{"id":625,"date":"2021-11-11T15:43:17","date_gmt":"2021-11-11T15:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yoganandafortheworld.com\/story\/?p=625"},"modified":"2021-11-11T15:43:17","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T15:43:17","slug":"a-place-called-ananda-chapter-5-polarization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yoganandafortheworld.com\/story\/a-place-called-ananda-chapter-5-polarization\/","title":{"rendered":"A Place Called Ananda — Chapter 5: Polarization"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Paramhansa Yogananda (standing, 4th from left) with disciples at Mt. Washington, Christmas 1930.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I have in my possession<\/strong> a Christmas card from Tara Mata in which her greeting contains these words: \u201cTo the first vice president of SRF from the second president.\u201d For years I thought those words, \u201cfrom the second president,\u201d were a misprint, inasmuch as Tara was, nominally at least, the second vice<\/em> president. It was not her way, however, to make errors of this sort, and in fact she always spoke as though she were the \u201cpower behind the throne.\u201d Once she remarked to me on the phone, \u201cPeople say that Daya and I run the organization. Well, it\u2019s true. We do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tara Mata figures large in the story of my life; I can\u2019t really describe Ananda\u2019s origins properly without including an account of my relationship with her. Yet I must confess it is a difficult story for me to relate.<\/p>\n

Tara was the most extraordinary person it has been both my fortune and misfortune ever to meet. There exists, I believe, a strong karmic link between us. She herself first stated this as a probability.<\/p>\n

Tara was a great soul. Yet she possessed such an unusual personality that I find it impossible to describe her only from that point of view. She was a close disciple of Master, and was much loved by him. Master was also deeply grateful to her, for in her he found at last someone with the editorial skills he\u2019d been seeking.<\/p>\n

It was not his temperament to give his literary works the editorial polish they needed for the general reading public. Tara was the only one he\u2019d ever met who combined editorial skills \u2013 hers were considerable \u2013 with spiritual depth and attunement with his consciousness. Other skilled editors there had been indeed, but these had lacked both spiritual insight and the necessary attunement; their skills were merely intellectual. Drawing on their readings of other teachings, they had intruded into his writings other, and sometimes incompatible, ideas. Master quite naturally preferred even unpolished writing to editing that distorted his teachings.<\/p>\n

That Master needed an editor is more or less generally known. He himself made no secret of it. As he once put it, \u201cBooks in the astral world are written by infusing them with the writer\u2019s vibrations. On this material plane, things must be done with painstaking deliberation. Divine Mother disciplined me when I wrote my autobiography!\u201d<\/p>\n

The instrument of Divine Mother\u2019s discipline was Tara Mata. He was deeply grateful to her for her help.<\/p>\n

To a person like myself, for whom writing has long been a major activity, it is obvious that conscientious writing requires careful working and reworking. Equally obvious to most writers, I imagine, is the fact that a great deal of this revision is merely mechanical. Master\u2019s consciousness was too intuitive for him to be patient with these mundane details. What he wrote, though deeply wise and inspiring, was often what might be considered a first draft. Tara, in laboring to bring his manuscripts to polished perfection, would never intrude her own thoughts on his writings. More and more, as she worked on his books over the years, she found her attunement with Master deepening, until she no longer needed to check with him constantly, as she had in the beginning, to see whether she\u2019d understood his full meaning. By means of this attunement, so he himself told me, she herself developed spiritually.<\/p>\n

Tara was not, however, everyone\u2019s idea of a saint. Deeply spiritual, yes; deeply loyal to her guru, certainly; mighty of will, unquestionably so. She was also, however, eccentric to the point of demonstrating little capacity to relate in a normal way to others. She was opinionated to the point of refusing to admit the very possibility that different opinions from her own might have any merit. She was given to making sweeping generalizations, each of which sounded like a decree imperiously presented before a lower court, this material universe. She so lacked the quality of respect for others that her high-minded disrespect amounted virtually to contempt.<\/p>\n

I remember once when the committee to which I belonged arrived at a consensus on some matter. A spokeswoman for the committee notified Tara by phone of our decision. \u201cYou\u2019re quite wrong,\u201d Tara announced in reply.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut there are fifteen us of who feel this way!\u201d protested the other.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dear,\u201d retorted Tara high-handedly, \u201cthat makes you just fifteen times as wrong!\u201d<\/p>\n

Tara practiced astrology \u2013 contrary, it should be said, to Master\u2019s wishes for her. Shortly after the opening of Disneyland, so I was informed, she had declared that that amusement park would never be successful: It had been opened on the dying moon. Some years later, after Disneyland was already one of the outstanding success stories in financial history, I said to her on the phone: \u201cI understand you predicted Disneyland would fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, yes! What a pity.<\/em> All that money they\u2019ve poured into that place!\u201d<\/p>\n

Her opinions about people were quite as extreme. Intensely loyal to Master and to anyone who continued, in her opinion, to be a good disciple to Master (having Tara as judge made this forever an insecure position), she also had violent antipathies, particularly toward anyone who she felt failed to match her own definition of what a disciple ought to be \u2013 a definition that, as far as I could tell, included implicit agreement with her.<\/p>\n

Mr. Cuaron, the SRF center leader in Mexico City, a close and deeply devoted disciple to whom Master once said, \u201cI lost sight of you for a few lifetimes, but I will never lose sight of you again,\u201d got on the wrong side of Tara by disagreeing with her as to the way the work should be spread in South America. Tara, referring to him during one of our many telephone conversations, said, \u201cWhy, he\u2019s the greatest hypocrite that ever lived!\u201d<\/p>\n

Durga Mata was a devoted, even a heroic, disciple. Speaking of her to me, Master said, \u201cWhen I met her, I said to her, \u2018You have come.\u2019\u201d Tara, however, told me, \u201cDurga is totally lacking in refinement. [Durga had not had Tara\u2019s formal education.] The only<\/em> reason Master took her in was that he so desperately<\/em> needed help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Lewis, Master\u2019s first Kriya Yoga disciple in America, and highly advanced in meditation, was dismissed loftily by Tara as too \u201cinsignificant\u201d to merit serious attention.<\/p>\n

When Debi Mukherjee, a disciple from India, suggested that the Autobiography<\/em> be printed in paperback format to make it more easily available to people, Tara\u2019s comment to me was, \u201cHis suggestion is so ridiculous as to be irresponsible.\u201d<\/p>\n

She even excoriated Daya Mata to me as \u201cinsincere\u201d for not accepting certain of her own wishes for the work.<\/p>\n

Yet Tara was able to say to me once with utter conviction, \u201cI\u2019ve never said an unkind word in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tara liked to cast people into types. She herself might be typed as having a sublimated artistic temperament: sublimated, because her artistic sensibilities were wholly devoted now to the divine search. Yet she was deeply sensitive to music and to visual beauty.<\/p>\n

Master told her, after a visit he\u2019d paid to the Louvre in Paris during his voyage in 1935 to India, \u201cI saw some of your paintings there.\u201d All she would reveal to me was that he\u2019d told her she had been a famous French artist during the Eighteenth Century. I was naturally intrigued, and read up a little on Eighteenth Century French artists. In my research I found a remarkable similarity to her in descriptions of the life and character of Watteau. I also was struck by one of Watteau\u2019s idealized scenes of a group of people relaxing amid the beauties of nature. The scene included a buxom young lady whose face held a remarkable similarity to a photograph of Tara herself when she was young. Had the artist\u2019s attraction to that form, I wondered, caused him in this life to be born into a similar body? Tara had, from all accounts, been extremely beautiful as a young woman. Beauty, however, meant nothing to her now. She had let her appearance go in her total dedication to serving Master\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Like many artists, she lacked social skills. It is not uncommon for artists to behave toward other people as though they weren\u2019t really human beings, but merely projections of their own artistic fancies.<\/p>\n

Master told Daya Mata, with reference to Tara, \u201cKeep her away from people.\u201d Unfortunately, that is just what Tara would never allow Daya to do. Tara was senior in discipleship to Daya Mata, having come to Master in 1924 (Daya came in 1931), and was sufficiently forceful to impose her will on the younger and forever-insecure-in-herself disciple, now the president.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve long wondered how it is that people can be truly great in certain ways, and yet so very much the opposite of great in other ways \u2013 unless, indeed, greatness be defined also as being greatly flawed. Tara was flawed, certainly, but at the same time she was<\/em> great. Personally, I much prefer greatness to mediocrity, even if that greatness include flaws that are outstanding.<\/p>\n

A comparison comes to my mind of a stained-glass window. When the sun shines directly upon the window, the color in every pane is revealed in its full intensity. In dim light, however, as for example before dawn, the color is so poorly defined that, however great its variety, it may seem uniformly gray.<\/p>\n

People, similarly, whose lives lack energy and driving force, may seem more virtuous than they really are simply because they haven\u2019t the energy to appear otherwise. Latent cruelty may appear in them as nothing but insensitivity. Deep-seated selfishness, too, may be excused by others in the same terms: insensitivity.<\/p>\n

How often has a murderer been described later by his shocked neighbors in such words as: \u201cHe seemed like such a nice person!\u201d<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know very well even those who are closest to us. Deep-seated traits may lie buried under the obfuscating mud of low energy and mediocrity. The spiritual power that will reveal our nature as it truly is will make it possible for us also to see clearly our own faults, and, recognizing them as obstacles, to discard them.<\/p>\n

We are not responsible for one another. It is not our job to judge anyone. Supremely important for each of us is it to see that our own direction<\/em> of development be toward a continuous expansion of sympathy, love, and understanding \u2013 above all by loving God ever more deeply. As Master told us, \u201cGod doesn\u2019t mind your faults: He minds your indifference.\u201d And as Sri Yukteswar said, \u201cHuman nature is ever unreliable until anchored in the divine.\u201d Even to be in deep communion with God doesn\u2019t signify, necessarily, that every root of our humanity has been dug up and exposed to the cauterizing rays of wisdom. Therefore, never grieve if you discover weaknesses in yourself. See to it only that your direction<\/em> of development be ever toward God.<\/p>\n

Tara had her faults, but I think she paid for them, too. Spiritual development does not excuse in us a single flaw, even as sincerity in fixing a roof doesn\u2019t excuse us from having the rain leak through the smallest opening.<\/p>\n

Master\u2019s acceptance of each of us despite the infinity of our imperfections, while he worked with unceasing patience to bring out the flawless divine image within us, was the surest proof of his own soul-identity with the divine love that sustains the universe.<\/p>\n

I will never forget one occasion when, speaking on behalf of certain others, I spoke critically of Dr. Lewis to Master, not because I had feelings against Doctor, but because I thought Master would want to know what those people were saying. Master thought I was speaking on my own behalf.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you<\/em> have passed the tests through which Doctor has passed,\u201d he told me sternly, \u201cthen<\/em> you may criticize!\u201d To reaffirm his loyalty and love for Doctor, he immediately telephoned this long-time disciple. They spoke as old friends.<\/p>\n

Tara had a tender nature, inwardly. Few people saw that side of her, however. She was like certain fruits: soft and sweet on the inside, rough on the outside. Most people saw only the outside of Tara, and were put off by her. As for me, I must say that I very much liked her. Her caustic speech I found stimulating; I saw in it an expression of the delight she took in using words colorfully. The Italians have a saying that covers this trait, \u201cSe non vero, ben trovato,\u201d<\/em> for which a loose translation might be, \u201cEven if it isn\u2019t true, it\u2019s well expressed.\u201d It wasn\u2019t that I agreed, necessarily, with her often drastic opinions, but often, too, I found them rooted in wisdom. I gained greatly from our association. My philosophy has always been that human beings are very much a mixed bag. Take what attracts you, and \u2013 in gratitude for that much good \u2013 overlook the rest.<\/p>\n

Gradually, however, it became clear to me that Tara represented an attitude toward the work that was completely opposite to my own. This fact didn\u2019t greatly worry me at the time, for I couldn\u2019t imagine that her attitude would ever, by any possibility, prevail. Thus, I saw her in this respect as a harmless anachronism who would never play a responsible, to say nothing of devastating, role in shaping the future of Master\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Master himself had described this attitude of hers as it was revealed to him at the time of his first acquisition of Mt. Washington Estates. \u201cAs I stood in the third floor sitting room,\u201d he told us, \u201coverlooking the city of Los Angeles, I thought, \u2018Now at last my mission begins!\u2019 Laurie (Tara), standing beside me, remarked at that moment, \u2018Now your troubles begin!\u2019\u201d Master laughed, \u201cI\u2019ve never forgotten those words.\u201d He\u2019d remembered them, he said, because they were true. What he didn\u2019t add, because it wasn\u2019t his way to speak in self-justification, was that he hadn\u2019t come to this country to avoid<\/em> troubles, but to do whatever was needed to bring his message of salvation to the West.<\/p>\n

Tara didn\u2019t see his work in terms of bringing spiritual solace to the masses. As she herself told me many years later, \u201cI thought he\u2019d come to America to gather up a handful of disciples, then take us all back with him to India where we\u2019d spend the rest of our lives meditating in the Himalayas.\u201d People, in her view, represented only trouble: a threat to the purity of Master\u2019s teachings.<\/p>\n

I recall one of the monks, on her arrival at Mt. Washington one Christmas, greeting her fervently with the words, \u201cI\u2019ve been longing to meet you!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell,\u201d she announced off-handedly, \u201cyou\u2019ll never be able to say that<\/em> again!\u201d Indeed, had that monk come to know her he\u2019d probably have wished he\u2019d never said it at all.<\/p>\n

Tara was a hermit by nature, and didn\u2019t actually live at Mt. Washington when I knew her; her home at that time was a little house across the valley. For some of the time I knew her, she also lived near Master\u2019s retreat at Twenty-Nine Palms.<\/p>\n

She approved of my enthusiasm for the work, but never realized that its direction was only incidentally toward strengthening the organization, but fundamentally toward reaching out to people with Master\u2019s message. To her, the needs of people were of very minor importance.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do they need with more books?\u201d she once asked me, commenting on the six or seven books of Master\u2019s that he\u2019d left in her care to edit and publish. \u201cPeople have all the books they need.\u201d She seemed to think that only idle curiosity could motivate anyone to want his commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita,<\/em> the New Testament, Revelation, Genesis, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,<\/em> Patanjali\u2019s Yoga Sutras,<\/em> and other priceless works that had come through him in a flood of divine inspiration.<\/p>\n

It was, in fact, a statement of hers to me regarding the Bhagavad Gita<\/em> that started the first ripple of trouble between us. Master had just been exulting to me that his Gita<\/em> commentaries would be out by Christmas of that year, 1950. I was sent to Tara\u2019s house later that day with a few letters, and mentioned to her Master\u2019s enthusiastic statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy Christmas!\u201d she exclaimed. \u201cIt won\u2019t be nearly<\/em> ready by then.\u201d<\/p>\n

I quoted her reply to Master on my return.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlways delays!\u201d he exclaimed. \u201cI will write her a note. You take it to her.\u201d My natural assumption was that he intended the note to be a scolding.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d I said to Tara repentantly when delivering his note to her. \u201cIt\u2019s my fault.\u201d<\/p>\n

As matters turned out, Master\u2019s note, whatever message it contained, was not a scolding. But from my words Tara could easily guess what had happened. My attempt to take the blame on my own shoulders erupted into a brief time of tension between Master and Tara.<\/p>\n

Master took me to task, later, for giving insufficient thought to my words before uttering them. Others seized on his scolding to voice displeasure with me also. To them Master spoke in my defense. \u201cWalter is very<\/em> sincere,\u201d he said. But me he allowed no defense. \u201cYou must be practical in your idealism,\u201d he insisted.<\/p>\n

Wise counsel, indeed! Still, I wonder what he would have said had she informed me that it would take another forty-six years, as it did, for his commentaries to come out in book form.<\/p>\n

In my book, The Path,<\/em> I omitted Tara\u2019s name. In the chapter \u201cA Spiritual Test,\u201d I could bring myself only to refer to her as \u201cthe senior editor.\u201d In the last period of our relationship she hurt me so deeply that I simply couldn\u2019t write of her as kindly as I felt Master\u2019s disciples deserved. Certain things she had said to me went simply too deep: for example, her statement: \u201cFrom now on, we want to forget that you ever lived!\u201d Today only, twenty years after the completion of my book, can I view our relationship with detachment, and feel for her once again the friendly appreciation I once felt. It isn\u2019t that I now see she was right. Rather, I see that our two premises regarding the needs of the work were so fundamentally different that, given her nature, she couldn\u2019t have treated me other than the way she did.<\/p>\n

I always knew intuitively that we would lock horns someday on our differences. I simply never believed she could possibly win. Her views were too utterly opposed to the basic needs of Master\u2019s missionary work; I was confident that he would never allow<\/em> her contractive outlook to win out. I hadn\u2019t counted on being 12,000 miles away in India while she carried on a determined offensive against me.<\/p>\n

For her part, I don\u2019t think it ever actually occurred to her that anyone could genuinely want<\/em> to reach out to people and help them. Such a desire would only, to her way of thinking, be a cover-up for personal ambition. She was determined that her philosophy become the officially accepted one in SRF.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery work,\u201d she said to them repeatedly, \u201cmust have a guideline. Our own must be to ask ourselves in every situation, \u2018What is best for the work?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

To me she said, after my appointment to the Board of Directors (it was she who had proposed the appointment), \u201cIn an organization, no one has a right even to think<\/em> except the members of the board of directors.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have in my possession a Christmas card from Tara Mata in which her greeting contains these words: \u201cTo the first vice president of SRF from the second president.\u201d For years I thought those words, \u201cfrom the second president,\u201d were a misprint, inasmuch as Tara was, nominally at least, the second vice president. It was … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nA Place Called Ananda — Chapter 5: Polarization - Swami Kriyananda: Lightbearer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A direct disciple recalls Tara Mata's influence in setting a direction for Paramhansa Yogananda's work.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.yoganandafortheworld.com\/story\/a-place-called-ananda-chapter-5-polarization\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Place Called Ananda — Chapter 5: Polarization - 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