Baba Hari Dass

In 1985, after 14 years in Canada, I wrote a feature for The Toronto Star about attending a week-long yoga retreat with Baba Hari Dass, a silent monk who communicates by writing on a small chalkboard. The retreat was held at a YMCA camp several hours north of Toronto. I attended with my then-wife and our two children, ages 8 and 14. That was the story: What is it like for a married couple and their children to do "yoga," chant, meditate, listen to talks on Ashtanga, or Eight-Limbed Yoga, and experience a new way of being together as a family?

As I understand it, one is either a monk who dedicates him/her self full-time to the discipline, or a householder. Husband to four wives, father to five children, my karma is what it is. But I've long been fascinated by that intersection, that tension between the sacred and the insane. Sorry, meant to say profane.

Apparently pleased with the article, Baba Hari Dass' people invited me and my wife, a visual artist, to teach at Mount Madonna School in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Later that year my then-spouse returned to Toronto and I stayed on at Mount Madonna. What to do? I began by seeking advice from the silent monk who I'd come to like and trust.

"How come she left?" I asked.

"She found you boring. She wants fun," he wrote on his small chalkboard.

"Am I boring?"

"No, you have different natures. Women leave you because they want excitement. You are a writer. You live in an abstract world which doesn't excite them."

"False expectations is the cause of 'broken heart,'" he continued. "Nothing is permanent. But we are looking for permanency."

Here's a man who's never been married, I thought. Would I trade places with him? Better celibacy, I decided, better the life of a monk than the hell of what one goes through with a divorce. That was then...

People ask: Does it get easier, breaking up... then breaking up and going through it again? I just shake my head.


is a silent monk who has not spoken since 1952 and communicates by writing on a small chalkboard. This verbal silence is a process which gradually quiets the mind and eliminates unwanted thoughts. While this concept may be initially difficult for most of us to understand, the example of Baba Hari Dass is ample expression of the potential for peace that lies within each of us as the result of spiritual discipline and devotion to helping others. Babaji is first and foremost a master yogi, having practiced the disciplines of yoga from childhood. In addition he is an accomplished author, builder, philosopher, sculptor, and proponent of Ayurveda (the ancient Indian system of health and healing).

http://www.mountmadonna.org/yoga/babaji.html


*Ashtanga Yoga

Ashtanga Yoga, also known as Raja Yoga, is the scientific method of enlightenment propounded [more than 2,000 years ago] by the ancient sage Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras. It is the Yoga that Baba Hari Dass has practiced since childhood. Since his arrival from India in 1971, Baba Hari Dass has been active in training students and teachers of Yoga in the United States and Canada. Through his compassionate example, young and old alike are learning the gentle art of peace.*

Because there has been much confusion over the past few years regarding the term Ashtanga, we wish to be clear that we do not teach a contemporary method of asana that has come to be known as “Power Yoga” or “Ashtanga”. Though asana (seat, or posture) is but one limb of Ashtanga Yoga and Hatha Yoga, it is often identified as Yoga.

We present the classical Ashtanga Yoga set forth more than 2,000 years ago by Patanjai in the Yoga Sutras. Ashtanga means Eight Limbed (ashta meaning eight, and anga meaning limb).

The eight limbs* are:
Restraints (Yama):
Nonviolence (Ahimsa)
Truthfulness (Satya)
Non-stealing (Asteya)
Continence (Bramacharya)
Non-possessiveness (Aparigraha)
Observances (Niyama):
Purity (Shaucha)
Contentment (Santosha)
Austerity (Tapas)
Scriptural Study (Svadhyaya)
Surrender to God (Ishvarapranidhana)
Posture, Seat (Asana)
Breath Control (Pranayama)
Withdrawing the Mind from Sense Perception (Pratyahara)
Concentration (Dharana)
Meditation (Dhyana)
Higher Consciousness (Samadhi)

http://www.mountmadonna.org/yoga/babaji.html

Epigraphs

Epigraphs serve as touchstones, little guidances, a way of tuning in to the work at hand. They’re like the musical hummings our grade school teacher would make as she sought to get us –40 or more untalented sixth graders--to sing in harmony, to launch us into song.

Some will appear at the beginning of the finished book, others at the head(s) of key sections. They serve, too, as a kind of scaffolding as I move through hundreds of pages of notes, a morass of material, “dark matter...” What is this thing all about anyway? Dr. Sward's Cure... I may even change the title. Soul Retrieval? I don't want to confuse people. I am NOT the Dr. Sward in the title. That's my father. I'm the fucked up melancholic son mourning the loss of a complex and difficult man.

Epigraphs. Because I'm one of those people who goes forward by going sideways, left, right, forward and back, needing guideposts to light the way, I check in each day with my mentors.

“I too have moments of faith, or assurance, or beauty—or maybe just lapses in nihilism. In the morning I’m capable of hearing the music of the spheres—it’s when the stars come out that I first hear the howling of eternal nothingness.”
--Peter De Vries, (letter to J.D. Salinger)

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“In the absence of hope, we must still struggle to survive, and so we do—by the skin of our teeth.”
–William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice

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“The dark karmas that haven’t been worked out will sneak in any chance they get.”
--Baba Hari Dass

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Count on it: there's always a little darkness.

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“When you make one wrong turn, the errors tend to compound.”
–Henry Roth. (The New Yorker, Aug 1 ’05)

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"The meaning of life is to go back to sleep and hope tomorrow will be a better day."
--Charles Shultz, Peanuts

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... the people with the truest understanding of their own abilities, research shows, tend to be depressives. [paraphrase]
--The New Yorker, Aug. 22 '05.

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"Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon
with the old moon in her arms;
and I fear, I fear, my master dear!
We shall see a deadly storm."
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode.

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"The soul has a soul and the soul of the soul is God."
-Dad

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"Without the invisible, you're invisible.
Without the invisible, there's no you.
Of course in your case the invisible
has a reason to be invisible.
Truth is, son, God doesn't want to be seen with you."
-Dad