Pendulum Swings
by Jack Alexander
One might say that my youth was a long preparation for discovering Mother and Sri Aurobindo through a series of what I think of as “Pendulum Swings”, each time filling in what was missed on the previous swing. Rather than write a long dissertation of what brought me to Sri Aurobindo, I’ll do a short overview of how the teenage Jack made his way forward. Sri Aurobindo was many swings away, but the religious/spiritual grounding was pointing me onward and Eastward. It would take lifetimes for the young aspirant and yet he had time and energy to keep looking until it was found, as if Mother and Sri Aurobindo were helping the pendulum swing.
Western Christianity via Liberal Disciples of Christ Church in Southern California. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man) Ecumenical Institute from Chicago.
The single most important guiding force for me, apart from my parents, would have to be my family church in Temple City California. Somehow my parents felt at home there and so I ended up meeting numerous lifelong friends there and became swept up by the two ministers as their “Thomas” (meaning I was going to be their protégé). Because of this, I was occasionally asked to give a sermon on Youth Day and was included in extra counseling and attention. The two with give me the first experience of what Sri Aurobindo would later describe as the deeper psychic education, training the soul behind the outer life
Two note worthy classes I attended were very important to shaping my vision of religious life and experience. One class was a challenge to normal church life brought by a group of dedicated and disgruntled ministers living together in an old seminary on the North Side of Chicago. They were very disciplined, (got up a 4am and recited prayers and scripture) and were very dedicated to the essence of their vision. They felt that the organized church was missing the boat in terms of doing the work of Christ in everyday life and dealing with the problems of the world. Their presentation spoke to me.
The other was an introduction to a French Jesuit Priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This class was very amazing also but in a very different way. This was concentrating on things like Evolution and how we were involved and effected by it. Although it was decades ago, the thing I remember most was illustrations of the ‘Noosphere” and how evolution went in cycles in a never-ending process. Some of the quotes that stuck with me from Chardin were: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience” and “Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”.Teilhard’s vision of the noosphere felt revolutionary at the time, and only much later did I recognize how closely it paralleled Sri Aurobindo’s own vision of evolution moving toward a supramental consciousness.
Work Camps, Service to the Poor and Infirm
The church ministers were strong on reaching out and serving the less fortunate. I remember going to visit “shut ins” in the community, to take food or just conversation to people who could not leave their beds or homes. Similarly, I remember painting a house in a poor black neighborhood in Los Angeles.
The youth minister organized work camps for Easter week going to the Sonoran Desert in Mexico with other youth groups from other congregations and assemble school buildings that were part of a governmental program for small, underserved towns in the region who had limited funds for a new school building. The Mexican government would pour a slab and deposit the prefab beams and roofing material and windows, and we would assemble them. In the process we worked with the villagers and got to know life in rural Mexico. I did that three years in a row and it was my introduction to what we would call “Third World” existence and I enjoyed getting to know them very much. The foreman who ran the project told me on my last trip, that if I was ever in Hermosillio, to come and look him up. When I turned 16, me and my 47 Plymouth drove to take him up on the offer. Those days of serving and building in the arid, hot villages gave me a sense of how spiritual practice could be lived through action, something I would later more fully understand in Auroville, and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s insistence that spirituality must be lived through action and offered in service to the world.
College Challange/Departure, Joseph Campbell Talk at Chapman College
Getting into Chapman College took pulling favors and going to a junior college to show them I could do college work. My connection to a Disciple of Christ church and having the ministers telling them wonders and getting good grades in Psych 1A and Anatomy Physiology didn’t hurt for the “C” student. Living on campus was fabulous, paying my tuition from an inheritance allowed meaningful autonomy and being enrolled in a 4 year college meant that my draft deferment would stay in place as long as I could stay in school.
One of the standout experiences was attending a convocation for the college to hear Joseph Campbell deliver a speech. It was transformative and hit me very hard in a good way….changed my life kind of good. Perhaps because of it, I began to question what I was doing at college and how the system was geared to teaching to a test. My roommates and associates in the dorm would study and cram for the exam and two weeks later forget what they had said on the test.
I found that increasingly uninteresting and started to talk with instructors, councilors, even the president of the College. Without exception, they all decried the system as flawed and regrettable but found it impossible to manage any other way. This was something I couldn’t agree with and decided to drop out of Chapman College.
Vietnam War and Alternative Service (1966)
With the Vietnam war raging, I was called up for my physical. During the Draft Board meeting, I mentioned that the form I filled out at age 16, I had ticked “Conscientiously Apposed To War”. They said: “Ok, now you have to prove it”. With the help of my ministers, and my brother who was in the Air Force and new how I thought, I got assigned to a Community Center in East LA as a general staff member for a two year job of service to the community.
Ecumenical Institute in Chicago, Summer In The City in New York,
As a benefit for working at the community center, I got to work on programs for kids and saw this opportunity to develop them based on trending community organization techniques I wanted to explore. One was the Ecumenical Insitute in Chicago, and the other was a fabulous system focusing on Art and Performance in an urban summer program. The head of this program called “Summer In The City” was Monsignor Robert J Fox and was supported by Sister Corita with her posters and creativity on the ground. I visited both sites and saw firsthand how community could be built with dedicated and creative people serving the community.
College Buddies Collective Seeking, Once a month, Nature, Lectures, Readings, Vedanta Society in West Hollywood, Bhagavad-Gita by Swami Prabhavanada
While at my work site, Eastmont Community Center, two of my college friends/roommates also came to work there to do their Alternative Service to the Draft. During that time, several other friends started meeting together to find meaningful things we could do together, like reading books of interest and discussing them, camping in nature together, seeking different religious traditions as I was disappointed in the response to my challenging the established church in my life.
One of the best we found was the Vedanta Society in West Los Angeles and it’s leader, Swami Prabhavanada who would speak once a month. He had such as wonderful way with words and his ending of his talks on Sundays was always something beautiful to behold. But because we could only hear him once a month, I purchased his translation of the Bhagavad-Gita on a book table that was on sale due to a nibbled corner by a mouse.
This was a first for me, where I was taken up by a book. I became a student of this new concept, especially in light of the war going on and our seeking for meaning as our group.
Philosophy Professor guidance
Sometime later, one of the instructors in Philosophy from Chapman was talking to my roommate about another location of interest in Los Angeles that we might find interesting, run by a woman who had studied in India and ran a center devoted to teaching. Her name was Dr Judith Tyberg but went by Jyotipryia.
East West Cultural Center, Dr Judith Tyberg,
The pendulum was just about to swing again. This person was engaging, upbeat, knew Indian history and spiritual leaders from firsthand experience. She had a school for gifted students and held weekly classes of the works of Sri Aurobindo: Wednesday was “Synthesis of Yoga”, Thursday night was “Life Divine”, Friday night was “Savitri”, and Sunday there was a general topic talk, sometimes by Jyotipryia and sometimes by a Tibetan Monk or a someone travelling through that had interesting things to say about life. Saturdays and Sundays were sometimes for packing tools for a place in India called Auroville. What came through her was the fact that, as a woman, and frustrated in being treated like a woman in her attempts to learn techniques and spiritual truths while in ashrams in the North of India, she was directed to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram because she too was seeking more……and as it was in the 40’s, she could get permission from Sri Aurobindo to learn anything she wanted . I believe it was TV Kapali Shastri she was approaching to teach her the secrets of chanting and the Vedas and when he asked Sri Aurobindo about her request, he said: “Teach her anything she wants to learn”.
Adventure of Consciousness, blown mind. The power of the Guru and to discover two. “The world is preparing for a big change, will you help”
I don’t remember the first time I went to East West Cultural Center or when I was handed Sat Prem’s book “Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness” but it was just as important, and more (pendulum swings again) than my being taken up by reading the Gita. It was as if each chapter was an affirmation and so moving! And that this person who was now tuning and clarifying the pendulum, was Sri Aurobindo. Just the table of contents was earth shaking but the fact that there was a whole chapter on “Quieting The Vital”……oh my goodness….that’s what really got me.
By now, our group of seekers were getting quotes from Sri Aurobindo and Mother to thinks over and discuss. Our dreams started to gravitate to thinking about our gatherings as: If a little is good, a lot would be better.
We began to dream about banding together and purchasing land or an apartment building or an old seminary and living together in a commune (remember this was the 60’s). I being the most mechanical/handyman type, decided to take a two year course at LA Trade Tech in Los Angeles in Carpentry so I could build us our housing if necessary.
Los Angeles Trade Tech, Commune of Seekers in SoCal , Asking Mother’s Opinion
Sometime around now, on a new calendar from the Ashram was a quote from Mother: “The World Is Preparing For A Big Change, Will You Help?”
This got us thinking one Thursday evening group at East West and Jyotipryia made a suggestion that before we got too far along, why not ask Mother what she felt about all this.
Weeks went by and then one amazing meeting we got a large envelope with a handwritten card from Mother and lots of blessing packets. Her message was short.
“Blessings. How will it help the work?”
You could hear a pin drop in the room. To most of us it was immeadealtly obvious that this was a sweet zen slap that lovingly sent us tumbling into recogintion that we had gotten off track.
This was when Jack and Mary decided to go to Auroville.
