INITIATION IV: CRUCIFIXION (November 1980 - December 1982): The Eighth State: Brahman Consciousness
Part I (November 1980 - May 1981)
As I watched Margaret Austin, the teacher of the course in pastoral counseling, I was stunned and daunted by the love I saw glowing in her eyes. One day as class was finishing, a fellow-student ranted furiously about how awful men were --- the woman's attack hurt and angered me: not all men were monsters! --- and while speaking of it after class to Margaret, she said she thought I was feeling compassion for the woman's pain. Was I? I wasn't sure --- but I certainly saw deep love in Margaret's eyes. I had gained considerable expertise in competitive academics, but I saw that if I were to succeed in the ministry, I would have to learn this soul-depth of unconditional love.
We students were assigned to each other for practice counseling, and we were told to be as open as possible with each other. I was to counsel a woman who had had considerable difficulty with schizophrenia. I was rather empathic, and as I listened to her over the weeks I found the light in my own world vanishing; the angels disappeared and everything became more and more flat and meaningless. I felt as if I were walking on cinders; I could taste the dust and ashes in my mouth. I had walked into Hades, the land of the shades. Once again, I was in terra incognita, but this time I was really scared. I didn't know what was happening, only that it was acutely painful. For some reason, I, who had studied the mystics, didn't think to apply the term "Dark Night of the Soul" to my own life, or to gain consolation by remembering that it was a necessary rite of passage.
I responded the only way I knew how --- by fleeing. When Maharishi offered a course in Science and Veda in December of 1980, to be held in New Delhi, I jumped at the chance. I took a leave of absence from the Divinity School, and Annie and I went to India. You can see how much pain I must have been in, to actually choose India again to escape from where I was!
As the Movement had forewarned us, the course was difficult. It was large; about three thousand TM'ers from around the world had answered Maharishi's call. Annie and I were separated. For the first week I stayed with same-sex room-mates in a decent hotel, which I was thankful for, as I had painful bout of dysentery almost immediately that lasted for several days. Then we men were bussed off every night about a half-hour away to a tent-city in an industrial complex called NOIDA --- the New Okha Industrial Development Authority. It was December, and at night even India was cold. We were camping out in dusty, muddy, rat-infested field, but still had to wear clean business suits on our daily trips into New Delhi. The sanitary conditions were bad here; the outdoor toilets, which quickly became permanently clogged, had been placed too close to the outdoor cold-water showers, and people started getting very sick. There was a wry joke going around the tents about "coming to the end of the world to see the world coming out your end." I avoided that whole side of the camp as much as possible, and bathed from a faucet near our tent.
The food at the lecture-hall in New Delhi was plentiful, but coarse and greasy; after a few weeks I had to choke it down, and for years afterwards my throat would involuntarily close at the smell of Indian food. Worse, there was no concept of sanitation among the Indian food-servers; to my horror I saw that the bare-foot janitors, after swabbing out the bathrooms, often climbed all over the stacks of "clean" food trays, and that they sometimes rinsed the trays themselves in the toilets. I began using my own cup and silverware to eat the food, and sterilized everything before and after with alcohol. I warned everyone I could, but most ignored me. To top it all off, the course administrators actually forbade course participants from buying their own meals at nearby hotels, saying that the sanitary conditions in the hotels might not be high enough! Those with the courage and the money to break the rules generally enjoyed much better health than the rest of us.
The lecture-hall itself was overcrowded, and the acrid smoke from the cook-fires outdoors often poured through the windows, so that we were hard-put to breathe. However, after the first week or so, the overcrowding eased up; a whole top floor of the building was soon given over to cots and mats for the thousand or so course participants who were too ill to sit up and attend the lectures downstairs.
Worst of all, I began seeing facets of Maharishi's character that really bothered me. On the one hand, he was still the highest man I knew, a clear channel of divinity, emanating tremendously charismatic spiritual force --- once as he was entering the hall, he looked straight into my eyes and I instantly flooded out into an immense sea of light. Another time, he left the dais and exited the room; I was impressed by the energy which still rose off the seat like palpable heat-waves. It was exactly as if he were still on his seat. I went over and bowed to it, feeling as if I had passed some test. Still another time, he was going over and over some minute phrasing of a course brochure, and I was getting more and more bored, until I suddenly vented a scream --- inside my head. He stopped speaking, and stared across the room at me, his eyes like two blinding searchlights. "Sorry!" I thought to him, ruefully. He then continued speaking, and I felt cleansed inside.
On the other hand, he was exhibiting some very odd personality traits. He didn't seem to care about the thousand very-ill people upstairs; he never mentioned them and never went to see them; it seemed I felt more compassion for them than he did, and that he didn't want to see any unpleasantness. He appeared at times to see us as pawns in his large world-plan; I got the sense we were being used as status symbols when he would invite petty Indian politicians to the course and then fawn on them, as if saying, "See how many of these Westerners follow me?" He continually harangued the West, ignoring the fact that we Westerners were his most devoted followers, and had dropped everything to sit at his feet amidst misery and squalor halfway around the world. He was also quite paranoid at times, accusing the C.I.A. of infiltrating us, and making us all stand in line for several hours to get new identity badges. Several of his German guards carried guns, and exhibited distressingly Nazi-esque disregard for everyone but their leader.
Finally, he declared himself infallible; he actually said, "I never make mistakes," which immediately reminded me of many errors he had made: first claiming that all meditators would reach Cosmic Consciousness in a few months, later adjusting the estimate upward to two-to-three years, then readjusting up to three-to-five years, then up again to five-to-eight years ... an almost perfect Fibonacci sequence of failure. By now the estimate is probably eight-to-thirteen years, or more likely has risen to 13-21, or even 21-34 years. It seems one isn't really able or allowed to get fully enlightened in the TM Movement; some of my old friends have been devoted practitioners for nearly thirty years now, still paying thousands of dollars in course-fees and Ayurvedic medicines every year, and still waiting for that magic day of enlightenment ...
Another mistake was his claim that when one percent of a town's populace started to meditate, that town would experience "Heaven on Earth," with the crime rate dropping to zero, etc. Even by 1980 this was patently untrue. Fairfield, Iowa, home of Maharishi International University, had close to half of its population meditating, and still experienced its full share of car-accidents, theft, disease, and murder. Now, in 1997, Fairfield is much the same: it is a wonderful town, and the energy is very good there, but its police chief will, if asked, rapidly disabuse the questioner of any illusions about its specialness with regard to crime.
The experiences that really surprised me, though, were two: First, I saw a wall of angels' faces, which suddenly flipped and became a wall of demons' faces; then back to angels and then back again to demons. This seemed to be a re-emphasis of the lesson given to me last year, when I had slain a demon and watched it turn into an angel. This time, the experience seemed to be implying that good and evil were two sides of the same coin.
The other, more disturbing experience happened while I was watching Maharishi as he began another of his shrill tirades, and suddenly my vision split: With my right eye I was seeing Maharishi, and with my left I was seeing Adolf Hitler. The images flipped back and forth: Maharishi, Hitler, Maharishi, Hitler....and they finally fused, so that amidst a rising wave of intense anger, I realized I was once again following a false Messiah. Past-life memories came floating up of following the highly charismatic Hitler/Maharishi; of being his second-in-command; of developing an elite flying cadre for him to bring about a new world order; of being promised the kingdom upon his death, and of being betrayed as he slipped further and further into madness. Suddenly the Nazi qualities of his guards and the concentration-camp sufferings of NOIDA all fell into place. In some weird way, were TM'ers attempting to balance the karmic atrocities of the Nazis that we ourselves had been in former lives?
Up until this course, I had gone along with the thinking of most meditators, who absolved Maharishi from blame for the insanities of the Movement: "He doesn't know what they're doing," they said. Now, it seemed clear to me that the Movement had been a perfect reflection of Maharishi's consciousness in every respect: both in its brilliant strengths, and its tragic flaws. I had given over so much of my power to Maharishi, and placed him on such a high pedestal, that I could not help but judge him harshly when I found him to be fallibly human. I still did not understand unconditional love, and its transcendence of both good and evil. It took me a number of years to realize full unity, take full responsibility for my perceptions, and to work all this through fully into forgiveness!
After my attack of dysentery at the beginning of the course, I had been relatively healthy. Annie, however, fell sick later in the course, and was sequestered on the upper floor for some days; I visited her whenever the guards would allow. The anger and compassion that poured through me as I visited that immense sickroom was almost overwhelming. Now, as she recovered, I made plans with her to cut the course short to return home as soon as we could. The course had held a few interesting snippets of Vedic complexities, but for the most part had been quite dull. I was pretty disillusioned and wanted to go home to lick my wounds. I now had not only lost my angels; I had also lost my master. We managed to get new reservations leaving India about four days early. A sizeable number of us snuck out in the last week for a day-trip down to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. That "prison-break" to see an aesthetic masterpiece remains the most enjoyable memory I hold of the entire time.
The small group of us leaving the next day met with Maharishi privately that evening; it was a sweet meeting. At its end, I was alone, face to face with him for the first and only time. I looked at him, but could not even begin to voice the confusion and turmoil inside. I gave up, and said only, "Jai Guru Dev." "Jai Guru Dev," he replied gently.
Returning to Cambridge, I remained at the Fogg until the Summer of 1981. The dysentery I had picked up in India returned every three-and-a-half weeks for several years, acute stabbing pains at first, that gradually lessened as the months wore on. Since I was no longer at the Divinity School, I moved into a full-time position as Cataloguer of Indian and Southeast Asian Art. It was interesting enough, but my inner emptiness remained. Annie meanwhile got a job right in Harvard Square, working as Assistant Manager, then as Manager of the Harvard University Press Bookstore. While my life was becoming more and more bleak, hers was becoming richer and more fulfilling.
NEXT: INITIATION IV: CRUCIFIXION, Part II (June 1981 - December 1981)
