Human Chakras: a 4-Part explanation by Guruji

 

Invite Love into Your Life

 

(Excerpted from two letters written in 2010–2012):

Make your home an ashram

for love, laughter, light and play.

Love adults as if they were children.

Play with children—

they are such great teachers.

Play with elders, too,

as if they were still in the prime of youthful exuberance.

Invite love into your life.

A Prophecy

 

(From an essay written in the early ’90s.):

There are some things I am sure of:

We are going to see beauty, harmony, peace,

abundance and prosperity ascendant in this world,

like never before.

You are going to witness it in your lifetimes.

Love is going to open up in mighty rivers.

Crime will not pay.

Pettiness will vanish.

You will love all as you love your own children.

I love you.

I will give you peace.

That is a promise.

Discipline Behind Compassion: Guruji’s Inner Rigour and Outer Freedom

Guruji with Meru model atop his head for the Sagara Giri Durga procession, October 17, 1982.

 (from "The Goddess and the Guru"):

But while compassion, openness and nonjudgment have loomed large in Guruji’s teachings from the beginning, he rarely allowed himself similar latitude or leniency in his personal spiritual practice.

“Partially because of his background, Guruji did operate in a mode of exceptional freedom,” explained longtime disciple Alok Baveja, a professor of business management at Rutgers University. “He flourished under freedom and, by his nature, he wanted his disciples to enjoy the same level of freedom. But in his personal sadhana, he was always extremely disciplined. Not expecting others to do disciplined sadhana doesn’t mean that he himself was not disciplined.”

Especially in those early years, few would have made the mistake of assuming so.

Guruji in the 1980s was a formidable, even slightly intimidating figure with a powerful, focused gaze that hinted at an intensity, passion and force of will that he rarely displayed in later years. By the early 2000s, Guruji was projecting a much warmer, more grandfatherly personality, becoming almost disarmingly casual and approachable. It became common to hear visitors and disciples refer to him in fond diminutives involving terms such as “cute,” “sweet” and even “like an Indian Santa Claus.”

“When you looked at Guruji in the last 10 years of his life, he just seemed like this nice old guy, in the usual, next-door-neighbor sort of a way,” said Megha Chatterjee, a New Delhi journalist based in Toronto. “You really had to keep reminding yourself, ‘Wait a minute, he was this important nuclear scientist! He’s a guru; thousands of people come and fall at his feet!’”

And this was, in many ways, exactly how Guruji liked it—this sort of humble accessibility helped defuse people’s self-consciousness and self-doubts, removing some of the primary barriers to spiritual practice. But at the same time, it could also lead them to underestimate the depth and breadth of his accomplishment.

“He does seem very unassuming nowadays,” said Balasingam Janahan, or “Jana,” a business executive based in Irvine, CA, and a seasoned Vedic priest for the area’s Hindu community. “He basically dismisses a lot of his own spiritual achievements and downplays a lot of the abilities that he used to share with us. But back then, you immediately knew there was something very unusual about him. He wasn’t so famous yet, but he had an extremely charismatic, even magnetic personality. His eyes had an almost hypnotic intensity.”

This “stricter” version of Guruji emerged most strongly when he worked with disciples displaying high aptitude, or promise as teachers themselves.

“Let me tell you unequivocally, Guruji in those days was not the way he is now,” Jana said. “You almost wouldn’t recognize him as the same Guruji that I first met in the 1980s.”

Haran Aiya, however, argued that—despite appearances to the contrary—Guruji remained essentially the same.

“He really never changed,” Aiya said. “It may sometimes have appeared on the surface that he was stricter in the beginning and gradually became more permissive and open with the passage of time—but in truth, he didn’t change. He simply measured what should be given to different people in different times and circumstances. Remember, ‘Sri Matre Namah’—‘the one who measures’—is the first name in the Lalita Sahasranama.”

Jana conceded that, even in the early days, Guruji modulated his approach to suit the capacity of his audience.

“Yes, he always kind of knew the level of people he was dealing with,” he said. “In later times, he left it to individual students to make their own choices about sadhana once they were initiated. But back then, he would tell you his orders exactly. He would give precise directions on how you must do this and do that, detailed to the minutest point.”

Jana was still a teenager when Guruji taught him his first puja, the Mahanyasam.

“He was a very strict teacher, with a very intense manner,” he said. “He actually got short with me at a couple of points, to the extent that I felt kind of bad; I thought I was upsetting him.”

When Guruji noticed his student’s distress, however, he explained, “No Jana, I am not angry at all. The reason I am hard on you is because I know you can do better, and I want you to get this exactly right.”

“In those days,” Jana added, “once you were initiated as Guruji’s disciple—particularly if he saw you as someone who could pass along his teachings—he would always check to make sure you were chanting the mantra, the number of times you were chanting it, the placement of your concentration—he would nurture you along every step of the way. And he would follow up frequently, asking questions about how your sadhana was progressing. Even when he was away, he would keep in touch by letters or ask you to call once in a while and bring him up to date on your sadhana.”

Even novices sometimes enjoyed a high level of one-on-one attention.

“During Guruji’s first visit to Toronto, I explained that I didn’t know Sanskrit,” recalled Sundhara Arasaratnam, a retired management consultant in Newmarket, Ontario. “I was worried I wasn’t pronouncing the mantras correctly. Instead of pointing me to ‘teach-yourself’ books, he sat down beside me and patiently taught me the basic Sanskrit letters—the vowels and the sets of consonants. Then he made a beautiful drawing that showed the locations of the chakras in our body, and how the Sanskrit letters map onto each of those chakras.”

Village Women as Priestesses: Breaking Caste and Gender Barriers at Devipuram

 

Performing the mṛgi mudra, representing the guru’s feet upon one’s head and, through this, one’s connection with the guru lineage. Guruji and Amma are sitting behind.

(from "The Goddess and the Guru"):

Some years later, after the building tasks at Devipuram wound down, he also taught some of the women who helped construct the temple. “He trained so many village girls to perform pujas and recite the mantras with perfect pronunciation,” daughter Rama noted. “Lalita Navavarana, Lalita Sahasranama, Trishati Ashtottaram, Khadgamala, the Panch Suktas, including the Rudram, the Kalavahana and Triveni Kalpam, as well as Varahi, Syama and Ganapati rituals, Bala Puja and more…”

Once again, Guruji came away impressed by their natural aptitude. “These girls came from poor, traditionally low-caste backgrounds,” he explained. “But if you went and saw how they did the pujas, how they dressed the goddess, you could see the love and fun with which they did everything, always giggling and laughing, really enjoying the process. This is precisely the sort of energy she loves. Nothing made Devi happier than having these girls as her priestesses.”

In 2013, American documentary filmmaker Julianne Reynolds profiled one of these village girls, named Leela, “loving her simplicity, innocence and absence of pride.” In the process, Reynolds learned that Leela had originally “wanted to live a much simpler life. She never set out to learn Sri Vidya pujas, but her mother got her the job at Devipuram, and she found that it gave her a sense of purpose and ownership. Guruji himself taught her this ancient wisdom, and she took to it with a butterfly’s grace.”

Breaking Fear, Secrecy, and Prejudice: Guruji’s Vision of an Open Śrī Vidyā

 

Guruji and Amma during the Prathista of Sahasrakshi, Devipuram, 1990.

(from "The Goddess and the Guru"):

“Sri Vidya means ‘sacred learning,’” Guruji explained during a talk in mid-1980s, in a fairly early explanation of his approach. “It is a large body of rituals held secret for ages, restricted only to priests because of the immense powers that the learning unfolds with practice. The idea [of the tradition’s secrecy] was that destructive powers should not be made available to minds lacking discipline and compassion.”

These “destructive powers” involved pure śakti, the uncontrolled energy believed to be at play in the direct worship of the Goddess—as opposed to the “safer,” more modulated energy involved in approaching her indirectly as the subordinate consort of a male god. It was (and still widely is) believed that “goddesses bear a seemly, auspicious demeanor when they are subjected to the will of their husbands or consorts—that is, when they serve within the [socially and cosmically safe and predictable] structures that their spouses provide.” Direct worship of the Goddess, by contrast, meant invoking dangerous “powers of illusion, natural forces, and energy in a pure form, beyond the control of any governing, restraining structure.”

As a result, the practice of Sri Vidya came to be seen as “fraught with danger.” Indeed, it was popularly believed “that the worship of Śrī-chakra is elaborate, complex and hazardous, and very few people would venture to undertake it,” as one scholar-practitioner noted in the 1980s. Another scholar of the period observed, “Even today, the Dravidian-speaking sections of southern India give evidence—through puberty rites, menstrual taboos, and widow restrictions—of greater concern for controlling and containing female powers than do the Indo-Aryan linguistic regions of the north.”

These human “female restrictions” were both implicitly and explicitly extended to the Divine Feminine—with the result that direct worship of the Mother Goddess came to be considered a risky undertaking best confined to temples and solitary ascetics. Since any inadvertent ritual error or innocent mispronunciation of a mantra could invite disaster, even devout householders avoided Sri Vidya practice at home.

~

This then was the social and religious context within which Guruji first began promulgating his comparatively radical philosophy of openness and inclusion. “There was so much fear of worshiping the Mother in those days,” his sister Suryalakshmi recalled. “Not just fear of performing rituals like Sri Chakra Puja; people were scared to even read a hymn like the Sri Lalita Sahasranama. They were afraid it would cause disruption in their lives.”

Without ridiculing or dismissing these deeply ingrained superstitions, Guruji argued that they were based on social prejudice and chauvinism, not spiritual truth. “Guru Dattatreya was given to Atri, a sage, and his wife Anasuya,”¹³¹ he said, “which indicates that one can be a householder and still do sadhana. He was openly ritualistic and a great Tantric. He taught the worship of Shakti to people from all classes. His system was called Kaula,¹³² meaning ‘total’—internal as well as external worship.”

Accordingly, Guruji’s teachings in Vizag during this period display repeated reassurances and deep compassion toward his students, especially women. He went out of his way to assure them that the Divine Mother would never seek to harm them, that they were all her children and she sought only to love and protect them. “People used to stream in throughout the day to listen to him,” Sundari Amma recalled. “He would sweep away their fear and apprehension, and awaken within them new enthusiasm, devotion and faith.”

For example, just before Guruji left for Africa, Sundari Amma’s mother told him she was worried her daughter was practicing Sri Vidya in his absence. “What if something goes amiss in the pujas or mantra japa while you are away?” she asked him. Guruji took the elder woman’s hands in his own and replied, “Dear lady, do not worry about your daughter. If she makes any mistakes I will absorb them and give over to her whatever merits she receives. The Divine Mother’s grace is with us, so what do we have to fear?”

Noted Sundari Amma, “This image of the guru offering my mother abhaya—absolving her from fear—holds a special place in my heart.”

Suryalakshmi added, “He taught people as a satguru¹³³—as ‘one who dispels the darkness’—that the Goddess is a gentle mother, loving, kind, doting, and compassionate. He taught them that it was okay to read and recite her hymns and prayers, to keep a Sri Chakra in their home, to do puja to Rajarajeswari, Kali, Saraswati—to all of these goddesses and more.”

Guruji gradually instilled confidence in his followers that anyone could pray to the Divine Mother—whenever, wherever and however they wished. And in time, with his encouragement and Amma’s example, more and more women (and men) began actively participating in his pujas and recitations. Before long, many were independently organizing and leading recitations, prayers, rituals and other homages to the Goddess on their own.

Between Two Gurus: Orthodoxy, Innovation, and the Diksha War

 

Guru Garu and Guruji

(from "The Goddess and the Guru"):

One Sunday morning, looking to connect with a wider community of spiritual seekers, Guruji took his family to the Yoga Shakti Mission on Napean Sea Road in Bombay. In those days, it was the city’s premier gathering spot for the spiritually minded, offering yoga retreats, puja lessons and meditation classes. In addition, various swamis, yoga masters, mystical poets and religious thinkers would come and deliver “Sunshine Lectures,” as they were called, on a wide variety of educational and inspirational topics. It was at one of these Lectures that Guruji first met an accomplished sadhaka and guru named Sri B.S. Krishnamurthy, who was widely known and respected in Bombay circles as a devout, knowledgeable and deeply orthodox specialist in complex Vedic and Sri Vidya ritual.103

“Krishnamurthy Gurugaru was a short, jovial, almost baby-faced gentleman with twinkling eyes and a smiling countenance all the time,” Guruji’s daughter Radha affectionately recalled. “He loved to perform these really elaborate rituals—a Navavarana Puja104 would go on for five or six hours! He had a deep, impressive, resonating voice, and he sang bhajans and kirtans105 very well. He would take a disciple’s hand in his and give shaktipat with an intense, locking gaze of two or three minutes.”

From their very first meeting, Krishnamurthy took a liking to Guruji—though he quickly understood that this unassuming, soft-spoken scientist was no typical householder seeking edifying lectures and lessons in puja technique. By this time, after all, Guruji was meditating nightly, reciting Gurugaru’s mantras and steadily stoking their power. He also spent countless hours learning and performing pujas—not as a matter of grim personal discipline, but because he found genuine peace and joy in it. He was delving into arcane spiritual texts and exploring unimaginable universes—careening through past, present and future—with a goddess. He had begun to visibly glow with the intensity of his spiritual efforts.

So while Krishnamurthy understood that Guruji would glean very little from any Sunshine Lecture, he felt that this unusual man might be an ideal candidate for delivering one—and his instinct was squarely on the mark. Before long, Guruji’s lectures were drawing large crowds. His clear-minded, unpretentious, often humorous presentations on sadhana, mantra, Sri Yantra, the Lalita Sahasranama, Kundalini Yoga and meditation technique were fresh, personal and original. Moreover, his status as a reality-grounded TIFR scientist—seemingly the polar opposite of a stereotypical starry-eyed mystic, with his casually erudite blending of science and spirituality—lent him a distinct curiosity appeal that differentiated him from other speakers on the Mission’s roster.106 For Guruji himself, it was a time of self-discovery, cultivating the seeds of his public life to come. Here was a man both finding his voice and realizing that he had something vital to say, honing his presentation and delivery style, refining his teaching technique—and growing accustomed to having an audience.

Noting Guruji’s particular interest in the Goddess, Krishnamurthy began inviting him to accompany and assist in the performance of Sri Vidya rituals. “I learned the Navavarana Puja in the Dattatreya tradition, along with the 64 offerings and mudras,107 by keenly watching Sri Krishnamurthy perform those rituals every evening,” Guruji said. “Within a fairly short time, I too became adept at performing these more complex pujas.”

Almost immediately, Guruji also began to display another lifelong spiritual preoccupation: an instinct toward simplification. The pujas and other rituals conducted by Krishnamurthy were rigidly orthodox and extremely elaborate, often lasting for hours (and not infrequently for days) on end. Guruji felt that busy working people—parents, breadwinners and homemakers—who might otherwise be interested in such spiritual pursuits, were undoubtedly being put off by the sheer time investment required.

So by referring to multiple ritual instruction books and scriptures, as well as his own meditational revelations, Guruji sat down and developed procedures for completing a full Goddess puja in between 90 and 120 minutes. Impressed by the thoughtfulness and precision of Guruji’s research and the logic of his revisions, Krishnamurthy agreed to try. Sure enough, Guruji’s approach was extremely well received by participants, and soon Sri Krishnamurthy was conducting their streamlined rituals for growing crowds, not just in Bombay but all over India. Krishnamurthy was both astonished and impressed.

Not long afterward, when he was scheduled to conduct a traditional, four-day yagna at Mookambika Devi Temple in Kollur, Krishnamurthy invited Guruji and Amma to come and assist him. Guruji’s work obligations at TIFR kept him away for most of the event, but he and Amma arrived in time for the purnahuti108 on the final day. Immediately afterward, Krishnamurthy—without any prior warning—announced with great gravity that he had decided to accept Guruji and Amma as his disciples. He gave them both the Maha Shodashi mantra, the highest level of purnadiksha.109

Guruji said he recalled experiencing “no specific sensation” on this occasion “other than that it felt cold, like cool rain sprinkling down on a hot day.” But on a more practical level—in light of his increasingly fruitful guru-disciple relationship with Anakapalle Gurugaru—he found himself in a quandary. “For a time, I was torn between these two gurus,” Guruji said. “I was confused! Which one to accept? Two gurus, and both of them forced it on me! It was not a very comfortable predicament.”

Daughter Anantalakshmi noted that the contrast between the two masters could not have been starker. “Krishnamurthy Gurugaru had a gentle, smiling demeanor—an aura of peace around him; basically, being near him was a comfort zone,” she explained. “Whereas being near Anakapalle Gurugaru was more like a discomfort zone. You had to constantly expect the unexpected. One moment he might be friendly and talkative, the next, surly and silent—then he’d dismiss you with a single word or phrase. But what an aura of power he emanated! So perhaps you could say this was a case of two very different sorts of gurus—one to keep you balanced, and the other to shake you up and snap you out of whatever it was that needed snapping!”

The situation came to a head soon afterward when Guruji traveled to Anakapalle and told Gurugaru all that had transpired with Krishnamurthy.

Gurugaru listened to his student’s account patiently, then cackled loudly, scoffing, “Maha Shodashi by itself isn’t even purnadiksha! You need the mahavakyas too!110 But anyway it doesn’t matter, because I am going to give you purnadiksha my way.” He sprinkled some water on Guruji’s head, gave him the Maha Shodashi mantra and the mahavakyas, and removed the diksha name given by Sri Krishnamurthy—whereupon he renamed Guruji “Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati.”111

The “diksha war” simmered for another few months, according to daughter Radha: “When Guruji told Krishnamurthy about Gurugaru’s action, he responded, ‘Who is he to give you Mahavakyas?!’—and he also gave Guruji the mahavakyas. And the competition to become Guruji’s guru was taken to a new level!”

In the end, however, Gurugaru easily won the day. A deeply unconventional sadhaka, siddha and yogic prodigy, utterly dismissive of outward social niceties and expectations, he was in many ways Guruji’s perfect match as friend, guide and guru, giving him free, “do as you will” latitude in developing his own powerful and personal spiritual practice. Krishnamurthy, on the other hand, remained—despite his respect for Guruji’s innovations—a stickler for the strict, ritualistic “methods and methodologies” for which he was justly renowned. Guruji was ultimately too subjective and intuitive a practitioner to be satisfied with that sort of teacher; moreover, his sadhana was advancing prodigiously—arguably outstripping Krishnamurthy’s own.

In the months and years that followed, Guruji and Krishnamurthy gradually grew apart.112 While Krishnamurthy would remain in contact with Guruji, occasionally attending and participating in major events at Devipuram, the guru-disciple relationship was decisively over. “I had found the simpler yogi to be my real guru,” Guruji said.

Their affection was mutual, and it was always clear that Guruji held an honored place in Gurugaru’s esteem. Sometimes, for example, Gurugaru would sit alone in his room, meditating for hours while long queues of supplicants sweltered in the heat outside waiting to offer donations, narrate problems, and seek prayers, advice and blessings. “He wouldn’t see any of them,” Guruji said. “He’d tell them ‘Go away! Get out of here!’ But with me it was always different. He’d say, ‘Ah Sastry, it’s you! Come in! Sit down!’”

Why the special status? Guruji shrugged.

“Maybe he knew I didn’t have any money, so I wouldn’t try to offer him anything,” he replied. “But at the same time he knew I wasn’t going to ask him for anything either. Maybe he knew that I just came to see him because I liked him.”

~

Guruji’s affinity for Gurugaru extended well beyond the realm of personal resonance. Both Gurugaru and Krishnamurthy, he explained, “belonged to the Kaulachara Dattatreya tradition, so either way I belonged to that tradition. Within it, however, there are three bhavas called pashu, veera and divya.113 The pashu knows the shastra but is doubtful about practice of any of the panchamakaras, or Five Ms.114 The veera practices the Five Ms. The divya has no need for an external shakti; his shakti is Kundalini, which is fully internal.” While “Krishnamurthy-ji had a wide knowledge of scriptures, and could recite the Vedas beautifully, he was a Kaula of the veera order,” Guruji said. “I later learned that I had finished my veera sadhana in earlier lives.”

Anakapalle Gurugaru, on the other hand, “was a yogi of the siddha order,” meaning that “he did practice the Five Ms earlier in his life, but after taking the sannyasa order he stopped them. He became what he himself used to call an ‘Upanishad Kaula,’ which meant the same thing as divya bhava—that is, one who has no further need to use the Five Ms.”

In terms of spiritual evolution then, Gurugaru made the most sense as a teacher and guide for Guruji. “He was a siddha, meaning his words always used to come true,” Guruji said. “He never insisted on surrender from his disciples. He never misbehaved with women that I know of. So I veered toward him,” ultimately concluding that “my true guru was Swami Swaprakasananda”—that is, Anakapalle Gurugaru.