Swamiji had planned to take a seclusion in Assisi in January. Fortunately, the doctors said he was well enough to travel. They prescribed several months of chemotherapy. He had two sessions in India; Miriam would administer the rest at Seva Kutir. At 7:30 a.m., when he stepped out of Guru Kripa on his way to the airport, a crowd of devotees was waiting outside his door to say goodbye.
Durga was living in India then, and wrote, “Swamiji was radiant. Smiling, laughing—very happy about going into seclusion. He was wearing his beautiful, white, linen jacket and a blue, silk tie. Some of the Indian devotees had never seen him in anything but swami orange and it took them a moment to adjust to the European swami. He looked carefully into the eyes of each one of us, sometimes offering a few words of blessing or advice. Then he said, ‘I love you all.’ It was clear the message was not just for the handful standing around him; it was for everyone.”
When they arrived in Italy, Miriam arranged for them to meet a local oncologist. If something went awry, they could call him. The doctor respectfully suggested that, given Swamiji’s age and the limited nature of the cancer, perhaps chemotherapy wasn’t necessary.
When it was time for his third chemotherapy treatment, the first one Miriam would administer in Assisi, Swamiji said, “No.”
He had great respect for his Indian doctor, and wrote to him, “I think of you as a personal friend, so I want to explain in my own words why I’ve decided to stop the chemotherapy. I found that after two treatments, it was beginning to affect my mental clarity. Mental clarity is the one gift I still possess, and my most important asset at this time of my life. I still have work ahead of me, though the field is becoming gradually cleared.
“I understand your priority, as my doctor. It is to prolong my life as long as possible. That is not my priority. What matters to me—the only thing that matters—is that I be able to serve God and my Guru effectively for whatever years remain.”
The coming year, Swamiji said, was one of the most important of his life, especially the launch of the Italian edition of Revelations of Christ, set for April in Rome. Then there was the 40th anniversary of Ananda Village, and the American celebration of his sixty years of discipleship. With chemotherapy, and the time needed to recover from it, the whole year would be used up.
“My life is in God’s hands,” Swamiji said. “He has protected me so many times. To receive more chemotherapy would be, for me, to doubt the power of God’s protection.”
***
Swamiji was supposed to go back to India in March for Master’s Mahasamadhi. In April, he would return to Italy, for the launch of Revelations. But his body was too weak for all that travel. Much as he disliked breaking his word, he felt the book launch in Rome was too important to risk. Cancelling the trip to India gave Swamiji several months of near-seclusion.
At the end of February, Jyotish and Devi came to visit. “Swamiji is still fragile,” they wrote in a letter to the community, “but overall, doing much better than we expected. Slowly he is regaining his strength, although it is an uphill climb. Seva Kutir is ideal for rest and recuperation. It is completely private, well removed from community activity. If he wants company, he can invite friends to come for a short visit. If not, he can be completely alone. He has interacted very little with the community, but they are happy just to have him nearby.
“We see him mainly in the late afternoon, for tea and a short walk. He is cheerful and happy, busy with a writing project, Religion in the New Age, a complete rewrite of the essay with the same title that he wrote ten years ago. It describes how religion will evolve, Ananda’s role in that evolution, and Master’s Dwapara way of organizing. It is a manual for how to develop Ananda in the years to come.”
Swamiji said, “I am particularly happy to show Master as a Dwapara Yuga leader, since SRF has cast him so firmly in the Kali Yuga mold.”
The book also included other essays; the subtitle, A Devotee’s Handbook, gave Swamiji great latitude. Subjects ranged from Why I Love My Guru to The Use of Incense in Meditation to The Final Exam, which explained how to prepare for death. “Every other book I have written,” Swamiji said, “has been to present my Guru’s teaching. This is the first book that is really my own thinking, inspired by him.”
***
When it was time to go to Rome to launch Revelations of Christ, Swamiji was stronger than he had been in a long time. He said it was more than just being well rested. “When I came out of the hospital—in fact, when I woke up from the surgery—I felt that something that had been with me for years had been taken away. These illnesses are evil, astral entities.”
The surgeon had shown Nirmala the tumor he had cut out of Swamiji colon. She said, “Lying there in the little metal dish, the tumor seemed to vibrate with outrage and anger at being discovered and removed!”
The book launch was held in Teatro Valle, a famous theater in Rome, over three hundred years old. Before there was a United States of America, Romans were attending events in this hall. It was completely full, seven hundred people, half on the ground floor, the rest in five tiers of box seats. Because of the design, no seat was far from the stage. It felt intimate, even though the crowd was large.

Swamiji dressed in a blend of East and West: an Indian kurta, in the pale apricot color he favored, and white slacks. On one side of the stage, there was a huge picture of Master; on the other, an equally large picture of the book cover, a painting by Ananda artist Dana Lynne Andersen, in colors that happened to match Swamiji’s kurta. There were huge bouquets of flowers everywhere. The setting was perfect.
The same government official who, the year before, had honored Swamiji with the Julius Caesar Medal, was there again to greet him. “It is an honor and privilege for all of Rome that you are here,” he said. Then, in the sweetest way, apologized: All he could offer Swamiji this time was a sincere welcome. Rome had already bestowed on him its highest honor.
In planning the program, Swamiji said, “This message needs to be received in the heart.” So it started with thirty minutes of music from the Oratorio. The choir stood on marble steps in the center of the stage. Swamiji didn’t sing with them, but sat to the side, turned so he could see the choir, and the audience could see his profile. His face radiated a child-like joy, humble, appreciative, and completely impersonal, as if he had had no part in creating the music that now moved him so deeply.
When he stood up to speak, beautiful slides of distant galaxies appeared on the back wall of the stage behind him. This was to illustrate the theme of the book: a concept of God and Christ as expansive and vast as creation itself. God is an Infinite Consciousness, not the human figure on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which Swamiji described as “good art, but bad philosophy.” His authority to speak about Jesus, he said, was discipleship to Master: “I lived with a Christ.”
It is noble, he said, to serve the poor, to heal the sick; but once you alleviate their physical suffering, you have only brought them back to zero. Unless there is a change in consciousness it is only a matter of time before the cycle of suffering begins again. As Krishna said to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “Get away from My ocean of suffering!”
God doesn’t care about our sins; He knows it takes incarnations for us to learn our lessons. “A saint is a sinner who never gave up,” Master often said. Joy. Joy. Joy. This is the divine thread that unites all humanity as one family in God. The evening ended, as it began, with music, this time Swamiji singing:
Children of God!
Your time of trial has ended!
See where the dawn irradiates the night:
Soon all your tears will rise like dew to the sun:
Sorrows will turn to joy; your griefs, to delight!
Children, rejoice, for lo! the Kingdom of God
Comes in full splendor: It needs but your sight!
It is difficult with the human mind, limited by time and space, to understand the importance of events like this one. Or in Mumbai, when Swamiji said his talk was “of global importance.” Or the garden party, when Master said, “My spoken words are registered in the ether, in the Spirit of God, and they shall move the West!”
Almost within hearing distance of the Vatican, Swamiji had proclaimed a new revelation of Christ. Only Christ himself knows what the fruit of that revelation will be.
***
Swamiji celebrated his birthday in Assisi, then in June, went to the Village for a late birthday celebration. Crystal Clarity was about to publish another of Master’s original books, the 1949 edition of Whispers from Eternity. In his poem, When I Am Only a Dream, Master said, “Read my Whispers from Eternity. Eternally through that I will talk to you.”
After Master’s passing, Tara Mata edited Whispers so drastically that it bore no resemblance to the original. As one example, Master wrote a prayer of 110 words. Tara’s edited version, approximately the same length, contained only twelve of the words Master had used. SRF members were outraged. In response, Tara Mata forged a letter from Master, authorizing her to edit the book, and inserted it as a preface. After she died, SRF kept Tara’s version in print, but also published the 1949 edition, because, “for sentimental reasons,” some people preferred it.
When Swamiji saw the galleys for the Crystal Clarity edition of Whispers from Eternity, he glanced at a few pages then said, “This book needs to be edited. I feel Master wants me to do it.” There were many pre-orders from stores and distributors, with a promised delivery date that meant it had to be at the printers by the end of the week. It was just before his birthday celebration; five hundred people had come to the Village to see him. But Swamiji felt called by Master to edit the book, so it had to be done.
Whenever he had a little time between the parties, dinners, and concerts arranged in his honor, Swamiji sat with the galleys, entering his changes by hand, then passed the pages to me to retype.
“Master said he edited Whispers himself,” Swamiji told us, “but clearly he only did part of it. I think he said that to keep Tara from doing it! When she offered to edit it, he only said ‘Would you?’ I think it was his way of telling me that someday I could. Subconsciously, I’ve always wanted to. Master’s speech was so flowery. In his exuberance, he used so many images! Nobody writes the way he did, with so much devotion. I think he was trying to jolt people out of their habitual way of being.
“This book introduces an entirely new way of relating to God. It shows the right attitude to have toward everything. Many of these prayers molded my spiritual life and in that sense, I’ve spiritualized them. Because I have been a disciple for so long, I am able to do this. I just look at a line and I know what words to use; Master gives them to me.
“I think this is the most important book I’ve done, more important than the Gita, the Bible, or The Rubaiyat, because it comes through the heart.”
After the initial editing, Swamiji went through the book one more time, then pronounced it done. He always goes over a book many times, so I didn’t believe him. “Are you sure?” I said. We didn’t want it to be half printed when he changed his mind!
“The final editing I do on a book is to put my vibrations into it,” Swamiji said. “If I polished this the way I’ve polished the others, it would change the vibration, which wouldn’t be right. Whispers is Master’s book, not mine.”
He asked Dharmadas and Nirmala to compare his edited version to Master’s original, line-by-line, to make sure no important concepts had been left out. They found only one or two small instances which Swamiji corrected. He made the printing deadline, but the effort was so intense, he said, “I feel like a shirt that has been pounded on the rocks by a dhobi [an Indian washerman]. When I lie down to sleep I see little black wiggling lines in front of me, and a small pencil coming along writing around them.”
It was, he said, “Hard, but blissful work. Master has been working through me and I can feel that he is very pleased.”
***
Sometime in early summer, Swamiji had a dream about Rajarshi Janakananda, Master’s spiritual successor. In the dream, Swamiji gathered his courage to talk to Rajarshi about the current state of SRF. It was a delicate subject; Swamiji was tactful. He didn’t just burst into it, but spoke carefully, trying to get a sense first of how Rajarshi felt about it. Immediately, “Rajarshi took the bait.” It was clear to Swamiji, that he, too, felt the situation was terrible. Rajarshi said something like, “There ought to be a revolution!”
Which was exactly what Swamiji had been thinking: “To start a revolution within SRF.” He had heard that many of the SRF monks, especially the younger ones, were not happy with the way things were going. Perhaps—with some encouragement from Swamiji—their discontent could spark a change in SRF from the inside.
He was already scheduled to go to Los Angeles in July to give several public programs to help our fledging center there. Swamiji asked Krishnadas to feel it out with SRF, to see if Master might open a door for Swamiji to talk to some of the younger monastics. Unfortunately, when Krishnadas phoned SRF—and they found out who was calling—he was immediately connected to a senior monk we knew all too well from the lawsuit years. Swamiji had hoped to meet younger monks without any official standing; now there was no chance.
A meeting was arranged at the Lake Shrine, between Swamiji and the two senior monks he had often met in the course of the lawsuit. They would be his hosts. “My guards,” Swamiji called them, “to make sure I don’t talk to anyone else.”
When Swamiji arrived, the monks suggested that first he might like to walk around the Lake, then they could meet. Swamiji declined on the basis of age and infirmity. Afterward, he said, “The clear message was that I needed first to get in tune with Master. I would have none of it!” The two monks, Swamiji, Jyotish, Devi, Krishnadas, and Mantradevi, sat together in a small gazebo.
One of the monks was quite outspoken, and started right in. Whether he was speaking for himself, or acting in obedience to others, is unknown. “Why do you put Master’s name on your books?” he asked.
“As a disciple it would be inappropriate not to. It is my Guru’s teaching, not my own,” Swamiji said.
“It a marketing ploy,” the monk said, “using Master’s name to sell more books!”
There were a few more similar exchanges, then Swamiji reverted to silence. Jyotish stepped in, trying to smooth the waters. They started over again, several times, but the conversation was doomed. Swamiji had hoped for common ground; clearly, there was none.
Finally he said to the monk who had chastised him, “I am senior to you in the work. Master put me in charge of the monks and if I were still in SRF, I would be now. I speak to you in that capacity.” He then offered some pointed spiritual advice.
After the meeting, Swamiji did walk around the Lake. He was immensely sad that, once again, his effort to help SRF had come to nothing.
***
Since the dramatic raids and arrests that followed, the legal case against Ananda in Italy had been making its slow way through the court system. Now, after five years, hundreds of hours of work by lawyers and devotee volunteers and tens of thousands of euros spent, there would be a hearing in late November. The judge would decide: either the case would be dismissed or Ananda and the accused would be put on trial. In all this time, Swamiji had never been able to appear in court or speak to a judge. He arranged to stop in Italy on his way back to India in order to attend the hearing.
He could only stay a few days. Mr. Kaarthikeyan had arranged a launch for the Indian edition of Hope for a Better World at the Mahatma Gandhi Center in New Delhi. Swamiji had promised to be there.
The judge, Swamiji, and all the parties were gathered in the courtroom when the hearing was unexpectedly cancelled for reasons unrelated to our case. Since Swamiji had come such a distance, and had to leave right away, the judge allowed him to speak.
The only reason he had not appeared in court before now, Swamiji said, was because his health made travel difficult; it was not because he was reluctant to appear. Now there were two things he wanted the judge to understand. First, the charges were entirely groundless. Second, if anyone were to be found guilty, he alone should bear the punishment. As the founder and leader of the community, all responsibility lay with him, and with no one else.
In the SRF lawsuit, by the grace of God, we had an intelligent, conscientious, courageous judge. As a result, every important decision went in our favor. The Italian judge, Dr. Massimo Ricciarelli, was cut from the same cloth. He had read every document, remembered the contents, and understood the issues.
There is a category in Italian law that doesn’t exist in America, which is more than innocent. It declares that a case should never have been filed in the first place; that there was no evidence that a crime had even been committed. In this lawsuit, there was a single, self-declared “victim,” who was mentally unstable, falsified documents, and had a long history of filing unsupported lawsuits.
A few weeks later, when the hearing was finally held, Judge Ricciarelli ruled according to that law: Ananda was completely exonerated. Just as Swamiji had said, the charges were groundless. Case dismissed.
Then, even more importantly, the judge addressed the underlying premise on which the whole investigation was based: that, by definition, Ananda was a cult rather than a valid religion. In a carefully worded ruling that set a precedent, not only in Italy, but in the entire European Union, the judge changed the legal definition of what constituted a religious group. Not only Ananda, but all groups that followed a spiritual path outside traditional denominations, would now be protected by Italian law.
In the United States, Ananda had set important legal precedents, insuring that the teachings of India, or of any non-traditional spiritual path, could not be the exclusive property of one group. Many called ours the most important religious freedom case in many decades. It has been an often quoted authority ever since.
Now Ananda Italy had freed not only itself, but the whole spiritual movement in Europe.
Swamiji’s statement had no legal bearing on the case, but those who were in the courtroom when he spoke, including our lawyers, said that Swamiji’s words, and even more, his presence, charged the atmosphere with the power of dharma, guaranteeing that Truth would prevail.
***
During his time at the Village, Swamiji had suffered extreme pain in his back. Finally the doctor discovered several compression fractures in his spine. Those fractures were mended, but all the travel created pain in other discs. Still, despite the pain, the launch in Delhi of Hope for a Better World was a great success.
“It must have been important,” Swamiji said afterward, “because Satan made it very difficult for me. I was dizzy, nauseous, no appetite, no energy, couldn’t walk a straight line or get up from a chair without help. But when it was time to begin, suddenly I had all the energy I needed. I stood for most of the hour talk, and afterward was hungry!”
In early December, Swamiji decided to reread his autobiography, The Path. Published in 1977, it was the sixth book he had written; now there were a hundred. Reading soon turned to editing, then to adding new material. When he reached the part where he was thrown out of SRF, he began to slash, burn, and rewrite. When the book was reprinted in 1996, he had edited the section about being expelled from SRF, but left untouched the many following pages about the long, painful process of rebuilding his life again.
“The book ended on a depressing note of tragedy,” Swamiji said. “In 1977, I didn’t realize that being thrown out of SRF was the best thing that ever happened to me. It freed me for the great work Master commissioned me to do.” Now he rewrote that whole section of the book, explaining briefly how he came to separated from SRF, but leaving out entirely the sadness and struggle that came after. He went right to the final chapter, A New Way of Life, about Master’s ideal of World Brotherhood Colonies, and the fulfillment of that dream through Ananda.
He retitled the book The New Path: My Life with Paramhansa Yogananda. Adding the word new was not to show that the book had been revised. It was because Master called his teachings a new expression of the ancient path of Self-realization.
A few months later, Swamiji felt the message of the book still wasn’t complete. He added one more chapter, The Final Goal. It wasn’t enough, he wrote, to speak only of serving God, “Master taught us above all that the true goal of life is union with God. Devotion, self-offering, self-surrender, oneness in Bliss and Divine Love: these are the entire purpose of life. What I’ve hoped for above all in writing this book has been to convince you, dear reader, to live more deeply for God.”
Swamiji speaks of the particular sweetness of God as Divine Mother. “As my Guru said, ‘Mother is closer than the Father. When you pray to Her, She will answer!’” Countless are the times in his own life, he wrote, when this promise has been fulfilled. The book ends with the words of Sister Gyanamata, “God alone! God alone!”