Unfortunately, I had come down with a bad case of a cold or flu -
am never quite sure how to tell the difference. I was achy, feverish,
sniffling, coughing, and quite weak. But somehow, being sick in the
ashram environment was different from being sick anywhere else. The
experience could more easily be seen as a simple karmic or purifying event.
For example, if a certain program or service came up that you were meant
to attend, the illness would often just hop right out of you during that time,
sometimes to return, and sometimes to be gone for good.
Just as the multiple personality research that I'd studied during
my youth had shown, we do have a great amount of control about all kinds of
physical circumstances that most people consider to be completely involuntary -
such as multiple personality cases where one personality needs to wear glasses,
while another does not need glasses while looking through the very same
physical eyes, and other examples, as I've covered in earlier chapters.
Along with this come the enlightening scriptures of Kashmir Shaivism, positing
that everything in the entire universe is basically voluntary, in fact
orchestrated by the supreme will of the greater Self within ourselves.
I was sick and weak with this cold or flu, but was still feeling
well enough during the course hours to attend without having to disturb anyone
with sniffles or coughing. Our guru entered the course hall, and we knew
that we were up for some magical ecstatic chanting.
First we had a dancing chant, where everyone dances a simple step
around a fire while chanting and clapping our hands. At first, I stayed
seated in a chair at the back of the room, feeling too weak to join in.
But then I saw Charity James, a long-time devotee from England, who was in her
90's and nevertheless was joining in the dance. This sight made me think
that I should be dancing too, and so I got up and danced in the slower outer
circles.
Eventually, our guru joined in with the dance, and soon, we were dancing out of the hall, following our ecstatic dancing guru like an entire town of children following the pied piper.
We danced through the
grounds, and suddenly, there was a movement underway in the crowd.
People were pushing to get closer to our guru.
Instead of focusing on what was important — the inner
experience that was being brought about by the course and our guru's sharing of
her ecstatic dancing, many were focused outwardly as guru groupies, or guru
gropies — groping to get a better position closer to her physical form,
perhaps hoping she might look at them, conveying the blessing that many would
feel with even a moment of receiving her glance. People were getting
greedy, and that greed was making them less polite and more pushy and
self-serving.
As I write this chapter, Thanksgiving has recently passed, along
with the Friday after Thanksgiving, which is often called Black Friday due to
the massive shopping it invokes. Newspapers and television sets have
been flashing a wild scene filmed right as a Walmart store opened its doors on
Black Friday. The crowd pushed forward with aggressive force, and even
elderly people were trampled without the slightest care or consideration.
In certain circumstances, people can turn into animals, and this is what
happened right in the midst of our beautiful Catskill mountain chanting dance.
This was not the first time people had jockeyed for positions
around our guru, but somehow it was the worst, especially in contrast to the
beauty of the day. Often our guru would let certain bad behaviors slip
by. After all, when you're dealing with tens of thousands of close
devotees of all shapes, sizes, and natures, reprimanding bad behavior could
become a full time job. Also, there was a certain trust in the
intelligent power of the universe, which the Indian scriptures call Shakti.
Sometimes our guru would also let things get somewhat out of hand so the
people involved could learn and improve their ways. This idea has also
given me solace when things in the outer world seem to be going downhill.
Challenging times teach us many lessons, including that there is always
an opportunity and possibility for learning more about the nature of this
universe, recognizing how results follow actions, and taking steps to improve
our choices in the future.
But on this day, our guru stopped the whole show. She
stopped the instrument players, the drummer, and all the chanters. She
stood atop an outdoor stand, in front of a large bronze statue of Shiva Nataraj
— the dancer God who dances this universe into existence as well as into
destruction. There, our guru berated the whole lot of us.
She asked what was wrong with us to be pushing each other like
that. "Are you in a third world country and you need to get food?
Is that why you have to push?" This well-deserved reprimand
went on for quite some time before the chanting dance continued across the
street and around the lake there. I didn't feel too personally guilty
about this bad behavior, because I'd been staying toward the back of the group
due to feeling ill and weak from the flu. Also, I wasn't usually one to
participate in this kind of groupie behavior, although this lecture definitely
made sure I was even more careful not to fall into the group pushiness anytime
in the future.
After dancing around the lake, we headed back into the upper
gardens, where our guru started to dance on top of a small hill. This
guru could really dance. Devotees were standing around the hill chanting
and dancing along, when our guru began tossing out pieces of fruit to us -
apples, oranges, and bananas. It was considered to be a great gift to
receive blessed fruit right from this great one's hands, and we were all about
ready for a bit of nourishment after dancing so ecstatically.
I generally made it a point not to get caught in greed when my
gurus gave out gifts. Early in my journey on this path, our first guru
was handing out chocolates in a special meeting. I was twenty years old,
and happened to be sitting right at his feet — just a few inches
away. As Muktananda started passing out the chocolates, I'd looked at him
and communicated silently with my mind and heart to him, "You can keep the
chocolate. Just give me liberation." As far as I could tell, I
was the only one of the hundred or so devotees gathered there who did not
receive a piece of chocolate, and instead of feeling disappointed, I was
elated. This experience had set the stage for me to stay more or less
free from the greediness for outer gifts that some devotees seemed to have
quite strongly.
Now, as my second guru tossed gifts of fruit while continuing to
dance and chant on a small hilltop, I stood back, a bit away from the
crowd. Along with not wanting to step into the stampeding herd mentality,
I was feeling too weak to be too close to these wild people jumping and lunging
for pieces of fruit. Clearly, our guru's words had not lasted too long
in the memories of many of the students.
At one point, my guru looked toward me and seemed to make an extra
effort to throw a banana extra far and right in my direction. With
nobody around me, I simply raised my hand to catch the gift, when Manohara, a
friend who I'd worked with in the garden department, literally pushed me to the
ground and grabbed the banana right as it was falling into my hand. I
was even more shocked to see the rabid look of glee on her face as she looked
at me flat on the ground. I asked her, "Do you think that Gurumayi
wants us to receive her prasad like that?"
Manohara actually responded, "I don't care. I would
have done anything to get a piece of that fruit."
The goal of Siddha Yoga is the following
awareness:
I am the Self. I am Consciousness. I am perfect. I am the Truth.
— Swami Muktananda
I sometimes think this may be the day that both my guru and I
realized that something was seriously on the wrong track. This path had gotten
too big to stay properly focused, and it was going into the wrong direction of
looking more like a groupie situation than a means to the highest states of
enlightenment.
I had an even more impactful demonstration of this downward turn
several years later, when Suze and her friends spread the false rumors about
me. Their rumors began to flood
our path, and brought forth mean and suspicious behaviors toward me from many
devotees, including those whom I'd considered dear friends.
Several other not-so-dear friends were all too happy to add their
own rumors and aspersions into the mix to knock me down, if just for the rush
of feeling better than someone else. We were back in elementary school
again, and these people wanted to make me the cootie.
These rumors and their repercussions began just before I became
ill, and they continued to swirl around and steal the goodwill of my spiritual
community away from me until I eventually felt unwelcome at the local
meditation center.
In the midst of this challenge, I was preparing for the
possibility of leaving this world and striving to follow an inner command to
“share what you've learned,” by writing a book that would hopefully help to
bring greater light to the world. In an ideal scenario one might imagine how
wonderful it would have been to embark on such a wonderful project with the
love and support of your friends and community, but for me, that was not going
to be the case.
Our first guru had spoken many times about wanting to create a meditation revolution and fill the world with saints. Our second guru was also speaking frequently about the importance of sharing the spiritual wisdom we've learned and becoming beacons of light for the world.
It is time that the devotees of Siddha Yoga in the United States
begin spreading spirituality throughout the world,
become torchbearers, beacons of light.
— Gurumayi Chidvilasananda
Everything on the guru front was supporting my inspirations and aspirations, but most responses from the community were quite negative, and at times, even nasty.
I was able to continue my endeavors in spite of the outer lack of
support because I wasn't writing for money or for the approval of others. My freedom from concern over such
things came fairly easily when I kept in my awareness the likely possibility
that I was on my way out from this world, and in light of the inner guidance regarding my mission and service to the world for however long
I am here, "First you have to share what you've learned."
In fact, this great betrayal from Suze and my spiritual community
had brought me to a point where I was actually emotionally ready to go, as in leave
this world. I was happy to stay, and also happy to go. My willingness to
leave wasn't quite as dramatic as it may sound, although it did include
feelings of sadness and disappointment about all that had taken place.
Simultaneous to seeing this world with my usual senses, mind, and
emotions, with my higher consciousness I could also see this world as an
illusion-based appendage or reflection upon the grand Allness of universal
creation.
While “exploring the unconscious” during my college years, I'd first
encountered the idea that this entire physical universe is like a baby finger
on the body of a great, infinitely dimensional expression that the ancient
vedic scholars could only, finally, call "That". In the years
since that initial epiphany, I'd been blessed by great spiritual masters and
studied powerful scriptures from ancient traditions. I'd chanted for thousands of hours in Sanskrit, and was
somewhat on a first-name basis with some of the most profound spiritual wisdom
of all time.
The Bhagavad Gita scripture from India describes death as similar
to disrobing from old clothes and taking on others that are new. From
space of this kind of awareness, the idea of "death" didn't seem
quite so shocking or daunting as it might have previously. In fact,
during this time, I had both a higher and lower response to the thought of
death as well as to all of the events, experiences, blessings, and challenges.
A wonderful Kashmir Shaivism scripture called the Shiva Sutras
describes different states of consciousness, from the lowest state of usual
day-to-day awareness to the sublime realm of great transcendence, called the
"turiya" state. This scripture says that this higher state
should be brought into the lower states of waking, dream, and deep sleep, as
one might mix oil into water. This gives a method that I call
cultivating dual awareness. If you just take the highest, most subtle
spaces of awareness and mix them completely into the lower arenas of
experience, then the turiya state might actually be diluted, or deluded by the
lower states of consciousness, whereas, the image of mixing oil with water
allows the blobs of oil to maintain their integrity while being mixed. This
scripture does not ask you to try to the mix the higher and lower states of consciousness
together like sugar dissolving into water, but rather to mix them like oil
mixing with water. The oil is mixed with the water, yet it remains separate,
complete, pure, and undiluted.
Perhaps there is a time and place where one experiences a pure and
complete mixture, keeping the full integrity of the oil of higher
consciousness, but for now, that isn't quite where I was at. No, I was
still experiencing some sadness and pain from all these events. Yet, at
the same time, the higher states of Perfection Consciousness were right there,
close at hand, like drops of divine oil floating in my watery world of thoughts
and emotions.
Live as if you were
to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
— Gandhi
The experiences with Suze had been especially shocking to my
system because of the rarity of my actually getting close to another person.
Even though I hadn't actually been "in love" with Suze, that
first step into long-term closeness and in-depth friendship ended up bringing
devastating consequences to nearly every aspect of my life, and certainly
changed my experience of friendships from that point on.
The group betrayal from so many in my spiritual community was the
most surprising and troubling part of my experiences with Suze. It's one thing to realize that someone
you thought of as a friend was a sociopathic type of person who would take your
blessings and kindness and give back hatred and revenge. But to have our spiritual community be so easily manipulated into turning
against me due to her nasty rumors was much more shocking and
painful. Some didn't hear the
exact rumor, but over many years, the general idea got out that I should be
generally shunned and disrespected.
Some may have used the excuse of this rumor and the resultant
suspicions about me to let loose their own agendas of bringing someone down who
may think or act a little differently than they do. Misbehaving people
exist in all walks of life, and our local and global spiritual communities were
no exception. The particular group dynamics that come with spiritual and
religious communities can breed particularly arrogant, harsh, and passionate
opinions and actions, particularly against those who may be either ahead,
behind, or a bit off to the side of the main stream path. Our guru often tried to address these
problems and encouraged people to be respectful and kind to one another, but
only some in the community took her request to heart and applied true respect
and kindness in their own lives, especially when they were told that someone
had turned against the path and should be treated as such.
Also, in spite of instructions from both of our gurus to share
what we'd learned with the world, many on the path did not accept the idea of
someone like me writing books about my experiences and understandings. As soon
as the first edition of my memoir came out, word passed through the community
that it was a negative book that devotees should not read.
My guru used to tell a story about a big bucket of crabs being
carried on a ship. One man saw the bucket and asked the captain why he
didn't put a cover on it. "Sir, these crabs can easily climb out of
the bucket. Shouldn't the top be covered?"
"That is not a problem," the captain explained.
"As soon as one crab starts to climb up and out, the other crabs
reach up and pull it back down." As the captain spoke, the
questioning man saw this very event happen - a single crab started to climb out
of the bucket, and two of the other crabs reached up and pulled it back down.
"The key," said the captain, "is that you have to have at
least two crabs in the bucket. If there is only one crab, it will easily
climb out."
My guru used this story to describe the aspect of human nature
that tries to keep one another down in the world of mediocrity. Given that
members of our path were human beings with human natures, they certainly
displayed this characteristic, perhaps even more so due to the group mentality
aspects of the interpersonal dynamics and some mixture of pure and impure
passionate feelings of attachment, love, devotion, and greed that seemed to
come with the great blessings of our path and guru.
In line with this story about the crabs, I came to feel that the
only way for me to climb out of the mire of limited existence and into
spiritual freedom would be to live, as much as possible, a life of solitude
away from the group think of these "spiritual family members" who
seemed so intent on pulling me down into their negative judgments and limited
concepts. At this point, I became a hermit.
A friend of mine once ate too many shrimp and had an allergic
reaction where she puffed up and had to go to the emergency room for
treatment. After that, she could
not eat shrimp anymore. That's how
I became with people. Although I
felt friendly and personable with just about anyone, and most people who met me
would think I was quite sociable, I was spending nearly all of my time in
solitude, and happily so. As my books got into a few people's hands, some would
write and want me to mentor them or be some kind of personal guide. My line, which I usually didn't come
out and say to everyone, was that I don't like people enough to be a guru. And what a blessing that has been in
terms of keeping me free from the pull of people.
I appreciate that my gurus were willing and hopefully happy to be
gurus. I appreciate all the many
interactions in person, through letters, and in the invisible connection that
forms between guru and disciple. And if my works can inspire and spark growth for people and bring light
to the world, I am very happy for that. But this distaste for too many interactions with people kept me from
falling into possible greed-based traps, and seemed to indicate that it was not
my destiny to play a guru role, but to stay true to my free-spirited nature as
a spiritual artist.
You may connect with someone to uplift them, and — shazam
— the next thing you know, they are bringing you down. I think this has been the case with
quite a few spiritual teachers and gurus throughout the ages. They started with the right purity of
intention, but then the accountants come in and fundraisers are held to build a
new temple or start a new spirituality-based business.
While writing books, recording CDs, making videos, and creating
the Night Lotus website, I had to constantly struggle between wanting to share
my works and my desire to be free from the shackles of worldly attachments and concerns. On one hand, I definitely wanted bring
my works to the world — to, as the command said, “share what you have
learned.” I would have also liked
to have my works bring in some income to be able to pay for general and maybe
even occasionally special expenses. And on the other hand, I didn't want to corrupt my freedom of spirit by
becoming commercialized. I didn't
want to have people calling me all day long and suddenly wanting to be friends
because I was known or successful. I didn't want to start thinking from a commercial or greedy point of
view, trying to milk all the money and fame from my efforts.
I'd often remember the message I was given while preparing to
possibly leave the world when I first became physically ill in 1995, which not
only told me to share what I'd learned, but also said that, “Your works will be
a classic after you're gone.” I
had no way to know if this was true or not, or whether it meant that my works
wouldn't become popular until I passed over from this life. I did feel intrigued by the fact that
not too long after receiving this inner command, I had quite a few works published
in book, video, and CD formats and as part of my growing website offerings.
On to Chapter Forty-One
Back to The Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Awakening
Chapter 2: Never to Return
Chapter 3: I Chose This?
Chapter 4: Through the Years
Chapter 5: Exploring the Unconscious
Chapter 6: Faith-Healer
Chapter 7: Hidden Persuaders
Chapter 8: The Threshold of Life
Chapter 9: When the Student is Ready
Chapter 10: Magical Meeting
Chapter 11: Toward the One
Chapter 12: Who is Shiva?
Chapter 13: Destiny Calls
Chapter 14: Winter Wonderland
Chapter 15: The Happy Pauper
Chapter 16: This Karmic Dance
Chapter 17: Stoking the Inner Fire
Chapter 18: The Fruits of Surrender
Chapter 19: That Gracious Glance
Chapter 20: How Could He Be Gone?
Chapter 21: From Heart to Heart
Chapter 22: Get a Job
Chapter 23: Smash the Idol
Chapter 24: Clothed in Devotion
Chapter 25: Nemesis
Chapter 26: Who Are You Calling Jad?
Chapter 27: A Perfect Mistake
Chapter 28: She Still Thinks She Did It!
Chapter 29: Taming the Beast
Chapter 30: Undo What You Have Done
Chapter 31: The Great Guiding Force
Chapter 32: The Wish Fulfilling Tree
Chapter 33: Where is the Key?
Chapter 34: The Hollywood Chronicles
Chapter 35: A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Nirvana
Chapter 36: Love, Betrayal, and the Unseen Hand of God
Chapter 37: An Inner Command
Chapter 38: Cardiff by the Sea
Chapter 39: Miracles and Great Beings
Chapter 40: Shiva's Fiery Dance
Chapter 41: A Shifting Path
Chapter 42: Cheering up Nine Swamis
Chapter 43: Death Threat
Chapter 44: Spirituality For Dummies
Chapter 45: A Real Angel
Chapter 46: Send in the Clowns
Chapter 47: Dispassion and Death's Door
Enjoy Additional Works by Sharon Janis as part of the
Night Lotus Offering of Multimedia Spiritual Resources
Click on a book or CD cover to enjoy it online
(All but Spirituality For Dummies are available to enjoy online in their entirety):
Watch a short video about Sharon and Spirituality For Dummies
