Mary Garden - Author

When a guru's not engaged in meditation
A-reciting of his mantra for the week, 
His capacity for infantile inflation
Is enough to drive disciples up the creek.
He will take the girls aside for tantric yoga
While celibacy's ordered for the chaps; 
If  he starts behaving like an angry ogre
He will claim it's just to make your pride collapse.
Oh, with all this yogic practice to be done,
A disciple's lot is not a happy one."

This little poem by John Wren-Lewis was inspired by The Policemens' Chorus from The Pirates of Penzance, and the first (1988) edition of The Serpent Rising by Mary Garden.

Sometime in 1980, John Wren-Lewis, my daughter Fiona and I found ourselves on a crowded Indian bus, sitting next to a young Western woman dressed from top to toe in white, who seemed oblivious to the heat, noise and smells around us. "It's a very long, tiring journey," she said, advising us to pull our scarves over our faces and focus our minds inwardly in order to shut out the general mayhem that would be our fate for the next eight hours. I wondered if she belonged to some religious group, a Hindu nun perhaps. Anyway, we were glad to have her company, as she obviously knew her way around.

It turned out that she was a New Zealander called Mary Garden who had left home many years earlier to find her guru in India. Her first stop had been a visit to the (in)famous miracle-working guru, Sathya Sai Baba, ending after several months as she observed the rich and powerful receiving private darshan from the Master, while she and other impoverished but serious devotees were ignored. There were also rumours of his sexual molestation of young boys, later to be confirmed by Western ex-disciples. "At least Rajneesh and his followers were open about sex," she said, adding that her later years at the Poona ashram had been very positive, mainly on account of the all the therapies available from skilled Western group leaders.

She tells of these ashram adventures in her book, and they are lively enough. But the main story centres on her years at the Rishikesh ashram of a beautiful boy-yogi, Swami Balyogi Premvarni. I don't recall her mentioning this on the bus, probably because she was still raw and hurting from her years as his disciple. Nor would the details of his constant sexual demands ("just raising your kundalini") and her pregnancy and late-term abortion ("your bad karma catching up with you"), have been suitable conversation on a crowded Indian bus - quite apart from all the weird yoga and "cleansing" rituals she had to suffer, including the ingestion of post-coital seminal fluids mixed with cream and honey ("nectar of the gods"). The first we heard about all this was in 1988, a couple of years after we settled in Australia, when we turned on the TV one morning to find Ray Martin interviewing her on The Midday Show about the newly published first edition of her book. I recall that he interrupted the interview more than once to advise about giving away too much of her story prematurely, but I suspect he was really concerned about the sensibilities of his typically conservative daytime audience! It turned out that Mary was living in Brisbane, and we've kept in touch, on and off, ever since.

So I was interested to compare the two editions of The Serpent Rising, fifteen years apart. The first was presented as fiction with no mention of Swami Balyogi's name or her own as the heroine. The second is the autobiography it really is. Mary tells us that her main reason for the revision was that guru-abuse can now be openly admitted and discussed. Moreover, she believed her story might help all the conflicted young people who had posted their own distressing experiences of this particular yogi on the Internet. Most had been puzzled, confused and disturbed by his outlandish behaviour, asking themselves the very same question as Mary had been asking herself for over two decades: Is it him or me? Was he "testing" me or is he downright abusive? His Yogant Foundation web site currently extols his skills as a spiritual master and yoga teacher, adding that: "The gems of wisdom and love which radiate from his heart deeply uplift the spirits of those who experience the blessings of his presence." Mary felt it was clearly time to expose him as a dangerous and violent sex-obsessed megalomaniac.

I know, I know, I know - I can hear the $64,000 question reverberating throughout cyberspace even as I write. It was my question too. It was Mary's question to which she has still not found a convincing answer. Why on earth did this highly educated and intelligent young woman allow herself to be so abused? What's really going on? Mary puts the blame squarely on the nature of the guru-disciple relationship itself, pointing out that it is probably the most authoritarian structure in the world, with its demand for total surrender and obedience, and hence potentially the most destructive of relationships. "We were seduced by yogis and swamis telling us what we wanted to hear: that we were special and they were God-incarnate," she writes. "Our need was our downfall. In the final analysis the authority of the guru is bestowed on him by the disciple."

Indeed! Here, I believe, Mary has hit at least one spiritual nail on the head - the desperate need of almost everyone to feel special. This is the subject of a recent timely piece in the magazine What is Enlightenment? (Issue 26: Aug-Oct 2004) entitled Women Who Sleep with their Gurus - and why they love it." The author, Jessica Roemischer, interviewed ten women who had slept with their gurus, some of them now spiritual teachers themselves. "If your husband's a doctor, then you're special. If you're with Mick Jagger, you're special. If you're sleeping with your Tibetan lama, you're special," said one. Another woman sleeping with a prominent American spiritual teacher explained that all the attention made her feel special "like Radha - a spiritual goddess", words which might have come directly from Mary's story when she recounts how "one full moon night, I experienced a love that seemed to cross boundaries of personal love… the whole universe seemed to be dancing with light and I truly felt as if I was Radha, the most beloved of the gopis, with whom Krishna sported in the lila of love." Which is all very cosmically gratifying until Krishna takes a fancy to another Radha (as he invariably does), whereupon mayhem descends. Hell hath no fury like a devotee scorned, as many gurus have found to their (literal) cost!

In her fascinating and well-researched article in WIE, Jessica explores the myriad conscious and unconscious urges which lead women to sleep with powerful males. But I feel she may be more than a little simplistic in simply asking why we shouldn't expect women to be able to take responsibility for their own personal and spiritual lives, even in the face of a corrupt spiritual teacher. "Women now have the freedom to go beyond instinct, beyond social and biological conditioning ... taking responsibility for our spiritual journey beyond self-serving desires, facing directly and honestly into what we have brought to the situation, and consciously disengaging the age-old structures that no longer serve us."

I'm sure that Mary would agree - in theory at least. But I think she'd also like to point out that there was more to her spiritual search than merely finding a father-figure or satisfying a neurotic need for attention. "I want to find out who I am and what is the meaning of life," she had written on her application to join the ashram. "I want to find out the truths behind this universe." Later when she became disenchanted, she constantly asked herself whether in rejecting her teacher she would be rejecting God. "If we did not believe in Swamiji and maintain our faith, then the whole structure of our dreams of becoming more spiritual would crumble around us - to leave would mean returning to the lives we were tired of, dissatisfied with. To stay would mean that, in spite of the harshness of Swamiji's teachings, we would taste things we had never tasted before and would probably be unlikely to taste anywhere else."

Mary subtitled her book A Journey of Spiritual Seduction. Is she implying that the real villain of the piece is not really her dominating swami, his needy women, or even the authoritarian structure of the guru-disciple relationship, but the very nature of the spiritual quest itself? Exploration into God is tantalizing, exciting and - dare we say it - erotic. It always was and always will be. How many of us can resist that call? And should we?

What is Enlightenment? Local bookstores or see http://www.wie.org.

Review by Ruth Parnell NEXUS Vol 11, No 2, February - March 2004, pg 73

This is the captivating story of a young New Zealand woman who, in 1973, threw away a promising academic career to pursue a spiritual quest in India. For this revised edition of her 1988 book, The Serpent Rising, Mary Garden has rewritten the narrative in the first person and included additional perspective in hindsight, though more is available on her website and perhaps a follow-up book is warranted.

While her quest extended over seven years, only a few of the early years are covered in any detail. Her intended first destination was a Hindu yoga ashram in the Himalayan foothills near Rishikesh, but instead she sidetracked to the Sai Baba enclave, where she spent countless hours waiting for the "avatar" to appear at darshan. Rejection and illness (as well as rumours of the guru's predilection for male disciples) soon gave her the impetus to continue her journey to the intended foothills but, instead, she found herself in the clutches of one Swami Balyogi 'Premvarni ("Swamiji"), who had not long before founded the International Yoganta Foundation. What followed was a path that wavered between joy and fear, bliss and denial, freedom and slavery.

This journey into deep spirituality and devotion is soured by all-too-worldly jealousy, anger and betrayal as Mary and other women at the ashram contend with the changing faces presented by their beloved, omniscient, "celibate" guru. Was it all just a cosmic game and karma being played out, or was it a cosmic con perpetrated by a dangerous mind/energy manipulator? Having come through it all, Mary tends towards the latter. Spending time at Buddhist Vipassana retreat and with the Rajneeshees on a later visit to India, she returned to Swamiji's ashram to take charge of her life at last.

Her story is a cautionary tale for spiritual seekers even today, lest they suspend their mental faculties and lose their own power.

'The Serpent Rising - a review', by Harry Whitehouse, published in The Range News, Maleny, December 30, 2003.

Mary Garden's second book (of the same name) "The Serpent Rising" covers much of the same territory as her earlier work. This time however not as fiction, but as an autobiography of power and authenticity.

The hippy culture of the 70's arose out of (among other things) a welling up of dissent, distrust and anger over the involvement of a number of nations (one of which was Australia) in the Vietnamese War.

Young people chose to dress flamboyantly and live alfresco where possible in various types of communes throughout Australia.

A spin-off from these experiences was a blossoming interest into aspects of Eastern mysticism, particularly of the Indian sub-continent variety.

As a consequence, hundreds of young people from western cultures ventured off in search of "enlightenment". India was a culture which predated the West's by thousands of years, and does have men and women of exceptional piety and psychic ability.

That said, India also has the usual crowd of suspects ready to cash in on marketable tends. Gurus sprang up like mushrooms, and enticed naïve westerners, particularly females, into their Ashrams and retreats. Mary Garden was one of those.

Under the guise of tutorship, these men insinuated themselves into the hearts of these women. Such was natural outcome of these conquests Mary readily admitted in her narrative, which is uncompromising about the inevitable consequences of her infatuation.

"The Serpent Rising" is a very good read. Mary's style is lucid and unpretentious but very honest.

Osborne R, 2003, 'Review of The Serpent Rising' , The Northern Rivers Echo (Lismore), 27 November, p 24

Mary Garden's pursuit of the divine began in 1973 when a poster in an Auckland health food shop prompted her to attend a talk by a visiting Hindu at a yoga ashram.

Soon, she would leave her university Master's studies and go to India: 'I had found what I had been looking for all my life.'

Seven years and 200 pages later, barely escaping sexual assault on the way to Delhi airport, she wondered, 'Is this is how you are going to farewell me, Mother India? I don't want your heaven any more because I can't bear the hell that goes with it. Now I just want to be one of those ordinary people of the world that your gurus seem to despise so much.'

Along with the challenges of Indian travel, Garden's disillusionment can be attributed to two men - hence the scathing reference to 'gurus'.

Satya Sai Baba was an afro-haired huckster whose acolytes, Indian and foreign, flocked to his southern ashram.

'I was sure I detected a soft glow and there seemed to be a luminous aura circling his mound of black kinky hair. As I had never seen such a phenomenon before, I wondered whether some psychic facility had recently developed within me - he was God in human form.'

Devastated by stories that the 'celibate' guru had sex with male followers, she moved to the Himalayan foothills and into the clutches of Swami Balyogi Premvarni whose preferred yoga asanas were conducted in private with a chosen female foreigner.

'Suddenly he reached over and pulled me down on the cot and began kissing me. His tongue began to push his saliva into my mouth. Stunned, I just lay there rigid like a corpse, and before I knew it he had pulled up my robe, manoeuvred his penis between my legs and was inside me.

'Seconds later I looked down to see he was mopping himself with his scarf, which he then handed to me. "Dry yourself. Just raising your kundalini (serpent-power energy). Now go".'

Garden explored other traditions, including Vipassana meditation and the Rajneesh sect, more open about their sexual desires, before reconciling with 'Swamiji' and falling pregnant to him.

Cast aside to have a horrendous late-term abortion, she left the ashram and, soon, India, seeing the Swami for 'what he really was - a dangerous and violent megalomaniac.'

A courageous memoir and a salutary warning to all shoppers in the spiritual supermarket.

Review by Reidun Priddy (founder member of the Sai Baba Organisation in Oslo, Norway in 1983 and active worker until 1999).

Mary Garden's Indian spiritual journey started in 1973 at the Henderson Yoga Ashram in Auckland, New Zealand. And what a journey it was! Her story captivated me from the start, not least because she has the ability to make each scene come alive. She brings the reader right into each event through her vivid descriptions - sounds, sights, details and her own thoughts and reactions at the time.

I have many things in common with Mary although I grew up in Norway, practically the other side of the world. I am the same age and as a child was also convinced that everything I was taught about Christianity was true, and that I would become a missionary. Later on I was also influenced by the same books as her and so many others at that time, such as Yogananda, Brunton and Hesse. In time I became a devotee of Sai Baba of Puttaparthi and went there many times, until I found out after 20 years that he was yet another of the many Indian gurus who abuses people and pretend to be something which he isn't

Her Indian guru called her a 'mouse', but I think she was very brave the way she gave up her life at home and went to live in India. She tells of how she was detached and unaffected by the appalling surroundings when she arrived and spent her first night in a hotel in Madras. I have been many times to India, and the first time I came I was almost terrified and really put off by the poverty, dirt and misery so uncomfortably close to me, and I wasn't even alone like Mary was. She felt at home in India, and even when she later went through hard times and hated being there, she wasn't frightened and didn't feel it was alien to her. The times she was frightened was when she fled from Sai Baba's ashram in a strange panic and when she, with good reason, feared the influence of her guru, Balyogi Premvarni. I have also experienced 'unreasonable' fear coming to the surface in India, and there is something about being there, the intensity of the physical environment has an impact that seems to affect the emotions and reactions to everything as well.

Her description of the night on the train after she leaves Sai Baba and Bangalore really reminds me of how I used to hate being in India when I was having a bad time - somehow bad is so bad there, and good can be so good. All her peace and joy are gone and she just wants to get away from the confusion, dirt and chaos in India to the clarity, order and cleanliness in the West.

There are many myths about Indians, and she writes for example: "Uninhibited behaviour between the opposite sexes is especially upsetting to the majority of Indian people as this goes against traditional Hindu culture." Yes, so we are told, but then why are Indian men notorious for harassing foreign women in Western clothes when they are alone?

Reading how Mary bravely tells of how she got ensnared yet again after vowing to herself that after Sai Baba no guru should tell her what to do with her life, I feel a greater acceptance of my own gullibility in relation to Sai Baba. She shows very clearly that on a spiritual search we are not rational, we open up to deep levels in ourselves and therefore become easy prey to those on the hunt. Through recording her experiences in such an honest and straightforward manner, Mary Garden contributes to a greater understanding of how and why people get caught up in cults without even realising it, especially since Eastern religions are so strange and exotic to most Westerners even now, that it is difficult to recognise the signs of a cult, for the tradition of gurus and ashrams have many of the cult characteristics inherent in them. Such a system demands an impeccable guru, because of its nature where the devotee regards the guru as God.

This book also brings home to the reader how defenceless we can be when confronted with the sort of power wielded by gurus and yogis. In physical strength it would be the equivalent of an infant compared to an adult. Mostly we don't know what we are dealing with and this combined with the putting down of the mind and intellect, which is a basic part of the teachings, leaves us helpless in the hands of ruthless gurus. The Balyogi said these things about the mind and intellect: "Too much intellect..." "You think too much." ""An academic brain. You won't understand anything with that intellect of yours." "…Doubts destroy your faith…" "Yogic sadhana is a death of the mind and the ego." "What faith! Like a diamond. Die mind!" Mary's "clever intellect was my greatest barrier to faith, to finding out the truth about things."

Sai Baba also says 'diamond' means 'die mind'. He told my husband to stop thinking and generally goes on about the mind and intellect in exactly the same way. Very useful when gurus don't want people to realise the truth about themselves. They go further to ensure that devotees won't presume to know anything about what they are really up to and as Mary quotes her guru in the Himalayas, I see no difference to the teachings of Sai Baba: "You have no concept of my consciousness. The intellect cannot comprehend such notions. The only thing you need is faith. You need to surrender to me." "Your real nature is your true guru." (So why tell us to surrender to them?)

Premvarni, writes Mary Garden, "appeared to be an enlightened tantric master operating beyond our feeble conceptions of good and evil or right and wrong. This enabled us to rationalise that through his lessons he deliberately created chaos so that our petty egotistical minds would be still, exhausted and at last transcended." Other devotees told Mary that "the level these gurus were operating at was at the level of Truth where there was no morality and one transcends good and evil." How well I recognise this same argumentation from Sai Baba devotees, myself included at one time. How dangerous this attitude is!

As Sai Baba, Premvarni also puts down other gurus while praising his own disciples as special - old souls connected to him through many lives. Mary says that "the leaving of anyone made them feel that only they were strong enough to stay." That is so true of Sai devotees as well. And the similarities go on: The Swami's living quarters are luxurious compared to the bare concrete for devotees. In the Swami, anger is not anger, sex is not sex, hunger and greed are not hunger and greed, sickness is not sickness and so on. All that is only appearances and everything is done for the sake of the devotee; raising the kundalini, working off karma, taking on the illness of others, removing deep tendencies, samskaras, carried over from past times and lives and 'testing one's faith'. If the master suffers, it is because of the devotee. But the truth is that the Swami himself is not what he appears to be, just like Sai Baba.

It is appalling to read how Mary Garden was treated by Balyogi Premvarni and also by Sarasvati, another devotee. How very satisfying to read the end of the book and see that the mouse had turned into a roaring lion when she left India!

Review by Robert Priddy (retired researcher and lecturer in philosophy and sociology at the University of Oslo. Former member and national leader of the Sathya Sai Organisation in Norway)

A real life spiritual thriller! Such a frank and wholly engaging account of such a remarkable 'spiritual journey' to India has seldom been written. This can be said with confidence because it is shatteringly frank. It takes 'seekers of the spiritual' on a vicarious tour of the mystique of yogis, gurus, swamis and their kind, without personally having to go through the accompanying betrayals and horrors that happened to Mary Garden and which so often occur. The extraordinary psychic and paranormal experiences, which are almost invariably also a baited hook, were also had by Mary Garden in plenty. For me this account represents a broad and experientially-founded rebuttal of much of what the vast New Age literature builds up in groping for spiritual solutions to living and following fraudulent gurus, and not least the search for transcendental experiences of any kind at all costs. The dangers she encountered were great and her survival of them and the intense physical and mental-emotional sufferings involved shows how the human spirit can recover from the direst of abuses.

Mary Garden's marathon through seven years of inner and outer heaven and hell began after arriving in India in the early 1970s at the ashram of the self-declared 'avatar' or Incarnate God of all Gods, Sai Baba of Puttaparthi in South India. The experience of staying in the ashram after having entered into an inner spiritual bond with this self-proclaimed avatar are recorded with great accuracy, a fact to which I can attest because my wife and I experienced or observed all the described kind of events there 12 years later, so little of real import had evidently changed. The teaching for self-brainwashing was already firmly in place and at that time the sinister aspects of a dangerous cult were already present, later to become known only when sexual abuses and cold-blooded murders were impossible to suppress successfully. Mary Garden eventually realised the fraud involved when she was told frankly about Sai Baba's homosexual abuse of young men in the name of God by an American lady who lived and worked in Bangalore and who was not under the delusions shared by all Sai followers.

This episode, bad enough in itself, was as nothing compared to what was to come... from the frying pan into the actual fire, with another 'pure yogi' with undoubted powers of an extraordinary nature who turned out to be a seducer of women and many a worse quality. That it was anything like an 'ordinary trip' would be a huge understatement… but the reading of the book itself alone can convey what is to be learned from it. Meanwhile, throughout the long agone, the anachronistic time capsule that is India becomes almost sensually present, like virtual reality… but one where unearthliness mixed with the direct social reality rules so much of the lives of its inhabitants.

To Guru or not to Guru?

Sue Delaney

The spiritual seekers of the seventies and eighties have become older and wiser. They are also becoming more articulate about their experiences at the feet of gurus and spiritual guides in different religious traditions, in the hope that a new generation of spiritual seekers will avoid some of the pitfalls.

For this reason, a reissue of Mary Garden's The Serpent Rising; a Journey of Spiritual Seduction is timely. Originally published as a fictionalized account of her seven years in India on the guru trail, she has now republished it as her own story. The narrative is essentially the same, but there is a new introduction, and a closing chapter which expands on the difficulties of emotionally disengaging from her guru.

Garden's story began as postgraduate student at Auckland University in 1973. One evening she went for the first time to a local Hindu ashram. Listening to the chanting of the saffron-clothed swami, she was suddenly plunged into an experience of bliss that changed her life. Within months she had dropped her studies and was on her way to India.

On the recommendation of friends, she first went to Sathya Sai Baba in South India. Three months later, disillusioned, she set off for Rishikesh in northern India, where she met an enigmatic young guru. At their first meeting he invited her to join the five other young Westerners that lived in his ashram. She accepted.

An authentic guru-disciple relationship is bound by strict ethical rules. Usually when guru and would-be disciple meet, both are within the same religious tradition. Both know the rules. The traditions strongly urge the aspirant to be cautious about accepting a particular spiritual teacher as their guru. First take time to make sure the guru practices his or her own teaching. Garden's guru preached sexual abstinence. He did not practise it, as she quickly found out. Within a month, she too was drawn into a sexual relationship with him.

This, together with his unpredictable moods created psychological havoc in the ashram residents. At times, different ones ran away, including Garden herself. She returned, unable to break the attraction she felt towards him. Another factor that kept her there was a powerful mystical experience that convinced her she had found her spiritual home at the ashram. Eventually she did make the break, but it took many years and much psychotherapy to resolve her continuing love-hate attraction towards the boy-yogi, as he was called.

The narrative flows smoothly and Garden has resisted interrupting that flow with comments made from the perspective of more mature years. The book focuses upon the intensity of the relationship with her guru, and that is its value. In essence, she provides valuable insights into how a guru-disciple relationship can go wrong, with lingering consequences for the disciple. It is an invitation to be extremely cautious in the choice of a guru or spiritual guide.

Sue Delaney is a psychologist interested in women's spirituality.