My Guru & His Disciple by Christopher Isherwood

Prabhavananda—about the possible dangers of the breathing exercises, she laughed at the idea but then conceded that if you practiced them rigorously, for many hours each day throughout a number of years, you could perhaps do yourself harm. So I was left in a state of indecision, not wanting to disobey Prabhavananda yet not feeling that I need give up our lessons altogether.
    Then, however, our teacher began to urge us to learn the yoga technique of washing out the intestines by muscular action alone; you squat in a bowl full of water, suck the water in through the anus, swirl it around inside you, expel it again, thus cleansing yourself of poisons. Until this technique has been mastered, you should use an enema every day. And meanwhile, the sphincter muscle of the anus must be made more flexible, through dilation … A set of rectal dilators now appeared. I use that verb advisedly because I can neither remember nor imagine our serpent lady actually giving us such unladylike objects. Did Denny perhaps procure them? The largest was a wicked-looking dildo, quite beyond my capacity but dangerously tempting to my curiosity. I told Denny that, at least as far as I was concerned, our lessons would have to stop—lest sex should sneak in through the back door. We parted from our teacher but continued to do some of the exercises at home. (Years later I took to using the breathing exercises occasionally, because I found them helpful in clearing up obstinate hangovers.)
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    On July 7, my monastic experiment with Denny was cut short by the opening of the La Verne Seminar. This seminar had been planned by some leading Pennsylvania Quakers in correspondence with Gerald. La Verne is about twenty miles east of Los Angeles. In those days, it was a very small town in the midst of orange and lemon groves, with a coeducational college founded by one of the Baptist sects. Since this would be vacation time, the Quakers had been able to rent the girls’ dormitory building to house the twenty-five men and women who were going to take part in the seminar.
    It had been agreed that there were to be three periods of group meditation and two periods of group discussion, daily. These were some of the problems scheduled to be discussed:
    To what extent must the beginner in the spiritual life be prepared to discipline himself? Can we make a distinction between the duties and privileges of two ways of life—that of the householder and that of the monk? Is the life of prayer a form of escapism, or is it, perhaps, the most direct form of action? Can the other major world religions, taken together with the findings of modern science, help us revise our cosmology? Granted that the present order of things is in a state of chaos due to the war, what could be the structure and sanctions of a new order of society? Can we produce an order in which man’s spiritual growth is fostered, not hindered? What have history and science to teach us about the nature and power of non-violence?
    Gerald, I knew, was coming to La Verne with one personal objective; he wanted to find out how far he could go in agreement with the Quakers. In his writings, he had referred to the Society of Friends as the most promising force for spiritual regeneration within the Christian Church. But he had described the Quaker way of meditation as happy-go-lucky. Quakers sit passively waiting for the Inner Light, he said, without bothering to study what the great mystics have taught about the technique of prayer. Gerald had also deplored the Quaker preoccupation with social-service projects. The Quaker social worker, he said, is unwilling to face the truth that his activity is chiefly symbolic; its material consequences for the people he is trying to help can’t possibly be foreseen and may sometimes be disastrous. The only person who stands to benefit spiritually from the project is the social worker himself—as long as he can remember that