Nitya’s Blessings

 

It’s a daunting task to do justice to the beneficial impacts that my five years living, studying, and traveling with Nitya Chaitanya Yati (followed by decades more of periodic visits and short term travels) have had on my life. Most days I feel as if my profoundest thoughts, visions, words, actions and appreciations are echoes of his teaching and example. Any accounting here, on the occasion of his 100th Birth Centenary, will be partial and meager in proportion to the cumulative and continuing blessing that knowing him has on my experience of and response to this life I am, even now, still being granted. Even the extent to which I receive and respond to life experiences as “blessings” is in great part due to his beneficent influence.

 

The very first blessing he effortlessly bestowed upon me was by providing a dramatically different model of what it meant to be a man from what I had been exposed to during the first 23 years of my life.

 

The only model I had been exposed to was that the worth and “success” of a man, of necessity, included a well-paying job, a wife and children. In Swami Nitya, I met a man who was immensely fulfilled, joyous, loved and revered by all, with no job, no wife, no children. In spite of these glaring “deficiencies,” he was always engaged in meaningful and productive projects, had friendly and intimate (emotionally and spiritually) relationships with women as well as men, and was beloved by children wherever he went.

 

Coming out of the 50’s into the 60’s I knew a lot more about what I didn’t want to do for a living (from manual labor to sitting in an office suite) than I did about what I did want to do. In addition to how to resolve the work/money conundrum, the thought of marital bliss seemed similarly elusive to me. I’d been in enough romantic relationships in which my partners, circumstances or I, myself, unexpectedly proved too fickle to be trusted. And even though in the 50s, most domestic conflict, acrimony and, all too often, abuse, were hushed up behind closed doors, I did not see many husband/wife partnerships that looked particularly appealing to enclose myself in for a lifetime. In these two senses, meeting Nitya and seeing his life-pattern, had an immediately liberating effect on me, like a weight of compulsion being lifted off my shoulders.

 

At other points my perspective on relationships in general and romantic ones in particular were refined and redefined by his personal teaching. One day while visiting my parents’ house in Illinois, we were out on a walk around the neighborhood. I mentioned that I was missing an “on again, off again” girlfriend.

 

He sternly commented, “You shouldn’t treat people as objects.” I asked what he meant. He said, “Missing somebody when they are not physically present, shows that to you, that person is an object of your senses, and then most likely an object of gratification too. People are not objects. They are each their own subject, and as such, just as precious in themselves as you are to yourself. And anyway, missing somebody is to be taken as a sign of their presence with you and not of their absence. Otherwise they would not even come to mind.”

 

Those simple words, spoken almost casually, have reverberated through my life and provided me with something, which I have aspired to remember and embody. To make note of my own (and our culture’s collective) tendency to objectify the other, and instead to cultivate the connection that goes beyond sensory input, one characterized rather by an innate affection.

 

One of the first things almost everyone noticed about Nitya was his humility. From early days to beyond the grave, I have been continuing to get lessons from him on humility. In word and deed, he both counselled and modelled humility. Often getting those personal lessons in public seemed uncomfortably close to humiliation. Here’s an example of a more private, but equally personal, lesson in humility.

           

For a number of years I traveled the world as Swami (and later Guru) Nitya’s private secretary and personal assistant (a role that, over the years, numerous others among his students were similarly fortunate to play). On this day, after about a year or two of living and traveling together, we were packing up to leave the house in the rolling hills of Northern California, where we had been staying for a month or so. That night he was catching a flight back to India, and I was going to a commune where he had taught in Washington state, in order to prepare his new East West University Prospectus for printing.

 

I was helping him pack, which took a long time, leaving me very little time to pack my own stuff before we were to leave. I told him I needed to pack. I felt that he was showing no appreciation for the help I was giving him, nor showing proper concern for my need to pack. I went to organize my things and was talking to myself, justifying feeling sorry for myself and being miffed at him. He walked by me on his way out of the room, paused and in a tone which seemed to me rather cheerful for the occasion said, “You’re looking a little deflated. Are you feeling deflated?” I rose up and perhaps a tad self-righteously said, “Yes, Guru, in fact I am.” And before I could say another word in my defense, in the same light, breezy tone he said, “Well, just remember: You can only feel as deflated as you were inflated,” and continued on his way.

 

Even today, long after the sting of those words has faded, I often recall them and the truth they conveyed as both rebuke and reminder, not unlike the biblical proverb, “Pride goes before a fall.” It’s as if I have had an inflation meter implanted in my witnessing consciousness since that time. Other students, who received similarly personal lessons on humility and I, used to refer to such procedure as “ego bleaching” or “psycho-surgery.”

 

Perhaps even more impactful were the lessons about humility he taught through the power of his own example. One of the years during which we were together at the Narayana Gurukula’s annual convention in Varkala in southern Kerala, he invited me to stay with him in his one room cottage on a couple of benches which, when placed together, made a narrow bed.

 

During the mornings I watched streams of people flow through to touch his feet in reverence and exchange a few words. He confided in me that whatever kowtowing element was involved was very uncomfortable to him. The way he managed to go along with it was that every time his foot was touched he would automatically say, “Narayana.” Narayana was both the name of his guru’s guru, and according to traditional lore, in the distant past, was the name of the very first guru.

 

Nitya explained to me, “I am only like a mailman carrying their message to that light and grace of guruhood, to the eternal and universal principal of the guru. The postman delivers hundreds of love letters on Valentine’s Day. Does he puff up his ego as if all those love letters he delivers are directed to him? No, that would be pretty comical.” Nitya kept his ego at a neutral zero, neither debasing nor aggrandizing his personal self.

 

During that same convention, as my “bed” was in guru’s little hut, I allowed myself to remain inside for some of the parade of visitors, usually with an open book before me, so as to remain relatively unobtrusive. As the conversations were in the local language of Malayalam, I could not follow them anyway. What I did find myself doing, though, was riding on the symphonic waves of emotion expressed in the tune and tone of their Malayalam verbalizations. For the most part, the devotion and upliftment in their “songs” to him and the deep attention and genuine affection he was giving them in kind, were the order of the day.

 

One jarring exception occurred when an older woman, with a rather disheveled look, kind of barged her way in and immediately started haranguing him with evident accusation and ill will. He listened patiently until she wore herself out and calmly gave a reply which I also couldn’t translate.

 

Later that night, when we were alone, I asked what she had been so agitated about. He told me that basically she was shouting to the effect that “There are people starving, so how can you sit smugly here, talk philosophy and smile.” I asked him how he could keep so cool and composed during such a tirade aimed at him.

 

He laughed and said he had developed a habit that when people berate him or accuse him of misdeeds, he says to himself, “Oh, this person has no idea how many times I have made mistakes, failed and even caused pain to others through acts of omission or commission. They have no idea. If they only knew, how much more they would have to say!” This is humility as a practice and as he practiced.

 

Another major area in which Nitya had a dramatic impact on my life is what can be called “faith.” Faith is a tricky concept. In the hands of religious fundamentalists, faith is tied up with a belief that they themselves (the Chosen of God) are better and somehow more important and entitled than those of any other faith. To them faith might be, “I have faith that God will smite my enemies (i.e. inferiors).” Such kind of religious faith has time and again allowed for and countenanced all manner of exploitation, oppression, dispossession and degradation of entire populations of people seen as “other.” In the first instance, Nitya salvaged “faith” in my mind from this scrapheap of man’s inhumanity to man.

 

The types of faith I had learned about previously included the Christian faith that they were going to heaven, and everyone else could rot in hell. This was trumped only by the Jewish faith that they are the Chosen People of God, and hence entitled to foster and foist upon others the very kind of denial of human rights and dignity, that many Jews have been victimized and traumatized by throughout their history. In Islam also, along with more spiritual understandings, there exists this notion that non-Muslims are infidels, deserving of less rights and respect than is due to members of their faith.

 

Through the potency of Nitya’s example and the wisdom of his guidance, my understanding and cultivation of “faith” has undergone a radical process of deconstruction and reconstruction. It wasn’t until I met Nitya that I had a sense of the difference between religion and spirituality. This is not to suggest that people cannot be spiritual and express their spirituality while adhering to one or another religious tradition, but that tends not to be the norm.

 

Religion is that which divides people as the chosen and the unchosen, the favored and the unfavored with heaven for the insiders and hell for the outsiders. Spirituality, on the other hand, only unites. Spirit is universal within all sentient beings. The spirit of life connects all beings, suggesting an equal and universal worth and worthiness. Divisions, inequities and the ensuing injustices of all kinds, are anathema to spirituality.

 

Spirituality, as exhibited by saints and mystics in every religious tradition, is ever-attuned to “the least of these,” the refugee, the outcast, the stranger. Religion, on the other hand (and I include Capitalism here, as the state religion in the United States of America), not only stratifies the world into the worthy and the less or unworthy, but each within its own institution has proven to be stratified and riddled with the same hierarchy internally that they try to impose externally on the world at large.

 

Faith, then, in its more liberated, or spiritual, sense implies a belief in something not fully available to the senses, nor all the instruments of science. Faith is not just a belief, but an intimate knowledge of some spirit of life, maybe just life itself, that transcends the senses, that transcends the individual, that unites us with other people, animals, plants and even the forces of Nature like rain, sun, soil and wind.

 

From Guru Nitya I learned that spirituality is the recognition and cultivation of connection between self and others. And faith is the certainty that comes from direct experience of that universal spirit, both within and without oneself. That has become a foundational faith for me, a faith that we are all connected and ultimately one, and a faith in that One.

 

Faith is sometimes given as a synonym for trust. A Zen Buddhist teacher I once studied with pointed out that what most parents, for example, mean when they say they trust their teenager is that they trust that their child will do what the parent thinks is right. This is not trusting the other person. This is trusting one’s own rules and sense of right and wrong. True trust would be trusting that whatever the child does will be ultimately okay. My faith in Nature, Gaia, Goddess, or whatever you want to call It/Her is this second kind.

 

Nitya, again and again, pointed out that Nature shows a tendency towards benevolence, as evidenced by the countless trillions of creatures who are birthed and then fed solely off of Her own bounty (sometimes two or three times a day), day after day, throughout millennia. How can one not have faith in such a Mother Nature?  Additionally and significantly, in the light of Guru Nitya’s ruminations, publications and his Stanford University course dealing with “erotic mysticism,” I have come to see Nature also as Lover Nature.

 

Even aside from the troubling facts that we are all, regardless of species, going to die, and occasional cataclysmic natural disasters, and the vile catastrophes that man visits upon man, thanks to Nitya, I still have faith in the benevolence and creative genius of Nature.

 

One time, around the age of 35, I landed a promising contract with the Oakland Unified School District to conduct a project on “Transformation of the School Climate.” I designed a process which the staffs of several schools would undertake with me. Just weeks away from the start of the project, the school district discovered that one of its accountants had embezzled and absconded with over two million dollars. In order to cover the losses, they had to slash two million dollars from their current budget. My program was among the ones cancelled.

 

I was feeling downcast and demoralized. When I told Nitya about the misfortune, he admonished me, “Don’t ever confuse money with the source of your life. Nature is, has been and always will be, the source of your life. Money, at best has only an exchange value. Don’t confuse something with exchange value for something with intrinsic and extrinsic value.”

 

To me there is no better case to be made for faith than the following passage, attributed to Jesus, in the Bible:

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Look at the birds in the sky. They neither reap, nor sow, nor store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father [read: Nature, if you prefer] feeds them…. And why worry about clothes? Consider the lilies of the field. They neither work nor weave, but I tell you that even King Solomon, in all his glory, was never arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the flowers of the field, which are alive today and burned tomorrow, is He not much more likely to clothe you, oh ye of little faith?

 

With respect to Jesus’ vision presented here, and having lived near, at, or below the so-called “poverty line” for decades, Nataraja Guru once asked his disciple, Nitya, “What is the most valuable possession a person can have?” Smelling a trick, Nitya refrained from speculating, but eagerly asked, “What is it, Guru?” To which Nataraja Guru replied, “A torn shirt. For nothing could take him or her down to the market faster to get a new one.”

 

It was Nitya who introduced me to the above biblical passage. He told us that he was so moved by these words when he was a young man that he became determined to take it on as a hypothesis in his own life. He decided to see if he could live in the world without job and money. He even decided not to don the orange robes of a traditional Indian renunciate, because in so doing, he would have effectively been announcing his need, which in India is conventionally catered to by strangers automatically giving some food or coins to the mendicant.

 

Instead he set off wandering, wearing all white. In the telling, he insisted that in the many months he did so, he never once missed a meal, although, he confessed, it could often come unexpectedly after he had already despaired of getting food that time.

 

When during our long association, I would fret over my long term financial security, he would almost chide me with statements like, “Jesus said, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ not ‘Give us this day our monthly social security check.’ And anyway, look at Nature’s track record. How many days have you lived so far? And how many days have you been fed, multiple times per day? That’s Nature’s track record. What makes you think that’s suddenly going to change?”

 

Even now, decades later, such thoughts can serve as a great stress reliever. The same can be said with regard to the “imperience” (Nitya’s word) of wonder, awe and reverence, all of which I learned how to cultivate from this dear and wise man.

 

At present, I am firmly in the midst of Act Three of my life’s drama and can expect to be called off the stage any moment. The signs of decline and debility can’t be missed. Eyesight, hearing, memory, mobility, all are noticeably diminishing. Then, too, there are the inevitable “organ recitals” whenever two or more people my age get together. All of which is leading to that moment when we must relinquish all at the time of our death.

 

In regard to this, Guru Nitya once mused to me, “You know, sometimes I think my entire life will have been worth living if it finally leads me to have a graceful departure.” That rang true and resonated with me twenty seven years ago, and as I age, I can still hear it ringing.

 

When the local community center where I live put out a call for volunteers to facilitate a weekly peer support group for seniors on the topic of “Growing Old Gracefully,” I recalled those words of his and offered to undertake it. It is the aspirational quality of “gracefulness” that promises to keep the group from degenerating into mere organ recitals or collective gripe sessions.

 

I learned a lot about grace, in its many guises, from Guru Nitya – grace, graciousness, gracefulness and the related term gratefulness. Grace, in the spiritual sense, is a gift which you did not earn nor could you have made happen through your own effort or merit. As Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth century Christian mystic, put it, “There is nothing one can do to earn a star or deserve a sunset.” Such is grace. The blessings referred to in this essay were showered upon me as grace.

 

I fear I have been rambling unnecessarily, another symptom of advanced age. And yet, I also realize I have failed to do justice to the tremendous impact and the countless blessings knowing Nitya has bestowed upon my life. Once when speaking about the great value in a Guru-Disciple relationship, he opined, “Take as an example, my relationship with Peter here. If he had not met me, today he would have become a whisky-drinking, hamburger-eating, stock broker on Madison Avenue.” By contrast, not one of those things has held the least appeal to me in the fifty-three years since I met him. I cannot but begin to gauge the true measure of Nitya Chaitanya Yati, and yet here he stands, an all-time, stalwart exponent of Wisdom, Compassion, Creative Vigor and Good Humor.

 

And finally, as a reward to any intrepid reader who has made it this far, I want to leave you with two impactful passages of Nitya’s, both having to do with facing death. May some of the impact he has had on my life, thereby become a similarly transformative blessing in yours.

 

The first is from a letter which he wrote to an elderly and infirm friend of his in Singapore:

 

Dear Ponnampalam,

Padma wrote to me that you were admitted to a hospital in a state of heart condition. I hope you are now in good shape again. Also I pray that you experience the best an aspirant can attain upon entering higher consciousness. The lower mind, hitched onto people, objects and events on the phenomenal side, should be unplugged to rise into higher consciousness.

            My attitude toward life and death is probably not the same as many. First of all, I do not feel commissioned to do anything for anyone. The sun shines and the river flows because of their intrinsic nature. Similarly I function according to my nature. It can stop at any time. So, I do not take any extra care to prolong my life. To be in the body was very good. Cessation of that life can be even better. My attitude towards a death-bringing disease is one of love and acceptance rather than horror. So I will not fight a disease. However, I may accept measures that may relieve me of unnecessary pain. To this day I have never prayed to be cured of any disease or to allow me to live beyond my permitted time. Both God and Death will only laugh at me If I cannot accept their laws. When others die, I do not think a terrible thing has happened.

            These are my thoughts on life and death. If we see each other again that will be fine. In any case, after some time, there will not be any you or I. Instead of waiting for such a day, even now we can merge our separate identities in the One without a second.

                                                Love & Blessings,

                                                            Nitya  

 

And the second is an excerpt from his wonderful essay entitled “Facing Death:” Thanks to Nancy Yeilding for, not only keeping the piece, but finding it on demand for us.

 

We should revise the idea of death to the point where it is natural to refer to the beautiful fragrance of death, the beautiful song of death, the spiritual voice of death. When you spiritualize it, then the morbid gross thing is gone, and the essence spreads out. Death is not an event here. It is the vast area into which we slowly dissipate, merge and become one with that. The very idea gives you a sense of liberation. What is most rewarding and helpful is this ‘vasting’ of you, this melting of you. You become like an invisible light, the light of all lights.