Chapter 7:

The Meeting and the "Work"  

The long night of almost sleepless excitement that passed until the next day was to be the last night of my undisciplined wilderness. From the next day, the day of meeting with my teacher, I would be unable to live as liberally as before. The doubts I had formed about my lack of discipline would be consummated in the will of my teacher. There would be a practical, moral revolution in my way of life. But at the time I merely swooned in expectation, in the joy of my discovery. And I went to meet my teacher as if I were to be given some sweet free gift of miracles and love, and coddled home like some eternal loved - one of the gods.

When the morning came I bathed and dressed very ceremoniously. My long hair and beard were combed and trimmed. There was to be no offense in me. I walked to the store in the bright sun and wondered what incredible miracles I was to see before evening. From works like Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi I had learned to expect some kind of priceless love - meeting and a dear touch of the teacher's hand that would shake my mind loose in a vision of lights and blessed peace. I walked to the store with the same excitement in which I used to follow a whore. I went to grasp all the miracles hidden in the secret parts of this mystery.

When I neared the store I carefully hid myself on the other side of the street. I wanted to be certain that the teacher was there before I made my entrance. After a while I saw several men come out of the store. One of them was apparently directing the others. He was a heavy fat man in his mid-thirties. He wore a T-shirt and a baggy pair of corduroys. The others appeared to be doing some sort of work for him.

I watched them move in and out of the store for some time. Finally, all of them left, except the fat man. As I watched him, I perceived a seriousness in him, the same kind of all-business attitude I found in the woman the day before. I supposed that he was alone, and I crossed the street, filled with embarrassment and expectation, self-consciousness and anxiety.

I walked into the store as directly and upright as I could. One should not approach a teacher with weaknesses hanging out! The man was sitting in a chair by the desk at the rear of the store. His mother was standing behind him in a small doorway making a sandwich. She recognized me and very animatedly told the man that I had been in the day before and bought a piece of sculpture.

The man stood up and approached me. He seemed to make it a point to shake my hand. He introduced himself as Rudi, and I told him I was Franklin Jones. "Your mother told me that you are a teacher." He looked around at her as if displeased, and then he said, "She tells that to anybody who comes in here. She really ought to keep her mouth shut."

I was already very uncomfortable, and now I felt foolish, but I was determined. "What do you teach?" "Kundalini Yoga." "Are you an adept at this yoga?" He looked at me very sternly and a little bothered. "You don't teach it if you can't do it." I told him I was looking for a teacher and I felt that I had been directed to him. He asked me what I did. I said that I wrote and had just moved from California. "No, what do you do spiritually?" "Oh, well I relax and direct myself toward the top of the head." He smiled a little. "Do you work?" "No, I have just been writing, and I live with my girl friend. She works." He drew away from me a little. "This yoga requires great discipline and surrender, and I can't teach anybody who doesn't accept the discipline and work. You go out and get a job and come back in about six months or a year. We'll talk about it then."

That was apparently the end of the interview! He made it a point to shake my hand again, and he turned away, so that I felt I was supposed to leave. As I left the store I felt a tremendous relief that I had been able to manage the meeting at all. I was disappointed, to be sure. There was no sublime love meeting, no miracles, no immediate recognition of me as the long awaited disciple. But I had been received at least conditionally. Six months or a year was not an unbearable length of time. Unpleasant as the prospect was, I was willing to get a job if that was the kind of test required of me. I felt a kind of certainty in the man himself. He was by his own admission adept in the teaching and practice of the highest and most miraculous kind of yoga. I had met him, and I was certain that I was willing to meet the conditions.

I was elated! I felt I had been successful. Strong and complicated feelings went through my mind as I moved up the block beyond the store. By the time I reached the corner I had gained my composure, and even my doubts had turned to elation and certainty. Then I became aware of a very strange sensation. A current of very strong energy was rising up my arm from my right hand, the hand Rudi had made it so much a point to shake when I arrived and as left.

As I became aware of this energy, it quickly passed into the rest of my body and filled me with a profound and thrilling fulness. My heart seemed to strain in a vibrant joy, and my head felt swollen, as if my mind were contained in an aura that extended around my skull several inches: As I walked I began to run. I felt on fire with a joyous energy, and I had become incredibly light!

When Nina returned home from teaching school I told her all about my experience. I told her about the mysterious energy, about my muted reception, and the condition that I get a job for six months or a year before I could go back for any teaching. She was a little puzzled by this condition. She had only known me as a writer and a wild man, and she wasn't sure that she really wanted it any other way. As the evening passed I also began to wonder about these things. My writing and my way of life were very real to me. They were even the necessary preliminary to spiritual effort. I began to think about the writings of Sri Aurobindo, and how he justified creative work, even writing and other forms of art, as a usable and even necessary means for spiritual opening. And even if I did get a job, should I continue to write? And what about all of my other habits? What does this teacher think about drugs, and sex? Should I leave Nina? Do I have to become a vegetarian?

The whole matter was much more complicated than it had originally seemed. So I sat down to write Rudi a long letter about all of my questions. I intended to have Nina deliver it to him the next day and return to me with his answers. "The young girl who brings this letter to you is my girl friend. We are not married, but we have been living together for two or three years." Etc. Etc. I wrote about all of my questions. I wanted to be certain I made as complete a transformation in myself as necessary, so that when I returned to him I should be fully able to use his teaching. I asked about creative work and drugs, sex and diet. I told him about the experience of his energy. And I made it clear that I was willing to undergo all the conditions.

The next day Nina went to see Rudi after work. She returned very amused with me. Rudi had received her very warmly, in contrast to his brusque and almost rude reception of me. Nina hadn't asked him to teach her. He told her that I had a lot of work to do, but he would be glad to take her as a student right away! Anyway, he appreciated my letter, and I should come and see him the next day.

I was happy for this news. Of course I insisted that Nina take advantage of his offer to teach her. But I was confounded at how he could take her as a student offhand, while I, who had such a long history of seeking, trial and experience, should have to go begging even for an interview! As it happened, this pattern of offense and testing was to be the basic form of my experience with Rudi over the coming years.

When I went to Rudi the following day his manner was much more familiar and friendly. He told me that he really loved Nina and that she was a very open person who could easily receive the Shakti or the "Force," as he called it.

On the other hand, he certainly did mean that I would have to begin to work on myself before he would allow me to come to his classes. "What about my writing?" "How much do you write or want to write? A serious writer works constantly, out of great need." "Well I write but more or less spontaneously. It is a different thing. Well, yes, I am not disciplined. A job wouldn't interfere with that work."

His one answer to all of my questions was work. Discipline and effort are necessary to provide an instrument that can contain this "Force." It isn't necessary to give up sex or life or go on any special diet. Only work, be intelligent with these things, take proper care of yourself.

My life with Nina was a particular focus of his. He wondered why we weren't married, and he knew that my undisciplined way of life must draw me into myself more than anything else. Thus, his teaching required a drastic turning of my attention outward. Work, love Nina, become more loving. Your life with Nina is your yoga.

And so he sent me away again with one of those electronic handshakes. But he told me that as soon as I got a job I would be welcome to come to his classes.

At that time I was about twenty-four years old. I had never taken a job other than the purely menial labor of waiting in restaurants and the like. Consequently, I was at a disadvantage when I went looking for work. I still considered that my basic work was writing and a kind of spiritual process in consciousness. Thus, I did not feel particularly motivated to any kind of career. But I felt constrained to find some kind of productive work that would not only allow me to reserve some creative energy but also provide sufficient means to support Nina and me.

The reaction of any and all agencies and employers that I first contacted was that I had a bad employment history and was educationally overqualified for most kinds of work. Their experience showed that overqualified persons with similar backgrounds to my own tended to leave unchallenging forms of work after a relatively short period. Finally, in order simply to have work to do, I volunteered my services to WBAI, a nonprofit, listener-sponsored radio station in New York. I worked at soliciting and addressing in the subscription department. After a few weeks, I was hired at a limited salary to do the work part-time.

In the meantime Nina began to go to Rudi's classes. She said it was a very strange and exciting experience. The classes were held in a large room on the around floor of a building Rudi owned on Hudson Street, a few blocks from our apartment. She said the room was surrounded with huge oriental sculptures. There were approximately twenty or thirty people at each class. And the classes were held on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at eight, Saturday morning at ten, and Sunday at eleven or noon.

Rudi's students were made up mostly of young people in their twenties or early thirties. Most of them were former professional "freaks," like myself, with very little history of dramatic accomplishment. They required disciplining, like myself, and probably many of them were really working for the first time in their lives. Some of course were older people, professionals or businessmen. Many were fairly successful and had met Rudi in the course of his business.

I would frequently go to Rudi's store to talk or enjoy the aura that permeated the place. The store was never empty. There was a constant stream of visitors and patrons. His mother was usually preparing food for people, and we would crowd around the rear of the store or sit in rows of funeral parlor folding chairs by the curb.

Rudi's attention was constantly directed toward someone or something. There was rarely any stillness around him, and this was another characteristic that was unexpected. There was no kind of distant, mystical, airy mood of quiet, none of the usual "spiritual" atmosphere peculiar to churches and religious or spiritual books. There was a constant activity that was even annoying at times.

Rudi was always animated in conversation, either with students and friends or with customers. His conversation was a constant stream of forceful moods, alternating between talk of spiritual life, his experiences in India, his spiritual experience and visions, or the perpetual absorption with business. For Rudi, life and work were yoga. His business was his highest yoga. And if you didn't know or accept this about him you could become angry at what appeared to be his perpetual concern with business and the store.

After a while I learned that I couldn't expect to visit Rudi and pass a pleasant hour conversing about spiritual life. More often than not there would be a brief handshake or a hug, and then he would spend his time talking to somebody else as if I weren't there. Then he might suddenly shake my hand and tell me to leave.

As the weeks passed and I became an accustomed regular at the store, I found that I would be given some work to do when I arrived. There was always some sculpture to be moved around, some windows to wash. Gradually it became clear that only casual visitors or friends got to sit and talk. Any student that came was given work to do.

As Rudi's business increased the work increased, so that I was called upon to come and work in my spare time. Rudi always generated work around him. Even if you stopped by to say hello at the house he would hand you a bag of garbage to take to the corner. And if you dropped by the store casually, you might be asked to go home and change, and then come back and wash the floor.

This "dharma" of work awakened tremendous resistance in me and most of Rudi's other students. But that was also the teaching. We would often wish it were otherwise, and we always suckered ourselves into a casual visit, hoping he would be in the mood to let us sit and entertain us with stories of miracles and all of the glory we were going to gain in the future by the aid of the "Force." The more we suffered, the more we communicated our resistance and discomfort, the more he would tell us to surrender. He said that we should "be like smoke." You can cut through smoke with a knife, but it is not disturbed.

The idea that was infused in us was the simple attitude of work. Work forced us to encounter resistance and obstacles in ourselves, and perseverance in work gradually wore away resistance and created a state of openness or surrender. The constant practice of work and surrender opened the instrument of the body and the internal mechanism that was a channel for the "Force," the spiritual energy of Shakti that was Rudi's gift, and the continuation of work strengthened the instrument in its openness and allowed the "Force" to expand and create ever higher realizations and capacities. He often said that work was endless and always created more work, so that life was pictured as a fruitful effort in constant relation to the "Force" that had no other goal than continual growth.

Two or three weeks after Nina began to go to "class" Rudi gave me permission to begin also. The work I had managed to acquire was not completely satisfactory from his point of view, but it was a "job" and I had managed to adapt myself to the basic conditions for his teaching. I had even shaved and gotten a haircut. I put more attention to discipline and cleanliness. And I had temporarily stopped using even marijuana to relax.

I decided to begin classes on my birthday, thinking this was auspicious. Rudi's classes always followed the same pattern. We would begin to arrive in the classroom about 7:30. Someone would light incense next to Rudi's chair, which was a large metal trunk covered with a bearskin. His seat was placed on a higher level of the room, about three or four steps above the rest of us. Most of us sat in folding chairs set in rows, with an aisle down the middle. Some would sit in yogic postures on the floor in front of him, but my legs did not grow accustomed to such sitting for a year or two.

Before my first class I was told to go to the store for instruction. Rudi told me that the "Force" was the real subject of the class. It came into contact with us through his eyes. I was simply to sit comfortably and relax and try to open myself or surrender to the Force. If I felt the Force enter me I should simply relax more and allow it to go down through the chest and belly into the sex organs. When it got there I should relax at the base of the spine and let it travel upwards to the head. If I wanted, I could silently say "So" with each inhalation and "Ham" with each exhalation. "So-Ham" meant "I am That," or "I am the Force, or God," whichever concept was meaningful to me. But the important thing was surrender and opening to the Force, so that it could carry the exercise. Sometimes, as he spoke of these things in class, he would also recommend that we feel a part of ourselves going way out into space, beyond all the universes.

With these instructions, I went on to class. The room was not particularly decorative. It was about twenty-five by fifty feet. There was a plain oriental folding screen behind his seat, to keep our eyes from distraction. And there were many large oriental figures along the sides of the room, as well as great numbers of smaller objects or paintings here and there. Rudi often said that this wasn't for "effect," but he simply kept them stored there for his business.

By the time class was to begin everyone was supposed to be seated and quiet and "into the exercise." The Force was not only supposed to be given by Rudi, in or out of class, but was always working in us. Therefore, surrender and work was to be our constant attitude, and class was merely a special exercise of the same work. In addition to class we were to spend up to an hour a day at home doing the same exercise. But we should not spend more than an hour a day at meditation. Such only creates illusions. It was a creative exercise, to awaken capability, not to produce effects like quietness. Apart from the exercise, we should only work and live intelligently.

When I went to class the first night I was again full of expectations. Nina had been urged not to tell me all the specifics of what went on, but to let me find out for myself. I had experienced the Force many times through Rudi's handshake, or when I chanced to look in his eyes. But, for all I knew, that might only be a taste! I truly didn't know what to expect, but I was ready for visions and miracles.

Shortly after eight o'clock Rudi came in and sat down. At the beginning of class he would sometimes speak for a short time about the Force and about work and surrender. Or else he would describe some experiences of the Force that he was having. He would often have visions of opening lotuses fantastic creatures, other worlds, or the presence of his teachers. His teachers were the two men whose pictures I had seen that first day in the store. The first and heavier one was Swami Nityananda, a powerful saint he had met in 1959 or 1960. After Swami Nityananda's death or "mahasamadhi" in 1961, Rudi became the disciple of the other man, Baba, or Swami Muktananda, who was Swami Nityananda's chief disciple.

Rudi spoke briefly on this first night, and I believe he introduced me to the group either at the beginning or the end of the exercise. Then he sat up straight in the lotus posture and closed his eyes. All of us also made an effort to relax and surrender. Then he opened his eyes. They appeared to be deep set and very wide. His eyes moved from person to person in the room. He concentrated on each one for a minute or two, or perhaps only a few seconds, depending on the needs of the person.

I could feel a certain relaxation as I tried to surrender, open and empty my mind. And I waited intensely for Rudi to look at me. When my turn finally came I felt a little foolish. Looking deep into a person's eyes, particularly under such circumstances, requires a certain relaxation from the usual armor we wear. But, gradually, I loosened up, and accepted my position of vulnerability. I tried to deepen my surrender as he described. I concentrated on his eyes. We remained that way for perhaps a minute, and then he passed on to another. I continued to try and deepen the surrender while concentrating on his form. He would often tell us not to close our eyes unless there was a very strong impulse from the Force to do so. Then, suddenly, the class was over. As was customary, we lined up to leave, and each received a big bear-hug from Rudi. He told me that it was a good class for me. The Force would begin to work for me very soon.

Apart from a certain relaxation during the class and an exhilaration afterwards, which I usually felt after a meeting with Rudi, I had not experienced anything unusual. This was somewhat disappointing to me. I realized that this work was not going to be simply a matter of free miracles and visions but a gradual process requiring great effort.

As the weeks passed, I became more accustomed to this exercise, and going to class became a matter of course The work of surrender became more natural to me, and I began to become sensitive to levels of resistance programmed into my being. At times they seemed to fall away, as if by the work of the Force, just as at other times they could only be removed by the active effort or surrender. But there were many times when I felt unable so much as to touch the resistance in myself. Indeed, the more I tried to surrender the more the resistance grew.

The activity of the mind also fluctuated in this same manner. I began to acquire a certain anxiety and frustration about my own limitations, and I would often go to Rudi desperately demanding some kind of help to remove the obstacles in my life. But there was only a sort of chiding humor to ease me up, and then the admonition to more work and deeper surrender.

This is a common experience among those who deliberately perform various kinds of work in consciousness. The more you try to do it, the more obstacles arise. There is probably no more confounding and frustrating admonition than the simple order to relax. And one of the greatest lessons I would learn from all my years of spiritual effort was how spiritual seeking not only reinforces or makes more conscious the very things it seeks to remove, but it is for that very reason founded in the same mechanisms and motives that are our problems and suffering. I would come to resolve these dilemmas on the basis of a radically different understanding, but for now I discipled myself to conscious effort with tremendous force and need.

Rudi would often talk about the kind of effort to surrender that he felt was required. He compared it to "tearing your guts out." I found that my life was becoming a terrible ordeal of surrender, and the depth of my work never satisfied him. He worked on me by frustrating me and minimizing my efforts or accomplishments, so that most of the time I was in a positive fever. I felt the incredible weight of all I needed to surrender. Real spiritual work must amount to nothing less than a wholesale cutting away of all that I am. It must amount to an infinite depth, an absolute surrender. And when I would examine the littleness of my depth, I would become awed and frustrated. I was burdened with the need for an impossible purification and self-abnegation.

This surrender was not merely a physical opening or relaxation of the nervous system. Nor was it simply a purifying and disciplining of life. It was a profound internal opening in every part. Rudi sometimes said we should concentrate on surrendering three things: self-pity, negativity, and self-imagery. Surrender was a perfect letting go of the ego, the learned identity and drama. As my experience grew I also became critically aware of the work, its effects, its value, and its sources. I acquired these things in my own intelligence, and thus I gradually became aware of differences between Rudi and myself.

Rudi claimed to have had visitations from certain "Tibetans" when a little boy. They told him his life would be very difficult, but it would bring him to a very high state. They also told him he would have thousands of students. His life has tended to bear this out. The size of his influence has expanded greatly, and every step of his life appears, at least to him, to require almost absolute sacrifices and work on his cart.

He described himself constantly as a poor Jewish boy whose father abandoned him and his mother when he was young. His mother apparently treated him to huge doses of violence, for whatever reasons, and he had to surmount terrible obstacles and resistance on his part in order to improve his life.

He was obviously a man of great passions and appetites, a figure of gargantuan energy and huge pleasures. He would often give himself as the perfect example of the need for great effort and surrender. In him all the passions of self-indulgence were active, and he would often say that when he indulged them he had to pay a terrible price to regain himself. Thus, he was not an example of religiously motivated purity. Even so, he recommended to his students that they achieve as great control as possible over their various desires.

I was quite overweight at the time. I weighed over 230 pounds and looked like a ball of fat, although I was not nearly as large as Rudi! He insisted that I watch my diet and lose weight. I took all of his admonitions very seriously, and I observed everything in him as the direct communication of God. Thus, I lost a lot of weight, to my great benefit. But Rudi, even though he protested himself, only grew larger and larger.

Finally, he would only say that his size and weight were the result of the activity of the Force, and we allowed him that. After all, Nityananda was also a huge fat man, and he more than anyone else was Rudi's ideal figure of the "God- Force." It was always Nityananda's example and image that Rudi held before himself. Thus, Rudi expanded in size like Nityananda, whatever the reasons.

During a trip to India some time later I was told that Nityananda had always been an ascetic, and his early photographs show a figure of skeletal thinness. Even in later life he ate only the very little he could be forced to take, but his body expanded hugely due to the influx of higher power, so that he was also called Ganesh, the "elephant god." When he died, his body suddenly contracted. I have seen photographs of his corpse that prove this.

I considered that Rudi's case was a combination of several factors. Certainly he was the instrument and bearer of a tremendous force that was not the ordinary gift of a human being. But he was also more complicated than the traditional Indian saint, and he was hearty enough to accept the psychology of the expansive, devouring fat man as part of the structure of his life. I mention the whole matter here only to show an example of the kind of conflict of differences between him and me that eventually caused me to leave him. His size and manner were otherwise quite charming and seemed to present no perfect obstacle to his growth. In India, a man told me that many may gossip about Rudi's unascetic tendencies, but when he arrives they all go to him to get "charged up" by his presence.

I never quarreled with the appropriateness of Rudi's philosophy and practice for his own case. It was only that I gradually began to understand that his emphasis on effort, work and surrender was a distinct characteristic of his peculiar need and experience. My own tendencies at that time were indeed destructive, and his teaching was almost entirely beneficial to me while I remained with him. But, for myself, such a machine of effort, once it had achieved its earliest benefits in my general well-being, began only to reveal its own impossibility, so that I was drawn to another understanding.

Rudi's way was obviously not entirely or even basically founded in Indian yoga. Indeed, I was to discover years later that his methods and aims were quite different from those of Swami Muktananda, his Guru. Even before he went to India and met his present teachers he had first been a student of Gurdjieff work in New York. And he had graduated from there to the practices instituted by Pak Subuh in the Subud movement here and abroad.

Rudi never spoke much in detail about his experiences in those movements, but the manner of his teaching, his philosophy and practice, can be seen as a direct reflection of the leading motives of Gurdjieff and Pak Subuh.

The Gurdjieff work emphasizes the necessity for profound effort, the absolute and conscious work of evolution. Like Rudi, it doesn't emphasize such work for the sake of "enlightenment" or some single, perfect and liberating perception that is the ultimate goal of striving. It posits the endlessness of that work in the direction of an ever higher evolution of abilities, knowledge and perception that will have direct consequences in human life.

Rudi's way of work and effort in an endless progress of growth was generated by his own needs in the presence of his peculiar tendencies. But it is clear that he acquired much of the technology and reinforcement for that path in the Gurdjieff movement. Even so, the Gurdjieff work was basically a pattern of philosophy and technique. He acquired the first evidence of what he called the "Force" from Pak Subuh.

Pak Subuh is an Indonesian teacher who experienced a spontaneous awakening sometime early in his life. It was the awakening of a certain power or spiritual force that came to him miraculously and thereafter remained always available to him. He found that he could also initiate this force in others, if they were even a little open to it. Rudi apparently experienced his first conscious initiation in this Force while involved in the Subud movement and later from Pak Subuh himself.

But Pak Subuh was not aware that there was any previous tradition of this same power. He thought it was an entirely new spiritual influence that he was to communicate to the world. He knew nothing of the tradition of Kundalini Shakti in India, nor the already traditional process of initiation by touch, thought, look or the giving of a mantra known in India as "Shaktipat."

Therefore, Pak Subuh interpreted this Force and its value along lines peculiar to his own experience. He saw that once this Force was activated in a person it could be developed into various purifying and creative life abilities through a spontaneous exercise he called the "latihan." Again, this energy was not promoted as a means to an absolute higher knowledge, which is its radical purpose in the Indian sources. It was interpreted as a kind of creative God-Force whose significance was in the evolution and expansion of creative life processes.

Thus, the work of Subud also has the kind of endlessness and nonspecific purpose characteristic of Rudi's teaching. However, in my own case, spiritual life always had a radically specific purpose. It was to realize the highest knowledge, the knowledge of fundamental reality that makes all the difference and ends the search. For this reason, I was also chronically disturbed by the notion of perpetual, evolutionary work which Rudi advocated. And, again, this difference in our tendencies or aims also helped to generate the break between us in later years.

Rudi apparently possessed the fundamentals of his path, both its philosophy and its activating "Force," even before he arrived in India in the late fifties. What he received from Nityananda and Muktananda was that Force in its most direct and powerful form. He saw his Indian teachers as an endless source, a fountain that he could always tap and thereby discover even greater depth, greater experiences, and greater power.

Thus, ever since Swami Nityananda's mahasamadhi, Rudi has made at least two trips a year to Baba Muktananda's ashram. He would always return claiming greater power and higher levels of experience. He always demanded recognition of himself as a unique source or instrument for this Force. His personal claims and the forceful manner in which he directed attention to himself tended also to turn me away from him in time. I greatly desired such gifts for myself, for reasons that were at times as unenlightened or as genuine as his own. And Rudi's tendency to command an exclusive right for himself to such power became a source of conflict between us, although I never outwardly manifested that conflict until the day I left him.

I felt that the great benefits of such Force must be available to all. And I was not so sure I could recognize tremendous growth in any visible measure in Rudi's students. Even where there was practical evidence of a partial improvement of life, I sought an utterly radical reversal and transformation of existence. Thus, I became hungry for direct contact with Rudi's sources. And it was only a matter of time before the burden of effort and Rudi's philosophy would reach their limit in me.

I had embraced that path totally, absolutely committed to the ends I sought. I was willing to do whatever necessary to attain them. Such fanatical intensity is characteristically required of those who devote themselves to conscious evolution by various efforts. The first effects of that commitment were wholly beneficial to me. But in time I began to learn profound lessons in secret. And the entire process began to become more degrading than enlightened. However, it would be three and one half years before I would have strength enough to wander into India on my own.    

Chapter 8
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