Free My Guru & His Disciple by Christopher Isherwood

morning hour.
    November 8. Picked up Gerald in the car and was at the temple by seven-thirty. When I went into the shrine, the Swami was already seated. I took my place on his left, holding a little tray with the flowers which one of the women had given me to offer; two red roses, a white rose, and a big white daisy. First the Swami told me to meditate as usual. Then I had to offer the flowers—the red roses to the photographs of Ramakrishna and Holy Mother, the daisy to the icon of Christ, the white rose to the Swami himself, as my guru. Next, he told me to meditate on Ramakrishna in the central cavity of the heart. Then he taught me my Sanskrit mantram, which I must never repeat to anybody, and gave me a rosary, showing me how to use it.
    A mantram consists of one or more Sanskrit words, a holy name or names, which the guru gives to his disciple and which the disciple is required to repeat and meditate on throughout the rest of his life. The giving of the mantram is the essential act of the initiation ceremony. The guru may also give the disciple a rosary; this can be thought of as a physical gift which embodies the spiritual gift of the mantram.
    The rosary beads used by the Ramakrishna Order are made of small dried kernels of the berry of the rudraksha tree. There are 108 beads, plus a bead which hangs down, out of line with the others, and has a tassel attached to it. This bead is said to represent the guru.
    Repeating your mantram is called making japam. When making japam with your rosary, you repeat your mantram once for each bead. On reaching the tassel bead, you reverse the rosary and start it the other way around. Out of the 108 repetitions of the mantram which make up one turn of the rosary, a hundred are said to be for your own devotions, and the remaining eight to be on behalf of the rest of mankind. Since these eight represent a labor of love and not part of your personal efforts toward spiritual progress, you must not count them in reckoning how much japam you are going to make each day—one turn of the rosary counts as one hundred only. The average amount of japam made by an energetic devotee would be between five thousand and ten thousand daily. The value of the rosary is that it measures your japam for you; you aren’t distracted from it by having to count. But you are also encouraged to make japam at times when you can’t use a rosary—when you are engaged in some manual work or driving a car.
    In my diary, there is no mention of any others having been initiated that day. Later on, as the Center grew, Prabhavananda would usually initiate several people at a time, each one in a separate ceremony. However, a number of devotees must have arrived later that morning, for this was the birthday of Holy Mother. By nine o’clock, I was back in the temple, having my first experience of a full-scale puja (ritual worship).
    The Swami offered flowers, incense, water for washing. He made spots of red on the foreheads of Ramakrishna and Mother with sandalwood paste. Food was brought in, a complete meal: soup, curry, and chocolate cake with whipped cream. The Swami’s nephew acted as prompter, reading the directions for the acts of ritual in Sanskrit. At the end of the ceremony we each offered a flower.
    After this, we went into the Swami’s study, where there is a grate, for the fire ceremony (homa fire). All our actions, good and bad, were symbolically offered up and purified in the fire. The Swami made a sign on our foreheads with the ash, to symbolize the opening of the third eye, the eye of the spirit.
    Then lunch, very gay, with lots of people. The food offered in the temple had been mixed in with what we ate, so this was actually a kind of communion service. They do this every day. The consecrated food from the temple is called prasad.
    The Swami admitted that he oversmokes. “You must listen to me,” he giggled, “not follow me.” He told us that during his first years