NEVER TO RETURN:
A MODERN QUEST FOR ETERNAL TRUTH
A Multimedia Spiritual Adventure Memoir
by Sharon Janis
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you, yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you, believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.
– KAHLIL GIBRAN
Chapter Twenty-Two
GET A JOB
EIGHT MONTHS LATER, our new teacher arrived for the summer retreat. For many years, she was our first teacher's translator, and had been installed as guru after his passing, per his instructions. This woman was exquisitely beautiful, although that did not account for the effect she had on me. I had met many beautiful people before. None of them affected me like this.
I was surprised by how shy I became around this new teacher. If I saw her heading toward me down a hallway, I would try to take a different route. Looking back, perhaps there was a sense of foreboding about the depth of commitment and the level of spiritual work that was waiting for me around the corner. This woman touched my heart in a way that was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Although I had experienced great affection for my first teacher, somehow this new guru moved me on a more personal level. It was like having a huge crush on someone with no sexual connotations, just falling deeply in love with her soul. She was strong yet vulnerable, beautiful yet humble, brilliant yet simple – a combination of her own personal nature together with decades of committed spiritual practice and service at the feet of our first guru.
Until this point, I had never really fallen in love. I'd met my first boyfriend in summer camp at age 8, and dated sporadically from age 12. But nobody I had ever met affected my heart like either of these two masters. The first had entered the deepest recesses of my soul, but now this woman was affecting me as a person. Me, who grew up without really knowing love or affection. Me, who was free of attachment to any human being. I didn't know what it was about this woman, but she seemed to break into territories of my heart that I preferred to keep locked. I didn't want to feel so much for her. I didn't want to be attached to anybody. I didn't want to expect her to notice me, and I didn't want to be disappointed when she didn't. Something about this woman ripped through all my locks. I could hardly even bear to look at her.
With her entrance, my rational intellect crumbled, my heart awakened, and life once again broke into a new series of lessons. Until this time, my quest had been on a path the Indian scriptures call jnana yoga, the attainment of inner freedom through knowledge and understanding. Now I was entering the road of bhakti yoga, union with the Supreme through one-pointed devotion. This was way out of my league.
Our guru would sit in the main lobby every day before lunch time. As Gregorian chanting played over the sound system, the residents and visitors would gather in the lobby area for the practice of darshan — being in the presence of a saint or sage.
Several hundred people came together each day before lunch. Sometimes, our new teacher would just sit quietly; other times she would conduct business or chat with devotees. I knew this mainly from the reports of others, because I never went to these gatherings. That is how apprehensive I was in the presence of this teacher. And, conveniently enough, a daily chanting session had been scheduled in the meditation hall that very hour. We were singing the special mantras my first teacher used to sing privately with his close disciples; the ones I had memorized during the week after his passing. Usually only two or three of us participated in chanting these mantras with an audiotape in the main meditation hall. Everyone else was enjoying darshan in the lobby.
One day, I got curious, and decided to go to the lobby, mainly to see what was going on there. There, our new teacher was seated, with a large group of devotees gathered around her. The lobby had two levels, and I sat far away on the second level. Our teacher was wearing a big pair of sunglasses, so I couldn't really see where she was looking. Every now and then, she would turn and speak with the people sitting next to her, but I was too far away to hear or lip-read what she was saying. After a while, I started to get bored, just sitting there watching a group of other people also sit there. I had a lot of work to do back at the office.
In the midst of this thought, I felt her look at me. My entire body got palpably hot. I couldn't see her eyes at all. I could only assume she looked at me, but I didn't really know what was happening.
My video-department boss was sitting right next to our teacher. Gail stood up and pointed in my direction, signaling for me to come up to the front. At first, I remained seated. Why would she be calling me to come up there? Gail kept gesturing, and I finally gave in and motioned to ask, "Me?" She nodded "Yes."
I walked up to my teacher, swimming in a sea of sensations. I was quite reclusive at the time, and it was a shock to be publicly marched down this aisle, in front of hundreds of onlookers.
With the Gregorian music drifting through the air, I shifted into a more primordial level of what was happening. I was now the symbolic disciple kneeling before the Master, awaiting the command. This experience seemed to elicit memories of service and devotion from pre-me history, recorded deep within my psyche in what Carl Jung referred to as the collective unconscious. In an indescribable way, I dissolved, leaving only the archetype. She could ask me to slay demons or rescue her land from an enemy kingdom. She could ask me to pierce my heart with a sword. As if in slow motion, the master turned to me and spoke.
"You should go out and earn money."
I looked at her.
She looked back.
Inside, I felt that I had gotten off easy. I asked, "Should I stay here or go somewhere else?"
Now she melted! I saw it in her eyes. But I didn't know what was happening. My heart understood what was unfolding before me, but my mind could not figure it out.
My guru spoke with tenderness, "No, you should stay here but work outside for a few months, so you can have some spending money." With her nod, I bowed my head and walked away. I decided that instead of going to eat lunch, I would find a job.
I went to the corner store, and bought a newspaper for the first time in three years. Looking through the Help Wanted section, I circled a few possibilities. Some acquaintances walked by, and I mentioned to them that I was looking for work. One of them told me of an opening they had just heard about. A local resident owned a bungalow colony and was looking for housekeepers. In this area of the Catskill Mountains, there were several Hassidic bungalow colonies. Most of the occupants came up from New York City to stay for the summer. This work entailed preparing the bungalows for their arrival, and providing maid service once they arrived.
I applied, and got the job. The owner asked me if I would like to do a bit of cleaning in his house that afternoon, and I agreed. I cleaned for just over an hour, and received six dollars in pay.
Relieved at having found this work, I returned home. While heading toward the meditation hall to prepare for our late-afternoon chant, I ran into Gail, my video- department boss. I told her that my new job would begin the next day. Gail took the news well, considering it would be nearly impossible for anybody to walk in and take over all of my complex bookkeeping, duplicating, labeling, invoicing and mailing duties. I shared with her my desire to give our teacher the six dollars I had just earned, as a way of offering her the fruits of my labor. But we both knew I would probably be too shy to do it.
After the chant, my teacher was sitting right outside the doorway, in front of the outdoor temple. As devotees exited the meditation hall, they moved outside to join her there. I was carried with this flow, and somehow stepped right into the spot directly to the left of our teacher's chair. I sat down, as if the place had been reserved for me. Normally, I would never have been so bold, but at this point I was being moved by forces beyond my control.
I hoped to be able to muster up the courage to give her my first income. Even though it was only six dollars, I really wanted to offer it to her. But as I sat there, it became clear that I would not be able to fulfill this inner prompting. I was simply too shy to hand her the six bucks.
As I realized this, my teacher looked at me and said, "You'll have to find a job." She was giving me an opening, but I wasn't able to take it. With the words painfully lodged in my throat, I was frustrated and disappointed with myself. She turned to Gail and said, "You'll have to get two people to replace her."
I looked up with hope. Gail was anything but shy, and seeing my plight, she shot back quickly, "Well, we'll have to find them soon, since she's already found a job."
My teacher looked surprised, and asked, "She found a job?" She turned toward me. "You found a job?"
The excitement in my heart swelled. I lowered my eyes with a hesitant smile, and whispered, "Yes." I reached into my pocket and pulled out the six dollars, and with all the courage I could muster, handed them to her. "I'd like for you to have this. It's my first income."
She accepted my offering with another surprised smile. I had come back less than five hours after her instructions, with not only a job but some first income as well. I didn't think of this as anything extraordinary at the time. She had told me to get a job, and I did. No big deal.
My teacher asked about the work I had found. When I told her I would be cleaning bungalows, she observed, "You must be very strong from playing drums. Let me feel your muscle."
This made me smile, because I was proud of my strong arms and enjoyed showing them off. I made a muscle, and she reached to feel my arm, but then pulled me down into her lap. She held my head there, and lovingly stroked my hair for a few moments. This may have been the strongest expression of affection I had ever received. But there, with the Divine Mother caressing my soul, all I could think of was the red kum kum dot on my forehead. I didn't want to stain her robes.
She began to praise me, detailing how hard I worked. To my surprise, the onlookers began to chime in. "And she plays the drum and harmonium for so many chants." "And she stayed here for three cold winters." "And she studies Sanskrit in her free time." "And she's so nice to everyone."
Blushing at the attention, I was transported into a trance-like state. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and was somewhat uncomfortable yet nourishing at the same time. Beneath my surprise was the sweetness of being recognized and appreciated, right at the feet of my beloved guru. So much energy was moving through me that it was about all I could do to maintain my composure.
She handed the six dollars back to me. "You should wrap this in plastic and keep it forever. It's a good omen."
While walking away from this breathtaking event, I ran into a friend who was not aware of what had just taken place. She asked me if I could loan her a few bucks for dinner. Without thinking, I began to reach into my pocket, and in my stunned state, almost handed her those blessed bills. Fortunately, I caught myself in time.
The next morning, I went to work at my new job. These bungalows were disgustingly filthy. They required a lot of heavy-duty cleaning. As we began scrubbing, some of the cleaners who had worked there the previous summer told horror stories about what they’d experienced. As bad as it was cleaning the mess before us, they recalled, it was much worse once the families arrived. During the previous year, some of the housekeepers had been pushed by the families to scrub the linoleum floors practically until the patterned ink came off. The kids would run around dropping and spilling things right and left as if the cleaners were their personal servants. This did not sound like my cup of tea!
I considered that maybe this was not the right job for me, after all. At lunchtime, I told the supervisor that I might not be back that afternoon or ever. I thought it would be a good idea to check the Help Wanted section again for something better. There was a twinge of anxiety over the fact that I had just been praised for finding a job so quickly. But, after all, who would even know if I quit and looked for different work? Who would care? What I didn't realize was that while finishing off the morning's work of scrubbing, I was being made famous during the noontime darshan.
I slid into the ashram through one of the back doors, and headed toward the dining hall. The gathering had just disbanded, and everyone was getting ready for lunch. Several people stopped to mention that I had been the topic of discussion. I had been praised publicly again. This time, instead of feeling elation and joy, my heart began to sink. Our teacher had told the whole story about how she sent me out to work, and how I'd found a job and offered her my first income that very afternoon. It did sound pretty good!
But I had sadly demonstrated the truth of "easy come, easy go." I found the job in a couple of hours and had quit in just about as long. I was a sorry specimen of a human being. And here, as I wallowed in my lack of fortitude, were these people looking at me with admiration, expressing their respect for the great surrender I had revealed. Each person who praised me thought they were making me feel really good about myself. But every look of admiration was like another dart being fired into my ego.
I realized with a flash of relief that I could still return to my job that afternoon. I hadn't really, officially quit.
During the following week, I'd return home from my job each day to find that I had been praised again. One day, the manager came up to me and said, "She praised you three different times today." This left me in a sea of mixed emotions.
It was wonderful that this new teacher thought I was a good person, but I really didn't feel my actions deserved such lavish praise. Nevertheless, the ripples of my act continued to reverberate, day after day. Maybe my teacher could see that this was the kind of ego work I needed right now. Maybe she was trying to build whatever structures of confidence I had missed out on during my childhood. Maybe she wanted to guide some of the other devotees by using my response to her direction as a good example. At the time, I had no idea why she was praising me so much.
A week later, we had a celebration for our teacher's birthday. Often, the devotees would put on a talent show to celebrate her birthday, and one had also been planned for this year’s celebrations. A panel of judges assembled and watched many proposed acts to see which ones to include in the celebration. Some friends and I had been gathering during the wintertime to learn Indian devotional songs called bhajans, and we decided to sing one of them for the panel of judges. Soon afterward, a message came from our guru. She did not want to have any talent show acts this year, but requested, “Kumuda’s bhajan group should sing during darshan.”
During our birthday celebration program, as devotees moved forward to personally meet the guru, our bhajan group began performing Hindi and Sanskrit devotional songs for her and the several thousand devotees who had gathered for this birthday celebration. This was another amazing experience for me, to sing the Indian songs learned during the previous winters right in front of our new teacher.
It seemed that wonderful times in this place were never 100% pleasant or easy, just as difficult times were never 100% unpleasant. During the most wonderful moments, there always seemed to be an unexpected challenge. You might be in the middle of a magical moment, and the crown would fall off your tooth. Or you'd have a chance to sing devotional songs to your teacher, and the musical instrument would break. That is exactly what happened on her birthday.
After our first song, the harmonium organ broke. We had to switch to another harmonium that could not be adjusted to the same lower key I was used to. This meant my solos would be four notes higher than my planned key, which had already been at the absolute limit of my vocal range. There was no way out, except to cancel my songs. But to me that was not even an option. I had to let go of my concepts. It was not a question of if I could do it, or how I could do it; I was simply going to do it.
Somehow, I did manage to hit even the highest notes. I was thrust into a mental state of witness-consciousness and watched as the singing moved through me. Maybe my subconscious mind went in and opened up my vocal cords. Perhaps the magic of surrender allowed my body to extend itself on my behalf. I wasn't even nervous. In fact, I was probably less nervous than I would have been if the harmonium hadn't broken.
Listen to our entire concert from this birthday darshan HERE 
As the darshan line ended, we completed our last song. The audience applauded, and my guru prepared to begin her talk. However, before speaking, my guru stopped for a moment and glanced toward me.
"Kumuda? Do you go to the Shiva Arati?"
The Shiva Arati was a chant sung every evening in the temple that I usually led on the harmonium. She smiled as I nodded, and gestured while inviting me up to her chair, "Come."
Once again, I had to stand up in front of a large crowd of people in my five-dollar T-shirt, funky corduroy pants, bare feet, and a beautiful blue velvet jacket that my guru’s secretary had brought to me as a gift from my guru early that morning. I walked up to her seat, and she handed me a set of large Tibetan cymbals as a gift. I was already in an energy-filled, surrendered space from the hour and a half of singing, and now came this dramatic, public presentation. My mind was in shocked stillness as I sat back down.
Our guru gave a wonderful lecture about birthdays, grace, and her experiences with her guru, our first teacher. I started to relax and enjoy the discourse, relieved that she was not going to praise me publicly again. At one point she was sharing with us about the resistance she had felt years earlier, when our first guru had instructed her to start giving public discourses. In the midst of this story, she said, "It's good if you resist. Because in my life I resisted him. So if you don't resist, I won't really like you." This was an unusual statement for her to make, and it struck me right in the gut.
The entire week of praise was instantly overshadowed by these new words. "Oh no," I thought, "Now she won't like me because I didn't resist her!" Little did I realize this was likely intended as an “ego massage” to prepare me for the next bounce to the other side of the praise and blame continuum.
A few minutes later, my teacher's glance brushed past me once again, as she began to speak once again about what had occurred the previous week. "A very fresh incident happened, and I'm totally overwhelmed by this." I held my breath as she continued, "And I won't mention the person's name because I don't want the person to turn red. I don't want you to spot the person.”
She paused to give a mischevious smile. After all, our guru had been talking about this for a week now, so most of the audience already knew who she was referring to. However, for anyone who didn’t know for sure, our teacher added, “She has been working in the video department for many years now, a very, very fine girl."
By this time, I was relieved to hear my guru praising me again. She told the whole story, placing me in a very flattering light, and then looked up to the picture of our first teacher. "Why did this happen? Because she's totally one with him."
Now, this bit of talk contained many more teachings about learning to give selflessly that became a guiding beacon in my life for years and decades to come. But in this moment, I just was mainly experiencing a state of shock, thinking, "O my. Now things have gone too far." I wondered, what did she mean by that? The idea of being one with our first teacher, this great realized being, insinuated that maybe I was up there too. But I knew I wasn't! When my guru said this, two things happened inside me.
First, I had to stop ignoring the good qualities I had cultivated through all these years of ashram life, dedication, and grace. I gained a new respect for myself and the process I had been through. If she could even say such a thing without bursting out laughing, I must have attained something very precious. A new self- respect established itself in my mind and heart.
At the same time, however, I feared that self-esteem was only a hop away from egotistical pride. This led to the second effect of her talk. I wondered, "Why would she be trying to build up my ego? She's supposed to be eradicating it!" I had heard that the job of the guru was to dissolve your limited egocentricity so the inner Self could shine forth unobstructed. At the time I often mistakenly interpreted self-respect as ego, thinking a truly humble person would never speak or think too well of himself. Obviously, I have a different philosophy now!
As my guru continued to praise my actions, I remembered a talk she had once given about the methods a guru can use to work on a disciple. Whenever our first teacher was really tough on her, she noticed that it often heralded an upcoming positive breakthrough. But when he was especially nice, it was sometimes a set-up for an especially difficult test around the corner. One analogy explained that the guru would sometimes puff up someone's ego so it would make a louder, more efficient pop with the inevitable burst. As I put all this together, my delight in being praised became mixed with apprehension. I suspected that there might be a less enjoyable counterbalance to this event, waiting for the right moment to snap itself around my karmic neck.
On to
Chapter
Twenty-Three
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