October 2011 - Advaita Ashrama

52
come only after she had received at least a million
signs. Then Helen would begin to internally
assimilate the outer sign along with her mental
‘sight’ of the object. Thus, the long road to
Helen’s awakening was launched—a battle from
start to finish. Helen kicked, bit, and hit Anne;
she threw water into her face. In fact, the first day
that Anne arrived Helen managed to lock her
into her second-storey room and hid the key so
that Anne could only be rescued from the rooftop
by the Captain, Helen’s father. But Anne was
undaunted, and she quickly saw the real problem:
Helen’s parents, who hopelessly enabled their
child’s tantrums by indulging her. The morning
after Anne’s arrival, at breakfast, she was stunned
when the Captain and his wife gave Helen a piece
of cake in order to stop her tantrums.
‘Why do you reward her for this behaviour?’
she asked them.
‘Have you no pity on our little Helen?’ was
their only defence.
But when Helen began to circle the breakfast
table, grabbing food from each family member’s
plate and eating it, Anne refused to tolerate such
behaviour. She demanded that both parents cease
indulging Helen, but the parents refused. ‘Leave
this house! ’ they threatened, but Anne stood
her ground and demanded that they leave the
dining room so that she could work with Helen
alone. Somehow Anne convinced both parents
to step outside the house to avoid the three-hour
tantrum that ensued. From the outside Helen’s
parents shuddered as they heard their daughter’s
screams amidst the crashes of china and silverware,
overturned chairs, broken water pitchers,
and the splatter of scrambled eggs splayed all
over their posh antiques and dining room floor.
Finally, when the dining room became quiet,
Anne unlocked the door and ushered the parents
back into their house. ‘Helen,’ Anne declared,
‘has learned to eat with her spoon and fold her
656
Prabuddha Bharata
napkin.’ This was not only a victory for Anne,
but a major turning point in Helen’s life.
Anne was the kind of teacher that Ramakrishna
would have called ‘superior’. ‘There are
three classes of physicians,’ he used to tell his disciples,
‘superior, mediocre, inferior.’
The physician who feels the patient’s pulse and
just says to him, ‘Take the medicine regularly’
belongs to the inferior class. He doesn’t care to
inquire whether or not the patient has actually
taken the medicine. The mediocre physician is
he who in various ways persuades the patient
to take the medicine and says to him sweetly:
‘My good man, how will you be cured unless
you use the medicine? Take this medicine. I
have made it for you myself.’ But he who, finding
the patient stubbornly refusing to take the
medicine, forces it down his throat, going so far
as to put his knee on the patient’s chest, is the
best physician.25
Ramakrishna, along with other great teachers,
asserted that all knowledge is within, and
Vivekananda used to reiterate his master’s
teaching by adding that even in a child this
knowledge requires only an awakening from the
teacher.26 Indeed, Anne possessed this attitude
toward her student to an extraordinary extent,
and with great persistence she was able to teach
the recalcitrant Helen obedience and manners
so that even her parents were no longer embarrassed
by their child.
But Anne was unstoppable. ‘What Helen
needs is more than obedience,’ she told them.
‘She needs to learn. She can learn; she is bright.
It is all there. And that is why,’ she added, ‘I
must take her to a separate cottage on the property—away
from your influence.’ Vivekananda
would have agreed with Anne. Helen required
a guru kula environment, a haven away from
the distractions of the world and authority figures
that unwittingly diverted or suffocated her
PB October 2011