In the Steps of the Yogis

Vijayananda In The Steps of the Yogis Published with the kind authorization of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai (first edition 1978) First Part The Preparation CHAPTER 1 PARIS 1945 June the sixth, 1944. The marvellous news spread like wildfire; the Allies had landed in Normandy; the German army was retreating in disorder. At last the seeming impossible had come to pass. Then on August 15th, 1944 came the attack on the Mediterranean coast; the country was free. At last we could breathe easily again. It was like waking out of a long nightmare. I was a doctor, thirty years old at the time. Like everybody else I had been called up. I asked to be attached to the F.E.F.E.O. the far Eastern Expeditionary Force. The Japanese had not yet been brought to their knees, and in the Far East fierce fighting still raged. It was not that I had any ill feeling towards* the Japanese. Far from it I had always had the highest admiration for the culture of this great people. The indomitable courage and chivalric spirit of their samurais, their delicate art, their ethics culminating in the Zen branch of Buddhism, all these had compelled the respect of the entire world. But for me the F.E.F.E.O. Was a door to the Far East .I had been promised a post at G.H.O. and Colombo was next door to India. It was India, which drew me. India? Why India? The West can certainly take pride in material civilisation and in the miracles that its scientists have achieved, and in this field the East has almost nothing to teach us. Even on the plane of ethical values. The moral code of the Jewish and Christian religious, Roman law and the legislative systems of modern nations have achieved heights that can hardly be surpassed. But India, despite all the changes she has undergone, remains the acknowledged centre of spiritual culture. An artist pursuing perfection in music or in painting would go to Rome or to Florence; in medicine the ne plus ultra of a student’s aspiration would be the Faculty of medicine in Paris; chemistry would best be studied in Germany…and so it goes on. But to achieve spiritual perfection it is to India that one most go to serve one’s apprenticeship. It is quite unnecessary of course to adopt the Hindu religion and customs. All that is called for is to study at the feet of a Master that wisdom which pertains not to any single race or nation but to all humankind, Whether it is called the Brahmagyan the Knowledge of the Self, the Gay Savoir or any other name is no great matter. However far back one goes into the history of India, one finds that always, even in the darkest ages, the torch of this wisdom has been kept alive. It would appear that there was always at least one wise man capable of handing it on. The West has known one Moses and one Christ lives according to their teachings. But in India every generation has had its Christs and its Moses’, and some of them, perhaps, even greater than the founders of the religions of the West. For the time being, however, I was in Paris. After a period of training at St Raphael and then in Algeria, I had been posted to the General Headquarters of the Far East Expeditionary Corps. But the atomic bomb had compelled the Japanese to surrender and so we were waiting for our demobilisation. Paris! I have always had a special corner in my heart for this great city so misrepresented by foreigners. Certainly Paris has its dissipations and its nightlife; but so have all the world's great cities. It is not only for the beauty of its avenues, the sheer exuberance of its architecture, the flair of its citizens and the elegance of their culture, that I love Paris. In the whole wide world there is no town to equal it. The truth is, it is not just a town, it is a world in itself. It represents the sum- total of all Western culture for centuries past. Each quiet quarter bears its own stamp, distinctive and unique. All spheres of arts, of humanity and of science are represented in Paris, in their highest form. But what is not generally known is that even to those who thirst for the spiritual life, Paris has something to offer. And it was to this field of research that I now decided to dedicate my spare time. Among the first of my discoveries was Gurukrita, the wise man of Saint-Mandé. Strange bonds of friendship link mystics to each other. It would appear that an invisible power draws them together and creates a feeling of mutual sympathy. How else could I explain my meeting at St Raphael with Doctor M? Dr M. was a physician somewhat older than myself, a Buddhist and proud of the fact. He was more inclined to the Tibetan forof Buddhism, to “Lamaism”. He knew the Tibetan and Sanskrit languages and had translated Tibetan texts into French. Additionally, he had a long and serious experience of meditation. I listened to him admiringly and asked advice of him as of an older brother. He spoke to me of his guru, his spiritual guide, a true sage able to easily guide those whom he considered able to receive his teachings". My heart leaped with joy. Ever since I had been 20 years old I had regarded the word guru as I would a magic formula. To utter it, or even merely to think it, would bring tears to my eyes. But what actually was a Guru? Did the word suggest something outside the sphere of human relations? I was hardly four years old when my father died and I have no recollection of feeling among my childhood memories. A psychoanalyst would say that, having been deprived of paternal love, I had repressed and sublimated my longing for it into a conscious search for a Guru, and perhaps there might be a measure of truth in this. But why to attach importance to the opinions of a psychoanalyst? The science of psychoanalysis is still in its infancy and has explored a tiny portion only of the complexities of the human mind. But the mind is a whole, all levels of which operate in relation to each other, and it can be known and judged only if it is considered in its entirety. Psychologists in the West are generally agreed that art, prayer, the love of God and so on, are all sublimations of the sexual urge. But perhaps it would be more correct to invert the terms of the relationship and to postulate that sexual love is no more than degeneration and a false interpretation of the love of the Divine. It is true that many of our actions and thoughts are symbolic expressions of our sexual life. But sex urge is not the last word. The sexual act itself is in effect, a symbolic expression of something more fundamental still. The urge to reach the "Other" is rooted in our instinctive awareness that we are "separated" from "something", and that we long to become one with it again, to become one with the universal consciousness. And it is the "Guru" who serves as the links, which makes this union possible. The physical Guru - I am talking of course of a true Guru - represents, in some way, the knife-edge between human love and the love of the Divine. This is only one of his functions, though not the least important. In the language of psychoanalysis, one might say that he brings about an "affective transference". The truth is however, that the true Guru is God himself or if one prefers, our luminous "I", the "Christos" of the Gnostics. He takes concrete shape in a visible form when we are spiritually mature enough for the inner quest. My friend, Dr. M. had written to his master to introduce me, and one fine summer afternoon I took the metro to Saint-Mandé. L'avenue Victor. Hugo.…..L'hospice Lenoir- Joussereau... I asked for doctor Goret... and I was led into his room. Imagine my surprise to find that it was the room of an invalid! The doctor, formerly a house physician in the Paris hospitals and holder of diploma in psychiatry, had been bed-ridden for over 30 years. With no private means he was supported by public welfare funds and lived the life of a veritable monk. It appeared that after an active life, cerebellar complications following a stroke had reduced him to this condition. An ordinary man would have a given himself over to despair or might even have gone mad. But Doctor Goret, (Gurukrita, as he called himself) was no ordinary man. Hewas, to use his own words a "born ascetic". With his mind turned inward, he had come to understand secrets and complexities of our thinking machine. He had then made an even greater discovery, the discovery of something he called "the beyond". One day he had chanced upon certain books about Theravada Buddhism and Vedanta and He had noticed that his own ‘discovery’ matched perfectly with these teachings of the great sages of India. Thus he called himself a Buddhist. However, the charge that a great master of Zen Buddhism once brought against his disciple “there is too much Buddhism in what you have said”, certainly could not be brought against Gurukrita, for his teaching was very much applied to his life and ,and he used words drawn from books only to communicate more easily with his interlocutors.

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