Jazz Raycole as Izzy Letts, Becki Newton as Lorna Crane, and Angus Sampson as Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski on “The Lincoln Lawyer.”
This is longer than usual. At 3,600 words, it obviously isn’t a quick jab. My hope is that it may help people who tend to be overly self-critical and feel that God expects them to be perfect before He will listen to their prayers or give them reassurances of His presence in their lives. I believe these stories will show that the opposite is true: that God wants us to come to Him exactly as we are.
Swami Kriyananda shared an anecdote from his first days with Paramhansa Yogananda. This was likely in 1948 or 1949:
“I was having difficulty receiving the results in meditation that I wanted. One evening, I found the Master alone and said to him, ‘Sir, I keep trying and trying, but I’m not going deep. Am I not trying hard enough?’
“The Master shook his head. ‘You are trying too hard,’ he said. ‘You are using too much will power. It becomes nervous. Just be natural. As long as you try “hard” to meditate, you will not succeed – just as, if you try hard to fall asleep, you won’t be able to do it. Will power should be applied gradually; otherwise, it can be detrimental. That’s why it is good in the beginning to emphasize relaxation.’”
In my first days on the spiritual path, and for almost sixty years thereafter, I went by will power and thinking, and I got barely anywhere. Surely, I learned lessons that brought me happiness and inner freedom. But I didn’t find the relaxed relationship with God and guru that I saw others enjoying.
Did I feel devotion to God, at least occasionally? Of course. But it was only when I turned eighty-three that I had a deep personal revelation of a better way.
In the meantime, I was blessed to receive help from counselors whose guidance I knew I should not take lightly.
Sometime around 1968, Brother Bhaktananda, the monk who had been with Yogananda the longest, wrote to me: “Learn to relax and enjoy the spiritual path.”
Later, he wrote, “Remember to be spontaneous in your devotion.”
In a talk that Bhaktananda gave, he said, “You do your meditation techniques and you feel God’s presence. And because He’s lovable, you love Him, and so you give Him your Love. And then He gives you more of His love, and you give it back to Him, and so it keeps growing.”
Again, that wasn’t my experience, because while I did the techniques regularly and faithfully, I did them wrong.
I remember a letter that Bhaktananda wrote me, when I asked him for his thoughts on how I could get more devotion.
He wrote: “Fathomless depths of love for God lie hidden in the human heart, waiting to be uncovered by the Guru’s liberating discipline.’
As you’ll see, God did reveal a level of devotion in me that I wasn’t remotely aware of in the beginning. In my case, it took Him a lifetime to do so — my fault, not His — and I hope I can save you some time.
My problem was that I didn’t trust myself in the slightest degree. Before I entered the spiritual life, I had tried every path I could think of that seemed to promise the happiness I was seeking. Among these, I had indulged in serious drug use, as a consequence of which I felt I had let myself down badly, and that I had let God down. My mistake was thinking He couldn’t possibly love me or come to me until I had succeeded in ironing and starching my every thought and feeling to gleaming perfection.
Ultimately, this is true – we cannot enter the final chamber of Self-realization until we have released our attachment to every thought and feeling that separates us from God.
What I didn’t realize is that God is always with us, standing by, eager to help us. Yogananda said that twenty-five percent of the path is our effort, fifty-percent is God’s grace, and twenty-five percent is the Guru’s effort on our behalf.
It doesn’t help us to imagine that we must be perfect already, or God won’t like us, and He may even shoo us away and bar us from His company.
Now that I’m in my eighties, I find that the exact opposite is true – that when I’m able to be most truly myself with God, that’s when I find Him closest.
Around 1970, Daya Mata gave a talk at the Self-Realization Fellowship church in Fullerton, California. The church was packed to the rafters – it held about three hundred people.
In the middle of her talk, Daya paused and turned and held my gaze while she said, speaking with great seriousness and urgency:
“My Divine Mother is NOT FOR THOSE who are hard on themselves and hard on others. She is kind, sweet, loving, and forgiving. You don’t have to chisel out your prayers to her in stone. You can talk to her in the language of your heart!”
She then turned and resumed her talk.
Years later, around 1978, I was at Swami Kriyananda’s home for a private conversation. When we were finished, Swami rose and, with a mischievous gleam in his eyes, said very cheerfully and forcefully, “I’ve told you before – you’re too hard on yourself!”
As I strolled back on the trail over the ridge to our home, I thought, “Swami has never told me any such thing!”
Then I remembered Daya’s words.
Naturally, I’ve reflected on the experience. Now, I don’t want to get all metaphysical and speculate about who spoke through whom, because I’d rather dwell on the lesson in his words, which touches on an attitude that I believe every disciple must learn sooner or later.
Sri Ramprasad Sen (c. 1720-1775) was a Bengali saint who was known for his radically open and trusting relationship with the Divine Mother. He told her everything. No matter how potentially shameful or painfully embarrassing, he shared it all. And, in this, he showed us the way.
Have you ever had this experience? You were going about your daily business, when you suddenly, quite spontaneously, almost accidentally, shared something – a thought, a feeling, completely unprepared, unedited, and unpremeditated – with the Divine Mother, and you found Her more intimately real and sweetly with you than perhaps ever before.
I remember driving down Alma Street in Palo Alto years ago. I was singing one of Ramprasad’s chants, “Will That Day Come to Me, Ma?”
As I sang, I pondered what it would actually be like to sing to Divine Mother as a little child.
My thoughts turned to when I was seven or eight years old, and I would spend happy times in the kitchen with my mother while she cooked and told me stories, often very funny ones, about our relatives in Peru and Chile.
As I sang, I was that little boy again, sweetly singing to his mother – and then I suddenly felt the inner skies parting and the Divine Mother blessing me from a great height. For hours after, I was in a state where I knew that I was one with everyone, not conceptually but directly perceiving that we are part of the same heavenly fabric, woven by God.
I believe there’s a reason I’ve always lived in Ananda communities where Nayaswami Asha was one of the leaders, because she combines the self-command of a yogi with a kind and serviceful heart, and a natural, unfeigned approach to the spiritual life that has defined her for the fifty years I’ve known her. I believe it was also a defining feature of her relationship with her great teacher, Swami Kriyananda.
A photo that “took itself.” I suspect that Divine Mother wanted to record the beautiful friendship between these souls, both of whom served us as wonderful examples of discipleship.
I remember a gathering at Swamiji’s home at Ananda Village. Before he began talking to us, Swamiji shouted up to a window in the upper level, “How are you feeling, Asha?”
The answer came, “Kind of lousy, Sir.”
“Well, carry on!”
Swamiji was showing us how to relate to God and to him, with the relaxed naturalness of a child toward its mother.
Asha with Swamiji, Ananda Sangha church, Palo Alto, California, 2006, photo taken by the author
I remember an occasion when I praised Asha to Swami. In my mind, I was wondering if, and how, it might be possible for me to develop the spiritual qualities that inspired me in her. I couldn’t imagine how I could make that much spiritual progress in a single lifetime.
Swamiji matter-of-factly addressed my silent thought. He said, “It’s going to take you a long time to get that kind of freedom!” He paused. “She has had the training.”
I felt no regret or disappointment. At the time, I was chanting long periods daily and feeling deeply fulfilled in God’s love.
When I was in my early sixties, I had a reading by a Vedic astrologer, Drupada MacDonald. He told me that I’d had fifty years of hard Saturn influences in my chart, from age thirteen to sixty-three. I could confirm this, because it hadn’t always been an easy ride.
Soon after I moved to the Village, a friend, Nalini, drove me to Santa Rosa for a reading with Marcie Calhoun, a psychic who was popular with Ananda folks. Marcie had given several readings for Swamiji. When we returned, I mentioned the reading to Asha.
She said, “Swami’s taking time off from his writing to relax and restore. I think he might like to listen to it.”
Several days later, she reported, “Swami listened to your tape. He said, ‘She (Marcie) really knows what he is like.’”
At a point in the reading when I asked Marcie if I had been with Paramhansa Yogananda in other lives, Asha told me that Swamiji had interjected: “No – he got it from me.”
Marcie told me that the spiritual path had been easier for me in other lives, but that this time I would have to work hard at it.
What were the challenges of those fifty years? What bitter lessons did I learn?
Well, it wasn’t all torture, but there were some steep climbs. Chiefly, the tests had to do with opening the heart.
In one of my first private talks with Swamiji, I asked him, “How can I open my heart and get more devotion to God?” Without a moment’s hesitation, he said, “That is your single greatest need.”
Later, I reflected that it’s everyone’s need, or we wouldn’t be here.
Nevertheless, I felt the karma daily. It was like a huge boulder in my path that I could never get past or shift aside. I didn’t know what it was made of or why it was there, I simply felt that I was spending my days hacking at it, meditating and chanting, and rarely knowing if it was having any effect at all.
I remember a wood-chopping contest at the Village. The organizers gave me a log that would ordinarily have given me no trouble, because I chopped wood daily and had gotten good at it. But the log had a giant knot in it, and oak knots giggle hysterically in the presence of an axe.
That was my karma – as much as I hacked and hewed, my progress seemed negligible.
There were exceptions. On the occasion when I asked Swami how I could get more devotion, he said, “You should chant.”
I said, “But Swamiji, I don’t think I’m by nature a chanter.”
Swami replied, “Well – you should!”
It wasn’t until fifty years later that I began to resolve my uneasy relationship with chanting, when I realized the extent to which my heart had been wrapped round and throttled by my mind.
I was a thinker. And as Joe Miller, a beloved Sufi teacher in San Francisco in the 1970s had liked to say, “You can get more stinkin’ from thinkin’ than you can from drinkin’. But TO FEEL is FOR REAL!”
I won’t bore you with the details of my chanting saga. Suffice it to say that I had lots of wrong ideas about how it should be done. Nevertheless, I plugged away. At one point, I chanted for at least an hour and a half every day for five years without missing a day. I had wonderful experiences of God’s joy and love, and it changed my life. Indeed, I felt continually protected in His love.
Still, the results were spotty, and I was painfully aware of depths that I hadn’t been able to plumb. I knew it was because I was doing it wrong. I wasn’t able to have faith that God would accept me just as I was, so I always felt that I had to put on a uniform of what I thought a devotee should look and feel like. I suspect that God blessed my chanting to help me persevere and not lose hope.
On the rare occasions when I was able to get into the feeling side of my nature, I realized that the heart was an entire world unto itself, with its own strengths and wisdom. I began to appreciate the world in which women spend much of their time: I was able to observe quietly and feel a deep inspiration and respect for their communion of feeling.
Still, there were vast unexplored depths. And so it went, until I reached my present age of eighty-three, when after fifty-eight years of trying, I simply threw up my hands and confessed to Divine Mother and Master and Swamiji that I could no longer see a way forward. I had tried everything, and I couldn’t think of anything else.
It was around this time that I was led by what I feel was a true intuitive guidance to a television series, “The Lincoln Lawyer,” on Netflix.
I was particularly struck by one of the characters. Lorna Crane is a paralegal in the practice of the protagonist, attorney Mickey Haller.
I felt that Lorna’s character held a special message. Becki Newton, the actress who plays Lorna, seems to fall naturally into the role. Lorna is eternally optimistic, cheerful, and happy, but also hardworking and deeply dedicated to her life as a paralegal and attorney-in-training, in a law practice where honesty and honorable behavior are valued. We get the feeling that Newton delights in the role, as an opportunity to express attitudes that are her own. Thus Lorna Crane is believable, magnetic, integrated and sincere.
I’m thinking that it must be a formidable blessing for an actress to find a role that expresses and reinforces shining qualities that truly define her.
I realized that God had directed me to the series to show me the attitudes that most please Him, chief among which are cheerfulness, enthusiasm, willingness, a zest for relaxed and happy service, and deeply focused dedication.
This is a bit off-topic, but Swami Kriyananda believed that writers should allow their fictional characters to express themselves at their best. And Sri Ramakrishna, a great saint of the nineteenth century, said that devotees who are professional actors should not play villains. Ideas matter; and negative ideas have real power to harm us.
Asha around 1976, photo taken by the author on the deck of the publications offices at Ananda Village. (click to enlarge)
Lorna reminded me of Asha. I fondly remember the time I spent serving at Pubble in the mid-1970s when Asha worked there. What I particularly remember is her bright, cheerful aura and her unflagging enthusiasm for Swami’s and Master’s cause. She presented us the model of a devotee who lived with a relaxed understanding that it was perfectly fine to be happy and enthusiastic in the spiritual life, and that we need not waste time dwelling on our deficiencies, whether real or imagined, but that we should lead with our strengths and be completely natural, as she was.
I remember something Asha said, after she had worked for three days and nights without sleep to help prepare for a program that Swamiji would give in San Francisco. She said, “I realized at the end that I hadn’t thought of myself in three days.”
(Are you, right now, at this moment, rendered as speechless as I was?)
Of course, there were differences in the karmas and dharmas of Asha and Lorna, but enthusiasm and happiness in serving are qualities that they definitely shared. I found it significant that Becki and Asha were both born under the sun sign of Cancer, a hallmark of which is enthusiasm and joy. Becki-slash Lorna really finds her way into the role in Season 3.
I remember Asha describing a speaking tour to the Ananda centers in Portland and Seattle, during which she was accompanied by Durga, a sister disciple, close friend and fellow Cancer, and how Durga had been so childlike and happy that she had kept them in stitches during the long drive.
At a recent Sunday service, I showed up for the early meditation feeling more than a little mentally unstable, a not infrequent condition, but more so than usual. Yet I knew, by then, not to fight against it, but to seize it gratefully as a wonderful opportunity to approach God with the innocent confidence of a child, and not try to be more perfect and “spiritual” than I was.
Durga chats with a guest at The Expanding Light guest retreat, Ananda Village.
After all, what kind of person would God prefer to relate to – or, indeed, could He relate to: a grim, tooth-grinding ascetic, tensing every muscle in his head in an effort to “think right” – or a simple, happy, appreciative and receptive, childlike soul whose wholehearted desire was to make God happy and serve Him as a friend?
As beginners, we may be prone to form images of a God who expects us to be hardworking earnest yogis who had darn well better get it right every time and never make mistakes, or smile inappropriately without prior authorization, or else He won’t possibly condescend to come near us. And then our fertile brains tell us what “right” looks like, without wanting to bother God by consulting Him.
Monastics at Ananda Village, circa 1976. Asha, Anandi, Seva, Parvati, Nitai. Photo by the author. (click to enlarge)
I remember how, when I arrived at Ananda Village with all my worldly goods piled in the back of a friend’s pickup truck on February 14, 1976, I set up a teepee in an isolated meadow with a magnificent sunset view, far removed from the busy, built-up and civilized part of Ananda. I had decided that I would live as a hermit, serving in the publications office only enough to help keep the community going, but spending most of my time in solitary meditation.
I never spent a single night in the teepee. It was destroyed in the forest fire that swept through the community in the spring.
First I was asked to live in an old house at the community’s entrance and do chores for a former SRF nun who was now in her eighties. Then I slept for several months in a sleeping bag on the floor of the publications building, where I worked during the day and couldn’t avoid witnessing the dedicated, cheerful spirit of the thirteen nuns who served there.
In the middle of the night, the door would bang open, the lights would flash on, and Kalyani, a uniquely supercharged variety of nun, would bang out the latest pages of Swami’s autobiography on the typewriter for an hour. Then the lights would go off and the front door would slam shut as she dashed out into the night to deliver the pages to him at the monastery.
Lorna Crane, played by Becki Newton. Her colorful outfits, which perfectly express her upbeat nature, became quite popular in the wake of the series.
I recall one of my first meetings with Swamiji. I was meditating five and half hours a day. I hadn’t said anything about it, but he knew. He said, “It’s boring when you just slog along with techniques. You should chant.”
It was unquestionably the right advice, but it would take me fifty years to begin to touch upon the right way of doing it. Meanwhile, I ground away, doing all the “right” things, but never quite catching the spirit in which I ought to be doing them.
The trouble is, there’s a real live actual version of us somewhere inside us who is the one that Divine Mother most urgently wants to talk to, and invite to join Her to walk hand in hand together through Her cosmic creation.
At any rate, on the aforementioned Sunday morning at our temple, I just relaxed and let myself be as I was, simpleminded and feeling quite stupid, yet fully at ease with my Divine Mother.
Instead of telling myself, “Now Rambhakta, you’d better darn well be serious and earnest and devoted!” – I looked around inside and saw that even without a whole lot of frantic last-minute Dustbuster cleansing or effort of will and jut-jawed determination to put on my best Sunday suit and tie and affirm the right attitudes of a devotee, I did actually want, with my whole innermost heart and self, to be friends with my Divine Mother and to offer myself to Her so that I could enjoy the greatest happiness possible in this world, which is to give Her my joy and help and energy, so that She could use me to help others.
It was a fine meditation, even though it was quite stupid, and very, very different from all the others I’d worked so hard at in, oh, let’s say the last fifty-eight years.
In 2015, I published a book, The Joyful Athlete, that brought together everything I had learned about the links between fitness and sports training and the spiritual life. If you’re curious to know what the primary link might be — it’s the heart. When we are sick we feel lousy. When we’re well we feel great. The body talks to us through the feelings of the heart — and so also does the soul. If we will discipline ourselves to listen very calmly and impartially to what the subtle higher intuitions of the heart are telling us, we’ll find that our training goes well and that we are happy and fulfilled — in sports, and in our lives.
Three weeks after the book was published, I got severe butt pain that ended my running altogether. Folks I respected — Jyotish, Vidura, and others — had been hinting that maybe I should turn my energies to serving my Guru’s work, and spend less time roaming the beautiful hills and valleys of Marin County. Now the universe had spoken, emphatically. I never would have quit running otherwise; I’d have felt it as a cowardly failure. At any rate, we cannot say that the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor.
During a recent meditation, I was sorely regretting that I was no longer fit, and that a full morning’s head-down editing left me brain-dead and unable to do more. I recalled a time when I could work long hours as needed with energy to spare.
My regrets threatened to bring on a dark mood. I felt thoroughly useless. And then, casting about in the dark for a better and wiser condition of mind, I realized that I only needed to turn in a certain direction in my consciousness — it felt picturesquely like an astral left-hand turn — and that my thoughts and mood would change immediately.
With inner feeling I saw myself in a space that was “light and bright” — it was all-white, upbeat, and while I was in that space I knew beyond any possibility of doubt that in my truest inner core I already was deeply in love with my Guru and God, and that my joyous loving wish was only to give lovingly to them and help their cause.
I can’t express with mere words what a tremendous relief and joy it was to find that in my deepest essential nature I was already in love with God, already profoundly eager and enthusiastic and ready to jump in and serve. And to know that I could, and should, remember and revisit that version of myself as often as possible; and that the most direct path was through meditation, most specifically by listening to the inner sounds. For as Yogananda said, when we hear AUM we are in the presence of God.
But what could I do for the body? In terms of physical fitness, at my age I am bound to feel that any heart rate above resting must be doing some good.
The next day, as I was reflecting on how I could get more exercise (my two bikes are both critically ill, awaiting surgery), I felt Divine Mother suggest, “Take your walker out for a spin around the community now and then.”
I realized that the true me is the soul-nature in me that is perennially cheerful and willing, and that it is only the heavy weight of the body that tries to drag my consciousness down, and that the remedies offered by this path are many: diet, sleep, exercise, energization, willpower, and prayer, among many others. When our intention is expansive, God is eager to suggest all manner of creative ways we can leverage the tools available. A walker, a gym pass, a bicycle, or Nayaswami Shivani’s massive Life Force trilogy of books about Paramhansa Yogananda’s teachings on health and healing.
I feel that my overarching purpose in sharing these thoughts is to help seekers who may be inclined to be too hard on themselves, and to let them know that they may be making the spiritual path a lot harder than it needs to be. I especially want to offer my gratitude to Asha and Swamiji for demonstrating that our own, native, unforced cheerfulness, enthusiasm, and naturalness have a central role to play in our spiritual lives.
I remember Swamiji saying that in meditation we needn’t always be looking for samadhi, but that we can simply turn in the mental direction where we feel the greatest light. We may be no better than we are, but each of us has a place inside us where we do love God, where we have enthusiasm for serving Him from the fullness of our heart’s natural love, and where we want to give Him our joy. We all have that place inside us, where we know how to talk to Divine Mother in the simple, childlike language of our heart.
— Rambhakta