Video: Gurus, Women, and Yoga: The Spiritual World of Hindu Universalism

September 23, 2019
Ruth Harris

In the annual Hindu View of Life lecture, Ruth Harris examines how Vivekananda conveyed the meaning of “guru-bakhti” to his female disciples, and the spiritual lens through which he sought to mold them in a male spiritual milieu.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

[MUSIC PLAYING]

 

Thank you all for coming out on this very warm evening. I'd like to thank the center's staff, first and foremost, for making this event, as all events, possible. And I'd also like to thank my colleagues, Derek Penslar, whom I had not yet met. Hello Derek, and thank you. And Mary Lewis, who I don't believe is here, they're both from the Center for European Studies, which is cosponsoring this event.

 

So let me begin with a very mundane matter, which is to remind you all to please silence your cell phones, or just turn them off. I have the distinct honor and pleasure of welcoming Professor Ruth Harris this evening. She's professor of modern history at the University of Oxford, and senior research fellow at All Souls College. She's published widely in the history of religion, science, women's history, French history, and more recently, global history. Some of her previous research topics include the history of the insanity defense in Paris, Catholic revivalism and healing in Lourdes, and the Dreyfus Affair.

 

She's currently studying global spiritual renewal between the years 1880 and 1950 by examining the impact of South Asian spiritual figures on Europe and America. The discussion this evening, entitled Gurus, Women, and Yoga, the Spiritual World of Hindu Universalism, is the 2019 annual Hindu View of Life lecture here at the center.

 

So permit me just a very brief word on this series. The center's Hindu view of life annual lecture aims to address the current urgent issues of our time from a perspective informed by insights and values arising from Hindu traditions, both of India and of Hinduism globally. The inaugural lecturer took place in 2016. This lecture is meant to evoke the memory of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who spoke at the opening of this very center in 1960. His portrait is upstairs.

 

The lecture may also include attention to Hindu views of pluralism and the religious traditions of the wider world. These are not unfamiliar issues to Professor Harris. Her lecture this evening will be exploring the evolution of the teaching and understanding of gurus and yoga in the West. It will examine how Swami Vivekananda had to adopt much of his teaching to encompass an entirely new world of female devotees, many of whom had been engaging in spiritualism, hypnotherapy, and above all, Christian Science.

 

Professor Harris will argue that Vivekananda had to adapt to their concerns while constantly differentiating neo-Vedanta from a host of competing Western ideas and practices, all the while also negotiating a host of other new and pressing concerns. Please join me in welcoming Professor Ruth Harris.

 

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RUTH HARRIS: Thank you, everyone. It's an absolute delight to be here. I just remembered that I was here when I was 28, and I was here for a job talk in the history department. I didn't get it, but I survived. And I've had a little bit of difficulty in doing this talk, because I didn't know how many would know something about Indian traditions, how many know about European and ideas of the unconscious, how many would know about American practice. And I just decided, as they say, to go for it. And we will see in the question and answer what you need to know and how you need to correct me.

 

I'll begin by talking, first of all, thanking both Charles and Derek who organized this. It's been a fantastic trip for me. I've followed Vivekananda's footsteps through New England and ended today at the Museum of Fine Arts, where as you know, Okakura was there to organize the Asiatic Japanese collection, and Kura Swami were vital in the Buddhist collection, and they, of course, were both associates of Vivekananda. My main aim is to bring Vivekananda into the world of the West, so that he can be seen as a global thinker, and I will try and show you why I think that is the case.

 

In 1893, the United States held the World's Fair in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World, and stake out its claim that the American century was coming. It was a massive display of economic and artistic power, bigger and better in every way that was imaginable than any which Europe had produced. But alongside the extravaganza of American materialism and industrial prowess, the equally famous World Parliament of Religions was held, and here they are assembled.

 

You'll see throughout on the stage there are figures from Asia, no one from Africa. There was one African-American who kept on making jokes about how he was there to represent American African-Americans and the whole continent of Africa. There were no Indians. There were no Mormons, because of polygamy. So there are tremendous numbers of Jews. They are very much seen here as important to the event, and they take a very big role. But that's a whole other story.

 

It was designed to show the superiority of what was called American Protestant modernism to representatives of other creeds gathered to exchange views on the shores of the New World. There were many from Asia who lectured on Eastern beliefs, but the most notable, not at this point the most famous, was a 30-year-old Bengali monk who had not even been invited called Swami Vivekananda. He addressed quote, "the sisters and brothers of America." It was very important that he mentioned the women first. And he received a rapturous response from a 4,000 strong audience electrified by a message which denounced quote, "sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism," and which staked a claim for India to be considered quote, "the mother of all religions."

 

The reception was all the more astonishing because unlike Buddhism, which was known now through Edward Arnold' s The Light of Asia, which was published in 1878 and was a Tennisonian style poem based on the Buddha's life, few in the audience knew anything about Hinduism beyond popular stereotypes of Swamis, who were snake charmers and did rope tricks. We have to remember that Hindu migration really starts in the 1890s in California, and there were very few Indians at this juncture.

 

The Chicago Parliament thus launched Vivekananda's career as the first recognized global guru. They were people before, but he is the first global guru, the subject of my forthcoming work, which is called Guru to the World. And I just want to explain briefly, in an ex tempore fashion, what I'm doing. What I'm trying to understand is why there's an alienation from conventional churches, especially Calvinism, with its emphasis on sin and redemption, and how and why Westerners turned to new forms of spirituality, invested in what was called Eastern wisdom. Why Eastern wisdom, which is a mutual creation of both the East and the West, was so important, and to understand that much of what we assume to be New Age spirituality was not the product of the 1960s, but was very much a product of the fin de siecle.

 

And also for us to change our vision of how we missionized the world, and to explain that Vivekananda comes, literally, two missionize the West, to undermine Christian imperialism, and transform global culture. And it's a remarkably ambitious, almost grandiose vision, but it's very interesting in the way that he powerfully saw this kind of inversion as possible.

 

And here he is. I was told by Bengali friends that he still makes Bengali mothers cry, they find him so beautiful. And this is a costume that he uses for lectures. He had already developed-- the turban comes from the Maharaja of Khetri, but the costume in general, which was a scarlet cloak and an orange turban, this became his trademark costume. It's very interesting, it's self-orientalizing, and yet it is not the conventional costume of a sannyasin in any way. So it's his creation.

 

But it's also a creation of the women that he met on the way in Massachusetts before, who suggested to him that he use this gear for lecturing, but that he wear a more sober clerical black coat in the street, because of course everyone was making fun of him, and everyone thought he was an African-American. So we'll have time to talk about the racism and the issues of racism that he faced.

 

Now today I want especially to analyze one strand of my work, Vivekananda's recreation of the guru disciple relationship for the West, what in India is called guru bhakti, and the importance of female disciples in this elaboration. First let me give you a little background. Now, this has been a totally audacious thing for me. My work has been concerned with the relations between physicians and female patients, between Catholic priests and women devotees, and the complex interpersonal dynamics and ideas that these relationships fostered.

 

But now I'm looking at an international arena, how Indian religion brought a new dimension to the discussion and analysis of what I call rapport, rapport in the French sense, in the developing sciences of mind. What happens between people in relationships? When Vivekananda came West, he was plunged into a world of mesmeric and hypnotic healers and their subjects, Christian Science operators and their devotees, as well as a whole array of mind cure specialists. And in fact, America still is famous around the world for the diversity of therapies, physical and mental, that people have outside of conventional medicine.

 

Now all of these people explored the nature of rapport, and were fascinated with the relationship between the rival claims of science and religion, or the possibility of a new kind of spirituality that encompassed both. So for example, one of the things that's very important to understand is somebody like Vivekananda, he saw himself in league with science because he saw an evolutionary dynamic in individual reincarnation, in time, and also he opposed Christian obscurantism. So people like Vivekananda and Dharmapala, a Buddhist modernist, spent a lot of time reading people like Spencer and Huxley, because they felt that Hinduism had discovered these scientific truths thousands of years before.

 

Now what I'm trying to explain, and this is the global history dimension of what I'm doing, is that in this world, Vivekananda, William James, who offered Vivekananda a position here at Harvard, and he rejected it. So he's very much, was very known here. He used to be at the salon of Sara Bull on Barlow Street, so people in Cambridge knew him very well. Mary Baker Eddy, and perhaps surprisingly, Freud, are all linked, as are the worlds of religion, science, and the occult. And part of my concern is to show the extent to which notions of science are very capacious in this period, hence why we have things like Christian Science.

 

OK. Now before leaping into the discussion, however, I want to insist on the human and relational in global history, which the guru disciple connection exemplifies. In this regard I'd like to say that I see myself as slightly different from many global historians. I don't want to caricature them, but in their preoccupation with connectivity, whether it be oceans or port cities or views of cosmopolitanism or in the printing culture or the transport revolution, it's very interesting how often these histories are unpeopled.

 

And what I'm interested in is repeopling this. And I have extraordinary documents to show the nature of these connections, and to show not just connectivity, but what could not be understood, because metaphysical systems were so very different, what was disruptive, what was painful in these interactions. And so that the whole cliche of the global and the local and the local and the global, this is not stuff that I'm really that interested in. If somebody wants to challenge me later, feel free.

 

OK, so who did Vivekananda know? He had a very diverse audience, high minded reformist Indians, very important in Bengal, but also in Madras. Harvard professors, British aristocrats, educated Western women, Maharajas, and ultimately Indian freedom fighters. And the Indians here know about his importance for many sides of the political divide in India. OK. Vivekananda now is a very, very controversial figure. His legacy is controversial. Important and controversial.

 

I will suggest that there are links which I'm keen to recover between the Western vogue for self-realization and the anti-colonial struggle, which is extraordinary. We never think that when we go to a yoga class that might have anything to do with anti-colonialism. But the women who did this then did. And that is one of the links that I'm trying to recover.

 

These global connections, especially linked to perceptions of Eastern wisdom, were important in spawning new understandings of self, spirituality, and freedom. The cross boundaries and cultures, and we of course know the most about this when we think of Gandhi and Swaraj, which was about self-rule India, but it was also about self-rule. It was about fasting, it was about his experiments with truth, which had a very strong aesthetic dimension, and were very much linked up to this whole world of vegetarianism and progressivism in America and in England.

 

And now I want to say that I hope that this work on Vivekananda will help us recast some of our views of global intellectual history, political thought, as well as religion in contemporary society. And I have one final caveat, which is I'm going to be concentrating on the women today, the Western women, not between Ramakrishna, his guru, and his guru brothers. Everyone who knows anything about this knows that this is a whole world of understanding about these relationships.

 

I'm not talking about Ramakrishna's wife and consort, Sarada Devi, and all the devotees that followed her, though I hope to talk about her in my book, or Vivekananda's own altered relationship to his guru brothers and younger disciples once he returned to India, when he introduced things like gymnastic training, dumbbells, and even delsarte exercises. So he brings the West back to India. And it's very interesting to see how some of them feel about it. Some of them are not so keen.

 

OK. When Vivekananda came west, his ideas were already highly elaborated. And so I must begin by explaining that what later became known as Hindu universalism, which has its roots in many, many older traditions, asserted that the temporal world of our senses was an illusion, maya, which could be shattered by entering into samadhi, or higher consciousness, and that these practices connected the individual to higher cosmic reality.

 

He advocated meditation to access brahman, the non-dualist Advaitic conception of the supernatural in which all souls, and hence all humanity, were united in their divinity. Cosmic holism and self realization were thus two sides of the same coin, which he offered as a contrast to the Christian notion of divine judgment, to the threat of damnation for transgressors, and the power of a separate punishing deity.

 

One of the most moving speeches that he made in Chicago was that it was a sin to call people sinners. And for many, many Americans, this was an extraordinary thing. And we have some personal testimony of saying that people who were disenchanted with religion and Christianity found a new sense of self, because they no longer felt that that was the most important thing to be, which was a sinner.

 

Rather than sin and repentance, what also became known as neo-Vedanta focused on merger and bliss, and proposed ancient techniques such as yoga as the means of accessing both. To make his ideas comprehensible to his American and ultimately international audience, he also sought to bind together two seemingly contradictory sources of ideas, the reformist, rationalist cosmopolitanism of his native Calcutta, and the mysticism of his own guru, Ramakrishna.

 

What's interesting is that when he comes to Chicago first, he then goes east to New England. He meets all these people who are transcendentalists, as are widely read. They're amazed that he can talk about Tindle and Longfellow as much as they can, that he speaks better English than they do. But they think he's remarkable. He thinks they're narrow-minded, because all they have is Christianity.

 

And of course he reads the Bible, he knows it. He knows about Christianity. He knows something about Islam. He knows about science. So his reaction to the people is very interesting because, he's an insider, a double insider. He's is an outsider who's becoming an insider in a world where there's so many insiders, and even though he's poverty stricken, he's not impressed. So it's a very interesting dynamic.

 

Now the former was comprised, when I'm talking about the reformist, rationalist cosmopolitanism, there was a wide range of intellectual fashions that he had from his youth in Calcutta. German historicism, biological evolutionism, liberal political thought, which he expanded when he met the Americans. He had an English education, which coexisted with Sanskrit learning, though some people debate how much Sanskrit learning he head.

 

He had a Shaivite mother. If you go to his house you can see the lingam there. And he had a free thinking Persianite father, his father spoke Persian and knew Persian poetry. His father was also a lawyer. So he was intimately related and a part of the imperial bureaucracy.

 

Moreover, Vivekananda knew about homeopathy, which had already become an Indian tradition. They call Hahnemann Mahatma Hahnemann. I mean, even today people call him Mahatma Hahnemann. They see him as an Indian. And mesmerism, had been a Freemason. I went to the Freemasonry, the Hope and Anchor Lodge, and you can see where he was. It was the first Freemasonry lodge in the world to accept people of color, and to be run ultimately by Indians. And he engaged in Victorian purity campaigns in his native Bengal against smoking and drinking, and later of course, he smoked and drank, which was always a problem for both the Americans and for the Indians. Not for me. It makes it much easier to study.

 

He also belonged to the Brahmo Samaj, the reformist Hindu organization which is too readily caricatured as a form of Indian Unitarianism, and unambiguous westernizers. And I won't bore you with the details of this, but it's very, very complex, but it's a very interesting group of people who are fighting against sati and polytheism, or seen as doing that.

 

But despite his Brahmo allegiances, Vivekananda apparently still yearned for the mystical connection, what he called a desire, literally, to quote, "see God." And he was tempted to visit the Saint of Dakshineswar, which is where Ramakrishna was. And I'd say that Ramakrishna is the most important religious figure of 19th century India, and maybe of the world. Just really important. And there he is. There's a whole other story about these photographs, but again, we'll have to leave that.

 

At first meeting, Ramakrishna appeared deranged to the well-heeled son of a lawyer educated in British institutions, smeared with ashes occasionally, naked or in loin cloths, falling into trance-like states of samadhi or ecstasy, and begging the divine mother or Kali, the goddess of death and destruction, birth and creativity, to appear before him. And this is the famous statue, which is well worth going to see if you ever go to the temple.

 

There's a whole story of Brahmins who work in temples, and he had to take this job. But once he did it, he tended to the goddesses needs in a very intimate way. And for him she was a living presence. So Ramakrishna's visions were so powerful because he seemed to blend the most quote, "authentic" aspects of Indian spirituality with a universal message that appealed to progressive Indians.

 

Why? Well he presented himself as a Hindu, as a Muslim, and as a Christian, to assert that all religious paths were equal. The message of universalism that Vivekananda developed, and was completely different from anything going on in Christianity in the same way, anywhere else, it's an extraordinary thing he does. He transcended scriptures and hierarchy, he made fun of scriptures, actually, to forge an unmediated relationship with the supernatural and find transcendence in them all.

 

Rather than just establishing a new sect, he rejected all sects, and refused the role of the omniscient father. He didn't want to be a guru in the classic mold. Instead he elaborated a theology of childhood, what is called divine play, Lila, an adoration that in its simple intimacy and whimsicality was wholly different from the Christian emphasis on God the Father.

 

When Vivekananda appeared before his audience in Chicago, he was careful not to reveal too much of his master's excesses, and I put that, of course, in quotations, because the mystical performances were extraordinary. Later disciples recalled how Vivekananda had actually admitted when he came back in 1897 that he feared being quote, "thrown into a ditch," had he talked about how Ramakrishna's chest bled with longing for the goddess, how we dressed as Hanuman, or the monkey god, creating a tail with his loincloth and urinating on his disciples from a tree.

 

I mean, for those of us who knew something about medieval mysticism, much of this that he does is not that foreign. But he was very afraid to try and explain this to 19th century Protestants, as you can imagine. Above all, Vivekananda kept quiet about his Kali worship, his worship of Kali, lest the Americans misjudge the nature of the goddess of death, destruction, and time, with weapon in hand and trophies on her girdle and necklace.

 

And this is one of the many images, there were many popular images. As you can see, Kali is often in cemeteries, and she is part of death. She is a very remarkable goddess, because she's also the creator. And after periods of destruction, she always saves something to recreate the world. She's, in that sense, the good mother and the bad mother, the frightening mother.

 

Instead, Vivekananda, along with the other delegates from South Asia at the conference, and there were 20 of them, contrasted Eastern spirituality with rest Western materialism, Hindu tolerance with Christian intolerance, Indian transcendence with Western instrumentalism. And this is all at the World Parliament. Such opposition simplified an exoticized India, but the presentation was vital for building a spiritual ascendancy to set against the reality of Indian subjugation.

 

And what's interesting is when he goes back in 1897, he talks even more about Eastern wisdom to his own audience. And I found that very fascinating. For receptive Westerners, it provided a clear framework for distancing themselves from conventional Christianity. Besides, although not in any way proselytizing, Vivekananda did indeed believe that India was the mother of spirituality, and his message was infused by cultural nationalism that had a powerful impact in his homeland.

 

And when I say he wasn't proselytizing, I really mean it. It was all about the difference between what Christians did in India. So what he did was he said, I want you to be a better Methodist. I want you to be a better Quaker. I don't want you to convert. And this was very interesting. And that's one of the reasons I believe the people in the West don't remember him, the name, even though he was formidably famous at his time.

 

But what I'm going to argue in my book is that the notion of Eastern wisdom obscured the connections that he was instrumental in forging, and disguised the way that he became not merely a shaper of the Western intellectual and spiritual tradition, I think Vivekananda was very important to us, but also a creator of a global amalgam that did much to undermine the very division of East and West, because of also what he brought back to India.

 

How else could India become the guru to the world? It's not just Vivekananda who became the guru to the world, but India. And we think of that for Gandhi. My friends, Indian friends, say this is our blessing and our curse. We are considered the guru to the world. It's a very dangerous role to play. But it is a pervasive spiritual inspiration for the 20th century and beyond. And I think that he somehow broke down the categories that divided the two, and that's part of what I'm trying to resurrect here.

 

Now he transformed his teaching as he learned more about his audience. He went to, the following summer after the World Parliament, to a place called Green Acre, Maine, the spiritual hothouse established by Sarah Farmer. Have any of you heard of her? She's just up the road in Maine. There she is. There's Vivekananda. I don't know why, but he always finds himself in the middle of everything.

 

So here he is with all these respectable transcendentalists, and he's in the middle. And what's so funny is she's the one who's used her fortune and the fortune of her friends to bring all these people to Green Acre, and it is now the Baha'i center in Green Acre, and her personal spiritual search leads her to another eastern figure, Abdul Baha, and she becomes the 13th disciple, and she meets Abdul Baha in Haifa. I mean, one of the enduring mysteries is why didn't her other friends who follow Vivekananda, why does she go for Abdul Baha? I don't have an answer to that. Her papers were burned.

 

In Maine there is comparative religion, and there's the full range of American metaphysical exploration, transcendental traditions, healing, the occult, and popular science. On display where a range of therapies and beliefs that were based on connections between healers, diviners, occultists, and their subjects, as the academic study, and as this place matured, it became a place for Christian missionaries to come and learn comparative religion.

 

The idea of the place was to extend the work of the world parliament and to make it a permanent feature, but the model, in the early years in particular, was Chautauqua, an adult education spiritual community. But when he came, there was nothing that he hadn't seen in Calcutta. And he'd also learned about American spiritualism, because he was engaged with the Lecture Bureau, and had gone with a spiritualist, WJ Colville, on a lecture tour across America. He was thus thoroughly au fait with these therapies and their performances. So he found little that was surprising when he came to Maine.

 

Instead, he made very gentle fun, he teased spiritualism, table turnings, palmists, astrologers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, at Green Acre. But he found practices and ideas that he hoped to help his hearers understand Vedanta. His audience, for example, were almost all familiar with what Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendental notion of the over soul, the soul that takes all our souls and is connected to each individual soul, a derivation of Eastern religion that already had a wide purchase amongst these people, and had been further popularized, along with the image of the spiritual hermit, by Henry Thoreau.

 

And it was very interesting, because he has the swami's pine, where he teaches his first yoga lessons. And people write about it and say he reminds me of the hermit by-- no, it's Thoreau who actually says people who pray and sit under a tree are like the sannyasins of old. And so it's Thoreau who's taking from these traditions.

 

You also recognize the power of Swedenborgianism, and as early as 1894, they saw a link between Indian thought and the 17th century visionary. For example, one journalist in Detroit concluded that Vivekananda was Swedenborg before Swedenborg. And I love this stuff not because I'm trying to make fun of them, but-- what is the spiritual lens that people see new metaphysical ideas? It's very difficult to refract new ideas. So you can only do it with the references that you have. So one of them, of course, is transcendentalism. The second is Swedenborgianism. We know how important that was in American intellectual culture, especially through the Jamesian dynasty. His father was a famous Swedenborgian.

 

His earliest and most devoted American disciple, who had the big house on Brattle street, Sara Bull, and who was the collaborator with Sarah Farmer here, had herself joined a psychic circle run by a Christian minister influenced by Swedenborgianism. Many of them came from Unitarianism and then went into Swedenborgianism and back and forth, very porous. This mystical strand focused on divine influx, an indwelling cosmic force that broke down the barriers between the individual and the divinity that flows through all things. And this, of course, sounds not too different from transcendental ideas of self divination, and of course in Hindu it's the atman. So this is the way they began to think about it.

 

But what was important was these currents upheld the importance of harmony and healing rather than sin and redemption, and were put to a range of practical therapies through chiropractic, osteopathy, and mesmerism. And chiropractic in particular emphasized harmony, balance, what we still talk about.

 

Also important in preparing the ground, here's another one. Here is some mesmeric treatment. It's very interesting that the mesmeric treatment here, it's not a supine woman, but a man whose hands he's holding. It's very interesting how in different contexts there are different ways of doing these forms of healing.

 

Also important in preparing the ground was theosophy, the famous or notorious creed of Madame Blavatsky. Although Vivekananda thought theosophy was balderdash, and he says he says some fantastic things about theosophy, which have only recently been printed, and resented what he considered its cannibalism of Indian religion, and he writes beautifully about that, he saw potential in its ideas of universal brotherhood of humanity, and in the way it argued that science and religion could be united.

 

He, like many other south Asians, were offended by the way theosophy used South Asian youth, disciples, and exploited them. So the guru disciple relationship in a bad way. So that is very, very interesting. Theosophy attacked Christian obscurantism and advocated a cosmic evolution. It emphasized the power of higher mind over materialist neuroscience, hence the attraction of the East, seen as the fountainhead of an otherworldly spirituality.

 

And here they are. That's Madame Blavatsky, who said she'd been to Nepal. We will never know if it was in her hallucinations or in her real travels, but she did know Buddhist tribesman, on her vacations in Russia as a Russian aristocrat. And here's Alcott, who is more attracted to Buddhism, who becomes a healer, who heals people in Sri Lanka. He likes Buddhism because he sees enlightenment in the 18th century. Buddhism is about enlightenment, in an 18th century sense. So these two are very powerful figures, even though they only have a few disciples. But theosophy has a big intellectual influence. She is a very important influence on Dharmapala, for those of you who know about Buddhist modernism.

 

OK. Still more was Christian Science, the fastest growing denomination in the United States when he arrived. And he writes with glee about how this is causing heartburn to the conventional, and then he also writes, he says, and I want to cause heartburn to the conventional. Vivekananda was impressed enough to call Christian Science vedantan, even though he meant by this that it had merely, quote, "picked up a few doctrines of the advaita and grafted them upon the Bible."

 

What impressed him was, I think, in comparison to hypnotherapists and mesmerists who competed in the new thought arena, Christian Scientists made a distinction between mind, meaning neurological mind, and Mind with a capital M, meaning universal mind. This was not mere semantics. He agreed with Mary Baker Eddy that the human mind was the source of disease and immorality, as it was convinced of the materiality of the world, in a manner which suggested the maya or illusion of vedantic thought, Christian Scientists maintained that suffering, which seems so overpowering, was nothing more than quote, "waking dream shadows." That's a quotation from Mary Baker Eddy. And he liked that quotation.

 

I cannot think of one important female collaborator, including British acolytes, where the Christian Science was much, much smaller, who did not experiment with Christian Science. And many continued to do so, even after they'd become vedantans. And he admits that he uses a lot of Christian Science at times when he has insomnia, because he's is happy to use whatever to help him feel better.

 

Despite the parallels, Vivekananda believed that Christian Science's popularity came from miracle working, rather than the true self-realization that went beyond physical cures. And that's Mary Baker Eddy. His first lessons in the New World on yoga took place at Green Acre, under what I said was Swami's pine. Emma Thursby, the most famous popular singer of her generation, took notes on the sessions. She was there. And in it, the notes are saved, he says meditation is a sort of prayer, and prayer is meditation. And where he insisted that the guru was nothing more than the higher self, with domination having no role in spiritual guidance.

 

He remarked also that understanding yoga entailed realizing that quote, "our present consciousness is only a little bit of an infinite sea of mind that should not constrain us." This idea of the oceanic was vital, one that he had absorbed from Ramakrishna, who famously used the example of a dowel of salt that dissolves in the ocean as an analogy of permeability between self and the cosmic. So when you put hard salt into the ocean, it melts. So where is the self? It becomes part of the ocean. And this is used again and again, and it's very much used by Romain Rolland, who coins the oceanic sensation after writing a biography of Ramakrishna.

 

And yoga means to join, yoke, and joining ourselves with God, joining me with my real self. These are all in his notes. It ended with shivohum, I am Shiva, which he translated as I am existence absolute, a way of demonstrating the connection between the cosmic potential of the universe and that of the individual.

 

Now what's interesting about these notes is it was conveyed in the language of Christian prayer, with transcendental and Swedenborgian accents. He also used the popular science so pervasive at Green Acre. He explained to his pupils that they should concentrate their nerve energies into the spinal column until they quote, "touch the pineal gland in the center of the brain."

 

And what's interesting is the talk was foreign, especially the remarks about the guru, but also really familiar. There was neuroscience, a sense of the oceanic that encompassed Ramakrishna's thought but also included the watery metaphors of many Western mystics. And there was even a mention of the pineal gland, a reference to Descartes' view that it was the seat of the soul and the place where our thoughts are formed.

 

When he elaborated these ideas in Raja Yoga, which William James promised to preface but never did, Vivekananda seemed to refigure phrases from the Harvard philosopher's Principles of Psychology. James advocated quote, "looking into our minds and reporting what we there discover," a practice similar to Vivekananda's urging people to know quote, "the internal nature of man" by observing the facts that are going on within.

 

So with this mixture of neuroscience, evolution, physics, he particularly loves thermodynamics, because it provided a rich analogical language of force, and it was also because of all the great experimentation that was going on in thermodynamics at the time, psychology and Vedanta, Vivekananda switched back and forth between materialist science and Hindu traditions of non-dualism.

 

And I think it is this potent combination, which people have often condemned him for, which I think is wrong. They say he's not authentic Indian. What's authentic Indian? There's so many kinds of ways of preaching Vedanta. Or they say he wasn't the real thing, or he was too Western. This stuff goes back to India, and his manual is read and adapted very well in India. So this idea of inauthenticity, of kind of eclecticism that wasn't correct, I think is a false accusation. You might deny that you like Vivekananda or not, but on that basis I don't think you can make a very good case.

 

So now let's go on to talk about the people. He theorized about science, consciousness, cosmic unity because he wanted the respect if people like Max Mueller, the German and Oxford based endologist who became one of his friends, and people like William James. But above all he was a teacher. He was a guru, where the human connection took precedence.

 

After months of classes in a shabby apartment in a rundown neighborhood in Manhattan, he created his own more isolated retreat in Thousand Island, between Ontario and upstate New York. And there it is. That's where he lived in the cottage with all the people. It was a very, very fun story, because he loved cooking and he cooked for them. But all the people he were with, none of them were used to cleaning up after themselves. They were used to having servants. They were supposed to do it all together. But in the end they didn't, they got a servant in from town.

 

But it's a fascinating story. And again, I'm happy to go back to that. I've just come back from there. I went up there two days ago, and it's the one place I haven't been to, and I really wanted to see what it was like. Miss Dutcher was an extraordinary artist, and she lent him her arts and crafts cottage, and she was a Methodist, and it was a Methodist retreat. They still have a big tabernacle church there.

 

Vivekananda gathered potential followers in the remote forested region of the St. Lawrence river stream with 1,800 islands, and it is indeed, where the term thousand island dressing comes from, because the manager of the Waldorf Astoria built, this is his powerhouse, and the whole island just two steps away from the island I just showed you, built a fairy tale German castle. He was a Prussian.

 

So the island is two miles wide and nine miles long, and they lived in a strange, Sylvan paradise among German style castles, lighthouses, wooden porches, and rustic river crafts. A lot of people there, the kids just go in the boats. They don't have licenses. And just everyone is on a boat. It's an extraordinary place. It's actually a place like I've never seen before. If you have a chance, you should go and see it.

 

They were a mixed bunch. There was a Russian-Jewish immigrant named Liam Landsberg who came, polyglot and intellectual. Christine Greenstidel, who became Sister Christine, who finally runs an important school for girls. And she's an impoverished schoolteacher. Her friend, Mrs. Funky, a French Canadian actress, and Sarah Waldo, a distant relative of Emerson. There are others, but Sarah Waldo is important, because she really does show the transcendental connection. She's right there. And she's the one who takes down what is called his inspired talks, which are some of the most extraordinary of his teachings. They're short. They're beautiful.

 

During their stay he sought to explain guru bhakti, the spiritual channel between master and disciple, which was more important to the devotee than the relationship between the child and parents. He was delighted and discomfited by their desire to learn, and both sides struggled with the powerful nature of quote, "personal love and the need for detachment." And these are not words I'm using, he uses them. Personal love, detachment. And so do the women, because they're trying to understand what is going on.

 

The women, for example, talked of his enchanting qualities, the magic of his presence, the tenor of his voice, the turn of his head, the expression in his eyes. They focused on his hair and his beauty, and you can find this remarkably in the reminiscences. When he went later to California, and ultimately they set up the first Vedanta temple in 1902, 1903. Oh, that's right. It's in New York. Here's the guy who runs it now.

 

AUDIENCE: 1894.

 

RUTH HARRIS: That's right, 1894. Yeah. But in California, the first Vedanta temple. When he went later to California and he roomed in Pasadena with a group of single women, who gave over a floor of their house to him, they listened at the door as he sang his morning prayers in Sanskrit. Alice Hambro, one of the most devoted disciples there, was enthralled by everything about him. His love of pancakes. The way he wound his turban. He would unwind it and show it to the children. The way he cooked curry. He's on the floor mixing the spices. And they find this enchanting. They never met a man who could cook for them. I mean, they find it extraordinary. By all accounts, he was a wonderful cook. He gets this from his father.

 

His quote, "baritone voice," and quote, "sparkling eyes," even 40 years later she said, quote, "I can only describe myself as enchanted by him." And it's a fascinating thing, the word enchantment, because this is another paper, he has to spend all his time separating himself from that he's an Indian magician, that he's not going to walk on coals. You see what I mean? So this is the different form of enchantment, where you lose a bit of yourself.

 

Now Indian devotees made very similar remarks about him, but could, I think, more easily encompass this response in the concept of darshan, the propitious view of a holy person or deity, of gazing upon the adored one, a feeling such as Ramakrishna experienced when he cast his eyes on Kali in the temple at Dakshineswar. Guru bhakti entailed a kind of love sickness. They understood this emotion as religious, and were perhaps less afraid of it.

 

However, American women, especially of Protestant heritage, found it much more overwhelming and confusing, as you can imagine. Vivekananda complained that the Protestants who came to him, this is what he says when he's at the first year Green Acres, he calls them spiritually dry. He makes fun of their corsets because it makes them rigid. And he's actually trying, he wants to teach them yoga so they can be more flexible, literally. He says, even the young girls are preoccupied with quote, "stony metaphysics." He's not interested. He wanted to teach them about this religious passion, which was equally seen by outsiders however, as exploitative.

 

You know, in France, it's associated with the abusive practice of Catholic priests, who are accused of coercing women through the confessional, or the way the hypnotist Svengali manipulates Trilby and George de Maurier's novel of 1894, exactly at this period. And Vivekananda also has to deal with people who are saying that he is too loved by the women, even amongst associates he respects. And this is something that pains him.

 

While he avoided any hint of romantic gestures, the women often experienced this love in romantic terms, and could not so easily separate the personal and the impersonal. And Vivekananda was aware of the paradox, and spoke long and often about the problems of allowing such personal love to overwhelm the process of transformation. In one of the lessons at Thousand Island, he explained how it was supposed to work.

 

The real guru is the one through whom we have our spiritual descent. He is the channel through which the spiritual current flows to us, the link which joins us to the whole spiritual world. Too much faith in personality has a tendency to produce weakness and idolatry, but intense love for the guru makes rapid growth possible. He connects us with the internal guru, again, this thing about the guru representing what's within. Adore your guru if there be real truth in him. That guru bhakti will quickly lead you to the highest.

 

And of course Ramakrishna talks a lot about how you distinguish the real guru. He says to his disciples, you are right to question me. You are right to test me. Vivekananda was guide, teacher, friend, and bitter critic, all parts of the guru tradition. However, he steered clear of any hint of the self annihilating ecstasies of Ramakrishna. Even when he insisted on obedience as the first step to liberation, this surrender was accompanied by encouraging his followers to question everything, and to feel their own power. He showed love, he listened intently, he laughed a lot, he had an extraordinary sense of humor, cooking, and scolding. Nor was he above devising unpleasant strategies to shift their preconceptions.

 

Christine, for example, remembered how he blew cigarette smoke in her face to rid her of chivalric notions, and to show her that what she saw as reverence for women was nothing more than a gilded cage. He said to her when he refused to give her his arm to climb up some rocks in Thousand Island, as you can see from these pictures, it's a rocky island. Why should I help you? Because you are a woman? That is chivalry. And don't you see that chivalry is only sex? Don't you see what is behind all these attentions from men and women? It's a very, very interesting inversion. It's not what we expect. I mean, I don't think any of us would have liked having the cigarette smoke in our faces. But it's an extraordinary way of saying the game of late 19th century courtliness to women was also debasing. And that he wasn't going to be a part of that. It's very interesting.

 

At first appalled, she soon realized that his desire that she quote, "stand on her own two feet," which is again, a phrase he uses, she uses, meant that she was meant to acquire a form of robustness, which in India Vivekananda would praise as virility, and Margaret Noble, his British disciple, described as aggressive Hinduism. Strength, courage. It was that was what was important to him.

 

In Thousand Island, Christine felt freer than ever before. Quote, "It is not difficult if one's devotion to the guru was great enough, for then, like the snake, one dropped the old and put on the new." Here she expressed a desire to grow afresh, but realized that the idea of guru bhakti was paradoxical, for such love required a kind of submission, an end to the ego that almost destroyed her sense of self.

 

The worst was when he scolded, and he did frequently, a torment that his female disciples from the West could never accept. I'm going to write a bit about scolding, because in Indian contrast, even male acolytes and his guru brothers submitted to these chastisements as a form of love, even if they also disliked the rebuke. They didn't mind the scolding as much as the women minded the scolding. And you can imagine why. This is a very complex thing. For a man to be scolding a woman is different from men to be, you know.

 

Margaret Noble, his most important Western devotee, especially in India, was astonished by the intensity of this rapport and its significance for self-transformation. And I write a lot about her. I mean, much of the book is about her as much as it is about him. She admitted once to her best friend, she could never really get rid of the personal, even if it also had led to her to what was impersonal. She searched for the words to describe the connection, and this is how she explained it.

 

I think, perhaps, the whole of one's nature comes out in that relationship, the bad as well as the good, and no one else matters very much. Probably this is always so with the guru. I am willing to admit, after all, that one's love for Swami is sadly personal. She often felt a failure because she couldn't get rid of the personal. If you will let me claim that it is at the same time in some ways the most impersonal thing of which one is any way capable.

 

Once again, the opposites merged, or almost merge, is Nevadida, which was her name in religion, it means the dedicated one, reflected so astutely on the mysterious emotional dynamic of the relationship. Perhaps to understand it better we might associate such emotional destabilization, both for guru and disciple, I mean, Vivekananda writes about how he knows that he's asking people for all their love, and how he cannot laugh at them or turn them away. He must take that responsibility.

 

But I'd like to compare it with psychoanalysis and the process of transference and counter transference that Freud was elucidating. The similarities as well as the differences are hard to avoid, because these quote, "therapies" emerged almost simultaneously. Raja Yoga appears in 1896, though he's written it and it's ready for publication in 1895, and Freud's case studies in hysteria in 1895. So the books come up pretty much at the same time.

 

Although Vivekananda, William James, and Freud all held differing views of religion and mystical experience, very different, they worked within a global context that emphasized a shifting view of the self, of subjectivity, and I would say that it was based on their investigation of rapport and its relationship to new sciences of mind.

 

Freud first encountered what he would later elaborate as transference when he observed hypnosis in Charcot's Parisian clinic, and in Nancy, where Hippolyte Bernheim treated all kinds of ailments with hypnotherapy. In these encounters, he experienced what in America would have been called mind cure, without the Christian underlay that typified the work of Phineas Quimby, at ease teacher.

 

Charcot was virulently anti-clerical, and Bernheim of Jewish origin, and both French physicians sought to ground hypnosis in secularism dissociated from religious experience, in science completely. Ultimately, even Charcot could not manage this dissociation. His last article in 1893 before he died was called Faith Healing, or in French, La Foi Qui Guery, but it was often also published as Le Faith Healing, which is very interesting, and followed the story of those who claim to have been treated and healed that Lourdes. He used the term from America throughout, because he acknowledged the importance of this religious tradition in the New World and its international impact.

 

For his part, Freud was fascinated by the way such subjects gave up their will to the suggestion that the operator imposed upon them, but Freud was a poor hypnotist, and was far from achieving the dramatic results of his French contemporaries. He abandoned the practice entirely when he came to create his own therapeutic encounter. Rather, he surrounded the client with all kinds of constraints and boundaries. The therapeutic encounter entailed the subject quote, "contracting the disease of love," as the late John Forester once explained it.

 

The women he treated were bourgeois paying clients, very different from the impoverished patients of the public hospitals where Charcot had practiced, or well-heeled spiritual seekers of Christian origin who flocked to Vivekananda. Freud too wanted to avoid all associations with the so-called, what he called, illusion of religion. Tellingly, he feared the dangers of too much sight, and for this reason the analyst hid away so that subjects were obliged to concentrate on their own thoughts and fantasies, only the voice of the analyst in the background.

 

And I think this is fascinating. It's somebody behind. You're not allowed to see the analyst in early psychoanalysis. Darshan was dangerous. It was overwhelming, OK? Because boredom, affection, annoyance, and disgust could be read upon the analyst's face, while the person being analyzed beholds in a loving way. So it is these things that I think Freud was very aware of. And I've just reread his early papers on transference and counter transference, and it is really interesting the similarities between him and Vivekananda on these matters.

 

Such emotions distracted clients from their own feelings and imaginings, and jeopardized the analyst, who might reveal too much and disturb the unconscious excavation. And there was a contract that the analytical hour was only one client, the transaction sealed by funds, but despite these numerous conditions, Freud understood and indeed hoped that the client's sovereignty was only partially maintained by the contract. I mean, one of the things is, if you pay money you have still some power, right?

 

But he also hoped that this human element was transferred in the process of confiding, explaining, free associating, fantasizing, catalyzing a closeness that allowed for regressions that might prove therapeutic when analyzed. I mean, Freud says in these early papers, the minute that a woman falls in love, don't let it go to your head. This is the moment when you can do the most for this person. And it's a very moving, though slightly snide discussion, because he's dealing with these women and he's talking to other practitioners, male practitioners.

 

So in that regard Freud also recognized the power of love. Part of this process was also not promising too much. Freudian psychoanalysis did not offer miracles, but only an ordinary unhappiness. That's what he said, remember? That's his statement. That's not Vivekananda. In contrast, Vivekananda refused all payment for himself, and there was nothing like the contractual arrangement that Freud built into his consulting room, which is as much to protect the professional competence of the physician as it is to protect the client.

 

He resists any of these liberal notions of the self and its transactions, nor did he try to lessen the impact of the process by denying the devotee access to visual rapture, or darshan. Moreover, he encouraged an exchange that was friendly, permitting the disciples to comfort him with their gaiety and solitude. There was still an element of Ramakrishna's divine play in Vivekananda, a theology of childhood and whimsicality that was very different from the model of what some have called the omniscient father that we associate Freudianism, the almost rabbinical man who knows everything, and the sage, the psychoanalytic sage.

 

Having experienced the heady spiritual passions of guru bhakti himself and observed it among his brother monks, he knew of the emotional heights that spiritual experience might produce, and how transformative It might be. Had he thought about it, and he didn't, Vivekananda might have argued that transference, like evolutionary theory in contemporary fin de siecle society, was a pale reflection of the inventions of Hinduism, which had long sustained the tradition of a protected place where the full gamut of emotions could be displayed, and mystical, artistic, and psychological creativity cultivated.

 

It's very interesting. He does reflect on evolution and say that it comes in Hinduism earlier, but he doesn't in this, because they're all coming up with it in different ways at the same time. If, like Freud, Vivekananda had no faith in what he considered to be miraculous display, he nonetheless wanted more than Freud's ordinary unhappiness. He sought a bliss that came from detachment and the power of engagement without desire for return. This remained a metaphysical quest for union with the divine, while Freud's atheism erased such hopes as nothing more than an illusion.

 

Freud and the legacy of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda became a subject of renewed controversy in the interwar period when Romain Rolland argued that his great friend and colleague Freud, that the oceanic sensation was not a regression to the womb, as Freud maintained, but rather was the expression of artistic creativity, and hence of the divine within. What Freud feared was that if you lost your sense of self, you would drown, that that wouldn't be a blissful experience. But this is the opposite with Ramakrishna.

 

Rolland's lengthy letter on this subject was the greatest challenge Freud experienced to his conviction that religious feeling was merely an illusion, and Freud did not right back for two years. And when he does write back, he says this has been the biggest challenge. So it's an extraordinary thing. And it's after Rolland has absorbed, he's written a biography of Ramakrishna, where he writes and he gets the notion of the oceanic sensation, an autobiography of Vivekananda. In the end, however, he reiterated his belief that religion was about regression, and the sympathy and warm regard which had united the two men in friendship never recurred. So they remain friends, but they never again correspond in the same way. This is the break.

 

I'm going to conclude now. Should Vivekananda as the first global guru be accused of exploiting these quote, "vulnerable" female acolytes? At the heart of this, what is going on? How do we characterize? What do we do with these forms of relationships? They are disturbing. They're intense. Is this stereotype nothing more than a racist cliche? This idea that gurus are always just trying to seduce women? That's the idea of the guru cult.

 

Certainly it wasn't that. How do we characterize his relationship to women both in India and in the New World? In the end, in the West, Vivekananda's relations with his Western followers produced a problematic dynamic of mutual dependence and freedom. He was very keen to retain his autonomy, but needed his followers for financial help. It's very interesting. When even Sara Bull, his mother in America, tries to make him only work with the right sort of people, he refuses, and then he goes to this rundown neighborhood in Manhattan, because he really doesn't care about just being with the right kind of people. He wants to universalize his message.

 

He felt the sting of racism, especially in America, and bitterly resented needing the protection of quote, "respectable women" when he walked in the streets. Some of the most moving passages are about how he is assaulted. And it's really rough for him. He can't believe it. His female devotees in turn recorded the harshness of his scolding, and the terror that he might withdraw his love. What's amazing is that doesn't happen. It doesn't happen.

 

There was also the unexpected difficulty of finding Western men willing to take direction from a quote, "brown man," and this of a subject race. And it's very interesting that he once says about a very good friend of his, Frank Leggett, he will give money for me in India, but he will not give money for my work in America, because Leggett writes to his wife that there's too much hysteria around Vivekananda. And it's very sad for Vivekananda.

 

All of these were part of the fraught relations that typified the guru disciple relationship. They became demonized when in 1911, nine years after Vivekananda's death, his famous follower Sara Bull left the Ramakrishna mission a large part of her fortune. Her daughter Olea accused the swamis of seducing Sara Bull into handing over her money. In the end Olea received the estate, only to die a day after the judgment was pronounced. And this was a major scandal.

 

Hinduphobia became part of the American landscape for the first time, even though from the outset remarks have been made about the impact of Vivekananda's foreignness and Hindu religion on quote, "vulnerable" Western women. In an age of me too, where the boundaries between intimacy, authority, and the therapeutic are so difficult to identify, It's not surprising that these perennial concerns were constantly being reconfigured, further complicated by the politics of gender and race of this era of imperialism.

 

They may take on a different meaning, however, if we place them in the wider historical context of the sciences of rapport that links spiritual reawakening to therapeutic hope, and the mission of universal spirituality and world peace that attracted these women to Vivekananda, and that first spawned them.

 

In the anti-colonial context, these freedoms were less about personal choice that we think about in America now, to choose, than detachment that allowed discipline and sacrifice, both for the individual, and the courage to engage in the freedom struggle. Alas, I cannot tell you of the implications for the political, but many of these discussions also had an impact on how people in India discussed engagement in the struggle for national independence. Thank you very much.

 

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