The Way-Back Machine: Robert Meets Alain

This isn't Alain; it's Swami Satchidananda, circa 1971. Alain arrived a bit later.

Oakland, 1972

Before falling in with Alain, Robert had already invested several years sitting cross-legged on the floors of assorted ashrams and auditoriums, part of the faceless rabble that bought the books and attended the  retreats of various hotshot '60s gurus—chanting, meditating, forking over cash, and once participating in a group exercise that involved vomiting, en masse, into self-dug trenches in a coastal forest—without ever being favored by the personal attentions of the gurus themselves. The swamis would glide by on the way to their limos, beaming beatifically but never specifically at him, despite his fervent namastes and deep, humble bows. This was frustrating because in that milieu, one-on-one guidance by a personal guru was considered absolutely essential to spiritual progress, much the way an MBA needs a mentor for career advancement.

Robert thought he’d found his guru more than once, only to have his hopes dashed: Swami Kriyananda, née J. Donald Walters of Palo Alto, disappointed him and others by being caught en flagrante on a bathroom floor with one of what turned out to be a long line of female followers barely beyond the age of consent, each of whom was under the impression she alone had tempted him to break his vow of celibacy. Swami Satchidananda, who was truly celibate and authentically Indian to boot, reserved his special spiritual ministrations for a clique of C-list celebrities and trustifarians. He did, however, bestow upon us Hindu names, following Robert’s impulsive pledge of every cent we had during a revival-style satsang/fund drive for Swamiji’s year-round yoga retreat in the mountains of West Virginia.

Robert’s incarnation as Raguvir was brief because the impulse to jocularly shorten this name to Ragu proved irresistible to too many people—another pothole on the path to enlightenment, because a guru-granted name was supposed to reveal a deep hidden aspect of one's being. Having to share his spiritual name with a popular pasta sauce was an undeniable disappointment, particularly since Satchidananda give me, the designated spiritual pygmy in our relationship, a muscular, butch name with terrific brand recognition, generally reserved for men: Rama. I never used it. Swamiji also gave our then-infant son a great nickname that he uses to this day.
Robert had reverted to his civilian name by the time we met Alain at Oleta's apartment in Oakland, circa 1972. Oleta had been a suburban housewife before leaving her salesman husband  (a “carnivore,” she explained dismissively) to devote her life to spiritual pursuits; we knew her through Kriyananda, to whom she'd signed over the deed to her house, the money from her divorce settlement, and a tract of land in the Salton Sea. Oleta and Kriyananda were contemporaries and thought to be lovers, an assumption the lady found galling. “If I had wanted to have sex, I'd have stayed with my husband!” she'd gasp, obviously horrified at the idea. For his part, Kriyananda was kept very busy imparting spiritual wisdom to nubile devotees and had stopped returning Oleta’s phone calls. She was stone broke but still gamely pursuing enlightenment, renting in a marginal neighborhood, teaching yoga and vegetarian cooking classes in community centers, and occasionally hosting small gatherings featuring a guest guru/teacher type.
A portly, tweedy, 40-something Afrikaner, Alain really stood out from his fellows, who were mostly wearing orange schmattes and using lavishly vowelled, polysyllabic pseudonyms. He had a credible patina of European culture and a plummy, vaguely British accent. Recently arrived in the U.S., he was setting up shop in a little-trafficked corner of the Bay Area’s bustling spiritual marketplace, promoting an out-of-the-counter-culture-mainstream path of his own devise. It didn't require any chanting, name changes, dip-dyed costumes, or barfing: just attendance at each and every one of his discourses, which were delivered to small groups in word-of-mouth locations. That, and unquestioning adherence to his dicta.
Alain's impeccable credentials as former factotum to J. Krishnamurti (a very big gun on the international spiritual circuit with a solid constituency that predated, by decades, that of the '60s-era crop of latter-day gurus) gave him enormous credibility and access to his very earliest audiences: middle-aged women of means, although he was considerably off-task with Oleta, who had already been picked clean. By the time we met him, his audiences were small groups—10, 12 maximum—0f seekers in their 20s.
It was inevitable that Alain and Robert find each other. Robert sat bang in the front of the room that night, as he always did at such gatherings. He was literally at Alain’s feet, because Alain sat in a wing-back chair while everyone else was cross-legged on the carpet, gazing up at him. I assumed my usual spot, too—the back of the room, discreetly nursing the baby to keep him quiet and poised to bolt if he stirred. The “discussion” was a really monologue, delivered by Alain in response to what we’d later learn was a planted question/topic posed by a ringer in the audience (a role that Robert would proudly assume in time). Much later I’d recognize many of the formulated questions and Alain's responses in Krishnamurti’s talks, recorded years before.
I don’t remember the specifics of that first lecture. I found it difficult to follow—circumlocutory and curiously inert. Airless. I assumed that the problem was me: my stunted spiritual state was a given in Robert’s and my relationship, amply evidenced by traits like refusing to give up "unholy" books—Robert once freaked, as we used to say, when he saw me reading Nabokov as I suckled our son, claiming that "Pale Fire" would pollute the baby—tending to fall asleep during mediation, and wanting to have sex. I didn’t think Robert “got” the lecture, either, and I assumed he’d be put off by the lack of exotic trappings and the astonishing fact that Alain never once, in a nearly 2-hour soliloquy, used a contraction.
I was wrong. Robert was entranced. And his rapt attentiveness, that naked longing that had failed to attract the notice of brighter luminaries over the past few years, finally found its mark in Alain: after the lecture, over a cup of tea, Alain sought him out for a lengthy personal conversation (“I see you can hold full lotus for a long time. Are you a student of yoga?”) as I stood smiling uneasily and shifting my weight from foot to foot, rocking the baby, who was hours past his bedtime and beginning to fuss.

Next: An array of edicts; the man who came to dinner. Part 2: Circles and Lines is here.

Comments

[21stCenturyMom]

Welcome to Blogorama, Rama where the road to enlightenment is paved with words - some better assembled than others. It's a pleasure to have you out here raising the bar on content production.

I'm so looking forward to having you back in the Bay Area where you can recycle without fear of reprisal and where you may just have occasion to throw an elbow at an ersatz guru should one cross your path in the future.

[Robin Clavreul]

Robin Clavreul

cellist

who could give me thecontact for Alainnaudé?

thanks

an old cellist friend

[GORDON H. DOWTON]

I find this particular foray quite interesting and do apreciate the skepticism involved. Do continue to go forth on that search that so eloquently opens up the follies of humankind to feel that 'someonelse' will show us the way. Perhaps to a person drunk on whatever but not to one who knows a Norway rat before trying to pet it. DOWTONg