Cover of Spirit & Nature magazine from Ananda Village, July 1976. Photo by the author.
I know hardly anything about Kathak dance, but I vividly remember how I felt when I first experienced it fifty years ago.
Soon after I moved to Ananda Village in 1976, three young classically trained American Kathak dancers came to perform there. They were students of Chitresh Das, a renowned Indian Kathak master who was teaching at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, ten miles north of San Francisco.
From the moment I first set foot on the soil of Ananda Village, I sensed with a calm intuition that it would be my lifelong home. But I wanted to be sure, so I spent my first ten-day visit knocking on the doors of every home and workplace and talking to the residents about their lives. As a result, I was fairly confident that I knew what my life in the community would be like. Yet I had no idea how profoundly it would change me.
I looked forward to photographing the Kathak dancers. I had taken up photography nine years earlier as a way to open my heart. When I borrowed my father’s thirty-year-old Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta camera, my goal was to find beauty and inspiration in the world and share it with others. Sixty years later, I continue to take pictures with the same thought in mind. Recently, when I prayed to Swami Kriyananda about certain photography-related matters, I heard his voice intuitively as a quiet murmur: “You’ve never taken a photo for yourself.”
This was my feeling as I looked forward to photographing the dancers; and Swami Kriyananda apparently approved, because he took pains to help me get ready.
Two days before the concert, I woke up feeling thoroughly disoriented. I found that I was utterly unable to locate the familiar portion of my consciousness that I had comfortably and contentedly inhabited for thirty-four years. I had lost all contact with the intellectual, masculine, reasoning portions of my brain, and I had been thrown into a comprehensively unfamiliar side of my awareness where logic and reason seemed not to exist at all, and where there was nothing but feelings, feelings, feelings.
I was keeping company with a young woman named Sahaja at the time. Feeling the change in me, she laughed heartily, “Well, Rambhakta, now you know what it’s like to be a woman!”
I’m sure that the venue for the Kathak performance was unlike anything the dancers had previously encountered. Under an oak tree in a picturesque meadow, a half-mile from the nearest human habitation, the Ananda carpenters had hammered together a rustic platform from weathered gray planks. There was nothing else in the meadow, only the oak tree and the little wooden “dance floor” topped with heavy plywood (firmly anchored by recessed screws to protect the feet of the dancers), and a simple, hand-painted backdrop.
Now, fifty years later, I am still unsure of the spiritual purpose of my inner visit to the world of feelings. I suspect it had to do with something Swami said to me later. When I asked him how I could open my heart and develop more love for God, he told me, “That is your single greatest need.” Long story short, from that time forward Swamiji never ceased to encourage, guide, and empower my efforts to expand my heart’s feelings through photography, and through wonderful relationships, service, chanting, writing, and singing his music.
I suspect that by opening my inner female, feeling nature, he hoped to give me a head start. Still, I confess that I didn’t much enjoy having my familiar way of being suddenly uprooted and tossed lightly aside. I was frozen in panic. How could I live without the familiar platform of reason? How could I orient myself in the world? How could I act, speak, and relate? Who was I?
I was thoroughly lost. Yet on the day of the Kathak dance I found that swimming in the vast, edgeless sea of feelings served me well.
Before the dancers began, one of them explained that they would perform the life of Krishna, and that they would use the gestures of their eyes and hands, and the rhythms of the many rows of bells attached to their ankles to tell the story. After each chapter, they paused and explained the next one: Krishna’s childhood and youth, his adventures as a divine warrior, and his relationship with his chief female disciple, Radha.
In the Kathak style, the legs don’t move in smooth, flowing lines, as in ballet – they are stamped and shaken in joyous, vigorous, ringing rhythm to the movements of the hands, arms, head, and eyes. The dancers were “shakin’ and bakin’” – for sure. Yet the dance was transcendent, exquisite, noble, and moving. It stirred my heart to its furthest depths.
I took many photos, feeling transfixed and transported. The dancers were wonderfully talented and well- trained, performing without artifice or awkwardness – they were never perceptibly thinking about what would come next; they seemed to flow with the story, at one with the inspiration that had lifted countless hearts for five thousand years.
The headmistress of a famous Indian girls’ school was visiting Ananda at the time. Saroj Paliwal was the embodiment of a tough-minded, efficient, loving school director. She was a formidable presence – Swamiji joked, “You might be tempted to call her ‘Pollywog,’ but I wouldn’t dare!”
She asked me with feeling to make her a set of prints that she could take back to India to show her students and teachers how consummately these young American women had understood and expressed the story of their country’s great avatar.
I made an extra set of prints and sent them to the dancers at the Ali Akbar College of Music. They replied with a note thanking me and saying that they had never seen Kathak photographed with so much sensitive perception and beauty. I accepted their praise impersonally, fully aware that it was Swamiji who had animated the part of me that could transmit the dance through photos.
A headline of the story, for me, is that it was the approach I had always tried to follow. Long before moving to the Village, from the moment I had borrowed my Dad’s camera, I had tried to pursue a similar practice of opening my heart to a source of higher guidance and inspiration.
When I discovered Ananda, I was working in the Bay Area as a staff photographer for five sports magazines. Whenever I photographed a sporting event, whether it was a marathon, an international swim meet, or a touring exhibition by Russian Olympic gymnastics, I would pray deeply, acknowledging God as the source of the event, and of the camera, the pictures and their purpose, and of me, and offering myself with full energy and total focus to do only as it might please Him to guide me.
I had begun taking pictures at a difficult time in my life. I had barely begun to take the first, uncertain steps out of a deep hole that I had dug for myself through drug abuse, primarily with methamphetamine and LSD. My consciousness was shattered by the drugs. I had also been paralyzed from the chest down for three years. The two surgeries to remove the benign tumor that was compressing my spinal cord had left me with mild paralysis in one leg and lingering spasticity in the other – I thought of my legs as Spaz and Gumby. The surgeries had also left me with disharmonious sensations buzzing like static electricity in my spine.
Physically, mentally, and emotionally, I was a mess. I regularly attended Sunday services at the Self-Realization Fellowship church in Fullerton. I remember a conversation with Brother Dharmananda during which he told me, “By the time we come on the spiritual path, we’ve pretty much squeezed the orange of this world dry.” He said, “No matter how many times you fall, just pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and keep going.”
The arts would help my recovery. I knew that nothing could heal me so effectively as love, and the arts had always found a way to touch and heal my heart. Random memories: silently singing a song by Mimi and Richard Fariña, “Children of Darkness,” on a dark night road in the forest at Big Sur and having a deep experience of God.
Now is the time for your loving, dear
And the time for your company
Now when the light of reason fails
And fires burn on the sea;
Now in this age of confusion
I have need for your company
Or taking a photo of a pair of old-style three-speed bicycles leaning together against a tree in Stern Grove in San Francisco. They looked just like sweethearts, and the dappled sunlight that fell through the trees was perfect. Someone bought a print to make Christmas greeting cards for his cyclist friends.
One of the first things that another SRF monk, Brother Bhaktananda, told me was, “The thought occurs that you might not be getting enough exercise.” When I took up running, I began to feel fresh energy enlivening and healing my damaged heart and brain. I thought how typical it was of Master not to want to weaken me with misplaced sympathy, but instead to deliver a vigorous kick in the pants, and a rousing “Hit the road, Bud!”
It puzzled me that the Kathak dancing was based on inflexible, rigid forms. It was definitely an art of Kali Yuga, the age of Matter in which the arts, society, and religion are cast in fixed rules, dogmas, and authoritarian hierarchies. Yet the dance was profoundly inspiring in a direct, high-energy, timeless way that seemed to transcend the consciousness of any particular age.
It told me that at any point in the long 24,000-year cycles of rising and falling human consciousness, God is eager to speak to His children through the arts. I think of the shockingly powerful effect of the paintings that Fra Angelico created on the walls of the monks’ cells to inspire them at the Convent of San Marco in Florence, starting around 1439, deep in Kali Yuga; particularly the portraits of saintly monastic elders. Fra Angelico truly knew what saintliness looks like. His brush was guided by God’s own hand.
The conclusion I draw is that art can serve as a channel for divine inspiration at any time, even now.
I doubt that forms will ever be entirely cast aside in the arts, since self-restraint will always be needed to open space for inspiration. As Swami Kriyananda said, “Before there can be an expansion, there must be a certain grounding first.”
(If you would like to learn more about the teachings of ancient India regarding the rising and falling cycles of human consciousness, I can heartily recommend The Yugas: Our Hidden Past, Emerging Energy Age and Enlightened Future, by Ananda members Joseph (Purushottama) Selbie and David (Byasa) Steinmetz. You can also watch the authors discuss the Yugas on YouTube.)
After the Kathak event, I soon returned to my familiar habits of rational thought. Swamiji told me, “Rambhakta, you have a very objective mind.” I don’t believe he meant it as a compliment. Rational objectivity can be useful, but it’s no way to live. He made it clear that it was far more important to keep working to open my heart. Swamiji wrote, “No success is achieved unless the heart’s feelings are involved.”
I’m fascinated by how the arts can serve to bring spiritual inspiration directly to our hearts, bypassing logical analysis. As Lahiri Mahasaya’s grandson liked to say, “Analysis is paralysis.”
Art can carry inspiration past the torpid barrier of the body, the superficial bubbles of sentimental feeling, and the mind’s organizing busyness. Spiritual art goes straight into our cells and fills us with unexpected, unimagined light which we recognize as the innermost lifeblood of our being.
Postscript
1. Asha Nayaswami commented:
“Very interesting, instructive, and entertaining article. I vividly remember that dance performance, too. And your photos of it. I had never seen classical dance before and was so moved by it, I had to walk away for a time and just be alone with the overwhelming feelings it awakened within me. Many different levels of feeling, including, I believe, memories of my own past life (lives) as a dancer. Wonderful. It was delightful to be reminded of that long-ago event. And to know it meant so much to someone else as well.”
2. Author footnote:
I felt unwell on Sunday morning and stayed home to write and edit. While I worked, I listened to Nayasami Shanti the Sunday service talk at Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto and was delighted to find her discussing the same ideas I was hoping to express: the need for feeling in the spiritual life and the arts, and the growing general public interest in the Yugas. I hastily scribbled these words of Swami Kriyananda that Shanti quoted, and that I inserted above: “No success is achieved unless the heart’s feelings are involved.”
— Rambhakta