Ashram Diary

It has taken years for me to find the voice I needed to express what India has meant to me. Now I have extracted — from the first few years of the journal I kept while at Shantivanam, listening to Bede Griffiths — a coherent story, part of an initiation journey, and I discover that my whole life has been like the symbolic immersion into the sacred river Kaveri. The story is in the book Ashram Diary: In India with Bede Griffiths — a story of immersion and induction into the freedom of the sannyasis, India’s “renunciants” who paradoxically embrace all reality, sacred figures who are free from all rituals of home fires and temple fires. Bede was an exemplar of the cross-cultural human, a Christian who “transgressed” — literally, “walked across” — the boundaries that seem to separate East and West. He truly married them in his soul, both sides, breathing with both lungs.

When Bede immersed me into the river, I was only a beginner, although with some years of monastic life and training behind me, and with my teen-age initiation into Paramahansa Yogananda’s kriya or sacred action of breath and energy leading into consciousness of the cosmic Christ. Kriya Yoga was an original gift that I brought with me when I embraced the traditional Christianity of the Camaldolese monks in Big Sur, and they have let me keep it.

Time has passed since the years of my diary, time with its gift of greater harmony between outer and inner life, and perhaps I am finally ready to follow Bede’s holy transgression and make my own crossover into a consciousness more and more cosmic. If you read my book, join in my thankful hope for this grace, and find your own crossing-point.