When he left for Hawaii, Swamiji intended to be back in Los Angeles for Christmas, but he developed a blood clot deep in his leg and it wasn’t safe to fly. He didn’t return until the middle of January. In February, he taught the first AKASH series. Usually Swamiji speaks extemporaneously, but this time he spoke according to his notes. The classes were filmed, and he hoped the video would show others how the course could be taught.
In March, Swamiji went back to Ananda Village. His office at Crystal Hermitage was converted into a room for Narayani. The immediate crisis had passed, but everyone felt better knowing she was nearby. Three days after they arrived, Swamiji woke up from a nap with the thought, “I should write a biography of Master. Odd, in all these years, it never occurred to me before to do it.”
Three weeks and two days later he had a manuscript of three hundred pages, Paramhansa Yogananda: A Biography with Personal Reflections and Reminiscences. “It was written mostly from memory,” Swamiji said. “I am supposed to be resting, but this book has been such fun to write that it has been no strain at all.”
He wrote the chapter on Kriya Yoga in the middle of the night. “I awoke at 3:00 a.m. with a flow of inspiration that took me into another state of consciousness. I got up, and when I began to write, words were just given to me. I always feel Master’s consciousness in whatever I do, but this was written by Master himself.”
Most of the stories, Swamiji heard directly from his Guru. In the audiobook, he reads them as he remembered Master telling them, in his tone of voice and manner of speaking. They are the closest any of us will come to hearing Master tell the stories himself. Swamiji’s congestive heart failure, though, had continued to worsen; excess fluid was a burden on his lungs. Sometimes the rhythm of the reading was dictated, not by the length of the phrase, but by the length of his breath.
The movie about Swamiji’s life that he was working on with Ted and Roberto, was progressing more quickly than the others. The new working title was The Disciple. Now it would also be the story of Ananda. Ted planned to film Swamiji in America, Italy, and India. In April, he brought a film crew to the Village. He interviewed some of the founding members, and filmed Swamiji giving a satsang, singing in a concert, and reading a P. G. Wodehouse story.
Swamiji read the story with his usual gusto, and had the audience in stitches. But afterward he said, “That was the last time I’ll do that.” He explained, “Too much laughter.” It was appropriate for us, but not anymore for him—too outward compared to his constant state of inner bliss. Even with his closest friends, there was more silence around Swamiji now.
His heart had become so tender, so sensitive to the presence of God everywhere, that often he found it difficult to relate in a normal way, especially when the waves of bliss overwhelmed him.
Narayani could sense even the smallest changes in his consciousness, and acted as a buffer between Swamiji and the world. When he was alone, she protected him from intrusion. If others were present, she gently guided the conversation or shifted the circumstances so Swamiji wouldn’t have to maintain a facade, but was free to surrender to the bliss.
Once Swamiji said to Narayani, “Some people tell me that you are a beautiful woman.” He squinted his eyes in an exaggerated way, and peered at her, as if she were a bug under a magnifying glass. “Yes,” he said, with a chuckle, “I can see that you are not ugly.” Then his mood shifted completely. Now, profoundly serious, he said, “I never think of you that way. What I experience is your consciousness.”
He told me, “Until now, I have not allowed myself to have a purely accepting love in my life. I have been hurt too deeply and too often, and have too much lost faith in others’ love for me, to the extent of telling myself that I really want nothing more from anyone.
“Yet we are human beings, and if, in our effort to rise above the ego, we try too hard to want love only from God, an element is lost from our human nature that is a part also of our divinity. This has been, through the ages, the greatest defect with monasticism.
“We cannot have, and don’t need, this kind of relationship with everyone. We do need it from one person, to completely fulfill our humanity. I think I have perfected the impersonal side of my nature, but I need also the joy of spiritualizing the human side.”
***
In June, Swamiji returned to Assisi. Here, too, his office downstairs became a room for Narayani. A television station in Dubai had offered him a free, thirty-minute program that would air every weekday. The station covered all of India, and many other English-speaking countries in that part of the world. Swamiji decided to record 108 programs on the Bhagavad Gita. In order not to repeat himself, he made outlines for each one and chose music to match the subject. The instrumentals would be illustrated with some of his colored slides. There were fifteen thousand to choose from, so he asked Narayani to find some that matched the music.
The film studio set up in his house was small, so community members were invited in groups of six, until everyone had a turn. Swamiji set a grueling schedule for himself, but it was soon obvious that his health was not up to it. Tests showed that his heart was operating now at twenty-five percent efficiency, even lower than before the surgery. As a result, his body was retaining fluid; losing weight would help. Although he described himself as already skeletal, a protocol was started to take his weight even lower.
Above all, the doctors suggested he work less. So Swamiji cut the schedule down to five programs a day and agreed to take a break whenever he, or others, felt he needed a rest.
“I am not at all afraid of death,” he said. “Rather, I look forward to it. But if Master still needs me here, I am happy to continue as long as he wants. I would, though, like to live usefully.” The fact was, his condition was dire, at any moment his heart could stop. He spoke with Miriam and then sent a letter to all the Ananda leaders.
“In the event that I should collapse or pass out, let Miriam decide what to do. I am not anxious to be hospitalized. Please don’t allow heroic measures to keep me alive. I want to be useful as long as I am in this body. But I am happy to go at any time.”
Miriam added her own postscript. “Swamiji said that I should make the decision, but please know I am depending on every one of you for support in helping me do so, whether through your prayers, if you are at a distance, or with your intuition and counsel if you are there. And Dr. Peter is my rock upon which I wholly depend for the medical care of Swamiji.”
As he gradually lost weight, Swamiji described himself as a deflating balloon, and, a skeleton that only needs a closet to hide in. But the treatment worked, greatly reducing the stress on his heart. By the end of the summer, all the shows were done.
***
On July 13, we received a touching letter from Swamiji with the title, Martyrdom. “Only within the last two weeks have I learned how to get on the internet.” Whenever he needed something, he asked one his staff to find it. “Last evening I happened, for the first time ever, to look up my own name. I was simply appalled.
“Among other comments about me—which I didn’t bother to look at because I don’t greatly care for compliments—there were two articles that really did manage for a few moments to get under my skin.
“The first was by SRF, my own Guru’s organization. It was a complete hatchet job on me. I didn’t read it carefully, for I don’t care all that much for insults, either. Still, I had to admit that it was extremely well done, and I found myself admiring it as a good job of writing.
“The other article was by a woman who accused me of being a sexual predator. It, too, was well written. I’ve no idea who she was; she coyly refrained from giving any hint as to her identity. What she said didn’t correspond to any memory of mine, and it also contradicted my own self-understanding, which is that I respect, and feel only kindness toward everyone. I can’t imagine ever forcing myself on anyone. But I’ve no wish to fight back in either of these cases.
“My Guru once said to me, ‘God won’t come to you until the end of life. Death itself is the final sacrifice you have to make.’ I don’t know what he meant by sacrifice, but I’ve always held myself in readiness for anything God sends me.”
That very night, after reading the articles, Swamiji had a dream. “Not a nightmare,” he said, “just interesting.” His enemies had decided to burn him at the stake. “I accepted this fate with good cheer, smiled at them, and gave them unhesitatingly the love I feel in my heart toward everyone.”
He was tied to the stake, the faggots piled around him, and lit. While he was burning, his enemies were sitting nearby having dinner, glancing at him every once in a while to see if he was consumed yet. Swamiji was telling himself, “This is going to hurt, but the pain will be temporary. It will destroy only my body—which I must leave someday anyway. It cannot affect my soul.” With these thoughts, the heat diminished; and soon “A few good friends were able to extricate me from the situation and hustle me away.
“In myself, I felt no desire in the matter. If I was burned, all right. And if I was saved, all right. There was no urgent desire on my part to get away; I simply went along with whatever was happening. When I woke up there was no feeling of relief. It hadn’t been a nightmare. My only thought was, ‘This will be a worthwhile dream to remember.’”
We had long been troubled by the many negative postings on the internet. Swamiji’s sudden awareness of them spurred us into action. For more than a year, we tried by every means available at least to drive the negative sites off the first page of search results—all to no avail. In the end, we had to accept that negativity is a test every devotee must face. We would have to rely on the intuition of each seeker to discern between truth and lies.
***
In May, while he was still at the Village, Swamiji looked again at Rescuing Yogananda. Even though he had decided not to publish it, he revised it slightly and sent a copy to the colony leaders. “I tried to soften it, but found I couldn’t do as much as I’d hoped. The truth is the truth.” Now that Mrinalini Mata was president of SRF, he removed the part about giving the job to him. “Perhaps the manuscript could be kept in the archive,” he said, “to be shared with anyone who demands the facts, or challenges Ananda’s right to call itself a legitimate branch of Master’s work.”
At the end of July, from Italy, he sent another, greatly revised version. Now he was thinking of publishing it again, and asked us, “What do you think?” At the end of August, yet another iteration, now called, Restoring the Legacy.
Earlier versions included many references to Swamiji’s personal experience and the pain he felt because of how SRF treated him. He said that he harbored no negative feelings, but many readers felt otherwise. Now he said, “The more I protested, the worse it got!” In the latest version, as much as possible, he had taken himself out of the book.
“It is really very simple. There are two ways to approach Master’s legacy: sectarian and nonsectarian. SRF has taken the sectarian approach; Ananda has not.” To the colony leaders he wrote, “I imagine you know something of the struggle of conscience I have been going through with regard to this book. Sometimes I’ve felt rather like Hamlet. Now I am leaning toward not publishing. Who am I to judge anyone, even when I know I am right?”
But the very next day, he changed his mind. “It came to me clearly this morning: It isn’t people I’m judging; it’s their actions. And those actions are wrong. They amount to a betrayal of Master. And I’m the only person in the world in a position to blow the whistle. It’s not myself I’m defending, but the principles I stand for. This book must come out.”
With a new title—Yogananda for the World—and a full campaign behind it, we posted it on the internet. In the first few months, ten thousand people downloaded the book.
“It took me less than two months to write the Bhagavad Gita commentaries,” Swamiji said. “Three weeks to write Master’s biography. Four weeks to write the book Superconsciousness. And—so far—two and a half years to finish this one.” Whether it was just a tricky writing project, a final catharsis, or a hard-fought victory over the power of darkness, finally, it was done. The book stayed on the internet, and Swamiji never revised it again.
***
In September, Swamiji went to Rome to launch the Italian edition of Education for Life. Teachers and students from the Village were visiting Assisi, so the launch became part of a weekend focused on this new approach to education. A whole generation of students had passed through the Ananda schools, so we could back our claims now with hard evidence: test scores, college diplomas, happy lives, successful careers.
About seven hundred people crowded in for Swamiji’s talk, interrupting him twice with a standing ovation. “Plus one more at the start,” he said, “just for showing up.” The next day, a hundred people joined roundtable discussions, including some officials from the Ministry of Education for Rome.
At the beginning, we called our Education for Life schools Ananda Schools. Naturally, people thought they were parochial, since Ananda is also the name of our church. To make it clear that the schools were spiritual but not religious, Swamiji suggested Living Wisdom Schools as the “Ananda brand” within the greater Education For Life movement.
“As a community, our priority has to be to develop our own schools,” Swamiji said. “No one outside Ananda will have the same understanding or dedication to the whole system. But people need to feel they can take what they want from EFL without having to become yogis. Inevitably, then, as it becomes more widely accepted, it will also become diluted. We don’t have to feel threatened by that. Living Wisdom Schools are not parochial, but they exist within the aura of Ananda. That is where the system will remain pure and intact.
“Those teaching in our schools don’t have the leisure also to be the spokespeople for them, but others may feel called to do that. The Montessori Method was brought to America by one person who traveled the country teaching it to anyone who would listen. I would like to see that kind of zeal for Education for Life.”
Late at night on September 30, Swamiji called from Assisi. “I am holding in my hand the first copy of the new biography of Master. So many beautiful stories. People who have only read his Autobiography can’t even imagine his greatness. This book, plus Yogananda for the World, will transform Master’s mission.”
***
Swamiji was supposed to leave Italy for India at the beginning of October, but he came down with a scratchy throat, which overnight became pneumonia. His compromised heart made him vulnerable. The doctor prescribed supplemental oxygen, strong antibiotics, and that “Swamiji live a peaceful life that won’t place so much stress on his heart.” Miriam administered the oxygen and the antibiotics, but as for the peaceful life, she said, “We all got a good laugh over that one!”
Fortunately, he recovered quickly, and arrived in India strong and radiant for the launch of the new biography of Master. It had been a long time since Swamiji had written any music. “I’ve said everything I have to say in that way.” But recently he had watched a movie called Come to the Stable, which included a beautiful hymn to human love. He changed the words to make it about God. At the end of the event in Delhi, in a strong, resonant voice, Swamiji sang:
Through a long and lonely night
I’ve whispered Your name!
Through the pains and joys of life
My bliss stays the same!
Tempt me no longer:
This world’s not for me!
I’ve known all its charms—
Fold me now in Your arms:
Make me free!
Lifetimes have passed! I’ve called out to You
Through hope and despair.
Lifetimes I’ve known the goals that I sought
Awaited nowhere!
Help me remember
There’s one goal alone!
All I am is Yours!
All I’ve done is Yours!
I’m Your own.
Unfortunately, dismal air quality in Delhi caused a relapse of the pneumonia. Miriam was ready with everything but the peaceful life, and he soon recovered enough for them to transfer to Pune, where it was raining and the air was clear.
At the end of October, Swamiji sent an email with a manuscript attached. “You may like to read the first sixty-three pages of my new novel.” Anticipating our amazement, he added, “Bet you thought I’d never write one!” It was called A Pilgrimage to Guadalupe. It starts when the hero, distraught at the death of his young wife, decides to take his grief to the Divine Mother. Turning away from his wife’s grave, he begins to walk to Guadalupe, Mexico, where the Virgin Mary appeared.
The book is a series of conversations the pilgrim has with those he meets along the way. With a teacher, he talks about education; with a businessman, about money; with a monk, about religion; with an artist, about art; with a hedonist, about sensuality. The book goes on through many aspects of life that have to be understood and resolved on the path to spiritual freedom. “It’s rather unusual,” Swamiji said, “and doesn’t promise to get any less so.”
I wrote to him, “To ask and answer all these questions in the way only Master’s teachings can do is unusual for sure, but also fascinating and helpful.”
Swamiji responded, “I can’t think of single thing I’ve written in this book that actually quotes Master’s teachings. I don’t even refer to Master, Ananda, Kriya Yoga, or any of the usual elements.
“Yesterday a swami came to visit. As he was leaving, he said ‘I feel Yogananda through you.’ He wouldn’t have said that if all he had received from me was teachings. Discipleship is more than a transfer of intellectual knowledge.
“As disciples, we must so absorb ourselves in Master’s outlook, understanding, and, above all, his consciousness, that it is his ray being transmitted to others. In this way Master through us will remain the Guru now and for future generations.”
***
Swamiji was holding weekly satsangs at his house in the community, and occasional satsangs in the city of Pune. But at the end of November, his health crashed again, this time in a different way. He was nauseated, couldn’t eat, and was passing blood. It seemed he had a bleeding ulcer, resulting in severe anemia.
Miriam hadn’t been able yet to establish the same quality of medical care in Pune that they had in Gurgaon. But there was no question of returning there; Swamiji was far too ill. Finally a devotee in Delhi connected Miriam to his wife who was doing her medical residency in Pune. She was also a disciple, and put Swamiji under the care of the best doctors in the area. Further tests revealed acute kidney failure. “His kidneys had always been borderline,” Miriam said, “but until the test came back, I never considered them as the cause of this crisis. The bleeding ulcer was sent by God to lead us to the real problem, just the way the gallstones showed us the cancer.”
Swamiji’s kidneys were almost completely shut down. His heart was being run by his pacemaker. He would have to go immediately into the ICU for dialysis. Miriam wondered, “Have we reached the stage of heroic measures?” Swamiji was conscious enough for her to ask.
“Do you want to die? I can take you home now and let you die.”
Up to that point, his voice had been barely audible. Now, with startling strength, he declared, “I have an obligation to live as long as I can to finish Master’s work.”
Indian hospitals understand that a patient’s best medicine is the company of those who love him. Even in the ICU, there was a small adjacent room where Miriam and Narayani could stay. In gratitude, Miriam exclaimed to the doctor, “I was afraid you were going to take him away from me!”
Blood transfusions were needed. Miriam and Lakshman were a match. Other devotees competed for the honor of “giving their life’s blood for Swamiji.” Kriyaban donors insured that the match would be not only physical, but also in consciousness. Local devotees cooked food and brought meals into the hospital. In the middle of it all, the doctor consulted with Miriam about Kriya. Only in India!
It was rough for a few days; then, slowly, the crisis passed. “I’m still in the hospital,” Swamiji wrote, when he was finally well enough to use his computer. “The nurse asked me how I feel and I said, ‘Wonderful.’ All I feel is bliss.” He resumed work on his novel. His difficulty now was being so filled with bliss it was hard to sleep.
When he had recovered enough to travel, Swamiji went with Narayani, Miriam, and Lila for a week of rest in Goa. Ananda devotees all over the world had been praying for him. He wrote to thank them.
“Someone asked me recently, ‘Have you seen God?’ I am always careful to be truthful, but a direct yes or no question like that isn’t easy to answer, so I said, ‘No.’ Then added, ‘But I see Him in you.’ That wasn’t a bad answer, but it was inadequate. People have a right to know whether what I am teaching is from intellectual belief or from personal experience. And I have a right to consider precious and personal my own relationship with God.
“The correct answer, then, as I am prepared to give it now, is: I have never been a visionary. No, I haven’t seen Him. But I can truthfully say that I have sipped from the little cup of His infinite waters of bliss, and sometimes the sweetness of that water is almost more than I can bear. It is only a cup. His ocean of bliss still awaits me.
“I know enough, only, to be able to say with utter certainty that nothing else exists in all creation that is even comparably worthwhile. God alone is what everyone is seeking—His bliss, and His bliss in motion, which is what I call His love.”