The people revered the holy men. The women in the area cooked succulent dishes and brought them to the Maharaji every day. Their eyes touched him on the hill, but he was everywhere. He could read their thoughts. He could know anything he wanted but he didn't want anything. His body and mind were so pure, so receptive to the energies of the cosmos, so "escaped from his troubles," that he could among other wonders taste the women's rich gifts all day without becoming full. He performed so many miracles that when Alpert would stagger up to a friend and jabber "Guess what the maharaji did! . . ." the friend would say "That's nothing. You should hear what he did last week. . . ." Once when Alpert, whose greatest problem was his attachment to food, went into the city to see about his papers he went to a restaurant and ordered some muffins, a delicacy he had forbidden himself. When he came back to the temple, the Maharaji smiled and said, "Did you enjoy your muffins?"
They couldn't understand why Alpert's desire for food made him alternately starve and stuff himself. "Don't fast if it is difficult," his teacher would say. "Eat as much as you like." But all Alpert's hangups about discipline were focused in his eating habits. All his desires were centered on food. He had gone from 200 to 145 lbs. in his wanderings, and he wanted to stay thin. Part of the holy men's power came from the extreme purification of their bodies, the cleansing and exercising of every sense until they could be aware of and control the most basic bodily functions. They had transferred all their bodily energies into consciousness. Westerners' greatest energies are centered in the groin; Indians have learned to transfer energy up the spine from the groin to the brain. Thus they can perform what to the Westerner are superhuman acts. Alpert witnessed an exercise in which a man seemed to die and come back to life. A soldier who was an advanced student of yoga came to pay his respects to the Maharaji when his caravan passed through the area, and the Maharaji guided him through the exercise. He sat cross-legged on the ground and held his breath while concentrating on the space between his eyebrows where three veins come together. Instructed by the Maharaji, he maintained concentration on that point even while his lungs ran out of breath and he technically suffocated. The trick was to forbid his consciousness to descend to his lungs, to forbid it to say, "I'm dying," to forbid himself to gasp for breath.
As he did this his body became rigid and he was in all appearance dead, The Maharaji pushed him over and he fell rigidly like a corpse, his legs still crossed. But he came instantly back to life as soon as the Maharaji commanded him to break the trance.
That kind of one-pointed consciousness is what Alpert is trying to attain. In each of us there is a who we are who has no desires, he says. This is the witness, the small place that watches everything and wants nothing. If we can stay in that place, maintaining bare attention to all nature, to our own egos and to the dream of the external world, maintaining bare attention without doing anything about what we see, then out desires and struggles will play themselves out and disappear. The process is to avoid attachment to anything, even the attainment of non-attachment itself. This Alpert watches his neurotic games but does not struggle against them. "Drinking root beer," the witness notes when he goes to the refrigerator in his father's house in New Hampshire where he is staying now. "Blaming self for drinking root beer."
When all the separations we have erected between ourselves and the universe drop away, we merge with the universe. The Maharaji, a fully realized being, can know everything because his consciousness is co-extensive with the universe. He has no ego. His self alternates between being the universe and seeing it whole in a constant rhythm that is like sexual intercourse with the cosmos. He is pure love.
"Why doesn't the Maharaji stop the Vietnam war?" some people ask, the way newspaper reporters ask, "Why are we unhappy?" Understanding stops action. The kingdom of heaven is not of this world. When we become like little children we see that all rewards are inside ourselves. We see that the world is an illusion formed by energy playing hide-and-seek. The military-industrial complex creates the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war creates the military-industrial complex. Professors create books. Books create professors. Suffering rates our egos. Our egos create suffering. People create people.
We go by seven-day cycles around here. We call them weeks. We divide the week into days and make it important to remember what day of the week it is. This is good. This is part of our karma. In each day of the week we find suffering and joy. Some of out joys are almost as good as the joys people have in movies. Our sufferings are better not spoken of. But we keep moving an changing. The part of us called Calcutta begins to look like Detroit. The part of us called America is materialistic, so when a spiritual awakening happens there it is precipitated by a material chemical. People in the East are sinking into the illusion, people in the West are coming out of it. "It's all one to me," Alpert says.
Compassion for the human drama is the highest form of love, Alpert says, "Don't be sucked into ego games," he says. When a man who had just left a mental hospital came to visit him, Alpert refused to be impressed by his complaints. "I'm going to go crazy, I'm going out of my mind," the man cried, his face between his hands. "Are you crazy now?" Alpert asked, once, twice. Soon the man was smiling and admiring Alpert's candle. It's difficult to be neurotic if you spend enough time with someone who isn't neurotic at all. Westerners' "love" is the working out of personal fantasies by manipulating other people, Alpert says. We bribe people. We have yachts wash up on each others' beaches by accident. We want things from each other. But real love transcends social and chemical processes, Alpert says. True love does not impose desires on the beloved. True love in simply being in the same place at the same time.
Alpert loves everyone who comes to see him, and it is hard not to return the feeling. He has been speaking at Esalen Institute in California, out in the sun with his body-suit on, but now he is back in New Hampshire. He compares his talks to the speeches holy men give in the marketplace. They are "his thing," but they really aren't important. The funny-looking white cloths and beads he wars aren't important either. They remind him not to want anything.
Alpert will go back to India in the next year or so. Meanwhile his teacher is sending him letters, and Alpert is practicing what he has learned so far. He tells the people who visit him that they don't have to study Eastern Religion to become as happy as he is. "You ask me what it is with curiosity and maybe even need, and all I can tell you is it's an experience you're having constantly," he says.
In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus thinks of Eastern holy men gazing at their navels. He is a Westerner, so he wants to be able to use all his knowledge. In a flash of intuition he realizes the link of navelcord to navelcord through the generations can be used for a telephone connection. He can use his navel to dial Adam and Eve.
It's all one. Choices were invented by someone in the first marketplace who wanted to sell something. "Would you like some of this or some of this, which looks and tastes exactly the same," he said to the first Westerner. And the Westerner chose.
Don't look for Eastern Religion in someone else's meditation classes. Find it by watching the sun come up between two obelisks in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Find Eastern Religion in decency and clean living. Even better is to let it find you.