I started reading this book after I heard the Swami's Ted talk. Another personal motivation was that I also wanted to gift my personal copy of the book to someone dear. And I said what better way to give than to read it and have all my customary markings on the next. It was also love's labour in that sense - love of a paternal or avuncular kind to dispel any doubts.
The net has tons of stuff on the book and the Swami himself. He is clearly an extraordinary individual. There is nothing that a semi literate man like me can write about the man or the book that one may not find on the net or that is more profound or informative.
The purpose of this blog is to note my personal thoughts on the book.
This book can be approached at two levels. To a faith-neutral reader I would commend the book for the sheer language, the compactness of the style of narration and the magical realism kind of plot that runs through the entire narrative that is spread mainly over a two year period.
The compactness loses out marginally as the Swami talks about life in Vrindavan. But that is forgivable given that the Swami's journey was all about seeking Vrindaban, a desire that seem to lay deeply embedded in him without his even being aware of it.
For those who love mysticism and the supernaturals in their stories there is plenty - a yogi carrying a whole tree as a log of wood, saints going into night long trances, a cobra slithering up the Swami's foot and then choosing to retreat, a saint swallowing three pure LSD tablets and its effect not picked up by any of the diagnostic instruments as part of a scientific experiment run by none less than a Harvard professor who had at one time been advocating the use of LSD for enhanced consciousness and finally a yogi going into a clinically dead state in a public demo for exactly 30 minutes to cock a snook at all clinicians. And here is the rub - he gets up from that state in precisely 30 minutes to the second!
So if you are one of those incurable rationalists who cannot suspend disbelief there is still an interesting narrative in this book.
And then if you are like me, more on the side of belief but not completely sure what this is all for; or, even better if you are completely convinced that this is all part of the Divine Drama, this is a book not to be missed.
It is a 350 page account and packed with detail. It would not make sense for me to reproduce any of it here. Here are some things that struck me.
Richard Slavin was barely nineteen when he set out on this quest. Even if one were to overlook some early indications in his life of an above average inclination towards matters religious, one cannot help accepting that for someone who tried LSD and joined the counterculture it is remarkable that he sensed an inner call, while meditating at Crete, that he should continue his eastward journey to India.
It is even more so interesting when he tells you that the impression that he had of India at that time it was that it was a land of poverty and snake charmers. Mind you this is set in 1969-70, the era of the cold war and the Vietnam War was on.
There are many things that one reads about the path that the Swami chooses that are interesting for readers of similar biographies or autobiographies. Before I note a couple of them I must say that all of that aside, the Swami's sincerity of purpose, honesty and above all the spirit of complete surrender that come through the many incidents he narrates and the metaphors that he chooses are unmistakable. In many places he simply melts you heart.
Equally interesting and informative are the guided peek he offers into the Himalayan world of the quest for the Lord. I was fortunate to have a glimpse of this through Swami Rama's evergreen classic, Living with the Himalayan Masters. Thereafter I got an idea of the challenges of settling down in a world of spiritual pursuits in Swami Virajeshwara's book A Scientist's Quest for Truth.
The important message that all the three - Swami Rama, Swami Virajeshwara and Radhanath Swami - converge on independently is this: Sadly the common man, including many among the educated in our society think that siddhi or spiritual realisation is about acquiring and wielding powers such as calling the future, working miracles and so on.
As the Swami puts it nicely, the greatest of all miracles is the magic of life that we see around us - the beautiful nature in all its breathtaking beauty and diversity and that everything - the birds, the beasts, the bees, the hills, the rivers, the oceans and the trees - are all in their respective place in this world and that we are all blessed to be able to enjoy them with the faculties that the good Lord has blessed us with. This message is conveyed to Swami and various other devotees by a cheerful yogi, Balashiva Yogi, who materialises a hill of vibhuti to cover a shivalinga which also he had materialised. After the materialisation the yogi says to his audience, "I can produce ashes, the Lord can produce universes!"
The Swami makes many critical choices in that space of less than two years. The avenue he chooses for realisation, of an ascetic sadhu, and of the various paths he chooses within that broad avenue, are even more striking. The Swami claims that he had little knowledge of many of the things that he saw or followed while he wandered in the Himalayas. For a nineteen year old to make those choices without any prior initiation would call for either great sagacity or an unerring intuition.
I am inclined to give the Swami the benefit of intuition more than sagacity. And that makes the narrative even more compelling because what better explanation can you think of for intuition other than a karmic vasana?
The other thing that strikes you about the journey is his willingness to assume significant risks on the journey. Was that a carefully considered choice, having overcome the fear of the unknown, I wondered. Or, was it just the result of a deep urge to pursue his objective, with the faith that the Lord in whose search he had embarked would look after him? In many places the Swami gives you the sense that it was more of the latter.
Yet when he walks away from Irene in Italy or when he politely declines the offer from many of the realised souls to initiate him into sannyasa , he seems to display a deep seated sense of awareness of the moment that he wants to choose for his initiation. It is almost four years after he "offers" his "life" to Srila Prabhupada at Vrindaban that he receives his deeksha, suggesting that he was no overenthusiastic kid waiting to rush to fall at the feet of the first guru who offered to show him the path.
As a senior Swami of a powerful global organisation like ISKCON I do not know what sort of a monk the Swami is today. He is bound to be different from the wandering mendicant renunciant, who had nothing more more than two unstitched pieces of white cloth, one each to cover the upper and lower parts of is body, a loin cloth and a begging bowl.
As he notes in his afterword, the honor and stature associated with being a Swami is a "distraction" from the continued pursuit of spiritual self realisation. It is possible that the Swami has instead consciously chosen a path of serving and loving humanity in humility as the path to realising the Lord. There are strong pointers to that when he extols the virtue of Ghanashyam who chose to please Radha and Krishna by serving selflessly those who love Lord Krishna and Radha in the book.
In the narrative, his sincerity, his willingness to surrender to the path that the Lord led him on to, his preparedness to see the Lord's will in everything that happened are all seriously touching. To read about a nineteen year old laying so much on the line in the pursuit of his burning spiritual aspiration is not just touching, but in places heart rending. The metaphor of a leaf careening in the wind that the Swami uses in three different places captures it beautifully.
In short I consider it the Lord's prasadam to me - to borrow a metaphor that I heard from Swami Dayananda Saraswati - that He made me read this book.
Hare Krishna...Radhey Radhey...
The net has tons of stuff on the book and the Swami himself. He is clearly an extraordinary individual. There is nothing that a semi literate man like me can write about the man or the book that one may not find on the net or that is more profound or informative.
The purpose of this blog is to note my personal thoughts on the book.
This book can be approached at two levels. To a faith-neutral reader I would commend the book for the sheer language, the compactness of the style of narration and the magical realism kind of plot that runs through the entire narrative that is spread mainly over a two year period.
The compactness loses out marginally as the Swami talks about life in Vrindavan. But that is forgivable given that the Swami's journey was all about seeking Vrindaban, a desire that seem to lay deeply embedded in him without his even being aware of it.
For those who love mysticism and the supernaturals in their stories there is plenty - a yogi carrying a whole tree as a log of wood, saints going into night long trances, a cobra slithering up the Swami's foot and then choosing to retreat, a saint swallowing three pure LSD tablets and its effect not picked up by any of the diagnostic instruments as part of a scientific experiment run by none less than a Harvard professor who had at one time been advocating the use of LSD for enhanced consciousness and finally a yogi going into a clinically dead state in a public demo for exactly 30 minutes to cock a snook at all clinicians. And here is the rub - he gets up from that state in precisely 30 minutes to the second!
So if you are one of those incurable rationalists who cannot suspend disbelief there is still an interesting narrative in this book.
And then if you are like me, more on the side of belief but not completely sure what this is all for; or, even better if you are completely convinced that this is all part of the Divine Drama, this is a book not to be missed.
It is a 350 page account and packed with detail. It would not make sense for me to reproduce any of it here. Here are some things that struck me.
Richard Slavin was barely nineteen when he set out on this quest. Even if one were to overlook some early indications in his life of an above average inclination towards matters religious, one cannot help accepting that for someone who tried LSD and joined the counterculture it is remarkable that he sensed an inner call, while meditating at Crete, that he should continue his eastward journey to India.
It is even more so interesting when he tells you that the impression that he had of India at that time it was that it was a land of poverty and snake charmers. Mind you this is set in 1969-70, the era of the cold war and the Vietnam War was on.
There are many things that one reads about the path that the Swami chooses that are interesting for readers of similar biographies or autobiographies. Before I note a couple of them I must say that all of that aside, the Swami's sincerity of purpose, honesty and above all the spirit of complete surrender that come through the many incidents he narrates and the metaphors that he chooses are unmistakable. In many places he simply melts you heart.
Equally interesting and informative are the guided peek he offers into the Himalayan world of the quest for the Lord. I was fortunate to have a glimpse of this through Swami Rama's evergreen classic, Living with the Himalayan Masters. Thereafter I got an idea of the challenges of settling down in a world of spiritual pursuits in Swami Virajeshwara's book A Scientist's Quest for Truth.
The important message that all the three - Swami Rama, Swami Virajeshwara and Radhanath Swami - converge on independently is this: Sadly the common man, including many among the educated in our society think that siddhi or spiritual realisation is about acquiring and wielding powers such as calling the future, working miracles and so on.
As the Swami puts it nicely, the greatest of all miracles is the magic of life that we see around us - the beautiful nature in all its breathtaking beauty and diversity and that everything - the birds, the beasts, the bees, the hills, the rivers, the oceans and the trees - are all in their respective place in this world and that we are all blessed to be able to enjoy them with the faculties that the good Lord has blessed us with. This message is conveyed to Swami and various other devotees by a cheerful yogi, Balashiva Yogi, who materialises a hill of vibhuti to cover a shivalinga which also he had materialised. After the materialisation the yogi says to his audience, "I can produce ashes, the Lord can produce universes!"
The Swami makes many critical choices in that space of less than two years. The avenue he chooses for realisation, of an ascetic sadhu, and of the various paths he chooses within that broad avenue, are even more striking. The Swami claims that he had little knowledge of many of the things that he saw or followed while he wandered in the Himalayas. For a nineteen year old to make those choices without any prior initiation would call for either great sagacity or an unerring intuition.
I am inclined to give the Swami the benefit of intuition more than sagacity. And that makes the narrative even more compelling because what better explanation can you think of for intuition other than a karmic vasana?
The other thing that strikes you about the journey is his willingness to assume significant risks on the journey. Was that a carefully considered choice, having overcome the fear of the unknown, I wondered. Or, was it just the result of a deep urge to pursue his objective, with the faith that the Lord in whose search he had embarked would look after him? In many places the Swami gives you the sense that it was more of the latter.
Yet when he walks away from Irene in Italy or when he politely declines the offer from many of the realised souls to initiate him into sannyasa , he seems to display a deep seated sense of awareness of the moment that he wants to choose for his initiation. It is almost four years after he "offers" his "life" to Srila Prabhupada at Vrindaban that he receives his deeksha, suggesting that he was no overenthusiastic kid waiting to rush to fall at the feet of the first guru who offered to show him the path.
As a senior Swami of a powerful global organisation like ISKCON I do not know what sort of a monk the Swami is today. He is bound to be different from the wandering mendicant renunciant, who had nothing more more than two unstitched pieces of white cloth, one each to cover the upper and lower parts of is body, a loin cloth and a begging bowl.
As he notes in his afterword, the honor and stature associated with being a Swami is a "distraction" from the continued pursuit of spiritual self realisation. It is possible that the Swami has instead consciously chosen a path of serving and loving humanity in humility as the path to realising the Lord. There are strong pointers to that when he extols the virtue of Ghanashyam who chose to please Radha and Krishna by serving selflessly those who love Lord Krishna and Radha in the book.
In the narrative, his sincerity, his willingness to surrender to the path that the Lord led him on to, his preparedness to see the Lord's will in everything that happened are all seriously touching. To read about a nineteen year old laying so much on the line in the pursuit of his burning spiritual aspiration is not just touching, but in places heart rending. The metaphor of a leaf careening in the wind that the Swami uses in three different places captures it beautifully.
In short I consider it the Lord's prasadam to me - to borrow a metaphor that I heard from Swami Dayananda Saraswati - that He made me read this book.
Hare Krishna...Radhey Radhey...
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