It has shaped the teachings of Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and TM-but not many Westerners know much about it. Now an unconventional exmonk from the Ramakrishna Order sheds some light on the nondual philosophy of Vedanta.
So when Lex presented me to a casually dressed, strong-framed, 40ish man about six feet four and 220 pounds, I had to bend my preconceptions of what an American Ramakrishna Monk might look like. The man I was shaking hands with reminded me of one of those guys who stand in front of the stage during rock concerts and keep over enthusiastic fans from hurling themselves on the lead singer. (By the time I learned, some years later, that he actually had been one of those guys for a time, my preconceptions had been so totally shattered that I accepted the information with a shrug.)
As Lex introduced me, a look of surprise snaked across Swami's face.
'Wait a minute,' he said. 'Are you the guy who cowrote Frank Zappa's autobiography?"Surprised myself, I admitted I was. 'Man, I've got that book on my night table,' Swami said with what seemed like genuine admiration. "I've really been enjoying it."
But Swami's taste in music made sense for a guy who played the electric guitar himself, had his own home recording studio, and liked to take his Kawasaki on the rural streets surrounding the center. And by the end of the evening, I was impressed by Swami's ready knowledge of Vedanta and his facility with Sanskrit chanting as much as by his sensitive execution of the puja ceremony. I no longer had any question about the man's authenticity, only about my own limited vision of what a spiritual teacher could be. As I was to learn, it's a limitation shared by plenty of other people in the spiritual community.
I had been attracted to the philosophical system of Vedanta for some time before meeting Swami, drawn by the sweeping nature of its pronouncements: All existence is One, The appearance of multiplicity is an illusion, and the only reason we can't see that is avidya, or ignorance. We are not who we think we are, but have made the misperception of identifying with the body and the mind. Hence the piercing relevance of Ramana Maharshi's constant inquiry; "If I am not just this body and this mind, then who am I?"
As one of the first Eastern teachings to have an impact on Westerners, Vedanta's appeal lies partly in its powerful philosophical nature but partly also in its tolerance of other religions, a characteristic suited to the increasingly secular and pluralistic culture of the West. That toleration makes Vedanta congruent with the religious pluralist in me, and appears to have had a similar impact on Western intellectuals earlier in this century, from Christopher Isherwood to Aldous Huxley to Joseph Campbell.
The Vedanta that arrived in the West a century ago had little to do with traditional sectarian worship of Shiva or Rama-the faith of the common Indian villager, one that most Westerners find impenetrable and off-putting and everything to do with the experience of the Bengali mystic, Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886). After serving for years as a temple priest of Kali, the Divine Mother, Ramakrishna had visions of Mohammed, Jesus, and the Buddha. He subsequently accepted the teachings of all three, leading him to make the statement that "all religions have a valid claim to the truth."
Through the influence of Ramakrishna's favorite disciple, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), Ramakrishna's brand of Vedanta, influenced by Vivekananda's integrated, intellectualized, idealized vision of Hinduism,
has become what most Westerners know as Hinduism. Even today, the aspects of Hindu belief most often embraced by Americans bear only a nominal relation to the culturally oriented worship of the average Indian. For one thing, Vivekananda was the first sannyasin in a major lineage to live outside the Indian system. Well traveled in the West and educated at British-run colleges in Calcutta, where he studied Western logic, philosophy, and history, Vivekananda developed a genuine affection for Western ways. He saw how Vedanta could thrive in an environment free of the, crushing restrictions of caste that Ramakrishna had repudiated (going so far as to cleaning the toilets of untouchables with his own hair.) Vivekananda became the first person to adapt the ancient vedic wisdom to the modern world and lay the groundwork for its further expansion. The meditation, yoga, and metaphysical principles taught by the succeeding waves of Indian gurus who followed Vivekananda to the West were more or less descendants of his approach. Their teachings were appropriated by the beat culture of the 1950s, the counterculture of the 1960's, and the current New Age movement.
That Vivekananda was also a charismatic orator who spoke fluent English didn't hurt his appeal. Following his watershed appearance at the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Vivekananda became the chief interpreter of Hinduism for the West. (His was also one of the earliest voices raised for religious pluralism,
"If anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others," he told the Parliament, "I pity him from the bottom of my heart."
So how has it come to pass that Vedanta, seeded so early in America by a man of such charisma and exceptional vision appears to have been so easily eclipsed? Vedanta today enjoys little of the popularity experienced earlier in the century by Zen-introduced at the same World Parliament by Soyen Shaku, and more recently, by Tibetan, or vajrayana, Buddhism.
One answer is that, in effect, it has entered the mainstream, the public just isn't aware of it's presence, because Vedanta often isn't identified as such. A Course in Miracles, which has over a million copies in print and has reached millions more through popular interpretations of the Course by Marianne Williamson and others, ostensibly represents the channeled teachings of Jesus. Yet it reads so much like Vedanta that it is sometimes referred to as "nondual Christianity." A recent set of audiotapes from the popular self-improvement guru Wayne Dyer, entitled 'Freedom Through Higher Awareness," is essentially Vedanta in action. Dyer's talks are shot through with references to Nisargadatta Maharaj, the venerable 20th-century master whose book, I Am That, is a modern classic of vedantic thought. Dyer explains and gives rudimentary instruction in the vedantic practice of "witness consciousness' without ever mentioning Vedanta-wisely so, perhaps, given the public's lack of familiarity with it. It's a little more surprising that so eloquent a spokesman for Indian thought as Deepak Chopra never speaks directly about Vedanta either.
Chopra often extols his teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and regularly touts his system of 'Transcendental Meditation. But Chopra's, and Maharishi's, Vedantic roots go unmentioned.
A more problematical answer may be that, unlike Tibetan Buddhism, which has been forced by circumstances to adapt itself to an ecumenical, worldwide audience, Vedanta has remained strongly identified with its more parochial Indian heritage. And the Ramakrishna Order in particular has been tightly controlled by headquarters in Calcutta. It has made few concessions to western sensibilities since its arrival here. One American-born swami with whom I spoke maintained that Vedanta is simply more arduous and demanding than most other Eastern religious imports, especially with its requirement of strict celibacy for all monks. 'Vedanta promises a long, hard climb,' he said, 'and most people are dissuaded by the difficulties."
Before I could get around to asking Swami Atmavratanda about all this, though, an odd thing happened. In August 1993, not long after we met, his name was removed from the register of the Ramakrishna Order. After 10 years of intensive training and eight more years teaching and working for the Order, he was suddenly on his own, The events that led up to his separation from the Order, and the ways he has dealt with it, present a compelling picture of where the Ramakrishna Order, and Vedanta in general, may be going as the millennium draws to a close. But to appreciate those potentially new directions, we have to look at how this quintessential American spiritual odyssey began.
Bruce Hilliger was born in staunchly middle-class Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1952, one of four children of third-generation German Americans. He was baptized and confirmed in the local Congregational church but soon lost interest.
A fan of popular music from his early years, Hilliger began playing electric guitar at age 16. He credits the time he put in practicing as paving the way for meditation.
"After sitting in one place concentrating on the guitar," he says, "it was easy for me to learn how to meditate, because I bad already gained the ability to sit still and not be distracted by other things."
Like many others whose consciousness was opened through psychedelics, Hilliger soon found that the drugs presented too many problems to provide an answer in themselves. At the same time, he became aware of alternatives. "Claims were being made that through meditation and other Eastern practices," he recalls, "you could transform your mind's vision in a similar if not better way, and do it permanently without damaging your nervous system. I decided to try that and see,"
Around the same time, a friend brought him to the Vivekananda Vedanta Society of Chicago to hear Swami Bhashyananda speak. "I had never met a man like this in my life before,' he says of the Maharastrian guru. After 20 minutes of listening to Bhashyananda, Hilliger's response was unequivocal.
"Whatever he had, I wanted to figure out how to get it myself."
"My main intention,' he now says, 'was to see what happened when you did these disciplines----like an experiment. Actually becoming a monk was part of that method, but it wasn't my initial or even my ultimate intention. Yet the Indian social system has a way of pulling you in and throwing away the key.
The Society wasn't much more than a rented house in the downtown neighborhood named Little Five Points and, later, suburban Pine Lake, but the sudden freedom was something of a blissful treat. "I had been on an intense IO-year retreat," Swami says.
"I'd had very little involvement with the outside world. My perception of the whole universe had changed so much that I had some really wonderful experiences."
He found, among other things, that the fears and expectations that had ruled his life before entering the monastery-his drive for success in the music world, his fear of failure were largely gone. In their place was a deeply embedded system of values and meaning,
"a reason to live and a reason to help other people who wanted to learn these same things. One of my friends said that Sannyasins are good gamblers because they have nothing to lose- it's like what the Jeff Bridges character says in the movie Fearless: "We've already died and survived, so there's nothing to be afraid of"
Having learned how to regulate his mind through meditation, to calm himself with breathing techniques, and generally to be stress free, Swami now learned to look more closely at the essence of what each person is. "By looking deeply inside myself and seeing how I had been transformed over those years, I could look at someone else and understand where they were in the process of transformation. I could look at people as manifestations of God rather than as, say, aggressive, competitive alter egos that I had to protect myself from, Now I could play with them in the playground rather than feeling I was on a battlefield."
When, after 10 years of Vedantic study and discipline and taking his sannyasa vows, Hilliger arrived in Atlanta, he soon became aware of just how much he had changed as a result of his training,. "All of a sudden I had a chance for the flower of divine extroversion to bud," he says. A year after began to teach at the Atlanta center, be met a woman working in a hospice and fell in love with her. "It was very shocking for me, because I had lived in a restricted and closely watched environment, I had chosen to be celibate, but suddenly I was confronted with feelings coming out of my subconscious mind that were stronger than any conscious control I might have tried to exert."
Hilliger identifies with Jack Kornfield's observation that his path was downward through the chakras rather than the other way around. "As a young, zest-filled 23 year-old, I went into a celibate spiritual atmosphere, and I was able to develop the transpersonal aspects of myself, but there were a lot of other areas that I had not developed or even investigated," he says, At around the time his romance developed, he came in contact with the writings of Carl Jung and the Jungian psychologist Robert Johnson, who specializes in writing about romantic love, "I had to come to grips with the fact that areas of my life had been unexplored," Bruce say, "and that I needed to explore those areas to whatever depth it took so that I would not have any unfinished business of any kind in my life."
In 1988, after Bruce had been in Atlanta for two years, headquarters in India decided to "retract" certain American monks to their main monastery in Michigan. There had been what Hilliger now calls "an unfortunate misunderstanding" about how the work of the Ramakrishna Order was going to continue in the West, It was decided that no new centers would be started without the official permission of headquarters in Calcutta. And so the centers that Swami Bhashyananda had started on his own in Atlanta, West Palm Beach, and Houston had to be closed down and the swamis brought back to the mother center. Bruce went back to Michigan, but the prospect of returning to the kind of circumscribed life he had spent 10 years living did not appeal to him. 'It was like being told to go back to high school after you've graduated from college," he says, 'Something inside of me said, "You can't stay here. You have to go out and repeat the kind of work you did in Atlanta somewhere else."
After nine difficult months wondering which path to take, he chose to accept a position as spiritual director of a retreat center in Greenville, New York, which was not part of the Order's network. He based his decision on a dream he had shortly before, in which, he says,
"I was in a large room with Swami Vivekananda, who stood before me with his arms crossed and a resolved yet compassionate look on his face. Feeling a gentle hand on my shoulder, I turned and saw that Sri Ramakrishna was standing next to me. 'Don't worry. Swamiji has done everything, 'Ramakrishna said,referring to Vivekananda.
"One of the first things I decided when I came to Greenville was that I wasn't going to live according to Indian caste rules, he says. 'In India you're either a householder or a swami. I look at myself now as an American anthropologist whose fieldwork had been to become a swami in the Ramakrishna Order. But I got lost in my fieldwork, like the Kevin Costner character, in Dances With Wolves. So I went back and rediscovered many parts of me that I had left behind while I was concentrating only on spiritual discipline in an Indian format."
Music, which he had almost totally dropped while in the monastery but which remained his true love, reentered his life with full vigor. Hilliger has been playing avant-garde rock, jazz, and country music for the past four years in bands called Swami and the Hurricanes and Samsara, and has put together a digital recording studio in a room in the center's farmhouse, where he records local bands. "It has been very good for me to integrate all of these things into my life," he says with a smile- "This is going to raise lots of eyebrows, because, orthodox Vedantists are still holding to the line that once you're a swami, that's what you are for, the rest of your life. If don't follow the caste rues, you've
fallen to a state lower than a householder,"
The direction in the West these days, according to Hilliger, is toward greater equality between householders and monks, or clergy and laity, which he views as archetypal forms.
"I believe there's a monk or a nun inside of everybody, and inside every monk and nun there's a householder. I'd like all differentiation from all sides to be taken away-from the householders, the monastics, the hatha yogis, the transpersonal yogis. Wouldn't it be nice if all four of these camps would realize that they are different facets of the same diamond, and each one needs to have light reflected on it to recognize it for what it is?"
Bruce Hilliger's case is certainly not unique. A number of other American-born monks have left the Order after various levels of training. John Dobson, who was thrown out of the monastery in 1967, founded the Sidewalk Astronomers the following year. Dobson is the nation's leading amateur astronomer, lecturing worldwide on astronomy and teaching people how to make their own telescopes-an original design referred to in the field as Dobsonian. Reached by phone in his San Francisco home, Dobson summarizes the situation succinctly, "We've got to take Vedanta in America out of the hands of India," he said.
Whether that needs to be done, or is even practicable, remains to be seen. But it is clear from talking with present members of the Order that both its American and Indian swarms perceive no serious problem in Vedanta's failure to achieve popularity in the West. Swami KaIikananda says simply, 'It's a very high route, and very few want to pursue it." Swami Chidananda, Bhashyananda's successor as minister of the Vivekananda Vedanta Society of Chicago, was born in India in 1932, and his attitude is similar. Although he insists that the teachings of the Ramakrishna Order are "meant for America,' he also acknowledges that "this kind of life is not for the masses" and "it is difficult for anyone to approach Vedanta." He allows that 'the practice of Vedanta can be done in any walk of life," but implies that the celibate life of the Ramakrishna monk offers fewer materialistic distractions. Of course, that path is a lot easier "if you don't have the sense desires."
Perhaps because the Ramakrishna Order is popular and well-respected in India, Indian immigrants feel comfortable with its centers here. For whatever reason, Hilliger feels that the centers tend to adapt more to the ethnic Indian population in America than to Westerners. "The teachers themselves have never been trained in any kind of multicultural understanding, in how to adapt to Western caste-free culture,' he says. "And so a lot of monks end up entering into a kind of caste system within the monasteries, Indians have a kind of conditioned tribalism-they're still trying to defend against the British, or the Americans, or the materialists. Because Hindu ideas have survived so long, they feel that's proof of how good they are. As John Dobson puts it, the Indians say, "We've been thinking these thoughts for thousands of years. John would respond, Why not try manifesting those thoughts differently?"
The nonconformist path that Hilliger and other American monks have chosen also has its perils, not least of which is making a living without the support of the Ramakrishna Order.
"It's almost as if you pay for your caste position,' he says. 'If you want to be taken care of as a holy man for the rest of your life, just be celibate and be good, if you want to have sex or a family, then you have to go out and work,"
Right now the Order is "unwilling to risk doing other things because they're afraid they might lose their monks, but in fact they're losing them by not doing those other things. Over the last 30 years, I'd bet that 98 out of a hundred people who joined the Order have left,' Although the Order doesn't give out figures, swamis like the ones I spoke with simply acknowledge that the high attrition rate among monks is the result of the arduous nature of the training. The issue of celibacy is hard to avoid in any discussion of the Order, Like the Roman Catholic church and few other modern religious institutions, it does impose a celibate life on its monks without exception. This in itself can create difficulties. As Swami Kalikananda put it, "They want enlightenment but they want to do what they want to do."
In 1986 a group calling itself the Sarada-Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Association of America, started by Lex Hixon, purchased the Greenville center and renamed it SRV, an acronym that depicts its dedication to service. It was yet another kind of transformation for Hilliger, who likens the psychological experience of leaving the Order and going out on his own to a divorce. 'I'd had all my food and clothing and shelter paid for by someone else for all those years. I hadn't paid income tax since 1972 because I'd never had a paying job." At the same time, though, he had learned all the building skills and how to run a farm and an ashram, and he applied this knowledge to his new situation.
Hilliger points out that if the SRV Center were run according to the precepts of the Order, it would have to survive entirely on donations; he would not be able to have an outside job, and nobody would be welcome there unless they wanted formal instruction in a particular school of Indian philosophy. As it is, Bruce drives a school bus, works as a substitute teacher, tutors students privately, and counsels students with attention deficit disorder (ADD) by teaching them meditation techniques. As a result of his work with the ADD students, their grade averages have improved along with their ability to concentrate on school work. He is also able to serve the community by letting the temple be used by a food coop, by yoga, karate, and tai chi teachers, by various 12-step programs, and for dance classes. SRV also acts as host to acting, fencing, aerobics, college leadership programs, and women's groups, and to Christian,
Hindu, and Tibetan Buddhist retreats.
In this regard, Bruce identifies with another popular figure on the American spiritual landscape who, like Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer, teaches Vedanta without openly acknowledging it: Ram Dass. In his essay "Compassion: The Delicate Balance," Ram Dass addresses the dilemma of maintaining one's imperturbability amid awareness of the unbearable suffering of the world.
'Where do we begin this amazing journey to our center point of balance?" Ram Dass asks, "We begin right where we are. We look around and find a way to engage our hearts and hands with the suffering in the world around us. And, at the same moment, we set about cultivating a more reflective state of mind through giving ourselves quiet moments for meditation, for study, for contemplation. These are the ingredients we put into the pot. And then we stir."
'That's my philosophy here,' Swami Bruce says in conclusion. "If people are ready for spiritual teaching, I'm here to give it. But if they need food or they want to develop their martial arts skills first, then that's how I should serve their needs. Vivekananda's idea was to utilize the knowledge in the monks- traveling from village to village. I think the Ramakrishna Order needs to do something similar-to unleash their monks so they can spread their knowledge wherever they can in America. What if we had someone in every town in the country who had realized a transpersonal vision? What a force for change that would be! But instead we're forming and then remaining in little clubs: 'I belong to Muktananda, I belong to Ramakrishna, I'm in Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship- I'm in Integral Yoga, "We all go and chant, ring some bells, wave some incense, offer some flowers, read the same books, listen to the same lectures year after year, and think we've reached the end. But that's just the beginning. We need to graduate and go out and teach it, share what we have with others. That will transform the world a lot more thoroughly. I don't see the main importance of our work as perpetuating the teachings. I see the main importance as worshipping God, however God presents Herself to me. Ramakrishna used to say, "Whatever kind of digestion a person has, give him that kind of food.' I feel that's what I'm doing,"
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