First There is a Mountain

1.

In the small Indian city of Pune, in the basement of the Iyengar Yoga Institute, was a humid, sliver-shaped library where cinderblock walls seemed to radiate sweat. Here an institute librarian, dressed in a sari and dark eye makeup, pursued her painstaking and apparently lifelong project of cataloging the vault into an antiquated and ever-crashing computer. There were three walls of books—some 8,000 volumes in several ancient and modern Indic languages as well as English, German, French, Italian, even modern Hebrew. This was the personal library of the yoga master B. K. S. Iyengar, a random amalgam of yoga texts spanning several centuries and ranging from the classic to the obscure to the kitsch. A handful of Western yoga students diligently examined yoga texts at the end of a long, cafeteria-style table, barefoot and dressed, like me, in inexpensively tailored Indian Punjabi frocks of soft cotton, sparkly adhesive bindis adorning many of our foreheads. Several Indian Hare Krishna devotees from the distant state of Bihar congregated at the other end of the table, wearing ponytails at the crowns of their heads and white cotton wrap outfits. At the center of the long edge of table sat Iyengar’s closest disciple, a Frenchman of Muslim extraction named Faeq Biria whose dress, comportment, Indian speech inflection and bright way of communicating with his eyebrows gave him the look of not just a protégé of Iyengar but a smaller and fresher version of the guru himself.

This is where I first heard the tale of Ramanuja. The legendary qualities ascribed to the saint—flexibility, universality, courage, authenticity, a love of the body—were the aspirations of the Iyengar Yoga Institute. Iyengar and his children could also teach you to stand on your hands, do a split or lie on the ground for twenty minutes without twitching—but all this in the service of something higher, and more noble, and somehow mysteriously connected to this man called Ramanuja.

B. K. S. Iyengar was known now to tens of thousands of American and European yoga aficionados for having transformed an inaccessible and centuries-old collection of Indian philosophies and rituals into a therapeutic melding of meditation and exercise called, in our homes, Iyengar Yoga. His technique had healed millions and helped secure the place of a mind-body ethic in the modern model of health. To Indians he was also revered, as the man who resurrected a dying national tradition by popularizing the practice of asanas—or physical postures—whose beneficial effects on the health and spirit proved the eternal wisdom of ancient India. To both camps, he was a kind of Ramanuja—a populist who brought the esoteric to those who never had legitimate claim to it, and someone who looked beyond caste to fashion a personal vision of the holy.

Classically, yoga is a collection of philosophies sprung from the two thousand-year-old Indian holy texts called the Vedas that espoused a quest for liberation from the bonds of the material world through a life of ritual, discipline, and devotion to God. Nearly ten centuries later, during the time of Ramanuja, yoga reappeared in South Asia as a series of physical regimens whose practice was meant to link an individual with the divine through the purification of one’s subtle body—a metaphysical ideal that roughly corresponded to the physical body. In the twentieth century, something called yoga arose in India once again, as a form of sport espoused by Indian nationalists. Drawing loosely from a small handful of newly unearthed medieval yoga texts, these revolutionaries sought to create a populist movement rooted in shared, and largely invented, physical choreographies. Rich, open to interpretation, and physically rewarding, this yoga became popular among Westerners and Anglophilic Indians alike. Fifty years later, the work of B. K. S. Iyengar and a handful of other Indians turned it into one more modern craze.

Today at the library, Iyengar himself was seated at an old oak school desk at the mouth of the sliver, peering through owl glasses at a flurry of philosophy texts, letters from his international retinue of students, and magazine articles about the global spread of yoga. He wore traditional South Indian dress—dhoti, kurta and forehead markings—though just this morning I’d seen him doing yoga in the shiny green Umbro shorts that were the vogue this year at the World Cup in France.

Ever since my first yoga class fifteen years before, I’d known there was an aging and charismatic Indian with a long white mane and eyebrows growing practically to his knees who ran a yoga school in India, and that he could still balance in a freestanding handstand while touching the soles of his feet to the back of his head. What I’d learned over several months in his company merely rounded out the legend, of a traditional Indian who could navigate the Western mind. Iyengar spoke in Western medical tropes but had neither a formal education nor extensive skills in any Western or even Indian language other than his mother tongue, Tamil, little spoken here in a city whose own language was Marathi. Iyengar carried a host of other affectations from his ancestral past. Though he was born in the state of Karnataka, what he called his homeland was a place where no relative had lived for hundreds of years, a town hundreds of miles and several states away.

I’d come to the library today as I did most afternoons. I’d attended a guided morning practice in the studio upstairs, a two-hour workout under the gaze of Iyengar and his offspring. I’d done headstands and twists, backbends and handstands. When I entered the library this afternoon, still lightheaded from the workout and requisite fasting, I touched the floor by Iyengar’s feet. He greeted me with a gruff nod of the head, and then I took a seat at the long table across from the Frenchman Biria, as Iyengar called him.

The room was quiet except for occasional interruptions from the Indian Hare Krishnas. You want to learn yoga? one asked me, eyeing the stack of books on the table at my side. I can help. But first please, can I ask you, why do you in the West do yoga?

I looked at him dumbly.

Excuse me can I borrow? another asked, drawing my stack of books before him and ensconcing himself in my research.

The first eyed the books again and looked at me ruefully. A book? Why are you learning from a book?

Eh. You, Iyengar grunted. Everyone looked. Biria lifted perceptibly from his seat, kicking his chair such that it rattled the case of books behind him. The guru was addressing me. I sprinted to the metal folding chair beside his desk. He gave me long look, then gestured to the paperwork cluttering his desk. It was galleys for a new collection of edited speeches, what would become his sixth book. You see I have my own research. He peered over the frames of his glasses and slicked back his white locks with his palms. Anyway. You asked what is yoga. Talk to Biria. He knows books. Ask him for the—the—this saint—Ramanuja. You asked. Read Ramanuja.

Biria was on his feet now as well, having rushed to the exact section of the bookshelf that contained Iyengar’s collection on medieval yoga philosophy and located the dozen or so texts on Ramanuja—no easy feat.

Ramanuja is Guruji’s ancestor, Biria said. This is the same family. Ramanuja, he continued, penned his famous commentaries in the very city the Iyengar family hailed from. The family’s traditions all descended from this place: their taboos, their tattoos, their family prayers, and their devotion to Vishnu. Ramanuja shared even their dress—down to the white-ash U-shaped impression of Vishnu’s footprint—.

Iyengar was looking down. He nodded and grunted whether at Biria or the papers in front of him, it was unclear. Eh. Biria. You tell her. Very important this, Iyengar finally called from the front of the room. Tell her. The pearls.

Just like Guruji, Ramanuja addresses the body, Biria went on, adding Ramanuja’s metaphor of pearls on a string, matter linked by the cohering thread of Brahman. "Sankara didn’t believe in the supremacy of the body. He thought it was maya. But if the body is maya how can you walk? Ramanuja realized the body was an instrument.

Guruji teaches to bring total awareness to the body, he went on. Iyengar was nodding at his papers. The holy dimension of the body comes alive. In triangle pose! Biria added, now looking at me as if he had unearthed an occult key. He spread his arms as if to demonstrate the stirring of Brahman with his gesture. The body is like a pearl, awakened by consciousness.

Earlier, I’d been trying to balance in handstand so as to ultimately, someday during my lifetime, get the soles of my feet onto the back of my head in the manner of the yogi. I strained to imagine a connection between this new information and what I’d been practicing in the studio upstairs.

Feel the divinity in every cell, Iyengar added, mumbling now. Give her the life.

Biria handed me a yellowed, stained and frayed edition of a book: Life of Sri Ramanuja, read the cover. It was published in India when books still cost ten cents, and had a book plate from Iyengar’s first home in Pune. The yogi’s handwriting in English looped through the margins like a small child at play. I dutifully brought the book to my seat and read the parable of Ramanuja’s life.

When I was done, I gazed at the frontispiece of the book, a sculpture of Ramanuja from the South Indian temple where the saint had written his commentaries. The statue wore the mark of Vishnu on his forehead; his feet curled in to his belly. It reminded me of that sculpture that had been so significant for Ramanuja, of Vishnu lying in that state between waking and sleep. I too sometimes believed I embodied a middle ground between earth and ether. I’d felt it this morning, in that moment of freefall in handstand, when I hadn’t yet finished rising up, and I hadn’t started to come down yet either. In that instant nothing was certain, and yet somehow everything was certain.

And then suddenly, I found myself imagining all the objects and people in the room around me—the Hare Krishnas in their white cotton, the librarian in her sari, the American women with their forehead bindis and kurta pajamas—all of us dancing in the margins of the book. Then, like disembodied pearl-ions bouncing off the walls and bookshelves, I saw the people in the room spring into the air beside Ramanuja and the book about Ramanuja, Iyengar and his collected writings, the three cases of books on yoga, our many competing notions of what exactly yoga might be. And there we all balanced, suspended in midair in freefall, at a precise moment of buoyancy after we’d risen and before we fell. I wondered if everything in this room—people, books, history, mythology, costumes, tradition—if it could all interact in a coherent way, if it could all exist at once. And for a split second I was nowhere else, I was inside that thought.

2.

I learned to meditate long before I got to India. I was seven. We were living with my mother’s second husband, years in which I tried to get as far from my stepfather as possible, casting for ways to leave home. Sitting in his old Buick Skylark while he ducked inside the hardware shop to buy widgets and hinges one day, I conducted an experiment. Was it possible to think of nothing, or was it only possible to think of the act of thinking of nothing? I concentrated on this conundrum to the point where I realized that even thinking only of the act of thinking of nothing was a feat. If I could maintain my focus on that thought before, during, and after my stepfather returned to the car, I’d conducted a successful experiment. As I sat in the car, I realized that with this technique I could manage the things I didn’t want to think about. I noticed that if a memory seeped into my thoughts that I found unpleasant, I could head it off by concentrating on forgetting it before it fully took shape in my mind. The act of thinking about forgetting that thought was so challenging that before I knew it I could only remember that I was trying to forget something, not precisely what it was I was trying to forget. In this way those memories disappeared. I don’t remember what it was I was trying to forget that day.

What are you doing? my stepfather asked me suspiciously, stepping into the Buick, fingering his widgets.

Nothing.

Tell me.

No.

He drove us back to our house, where in the back of my bedroom I had a secret room. My room had velvet walls and no windows. I could hole up here, burrowing into the pillows and carpeting and reading my magical kids’ books: Oz and Ozma, Dorothy and the Wizard, Half Magic, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. I had an imaginary TV as well, and I could watch sitcom reruns and game shows with no one ever telling me to turn them off, because no one could find me in my refuge. There was no doorway, just a shimmery spot on the wall beside my bed that marked its entryway. To get through it, I had to squint my eyes so I saw double, and then shift my focus back and forth between one image and the other. In the space between the two images, I could see through things. This helped me walk through the wall.

At slumber party salons, my girlfriends participated in other experiments in magic. In my stepfather’s basement workshop, to the sound of a low-growling furnace, we set up in a circle, each of us taking a turn in the center. There, each girl lay down and closed her eyes, trying to empty her head of all thoughts. I remember the girl at my head rubbing my temples to help me unhinge myself from the world of the basement. Then, with one finger from each girl’s hand under my body, they chanted in unison, Light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board. I listened until I heard nothing but that chant, over and over. Light. Stiff. I imagined my body sandwiched into a piece of plywood, and then drifting as it became light, fuzzy with feather hairs growing from my sides. And then slowly, each girl supporting me with only spindly index fingers, I began to elevate. This required great sensitivity on the part of the girl at my head, who gave the signal at the precise moment when she felt my body was ready. Then, if all went well, if all the people in the room were in proper communication, if I had entered the proper state of relaxation, my body rose toward the ceiling, the fingers beneath me offering only delicate guidance.

I remember floating. I am sure I floated. I am sure I was doing more than simply resting my weight on the girls’ fingers. It was not their strength, but my own particular state of mind that allowed me to levitate. We all knew this because you stayed buoyant in the air until you thought, I am floating, and then you plunged—plunk—inexplicably, to the floor. The thought—I am floating—was the membrane separating the realm where your body obeyed gravity from the realm where you were something other than your body, something that could hover outside of it. The act of tricking your mind allowed you to cross that membrane. And then, like a password at a gate, the utterance of that thought spit you back to the basement. Plunk, and you hit the ground. Your eyes popped open and you remembered the faces of your friends, the objects from the workshop, the hum of the furnace. You were back. Hello Colleen Copitelli! Hello Debbie de Marche! Giggles. Next!

In the seventies these were the parlor games we played, left over from the Surrealists, encouraged by such forces as the Milton Bradley Corporation, which in all earnestness believed that Twister! Monopoly and Ouiji occupied a single universe. In my case, the particular pathologies of my family conspired to make the occult especially central. My mother was keen to know why that Ouiji dial kept leaning to a particular letter—N; why the Tarot cards kept tossing up the figure of the Jack; why she could come up with a very particular story of a young prince in Medieval France when she closed her eyes and imagined a past life for herself. Later, my mother introduced me to the writings of turn-of-the-century vegetarian cults, to the Nature Cure enthusiasts, Alistair Crowley. Through my mother’s West African boyfriend we got free instruction on how to manipulate an invisible ball of energy in Tai Chi exercises; another of her brief romances put us in contact with the philosophies of Alexander Lowen, the controversial psychologist who believed that memories resided in the muscles. It was my mother who introduced me to Carlos Castañeda’s tales of otherworldly transport. Around the same time my sister inducted me into that vast world made accessible through drugs. And so in high school, there seemed a kind of inevitability to the fact that I got my first real job as an assistant at a foundation for Sufi dervishes.

I didn’t know that these experiences were some kind of preparation, but when I made my first descent from the yoga studio at Iyengar’s school in India to his basement library, I had the strange feeling I was coming home. On Iyengar’s cluttered shelves I discovered the corpus of Indian mysticism, a trove of testimonials unified by their fascination with that ineffable, and blissful, feeling of being transported. What struck me at first was not their relation to the divine, but the matter-of-factness with which they discussed the act of flying. For these Indians, the pursuit of this ecstasy was not escapism; it was discovery. When Carlos Castañeda soared above the deserts of New Mexico on Don Juan’s magic peyote, he became an absurd symbol of America’s spiritual yearning. But for the Indian yogis there were no such contradictions. The benefits of yoga could understandably be confused with the benefits of drugs, even Iyengar understood this. He had told me, for instance, that among his famous students was that spokesman for psychedelia, Aldous Huxley. Had Huxley been a good student? I asked the guru. No, he answered abruptly. After he was coming to me Huxley found drugs, Iyengar explained, shrugging. After that, for yoga he had no need.

Another day in the library a yoga teacher from France handed me Paramhansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. The edition was the kitsch supermarket paperback, from America, that I had seen in dozens of yoga studios and used bookstores back home. I had never read it

You haven’t read it? the Frenchwoman asked in her thick accent, feigning horror. She wore the Pune chic of Indian cotton Punjabi top and balloon pants, bindi firmly secured on her forehead. Oh it’s beautiful. It’s—it’s a romance. I took it from her hand as I might have Gone With the Wind—guiltily, expecting something titillating and steamy. And maybe, I considered in the back of my mind, Yogananda would explain exactly what was yoga.

He did not. However, the tale of Yogananda’s love affair with God was a romance indeed—in the French sense: a roman, a tale. He told his life story with the dramatic sensitivity of a Star Wars scriptwriter: sparkly and full of explosions. Yogananda’s primary concern was to convince the reader that the supernatural was possible: Not only could his guru send a telepathic message to him from a distant city telling him what time to pick him up at the train station, but he could amend the first message to communicate whether and how long his train was going to be delayed. Through mind control, Yogananda instructed, you could nullify the petty irritations of the real world. This he learned from his guru, who, while meditating with his protégé one afternoon, seemed to Yogananda to be having no problem with the mosquitoes that were savaging the poor apprentice.

Guruji? Yogananda finally queried the adept. There are mosquitoes swarming around my body, and yet you seem to be unbothered. How can this be? His teacher went on to explain that the mosquitoes weren’t actually attacking Yogananda. They only seemed to be. If Yogananda could concentrate adequately on the reality that mosquitoes were in fact maya—that if only God existed, there was no such thing as mosquito—they would no longer bother him. And sure enough, as soon as the student ceased to believe in the mosquitoes, they miraculously vanished.

I was riveted. The book transported me into a romantic Indian countryside where the atmosphere swarmed with genies, where the primary purpose of air currents was the transport of heavenly particles. What connection his technique of mind control had to what I was learning in the studio upstairs I had no idea. Iyengar taught that yoga involved not an out-of-body state, but an inhabiting of your body to the point of hyperawareness. The world was no more an illusion than the body that you walked around in. I’d read in a newsletter published by the school that Iyengar believed the goal of yoga was the very embrace of one’s body. When your body, mind and soul are harmoniously healthy, Iyengar wrote to his students, you will bring spiritual glow and dynamic harmony to those around you and to the world—not by withdrawing from the world but by being an electrifying, living organ of the body of humanity.

Yogananda, on the other hand, counseled, man is essentially a soul, incorporeal and omnipresent. This idea seemed quaint—but his tales of magic were winning. Yogananda described in great detail, for instance, how enlightenment came to him at a young age. In the presence of his guru, he found that he often received Samadhi, or bliss—the ultimate goal, he wrote, of yogic meditation. As in any proper romance, Yogananda saw stars when he realized this state of rapturous union with his love—a diaphanous luster. The vast space within me, he described, became a chamber of light. This was a sensation of such utter euphoria that he was drawn, in the manner of generations of renunciants before him, to seek a life in the perpetual state of ecstatic unification with the beyond.

I already knew something of Yogananda, because a boyfriend of mine in California had once taken me with my mother, who was visiting from New York, on a picnic to the grand oceanfront garden in Malibu that had been Yogananda’s American headquarters. Here he oversaw a new universal religion called yoga. The shrine held the same iconic photograph that adorned the book jacket: long black hair draped across Yogananda’s cotton tunic; he wore a mild and knowing grin. Other photos documented the rise of the mystic in California’s social arena beginning in the 1920s, when he amassed a following of wealthy esoterics seeking instruction in meditation and this new eclectic religion. Yogananda came to influence such Hollywood eminences as Marlene Dietrich, William Randolph Hearst and Gloria Swanson. The photo gallery, reproduced on