Finding My Perfect Master

Giriraj Swami: It is a great honor and privilege and pleasure to be back here at the Potomac, Maryland temple. I have been requested to speak about my spiritual journey and when I asked Ananga Vrindavanesvari for more details she said I could speak about SP and chanting. So every journey begins with the first step, but when I thought, “What is the first step?” I could not say because it probably began before this life, and even if I tried to guess what the first step in my last life was, it probably would have gone back to the life before that.

So, I will choose a point more or less arbitrarily within this life. I guess when I was at the university at Brandeis in Massachusetts I was looking for perfection. And I began as an English major I thought in English I would find the meaning of life. But the English as taught in the university dealt with other matters and not so much about the meaning of life. So I thought I will become a philosophy major and I found the same thing, I thought I would find the meaning of life but they were discussing other topics. So then I thought, “Well let us try psychology and I was lucky because the psychology department at Brandeis University then was developing what they call a third force in psychology under the chairman Abraham Maslow, and the other two—one was behaviorism which was the study of stimulus and response mainly in and the other was psycho analysis which studied diseased persons—so Abraham Maslow had the idea that there should be a third force to study healthy persons. And the psychology department invited many speakers from different eastern mystical traditions. 

By reading I had understood that I needed a guru. I would read many books so the final conclusion was I needed a guru. And from then on my quest was to find my perfect master. And I went to many. I will cite some examples. There was a Zen master who was supposed to have been certified as enlightened by another certified, enlightened Zen master from Japan. So I went to his ashram in Rochester, New York, and we had to sit erect facing the wall and do some sort of meditation and then the master would go around with a stick and if he found that you were being inattentive he would be at the back with the stick. 

So I go a little bit discouraged but I was really looking for I didn’t give up. I stayed for the weekend and got to know him and the students. And then coincidentally you could say but when I went back to Boston a professor at MIT named Smith arranged a lecture with the same Zen master. But someone in the audience asked about Vedanta and he replied, “Don’t ask me about Vedanta. I have enough trouble keeping up with Zen.”

So I thought, “He is not my perfect master.” Then at Brandeis the department invited a famous hatha-yogi and he gave a lecture and the part I remember most vividly is he said that by yoga you can gain mastery over your involuntary muscles specifically your colon and you can command your colon—I guess small intestines—I forget the exact thing, but ascending colon advance and it goes up; transverse colon advance, and it goes across; descending colon descends; and rectum release. So I was intrigued I would say, I was intrigued because I was so desperate I didn’t want to discount any possibility. So then I asked him, “Can I ride with the swami?” His ashram was in New York and he was going to the airport. So he said, “No, you can’t ride with the swami. His car is already occupied, but you can ride with some of his students.” 

So on the way to the airport they were discussing all the different types of food they missed since they had joined the ashram and I thought, “Well that doesn’t seem right. They just finished a lecture by the swami and they are food they were missing.” But I thought, “Anyway, they are just the students. You can’t necessarily judge from the students. Let me meet the master.” So I went to the airport and he was the picture of Indian spirituality. He had like long, curly hair, long flowing beard, long robes and he was very. . . not just that but the twinkle in the eyes, the blissful grin—everything. And when I got there I would say he was very warmly embracing his lady admirers. And I looked and I thought, “He is not my perfect master.”

So there were others, as a matter of fact, but. . . then just to accelerate a little I heard that there was a psychology professor, Antioch College in Ohio, who was supposed to be enlightened, so I thought, “Okay, I will try him.” I was really desperate. So I drove to Antioch, waited until the classes where over, then Friday I drove and went to his office, met his secretary. I said, “I want to meet So-and-so.” She said, “He is playing golf.” She must have seen the look of incredulity on my face and she said, “That is his Zen.” “This is not my perfect master.”

So I had driven all the way so I went to the student union and the students were talking about another swami who had just visited the campus—I don’t really know his name—but it ended with the syllables ānanda which isn’t of much help in trying to identify that person. I tired later but there were too many “ānandas.” But they said that he had said that God is in your heart and you can have a person relationship with Him and He can speak to you. And this captured my attention because up until then everything I had heard was impersonal. The idea that God is impersonal that the ultimate goal of life to disappear into the void or merge into the One. And I thought, “Wow! God is a person and He is in my heart. And I can have a relationship with Him.”

So I went back and I would had developed the idea that you don’t choose your guru, but your guru is there and it’s not exactly your guru chooses you, but its somehow that I have a guru, but he happens me. And I had an image of, sort of vague mental impression of him and he didn’t have hair and all the other swamis had long hair. So after so many and I was almost hopeless. I had gone to so many and every time I raised my hopes and every time I was disappointed and I finally became like just despondent, like, “I can’t find my guru.”

I had friends, we were going to go. I was already a vegetarian by then so I invited them over to my apartment for soup and pasta and salad, and we were going to go to the movies in Harvard Square. But just that day I had seen a poster on campus, “BG As It Is: Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta. Such-and such auditorium, Such-and-such time.” And I looked at it and I was so discouraged, I didn’t even take it seriously. But after dinner when it was time to leave that poster came to mind and something in my heart was very forcefully telling me I had to go. So I mentioned it to my friends and they said, “Well, we already have a program just to go to an art house and see a Japanese movie.” And I said, “Well, we will just go to the late show.” But the one who really objected was a lady friend who really got upset and my nature to please people, I didn’t like to upset people, so I kept trying to agree, but then something inside of me kept insisting, “You must go! You must go! You must go!” And I just couldn’t resist that force. And then finally she blurted out, “Why can’t you be like normal people? Why do you have to go running after these swamis all the time?” And I blurted out, “All right, this will be the last one I ever go to!” [laughter] And it was.

Because of the part of the discussion we got late.