The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (14 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Gilbert
Tags: #Non-fiction
When I was growing up, my family kept chickens. We always had about a dozen of them at any given time and whenever one died off—taken away by hawk or fox or by some obscure chicken illness—my father would replace the lost hen. He’d drive to a nearby poultry farm and return with a new chicken in a sack. The thing is, you must be very careful when introducing a new chicken to the general flock. You can’t just toss it in there with the old chickens, or they will see it as an invader. What you must do instead is to slip the new bird into the chicken coop in the middle of the night while the others are asleep. Place her on a roost beside the flock and tiptoe away. In the morning, when the chickens wake up, they don’t notice the newcomer, thinking only, “She must have been here all the time since I didn’t see her arrive.” The clincher of it is, awaking within this flock, the newcomer herself doesn’t even remember that she’s a newcomer, thinking only, “I must have been here the whole time . . .”
This is exactly how I arrive in India.
My plane lands in Mumbai around 1:30 AM. It is December 30. I find my luggage, then find the taxi that will take me hours and hours out of the city to the Ashram, located in a remote rural village. I doze on the drive through nighttime India, sometimes waking to look out the window, where I can see strange haunted shapes of thin women in saris walking alongside the road with bundles of firewood on their heads.
At this hour?
Buses with no headlights pass us, and we pass oxcarts. The banyan trees spread their elegant roots throughout the ditches.
We pull up to the front gate of the Ashram at 3:30 AM, right in front of the temple. As I’m getting out of the taxi, a young man in Western clothes and a wool hat steps out of the shadows and introduces himself—he is Arturo, a twenty-four-year-old journalist from Mexico and a devotee of my Guru, and he’s here to welcome me. As we’re exchanging whispered introductions, I can hear the first familiar bars of my favorite Sanskrit hymn coming from inside. It’s the morning
arati
, the first morning prayer, sung every day at 3:30 AM as the Ashram wakes. I point to the temple, asking Arturo, “May I . . . ?” and he makes a be-my-guest gesture. So I pay my taxi driver, tuck my backpack behind a tree, slip off my shoes, kneel and touch my forehead to the temple step and then ease myself inside, joining the small gathering of mostly Indian women who are singing this beautiful hymn.
This is the hymn I call “The Amazing Grace of Sanskrit,” filled with devotional longing. It is the one devotional song I have memorized, not so much from effort as from love. I begin to sing the familiar words in Sanskrit, from the simple introduction about the sacred teachings of Yoga to the rising tones of worship (“I adore the cause of the universe . . . I adore the one whose eyes are the sun, the moon and fire . . . you are everything to me, O god of gods . . .”) to the last gemlike summation of all faith (“This is perfect, that is perfect, if you take the perfect from the perfect, the perfect remains”).
The women finish singing. They bow in silence, then move out a side door across a dark courtyard and into a smaller temple, barely lit by one oil lamp and perfumed with incense. I follow them. The room is filled with devotees—Indian and Western—wrapped in woolen shawls against the predawn cold. Everyone is seated in meditation, roosted there, you might say, and I slip in beside them, the new bird in the flock, completely unnoticed. I sit cross-legged, place my hands on my knees, close my eyes.
I have not meditated in four months. I have not even
thought
about meditating in four months. I sit there. My breath quiets. I say the mantra to myself once very slowly and deliberately, syllable by syllable.
Om.
Na.
Mah.
Shi.
Va.
Ya.
Om Namah Shivaya.
I honor the divinity that resides within me.
Then I repeat it again. Again. And again. It’s not so much that I’m meditating as unpacking the mantra carefully, the way you would unpack your grandmother’s best china if it had been stored in a box for a long time, unused. I don’t know if I fall asleep or if I drop into some kind of spell or even how much time passes. But when the sun finally comes up that morning in India and everyone opens their eyes and looks around, Italy feels ten thousand miles away from me now, and it is as if I have been here in this flock forever.
‘‘Why do we practice Yoga?”
I had a teacher once ask that question during a particularly challenging Yoga class, back in New York. We were all bent into these exhausting sideways triangles, and the teacher was making us hold the position longer than any of us would have liked.
“Why do we practice Yoga?” he asked again. “Is it so we can become a little
bendier
than our neighbors? Or is there perhaps some higher purpose?”
Yoga,
in Sanskrit, can be translated as “union.” It originally comes from the root word
yuj
, which means “to yoke,” to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union—between mind and body, between the individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student, and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors. In the West, we’ve mainly come to know Yoga through its now-famous pretzel-like exercises for the body, but this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosophy. The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hip is aching, keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating, “Wow . . . my hip really aches.”
But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra—the repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga—your disciplined practices of sacred union—to get closer to Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Yahweh. During my time at the Ashram, I met devotees who identified themselves as practicing Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and even Muslims. I have met others who would rather not talk about their religious affiliation at all, for which, in this contentious world, you can hardly blame them.
The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man’s apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization’s needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: “Desire is the design flaw.”) The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: “You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.”
Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal
presence
from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you. True Yogis, from their seat of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God’s creative energy—men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: it’s all God in disguise. But the Yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral—they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do have that chance.
“Our whole business therefore in this life,” wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, “is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.”
Like all great philosophical ideas, this one is simple to understand but virtually impossible to imbibe. OK—so we are all one, and divinity abides within us all equally. No problem. Understood. But now try living from that place. Try putting that understanding into practice twenty-four hours a day. It’s not so easy. Which is why in India it is considered a given that you need a teacher for your Yoga. Unless you were born one of those rare shimmering saints who come into life already fully actualized, you’re going to need some guidance along your journey toward enlightenment. If you’re lucky enough, you will find a living Guru. This is what pilgrims have been coming to India to seek for ages. Alexander the Great sent an ambassador to India in the fourth century BC, with a request to find one of these famous Yogis and return with him to court. (The ambassador did report finding a Yogi, but couldn’t convince the gentleman to travel.) In the first century AD, Apollonius of Tyrana, another Greek ambassador, wrote of his journey through India: “I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet not on it, and fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the richness of all men.” Gandhi himself always wanted to study with a Guru, but never, to his regret, had the time or opportunity to find one. “I think there is a great deal of truth,” he wrote, “in the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible without a Guru.”
A great Yogi is anyone who has achieved the permanent state of enlightened bliss. A Guru is a great Yogi who can actually pass that state on to others. The word
Guru
is composed of two Sanskrit syllables. The first means “darkness,” the second means “light.” Out of the darkness and into the light. What passes from the master into the disciple is something called
mantravirya
: “The potency of the enlightened consciousness.” You come to your Guru, then, not only to receive lessons, as from any teacher, but to actually receive the Guru’s state of grace.
Such transfers of grace can occur in even the most fleeting of encounters with a great being. I once went to see the great Vietnamese monk, poet and peacemaker Thich Nhat Hanh speak in New York. It was a characteristically hectic weeknight in the city, and as the crowd pushed and shoved its way into the auditorium, the very air in the place was whisked into a nerve-racking urgency of everyone’s collective stress. Then the monk came on stage. He sat in stillness for a good while before he began to speak, and the audience— you could feel it happening, one row of high-strung New Yorkers at a time—became
colonized
by his stillness. Soon, there was not a flutter in the place. In the space of maybe ten minutes, this small Vietnamese man had drawn every single one of us into his silence. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that he drew us each into our
own
silence, into that peace which we each inherently possessed, but had not yet discovered or claimed. His ability to bring forth this state in all of us, merely by his presence in the room—this is divine power. And this is why you come to a Guru: with the hope that the merits of your master will reveal to you your own hidden greatness.
The classical Indian sages wrote that there are three factors which indicate whether a soul has been blessed with the highest and most auspicious luck in the universe:
1. To have been born a human being, capable of conscious inquiry.
2. To have been born with—or to have developed—a yearning to understand the nature of the universe.
3. To have found a living spiritual master.
There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one. The universe will shift, destiny’s molecules will get themselves organized and your path will soon intersect with the path of the master you need. It was only one month after my first night of desperate prayer on my bathroom floor—a night spent tearfully begging God for answers—that I found mine, having walked into David’s apartment and encountered a photograph of this stunning Indian woman. Of course, I was more than a bit ambivalent about the concept of having a Guru. As a general rule, Westerners aren’t comfortable with that word. We have a kind of sketchy recent history with it. In the 1970s a number of wealthy, eager, susceptible young Western seekers collided with a handful of charismatic but dubious Indian Gurus. Most of the chaos has settled down now, but the echoes of mistrust still resonate. Even for me, even after all this time, I still find myself sometimes balking at the word
Guru.
This is not a problem for my friends in India; they grew up with the Guru principle, they’re relaxed with it. As one young Indian girl told me, “Everybody in India almost has a Guru!” I know what she meant to say (that
almost
everyone in India has a Guru) but I related more to her unintentional statement, because that’s how I feel sometimes— like I
almost
have a Guru. Sometimes I just can’t seem to admit it because, as a good New Englander, skepticism and pragmatism are my intellectual heritage. Anyhow, it’s not like I consciously went shopping for a Guru. She just arrived. And the first time I saw her, it was as though she looked at me through her photograph—those dark eyes smoldering with intelligent compassion—and she said, “You called for me and now I’m here. So do you want to do this thing, or not?”
Setting aside all nervous jokes and cross-cultural discomforts, I must always remember what I replied that night: a straightforward and bottomless YES.
