Never to Return: A Modern Quest For Eternal Truth, Chapter 25: "Nemesis"

NEVER TO RETURN:

A MODERN QUEST FOR ETERNAL TRUTH

A Multimedia Spiritual Adventure Memoir
by Sharon Janis

The play is enlivened by the presence of trouble-makers.
They are necessary to lend zest to the play –
there is no fun without them.

Chapter Twenty-Five

NEMESIS

DURING MY FIRST WINTER in the ashram, a man came from Los Angeles to supervise preparations of the building and grounds for our upcoming summer retreat. He was the kind of guy who wore Armani leather jackets and dark sunglasses – very stylish and clearly a VIP. I was taking care of all of the ashram’s mailing needs at the time, and, upon his arrival, he asked me to package and send a box of chocolates to his wife for Valentine's Day.

Ralph seemed like a friendly enough guy, and even offered me a little sampler box with four Godiva chocolate hearts for myself. At the time, I’d had no money to buy sweets – especially top quality sweets like these – and therefore was especially appreciative of his delicious gift.

Who would have known he was to become my nemesis? Those chocolate hearts, unbeknownst to him or to me, may have been like the ceremonial bow one takes before moving in to destroy one's opponent.

Ralph was from the Middle East, and had been through some heavy-duty war situations there, such as running through streets with bombs going off around him. Once, Ralph had been running for his life, and saw the image of a man’s face guiding him to safety. Years later, he encountered our first guru and recognized the face that had guided him and had likely saved his life. Soon after meeting our guru, he jumped fully into serving and participating in the path, and had worked his way up through increasingly higher positions of responsibility in the ashram heirarchy. When I first met Ralph, he was the head of the construction crew and the landscaping department. By the time our second guru was in place, he was pretty much in a position to oversee everything being done in every department of the ashram.

Ralph’s mentality was different from any I had known in my life. This guy could be the kindest and most charming man in the world one moment, but in a flash he'd bare his teeth and attack. Through his presence in my life, I gained a lot of inner strength and learned many difficult but important lessons.

This, after all, was what I had come to this school for. I wanted to be transformed. I wanted to learn to respond to the universe in a new way. I wanted to rise above pettiness and get rid of all the garbage that had accumulated on top of my pure soul. I wanted desperately to grow into that great being I knew was inside myself. Ralph probably had similar goals, but seemed to require different lessons to get there. His abrasive behavior gave new challenges to many students and devotees of our path.

On the road to personal and spiritual freedom, adversity is grist for the mill, it’s like sandpaper smoothing our rough edges. The choices we make in responding to our life situations is part of what the Indian scriptures call sadhana: our efforts to consciously participate in the personal evolution of our soul through this journey of human experience.

The importance of challenging experiences has become clearer to me as I’ve contemplated my most valuable experiences from this time. During these years in the ashram, many wonderful people had come into my life. There had been sweet moments, light moments, joyful and blissful moments – so many amazing, powerful blessings. Yet, somehow, when I look at the life lessons that most transformed me and created the greatest leaps of understanding, faith, self-control, and inner strength, most of these lessons came from people like Ralph, or from circumstances that might be viewed as harsh or challenging. While these events were occurring, I couldn't often see the positive effects coming from such difficulties, however, upon reflection with an objective eye focused beyond surface comforts, these challenges and breakthroughs are some of my most treasured moments.

In 1984, my guru had invited me to India to join her and a small group of devotees on a driving tour through India, where she gave large scale programs and met with Indian devotees. My assigned job was to shoot super-8 film of the tour. One day, my teacher was standing outside, talking informally with the maharaj whose house we were using for programs. Super-8 camera in hand, I started filming a few shots of the conversation, and then noticed my guru’s hands. Behind her back, she was fingering her rosary-type beads, called a japa mala. I was moved to see my guru engaged in silent focus on the highest, even in the midst of conversation with a royal figure. I thought this would make a beautiful image, and moved in to get a close-up of her hands. At that moment, Ralph came up behind me and sneered, "Why do you always shoot stupid things?"

I turned around, and was so surprised by his lack of politeness that I took a quick shot of his face with the camera. "There. Now I've got another one."

Within a few days, I was mysteriously sent back to the United States, being told that “they need you for editing.” I don't really know if this decision had anything to do with Ralph specifically, but the timing was remarkably synchronistic.

Another memorable experience with Ralph occurred the following year, during an evening program in Los Angeles, where our teacher was giving programs for several months. She had brought me out from the New York ashram to take some video classes at UCLA. I’d also direct the cameras for my guru’s programs whenever I wasn't attending evening classes.

My task as video director was to tell our three cameramen what to film, speaking back and forth through our system of audio headsets. On my first day as director, our teacher came out and sat in her chair to give a lecture to the two or three thousand students and visitors who had assembled in the very nice rented theater.

As she spoke, I directed one of the cameras to shoot some cutaway shots of the audience watching, reacting, and laughing. These kinds of clips would be useful in adding color and ambiance to future video edits of these talks, as well as for bridging edits we might like to make in the talks, for example to create a half-hour video from an hour-long talk. I was seated in the front left corner of the theater, in front of a console with small video monitors showing what each camera was filming, along with several video decks to record it all.

Here was my guru espousing profound spiritual teachings that I wanted to hear and learn, yet I could no longer let myself become absorbed in what she was saying. Instead, I had to pay attention to what each of the cameras was filming. It was fun to have this new responsibility, although I couldn't help but notice that I might be missing some valuable teachings at the same time. Of course, this concern was mitigated by the fact that, as video editor, I would likely have the opportunity to watch these talks not just once, but perhaps many times.

Here we were in this huge theater with thousands of people, and they were all sitting completely silently while listening with full attention to our teacher’s words. It sounded almost as though our teacher was giving her talk in an empty room – that is how still and quiet everyone had become. And there we were, the cameramen and me, gabbing away in a nonstop stream of whispered directions.

"OK, camera 2, go in for a close-up; 3, get some medium-wide shots of the audience."

The phone next to me began to flash. The only other phone hooked up to our system was the one in our guru’s meeting room, behind the stage. Since she was in the hall giving her talk, it was Ralph who was staying in that room, watching all that we were filming from his own set of monitors. I answered the phone, and heard a terse voice say, "Hey you, director. Why do you always shoot ugly people? They all look like you!" It was Ralph.

Not since my childhood had anyone insulted me so blatantly. This situation gave me the opportunity to make a choice. I could let his insult get to me and respond with anger or victimization, or I could let it go and stay focused on the task in front of me, continuing to direct the three cameras as carefully and lovingly as I could.

Because of my desire to serve, I just let it go. I didn't think, "Oh no, I must be ugly," nor did I think, "No, I'm not!" I simply put the phone down and continued to perform the task before me. It took all my focus to surmount the other potential responses waiting to bring me down.

These new challenges were digging deeply into forgotten pockets of my psyche. Perhaps such circumstances were coming because my growing spiritual foundation was now strong enough to support transformation of some limiting personality patterns I had accumulated during this, and perhaps other, lifetimes. With a difficult childhood, being mistreated was certainly one of my more troublesome patterns from this lifetime.

That is why I didn't storm out the door when this man gave me a hard time. Even though I might get upset or frustrated on one level, from a higher perspective, I saw that these challenges were just the right medicine for my spiritual growth. They pushed me into a new strength, a more dependable emotional steadiness.

There were even times when Ralph would lie and tell our teacher I had done something I hadn't. Most of the time, I wouldn't even stick up for myself; I just let him say whatever he wanted to. Once Ralph told our teacher that I had erased a batch of tapes of our first teacher, which of course I would never have done. When my teacher called me in and questioned me about it, I eventually explained that I had not erased any tapes. At the time, she said to me, "You never stick up for yourself. You just let anyone say anything they want about you. That's why everyone thinks you're whimsical."

With my limited ideas about how a spiritual person should behave, I didn't believe that sticking up for myself was ever appropriate. With this comment, my guru seemed to be guiding me to learn how to stick up for myself, but I didn't know how to do this. It seemed easier and more spiritual to just let people say and do whatever they’d say and do, without trying to fight, object, or protect myself from them.

This is an example of how a valuable spiritual concept may also need to be balanced out with more practical responses. Such an extreme surrender to never fighting back is appropriate when you reach an advanced spiritual stage where the Divine and your soul are in such perfect harmony that nothing appears outside that is not welcomed inside. However, I wasn’t yet established in this awareness, and so some of my lack of response also came from a sense of personal insecurity and my tendency to fall back into old patterns of unresponsiveness. I was also afraid that if this man became angry, he might cause even more trouble for me.

Here was a test that mirrored some of the difficulties I had encountered as a child. At that vulnerable time, I'd had no option but to withstand discourteous behavior silently, and this tendency became incorporated in my relationship with the world and people around me. Even with this personal guidance from my guru to speak up for myself, I fell back into my tried and true methods, accepting this unacceptable treatment silently. Nevertheless, her words have continued to guide me in other situations during the decades since that message was first given, as I’ve strived to find a balance between self-surrender and self-defense.

My guru’s statement about my not sticking up for myself also helped me to contemplate where this tendency came from so I could keep the good reasons and let go of the harmful ones. I realized that along with coming from childhood insecurities, my lack of external response to incorrect assertions about me also reflected a certain peace of mind.

During these years, my main focus was on the states of consciousness I would enter while chanting, meditating, and watching video after video of elevated wisdom every day. Why come down from all these great experiences to get into a petty "he said, she said" argument? A new awareness was developing in me through all these years of intense spiritual practice. I became more and more convinced that, on the big picture level of universal creation, everything is as it should be, always. One of the great statements from the ancient Indian scriptures expresses that "This is perfect, and that is perfect. Even if you take some of the perfect from the perfect, only perfection remains."

Now I'm not suggesting that I always walked around in this transcendent space, but it was definitely becoming more apparent to me. Whenever I'd find myself getting irritated by people like Ralph, one of my choices was always to rise above the irritation and chuckle inwardly at the strange forms our universe creates to amuse and entertain itself. Sometimes I could see that God, Consciousness, the One that is in all, was masquerading as Ralph and as me. With this glimpse, I was also able to feel deep affection and love for this man, even when he was giving me a hard time.

Sometimes Ralph would tell me to do something that I would later be reprimanded for by our guru. I'd usually weather the chastisement silently. He would stand there and watch me get busted for doing exactly what he had told me to do, and wouldn't say a word on my behalf. What a good nemesis!

Nevertheless, I believed that these experiences were also important spiritual tests and lessons. Because of this, even when I felt agitated about certain outer events, deep inside I would also relish the friction and growth these challenges were creating in me. The steadiness that came from hours of chanting, meditating, serving and studying spiritual teachings allowed me to maintain a peaceful inner composure, even in the face of injustice. There was nobody inside me who wanted to fight.

Ralph was a worthy opponent – he was intelligent, creative, confident, and fun-loving. Sometimes he was absolutely sweet and loving toward me, acting almost like a big brother. His undependability required me to learn how to be flexible in my responses to him. He was as undependable as life itself.

One reason this man had so much stature around the ashram was due to his admirable dedication to our teacher and the organization. He worked tirelessly, and was often able to complete magnificent projects within seemingly miraculous deadlines.

In some ways, it was better to be on Ralph's bad side, because those who were on his good side were inevitably asked to surmount impossible challenges in fulfilling his creative quests. During some years, I was on Ralph's good side for months at a time. The benefit of being on his good side was that he was able to cut through a lot of the red tape in meeting my requirements. For example, instead of my having to present each request to the managers and other committees, Ralph might quickly take care of the situation, whether it was a request for new equipment or more assistants in the department.

During one winter, Ralph sent me a telex message from India with a list of videos he wanted to have edited in the next week. Someone would be going to India on the following Sunday, and Ralph wanted me to have this list of tapes completed in time to send with the person. I picked up the message, and saw a list of twenty-five videos! This list would take a year to do! Each video had to be research, scripted, and carefully edited, with music choices and narration recording if necessary. What kind of crazy request was this?

Obviously, I would never be able to complete twenty-five videos in one week, but I saw this request as bringing a good challenge, and decided to give it all I had. After all, it was the dead of winter in the Catskill mountains, so any excitement was welcome. During the next seven days, I worked non-stop, around the clock. The only exception I made to this workathon was to go to the chant each morning, which I did tend to doze through.

The first video was a complex, ten-minute montage of my second teacher's life, from childhood on, based on a poem she had written and recited during a recent talk. The scripting and editing of this video took a day and a half.

Then came a documentary about the history of the building of our ashram temple. This video required a much more well-researched script. Fortunately, there were two people in the video department who were available to help write the script for this one, which I then edited on video.

After this, I scripted and edited a half-hour newsfeature-style piece showing highlights of our teacher's recent tour to meditation centers around the country. By this time, I was beginning to hallucinate from lack of sleep.

A friend gave me some of her diet pills to help me through the last couple days. By Saturday morning, I had completed six videos. The courier was leaving on Sunday afternoon. I had time for one more. The next tape on the list was an important but demanding one. The anniversary of our first teacher's passing was coming up in a few weeks. This was to be a forty-five minute program showing highlights of his three world tours, and it was going to be sent to hundreds of meditation centers around the world. A video like this could have taken months to complete, but I somehow managed to finish it just in time to send to India with the other six completed edits.

After handing the package to the courier, I went back to the video room and sat down, staring blankly into space. I was too wired to go to sleep, yet my mind was completely still. In spite of the exhaustion, I felt pretty good. I had scripted and edited seven videos in just as many days. I had achieved something I would have considered to be absolutely impossible.

I could hear footsteps coming toward the video room, and looked up to see one of the ashram managers walk into the room. I smiled and told him that the tapes were on their way. He looked a little uncomfortable, and said that he had been waiting for me to finish so he could deliver a message to me from India. "They're not going to let the video crew shoot the yajna fire ceremony this year, because your editing is so lousy."

I couldn't do anything but smile incredulously at these words. I might have expected some sort of thanks or praise for my dedicated efforts, and here I was being insulted. I didn't even feel too agitated about the message. I was just too exhausted to buy into it.

This request for seven videos in seven days was an example of being on Ralph’s good side. When Ralph was in "nemesis" mode, it was clear that arguing or talking back to him was not really a viable option. Or else, as he shouted to me once across the lobby after I’d accidentally allowed a door to close loudly, "With an attitude like yours, I'm not even going to let you wash toilets in this place!"

One purpose of this holy place was to move all of us beyond the limited arenas of egoic illusions of power and to bring us to the seat of true power within the soul. Nevertheless, you can be sure that certain people like Ralph, who were given positions of authority, sometimes seemed to be taking a very long and scenic route to this ultimate goal of freedom from ego! Regardless, even during the difficult times, I also understood that each person must learn their lessons in their own way and in the right order. Many personal and spiritual lessons seem to come only after we’ve made mistakes or had our comfort zone tresspassed upon – either by our own negative potentials or by the actions of others toward us.

At first, my only choice of response to Ralph’s taunting seemed to be my usual method of silent acceptance, but a few times I managed to find other forms of responding, such as acting innocent and unaware in ways that pointed out his folly.

One day, for example, Ralph asked me what my name was. He knew that my spiritual name was Kumuda, and obviously wanted to know what my American name was. But I didn’t feel so ready to give up that info to him.

Now, I knew who Sharon Tate was, the pregnant woman who had been brutally murdered by Charles Manson's followers. But I managed to suppress my shock and looked up with an innocent face. "Who?"

He didn't know whether to be angry or bewildered at my naiveté. Inside, admittedly, I was chuckling.

Then came the chanting video challenge. That winter, I had been asked to make a special video for our teacher's upcoming tour, that would explain the meaning, purpose, and benefits of chanting God’s name. I really wanted to do a good job on this video. I had recently received several messages from my teacher, expressing her dissatisfaction with my videos.

While receiving such messages, I was still being given projects to work on. Her words were clearly intended to inspire me to improve my abilities, and that they did. One letter had expressed, "I do hope that you make good use of the skill that you've got. So far I haven't seen one video that makes me feel, 'This is it! This is it! This is it!' So, I'm waiting for this video. When will it be?"

Over the previous few years, I had put great effort into contemplating how to become a better editor, and how to create that one video that would make my guru’s heart sing. This became an important part of my spiritual path. I studied books on editing and prayed to God to grant me the boon of being a great editor. I meditated on how to improve my skills. Once, while editing a special winter scene, I was moved to spend several hours walking in the snow beforehand so I could really incorporate my experience of this white fluffiness into the piece. I put all I could into this goal of becoming an expert editor and scriptwriter, and my skills had indeed been improving through these efforts.

I was starting to gain more confidence in my abilities, and decided to pour my heart, mind, and soul into creating this chanting video. Maybe this would be that one video my guru was waiting for. I spent weeks researching quotes and footage, and came up with my first really polished script. Then I put together a carefully crafted first edit.

Ralph had recently arrived at the upstate New York ashram for a short visit, and would be in charge of approving videos while he was there. I was really excited to show him this edit, because it was the most professional first edit I had made. I thought he was really going to like it. Ralph had been sweet and brotherly to me when he arrived, and when I phoned, he told me to bring the video right on down. I brought the tape to his office and popped it into the VCR. Ralph sat down to watch, and I hit the play button. Just before the first shot came on, some construction crew workers entered the room to talk with Ralph. He got up and walked to an entirely different section of the large office to go over some budgeting figures with them. His back was toward the television screen, so I hit the pause key.

Ralph turned around. "I didn't tell you to stop playing it. Just keep it playing."

I rolled the tape again, and looked over to see Ralph standing far away, still with his back to the television and me. The video played on, and eventually ended. I pressed the rewind button so he could watch it properly after his meeting. Ralph finished talking with the crew workers and came back over to where I was seated. He looked me right in the eye and said, "Forget it. It's lousy. Don't ever show it to anyone."

My jaw dropped in shock. He had been very friendly to me lately, so I was not expecting this dramatic shift back into combat mode. I had been caught off- guard. I could have said "But you didn't even see it," but obviously we both knew that he hadn't seen it. He was playing a game, a power play. Nevertheless, there was no other manager for me to turn to for help – Ralph was responsible for approving or not approving the videos, and that was that.

This experience was both difficult and easy to take at the same time. It was painfully difficult until I was able to work within my mind and heart to let go and experience the freedom of detachment – detachment from all the work and care I had put into this project, and detachment from the hopeful satisfaction of finally making a video that my teacher might be pleased with. I moved into a new space of acceptance that whatever happened was the will of the Supreme. At first, I was angry, and could feel the anger eating away at me. So I had to move my experience above the event and into the Supreme Self that is beyond all events, all efforts, and all videos. This shift is different from just going into denial. It is a way to become greater than any obstacle by moving into identification with the conscious energy through which the circumstances themselves were created.

All the emotional force that would come with my shocks, angers, and frustrations would boil down, with the fire of detachment, into energy itself. Then this same energy could be used to fuel a breakthrough into higher understanding.

The important thing was that I had performed my service with devotion and care. I decided that it was not necessary for my actions to achieve any more result than that. Nothing done with love is ever wasted.

Perhaps you’ve seen images of Tibetian Buddhists who spend weeks to create a beautiful and elaborate mandala painting using delicate and carefully controlled streams of colored powders. With perfect focus, these monks create magnificent tapestries of intricate and perfectly mirrored patterns of lines and shapes, and after the masterpiece is completed, they will run a finger through the design or dump all the powders off of the canvas.

This act of artistic surrender is an expression of the impermanance of life, and a testament to their selfless service in creating such an intricate and beautiful work without having any personal expectation for that work – even the simple enjoyment of enjoying its beauty in the future. This practice affirms that nothing in this ephemeeral world will outlast the sands of time, and through the years, many of my videos were also offered up to those same sands by various approval committees. These videos were not necessarily destroyed, but ended up stored, unused and unseen, on what we jokingly referred to as “The Kumuda Memorial Shelf”. After my meeting with Ralph, this new chanting video was also added to the shelf, never to return.

Even though I’d more or less surrendered to letting go of this chanting video, a more difficult part of this test came when I returned to the editing room to begin editing the next video. How could I maintain my creative enthusiasm in the face of these frustrations and disappointments? Anyone would have wanted to quit at this point. Under normal circumstances, I would have stormed out the door. But this was not an ordinary job, and these were not normal circumstances. I packed up the chanting source tapes, filed away my script, and began the next video.

I was a seeker of eternal truth. I had made a deep personal commitment to this quest. How could I give up and turn back now? A Sufi poem asks the seeker of truth, "Not even four thorns have pricked your foot and you are ready to leave your path?" I didn't want to be so weak. I wanted to be unconditionally free. I couldn't quit. I couldn't give up. I tried even harder on the next video.