ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award Finalist 1999
All proceeds from the sale of Can You Listen to a Woman are donated to Yasodhara Ashram's Youth Program
Reviews
"I can wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone venturing forth on the spiritual path."- Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D. author of The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga
"This is an intensely personal account of how love, tragedy, and the guidance of an illumined teacher helped (the author) to overcome spiritual and emotional isolation."
- Linda Johnsen, author of Daughters of the Goddess: The Women Saints of India
"This is as moving an account of the soul's pilgrimage as I have ever read. Its honesty and courage come as a tonic in an age when spiritual "junk-food" is on the increase everywhere. I recommend it warmly to all who are really concerned about seeing more of the Light as they journey on. A compelling read."
- Tom Harpur, author of Prayer: the Hidden Fire
Candid and inviting, Forsee's style is accessible and without pretentious airs. This book successfully manages to retain a sense of perpetual wonder?as if the author himself is humbled still by his journey." --Karen Wyckoff, ForeWord Magazine
Excerpt
From Chapter One: Assignment
Soon after I moved to Yasodhara Ashram, Swami Radha gave me a ballpoint pen that had a little digital calendar built into its cap. I saw the gift as a nice gesture, but the thought that I was meant to write something with it never occurred to me. Instead, like a child temporarily enchanted with a new toy, I directed my efforts towards the ultimately fruitless task of trying to make the calendar work. I tried two or three times then gave up and put the pen into the top drawer of my desk where I promptly forgot it.
A year and a half later on a warm Sunday night in the middle of summer, Swami Radha spoke at satsang* and the last words of her talk that evening were, "and I remember giving a pen to someone once and I'm still waiting to see if that pen is going to produce anything." I remember the humor and warmth in her voice when she said these words, but the message sailed directly across the room and embedded itself right where it was meant to. Immediately after satsang I rushed home, yanked open the top drawer of my desk, and with considerable relief found the pen still where I had left it. But the problem of what I was meant to do with the pen had remained in the drawer, as well. I still didn't have the story to go with it. In time the pen disappeared altogether and she never referred to it again.
Tonight in Spokane, many years later, she sits across from me at her desk, hunched over, peering intently through a magnifying glass as she turns the pages of a miniature diary given to her in India by her guru, Swami Sivananda. We are reviewing the biography work so far. A soft, late night quiet fills the room. Outside, a street lamp casts its silvery glow onto the sheer curtains covering the window beside the desk. The lamplight gathers around her like a gentle, luminescent shawl. I can just make out the writing on the cover of the little diary as she holds it up to the light.
Compliments of J. Singh Accountants
Bombay/Calcutta
1954
I sit watching her closely as she peers silently through the magnifying glass, sifting the returning memories. Thirty-two pages of tiny, indelible, single-syllable reminders of her six months with Gurudev, each page divided into an orderly alignment of consecutive days. I think of the incredible wealth, daily bread, carefully preserved in the form of a few key words. At all costs, her memory of this extraordinary place and time must be reliable.
As I look at her, I begin to feel waves of admiration and gratitude for the tremendous respect she brings to her life, here in this moment, and in all the moments past. She puts down the magnifying glass and looks up.
"If you do this biography work, it could bring about a lot of change in you. Can you see that?"
"Yes, I can."
"So now you understand why you can write about me only from your own experience?"
"I do."
"Go back to your diaries. Highlight the things that stand out for you now. Find out what is there. See how far you have come. You must be able to see how far you have come. Om Om."
Once when Swami Radha was describing her own early career as a writer, she showed me a photograph taken when she was nineteen years old. The ethereal beauty of the young woman in the photograph took my breath away. Her clear, penetrating dark eyes looked straight into mine as if I, a stranger, had just addressed her by name. Swami Radha noticed, and a few days later presented me with the photograph.
That night was one of those special times when she would go back to the earliest memories of her growing-up years. These stories often affected me so deeply that the feelings could be almost overwhelming. Even now, I don't know why that period of her life was so important to me. So intimate and familiar were these stories that it was easy to become part of them, a silent observer sitting at the next table or walking along the same Berlin street.
She was just nineteen when the Berlin business paper, Nachtaus Gabawas, began publishing her short stories under the pen name 'Lorenz'. The editor called her regularly, knowing that she could always have a story ready for the next evening edition.
"Nicholas would call me up and say, 'You'd better come down here, the story is too long. You'll have to remove four lines.' "
Swami Radha laughed, remembering the phone calls that could come at any hour of the day or night.
"So I would go down to the building where they did the typesetting and printing, and I'd sit with the typesetter at this huge machine while he shifted the hot lead up to where I could take enough out to make the story fit the page. Afterwards, Nicholas and I would go over to Romanche's, which in those days was a popular cafe for writers and artists on Kurfurstendahm, and over coffee or a glass of wine, we would develop some ideas for my next assignment."
She chuckled again, recalling how Nicholas always phrased his question to her in the same way.
"Now then," he'd say, as he rummaged through the stuffed cardboard folders in his briefcase, "what is your next assignment?" From there they would go into whatever ideas or thoughts came to mind.
One rainy night when she was walking home from one of their sessions, his question returned to her only this time from a very different perspective.
"What is my assignment?" she asked herself as she walked along the dark, wet street.
Maybe there was a purpose to life after all, a particular job to do in this lifetime. If so, she wondered, what could it possibly be? There was no immediate answer, of course, and she put the question aside. It would come back to her many times in the tumultuous, tragic years ahead.
What is the purpose of life, and how much living does it take to get to the point where it is the only real question left to ask? Swami Radha had her own ways of encouraging her students to find the answer for themselves. But we had to be open and receptive and listening to get the message, which meant that a certain amount of mental/emotional self-control was necessary in order to hear it. Now, years later as I sit with Swami Radha late at night in her apartment in Spokane, her story about Nicholas and the assignment conjures up the memory of that ballpoint pen with the digital calendar built into its cap. Finally I understand.
© 1999 timeless
back to top |
