It was in Bay Area that Swami Vivekananda came in touch with a few such persons whose life would then be spent in the glow and grace they received through the time spent with him. Among them were Ida Ansell, Tom and Edith Allan, Sarah and Rebecca Fox, Frank Rhodehamel, Cara French and several others.
Ida was born in New York City and spent her childhood in Boston. She had a physical disability right from her childhood and on top of that also suffered from nervous ailments. She had moved to the West Coast before reaching her teens. There she finished the eighth grade, studied shorthand and typing.
It was serendipitous (as is not unoften the case in life-changing situations), that when Swamiji arrived in the Bay Area, Ida was in San Francisco and staying at a ‘Home of Truth’ institution. She later recalled in her memoirs : “If I had not accepted the offer of a course in stenography just before entering high school, and if, in the second year of high school I had not had a nervous breakdown and been forced to leave school, I might never have met Swamiji, although I probably would have heard some of his lectures. I had been studying the piano as well as going to school. The doctor, whose verdict was, ‘You must give up school or music, or you will not need either,’ sent me to Miss Lydia Bell for help. Miss Bell was the leader of the California Street ‘Home of Truth’ in San Francisco. I was staying in the Home and taking notes of her morning classes and Sunday lectures.”
It was these skills of hers that came in handy in taking notes of Swamiji’s talks and lectures in the Bay Area, which she took for practicing her craft as well as for strictly personal use, and not for placing in public domain for decades. It was in 1940s, that Swami Ashokananda, Head of the Vedanta Centre of North California, persuaded her to publish them. Since then, they are part of the ‘Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda’.
Ida recounted about the time she spent with Swamiji :
“All the superlatives in the language couldn’t convey one’s impressions of Swami Vivekananda when he introduced us, early in 1900, to a completely new conception of life and religion. I have been requested, as one who took notes of his lectures for her own use, with no thought of their ever being published, to give my impressions of him. How to do it? He seemed like a radiant being from a higher plane, and yet so understanding of every phase of humanity. He appealed to every grade of intelligence by his oratory, his humour, his mimicry, his scornful denunciation of any form of pettiness or intolerance, and by his compassion for every human need.
“When I saw and heard him and thought of the interpretation we had been given of the civilization that had produced him, I felt almost ashamed that I was an American. I went to most of his lectures with Miss Bell and to some with other friends and met the same glowing enthusiasm in all, though with some it was the man rather than the doctrine that appealed most. I remember one very wealthy and aristocratic young lady, who was studying music with my teacher, saying ecstatically, ‘Oh, he is like a lovely golden statue!’”
Ida thought there was something for every one in Swamiji’s discourses as they took into account different temperaments that human beings had. She felt that some apparent contradictions in Swamiji’s words were due to his attempt to address needs of people at various stages of development.
She remembered the thrill she experienced at many of the Swamiji’s words : “What becomes of one’s individuality when one realises his oneness with God? You people in this country are so afraid of losing your in-di-vid-u-al-i-ty! Why, you are not individuals yet. When you realize your whole nature, you will attain your true individuality, not before. In knowing God you cannot lose anything. There is another thing I am constantly hearing in this country, and that is that we should live in harmony with nature. Don’t you know that all the progress ever made in the world was made by conquering nature? We are to resist nature at every point if we are to make any progress.”
Ida also noted that Swamiji always encouraged questions at the end of each lecture: “Once when someone suggested that they were tiring him with too many questions, Swamiji said, ‘Ask all the questions you like, the more the better. That is what I am here for and I won’t leave you until you understand. In India they tell me, I ought not to teach Advaita Vedanta to the people at large, but I say I can make even a child understand it. You cannot begin too early to teach the highest spiritual truths.'”
But taking notes of Swamiji’s talks was no easy a task. The only experience of working as a stenographer that Ida possessed before she tried to take notes of Swamiji’s lectures was with the talks of Miss Lydia Bell. Miss Bell spoke slowly and in a thoughtful manner, and she could almost always get down every word. As against this, Ida recalled, that “one would have needed a speed of at least three hundred words per minute to capture all of Swamiji’s torrents of eloquence. I possessed less than half the required speed, and at the time I had no idea that the material would have value to anyone but myself. In addition to his fast speaking pace, Swamiji was a superb actor. His stories and imitations absolutely forced one to stop writing, to enjoy watching him.
“Swamiji always attracted attention wherever he went. He had a majestic bearing which everybody recognized. As he would walk down Market Street, people would stand aside to let him pass or turn around and ask. ‘Who is the Hindu prince?’ His eyes were always tumed skyward, never down. Someone said of him that he never saw anything lower than a telegraph pole.”
It was this majestic bearing of his that was largely responsible to enable Swamiji watch a ship launched from the actual launching platform. Tom Allan, husband of Edith Allen, about whom we will have more to say later, worked in one of the big iron works of San Francisco at the time. When Swamiji expressed a wish to see a launching, Tom invited a little group to the shipyard. The launching platform was closed except to the invited guests of the management who had tickets, and the ramp leading to the platform was guarded by two attendants. Swamiji decided he would have a better view from the launching platform, so he just calmly walked past the guards, who made no protest. He took Ida along, helping her through the difficult path. When he came down, after the launching, he said. “It is like the birth of a child.”
Ida also published reminiscences of the days spent in Shanti Ashrama in company of Swami Turiyananda, who had been entrusted by Swamiji of a property gifted to him to be developed as a retreat. This place, considerably difficult to access, was about sixty miles from San Francisco, and named Shanti Ashrama. It was Swami Turiyananda who formally gave Ida the Mantra-Diksha. While remaining single, she continued to work for many years as a stenographer and in her later life joined the community at the Vedanta Society of South California at Hollywood, once the latter had been established.
At the Shanti Ashrama, also stayed a young Dutch spiritual practitioner who had migrated to America – Cornelius Heyblom, who had before that taken Mantra-Diksha from Swami Abhedananda and also seen and listened to Swami Vivekananda in New York. He later took the Sannyasa vows, came to be known as Swami Atulananda or Gurudas Maharaj, and spent the large part of his long life in India as a traditional monk, mostly living in Uttarakhand. Swami Atulananda was regarded as a spiritually lofty person and became a source of inspiration to monks from India and West alike. The friendship Ida developed with Cornelius at the Shanti Ashrama remained strong for the following fifty years until Ida’s death. Most of those years Swami Atulananda was in India but they had a fortnightly exchange of letters. Many of these letters from Swami Atulananda are considered to contain great spiritual insights and have been published in his book.
Swami Vidyatmananda (formerly John Yale) who knew Ujjwala well during her last years of her stay at the Hollywood Ashrama describes Ujjwala’s room as “a museum or an old curiosity shop crammed full of books, photographs, bric-a-brac, and other mementos accumulated during a long life. She would take out from one of the innumerable boxes which overflowed the space on shelves, in drawers, and even under the bed, perhaps the stub of a ticket to one of Swamiji’s San Francisco lectures, or a letter from Swami Turiyananda, or some rare photograph. When the daily worship was instituted at the Ramakrishna Monastery at Trabuco, Ujjwala gave as a holy relic for the Trabuco shrine her most precious possession, a portion of a yellow silk turban Swamiji had once owned and worn.”
Towards the end of her life Ujjwala began what should surely be seen as the ‘work of her life’ — the transcription of the shorthand notes she had taken in the spring of 1900 of thirteen lectures by Swami Vivekananda. Already four lectures from her notes had been published in the Northern California center’s journal, ‘The Voice of India’, brought out by Swami Ashokananda. She was in doubt as to whether the notes be transcribed and placed in public domain as they were rather scrappy and she feared the transcription might do violence to Swamiji’s wonderful style and fluency. But she finally decided they needed to come before the world. “Now we see that Swamiji was a special messenger of God and that every word he said was full of significance,” she wrote. “So even though my notes were somewhat fragmentary, I have yielded to the opinion that their contents are precious and must be given for publication.”
She completed these transcriptions only two months before she died. And that is how they now find a place in Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, and the readers throughout the world thereby get the tremendous power of one of the world’s greatest messengers of Truth and Light delivering his message in the final phase of his stay in the world of mortals.
Swami Vidyatmananda also describes the last moments in Ida’s life. They deserve to be reproduced here: “The brahmacharini who came to her room, as was usual, about seven o’clock on that Monday morning, found Ujjvala in bed, unconscious. She had been her usual lively self the evening before, having especially enjoyed some chocolate fudge I had made. We had, all of us, been sitting in Swami Prabhavananda’s room. Suddenly Prabhavananda had asked Ujjvala: ‘Ujjvala, have you become butter?’ He later said that the question had come to him unexpectedly and that he had given expression to it without quite knowing why. This was a reference to something Swami Turiyananda had told her around 1900 at Shanti Ashrama, that if she worked hard at spiritual life she could become butter – the allusion, of course being that one’s Sadhana (spiritual practices) is a process of churning and drawing out the essence. To everyone’s surprise, as Ujjvala by nature tended to be self-deprecating, she had firmly replied: ‘Yes!’
“The doctor stated that Ujjvala had had a massive stroke in her sleep. I went to her room. She was very attached to me, so I knew that I could rouse her if anyone could. In effect a certain consciousness did return, only to reject my salutations, as if to say, ‘Now let me be; I have serious things to do’ and plunge inside again. It went on like this until about noon. Then she whispered ‘Mother’, and tears flowed from the outside of her eyes. Swami Turiyananda had once told her: ‘What you want, you will get. If you want entertainment, you will get entertainment. If you want Mother you will get Mother.’ In an instant – from the dramatic change which came over her face – yes, it changed from flesh to clay – I saw that Ujjvala had died. Swami Prabhavananda had waited gravely in his room. When I brought him the news, he said, ‘Her guru came for her.’”
Such had been the recasting of the life of Ida Ansell, transformed for the next fifty years by Vivekananda’s touch.
▶Next Chapter: Recasting Lives: Tom and Edith Allan