The Way-Back Machine: Robert Meets Alain

 

 The Man Who Would be Guru, Part 1
Robert Meets Alain
Oakland, California 1972

"...that naked longing that had failed to attract the notice of brighter luminaries over the years finally found its mark in Alain."

Before falling in with Alain, Robert had already logged 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— forking over cash, chanting, meditating, 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. They 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 ambitious 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, né 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 that she alone had tempted him to break his vow of celibacy. Swami Satchidananda, né C. K. Ramaswamy Gounder, truly celibate and authentically, attractively 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-given name was supposed to reveal a profound aspect of one's being. Having to share his spiritual name with a 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) to devote her life to spiritual pursuits; we knew her through Kriyananda, to whom she'd signed over the money from her divorce settlement, the deed to her house, and a tract of land in the Salton Sea. Oleta and Kriyananda were contemporaries and assumed to be lovers, an error the lady found galling. “If I had wanted to have sex, I'd have stayed with my husband!” she protested, obviously appalled by 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 Naudé, né Eugene Alan Naude, 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 a seemingly simple path of his own devise. It didn't require any chanting, name changes, dip-dyed costumes, or surrender of bodily fluids: just attendance at each and every one of his discourses, which were delivered in front of small groups in word-of-mouth locations.

Alain's credentials as former factotum to Jiddu Krishnamurti—a very big gun on the international spiritual circuit, with a solid constituency that predated, by decades, that of the current crop of latter-day gurus—gave him enormous credibility and access to his very earliest audiences: middle-aged women of means. By the time we met Alain, his audiences were small groups—10, 12 maximum—of 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. 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 really a 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.

I don’t remember the specifics of that first lecture. I do remember finding it 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 "non-holy" books—Robert once freaked, as we used to say, when he saw me reading "Pale Fire" as I suckled our son, claiming that Nabokov would pollute the baby—tending to fall asleep during mediation, and having a libido. 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 rather remarkable fact that Alain never once, in an hour-long monologue, 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 years, finally found its mark in Alain. After the lecture, over a cup of tea, Alain sought him out for a personal conversation (“I see you can hold full lotus for a long time. Are you a student of yoga?”) as I stood smiling and shifting my weight from foot to foot, rocking the baby, who was hours past his bedtime and beginning to fuss.

Go to Part 2 of The Man Who Would be Guru: The Man Who Came to Dinner

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