pile of cement blocks was waiting to be carried up the side of the ridge.
Hours later, when the sun dropped behind the ridge, Phil and I stopped working and walked to the bottom of the hollow, where we bathed with other devotees in a sparkling pond. The cool water washed away the memory of work, and I felt happy. After bathing, a devotee helped me to apply clay markings to twelve sacred spots on my body and showed me how to tie a dhoti around my waist. With our bodies now sanctified as sacred space, we climbed the darkening ridge to the temple and went inside and waited expectantly for the curtains hiding the deities to open for evening worship.
A bell rang and the curtains opened. We fell to the floor at the first glance of Radha and Krishna and paid obeisance to them and to our guru Prabhupada, the Indian swami who had brought the gospel of Krishna to America a few years before, when he was in his late sixties. We stood up and looked admiringly at the divine couple, dressed now for sleep in miniature but colorful pajamas. The gleaming bronze statues with their tiny, intense eyes smiled out at us from behind thick garlands of wildflowers, and we began to dance before them. Krishna, a deity celebrated by Hindus for his playfulness as a child and his heroic deeds as an adult, graced us now with a saving glance. A shock of pleasure went through me, sending a tingling through my body and a smile of delight across my face. I knew inwardly without a doubt that there is no God greater and more beautiful than the blue flutist who tends the cows of Vrindaban while maintaining countless universes with only a spark of his power. A flame of bhakti, or divine love, blazed within me, and I offered myself repeatedly without reserve to the deity who had captured my soul.
An abrupt change in the rhythm of the mridanga, a traditional South Indian drum,signaled the end of the ceremony. We dropped to the floor and shouted a litany of praises in Sanskrit to the chain of gurus stretching from Prabhupada back to the sixteenth century Bengali saint Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and founder of the Krishna-consciousness movement; further back to Lord Brahma, the creator of the universe; and back, finally, to the supreme lord, Krishna himself. As I lay swimming in sweat on the sagging floor, I shook in the afterglow of the ecstasy that had swept over me. It was for this feeling that I had left home—and for this I was willing to forsake everything.
After a discussion of a scriptural passage, we gathered around a large kettle of hot, sweet milk and a tray of papadums, or fried, paper-thin wafers made from black gram flour. The temple took on the feeling of home as we ate our bedtime snack. The altar upon which the deities stood was now hidden behind folding doors. While we chatted, a priest sang a Sanskrit lullaby to the deities. After drinking our milk, we unrolled our sleeping bags and lay down. We were quiet now, and someone turned out the light. The quiet and coolness of the mountain night, pleasingly different from sticky summer nights in Brooklyn, soothed and caressed me. It took only a minute for me to fall into a deep sleep.
Days passed, and I milked cows, split wood, hauled rocks from streambeds, weeded gardens, and strung barbed-wire fences through forests and around pastures. I overcame my fear of horses and drove a team and wagon up and down the waterlogged road, carrying passengers and supplies. Krishna became the center of my life as I meditated constantly on his qualities and sacred acts as described in the Vaishnava, or Vishnu-centered, scriptures of Hinduism, which describe the feats of Vishnu, Krishna, and Rama, and their female partners. I frequently felt the sweetness of Krishna’s love rewarding my enthusiastic attempts to serve him. Bliss in golden waves flowed from my mind and heart through my purified body. My mind became still and empty of fear. The knot of thoughts that had tormented me before my spiritual awakening in Brooklyn a few months earlier vanished like a morning mist burned away by the rising sun. In the peaceful garden that my soul had become, I stood entranced by the grace of Krishna’s love. Krishna had banished the passions and terrors of unredeemed existence, and I began to forget that they had ever ruled me.
(To be continued)
Excerpted from The Light of the Self: A Memoir of a Spiritual Awakening (Available on Amazon)
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Image: New Vrindaban, West Virginia, c. 1970 (unknown photographer)
Notice—Recordings of Earlier Posts Now Available
I have begun to add audio recordings to earlier posts. Here are the first two. I’ll link more in in later posts as I record them. Enjoy!
