Ananta (Frederic Bushnell)

Collaboration, Spring 2015
Michael Miovic, “Remembering Ananta”

PDF (2 pages)

(Michael Miovic, 2001:) “For those of you who may not know, Ananta is one of the Ashram's last surviving legends. Born Frederic Bushnell, he was raised among the crème de le crème, the blue-blooded Brahmins of Boston. His father was the attorney general of Massachusetts, his mother descended straight from Priscilla Alden, Governor Bradford, and their Mayflower stock. They lived on Beacon Hill and dined with the Cabots and the Lodges; they hovered above the peak of American society.
         Yet young Frederic's fate was other than to be a social luminary – as a teen he developed a fascination with Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and in his early twenties set out on a spiritual quest that brought him to Panditji, the powerful Tantrik guru of Rameshwaram, and from there ultimately to the feet of the Mother. It was Panditji who gave him the name Ananta Chaitanya, after the serpent of infinite consciousness, and the Mother approved. Indeed, in her usual manner, she crystallized the spiritual truth with a manifestation on the material plane: she gave him a lovely little snake-infested island to live on in the middle of the river near Cuddalore.
         With the help of his trusty servant Shingeni, and an inner push from both Panditji and the Mother, Ananta fashioned this inhospitable exile into a veritable sanctuary. He built dikes to reclaim land from the river, sowed beautiful flower gardens cropped in neat rows, dug lotus pools, raised a coconut grove to provide shade and income, and, most importantly, erected statues and grottos to honor the Immortals – an arch for Poseidon, a status of Pallas Athena, and a giant seven-headed serpent rising over a gold-framed photo of Zeus the Father. He also fashioned a small temple for puja, and, like an ethereal echo from another world, a façade of the Parthenon slanting through the shade of the coconut grove as if it were a ray of light.
         In this idyllic setting Ananta carried out his yoga sadhana dedicated to the Mother and her divine children, the gods. And the Mother was pleased: one a year she used to pay a visit to Ananta on his beloved island, and she said in no uncertain terms that the Greek gods had consented to manifest there and would help him in Integral Yoga as far as they were able.
         Things proceeded quietly along in this manner for nearly thirty-five years, with scarcely a soul taking note of Ananta's existence, for as we all know he is a man of great sobriety and modesty who abhors any sort of theatrical display or social occasion. Indeed, I might never have met this shy recluse, had it not been for an unfortunate medical circumstance, i.e., the onset of two different cancers simultaneously, which forced him to return to the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles for treatment.
         It was there that I met him during my last year in medical school, right after his penultimate nose job, and we stuck up a friendship that has turned out to be nothing short of an adventure in consciousness. We have been to Palenque and back multiple times, to his island in Pondy, and even down to Rameshwaram to Panditji's widow, who is carrying on the Tantrik tradition. Yet what had still eluded us was the golden prize: Greece.
         So, in the autumn of '98 we started plotting a return to Greece, and by June '99 the plans were finalized and the tickets purchased. It seemed that at last, after a lapse of some thirty years, Ananta was poised again to set foot upon Grecian soil.
         His last words to me before we left: “Are you READY?! You will be Tested!”
         Alas, only one hour before departure, even as we were waiting at the boarding gate in the airport, my senior guide and beloved companion was smitten down by a series of grand mal seizures the ferocity of which almost certainly would have finished any lesser mortal.
         I was in such a state of shock myself from this untoward event, that when the paramedics asked me if I were responsible for this nearly moribund elderly gentleman with striking, platinum-blonde hair and cerulean eyes that rolled backward in their sockets, I impulsively said, “No, I've never met the man in my life!” What can I say? A lapse in yoga; a lamentable defect in character; a cowardly retreat from the clarion call... if that was my first test, I failed.
         But no use crying over spilled milk; life moves on. So with that, I hastily left him in their able hands and boarded the plane en route to Greece...
         ...
         After a couple of days in Athens, I was finally able to reach Ananta by phone.
         “Have you gone to Delphi?” he asked urgently. “Michael, the Olympians – they are waiting for you THERE!”
         “No,” I said, “not yet. How are you? How's your health?”
         “Horrible,” he replied, “absolutely miserable. I was in the hospital and now it feels like my back is broken and I can barely walk, and there's no food in the fridge and I'm practically starving to death.”
         I breathed a sigh of relief; it was good to hear him back to normal.”

(Michael Miovic:) “Back in Athens again, I called Ananta to report on the mission in Delphi. “Good for you, Michael, good for you. I knew you would get something, remember, you ARE a child of the great, great sun god, Apollo … Now then: have you gone to Lycosura? You must get to Lycosura, and of course Likion. They say likion means ‘wolf mountain’, but they're wrong. It means Light, the mountains of Light. But beware, Mother said Zeus is VERY beautiful, but very dangerous!” There was a pregnant pause. I didn't know what to say, faced with such a dramatic revelation, and that from a man who is usually so measured in his speech.
         ”Oh! And what do you think of the Greeks? The people are so damn good-looking, and affectionate, really warm. I mean, they practically adopted me. When they really love you they start to feed you, just like that, with their hands, they feed you like a baby. And the singing and the dancing, my God, I love it when they just jump up on the table and – ”
         “Uhh, listen,” I interrupted, trying to get back to my narrow vision of the point, “how am I going to find Lycosura? I don't know where it is.”
         “Aaahh,” he derailed for a moment, then refound Ariadne's thread, “and the music! So joyful! So what if someone just grabs you and gives you a kiss? What's wrong with that? You know, I do not believe in morality. The only thing that's wrong is cruelty … and the Christians, with all that false piety, and what they did to Greece, horrible.”
         I was becoming impatient. “Ananta, the card runs out in 20 seconds.”
         The director of the National Museum knows everything,” he rushed, “just tell him I sent you … or find Yanis, the police officer. And Michael, remember: we all have our faults, we are ALL human, me more than most, I admit, but do you know what? Mother told me, she said, ‘Ananta: – ’.”
         The line was cut off, alas, or I might have heard more. As I lay in bed that night contemplating my next move, I continued the story I had heard so many times that it had a life of its own in my head. “Mother said: ‘Ananta, if you feel that strongly about Greece, then you must go there. But you will go where I send you.’ And then she just reached behind her, like that, and puff!, pulled out the map Where did the map come from, where? There was no map there. And then she just laid it down on the table and pointed. ‘There! You will go there.’ How did she know about the temple at Lycosura? How? When I got there, the archaeologist said, ‘Yes, it's true, it is the oldest temple in Greece, the oldest.’ But how did Mother know that? And in the middle of nowhere … And then she said, ‘Ananta, I cannot give you money, but I will give you EVERY other kind of support you could need.’ And you know what? From the day I set foot in Greece, I didn't spend a single drachma, not a single one. People gave me everything, absolutely everything. They fed me, they gave me clothes, they let me stay wherever I wanted. What would I have done with money? I didn't need it, I could have cared less about money ...”
         So much for ancient myths. I was now faced with the present reality of how to find Lycosura without Mother's guidance, and, hopefully, without Ananta's either, for the latter might land me in Siberia or Antarctica by a whim of the gods. ...

(Michael Miovic:) “On the bus from Olympia back to Athens, I finally finished the reading Ananta had assigned me: three plays by Aristophanes and Plato's Symposium. The latter is a consummate description of a dinner party in which the guests, many of them luminaries of Athens, debate the nature of love. Aristophanes, the famous comedian, has the last laugh on the subject, but it is the great Socrates who has the last word.
         Ananta thinks he may have been Aristophanes in a previous life, and after reading up on Aristophanes, I had no reason to doubt this. There is a definite similarity in character, a wit, a fabulous light-hearted inventiveness tinged with penetrating insight, at times outrageous entertainment, that I have come to know and love in this life, too. Also still a conservative at heart and a bit of the upper-class snob. But no one entertained the Mother like Ananta, with his burlesque comedy routines on August 15th and his stints as Santa Claus on Christmas. “Ananta,” she used to say, “no one can make me laugh like you.” ”

(Amrit:) Ananta, meaning ‘Infinite’, was Panditji's disciple even before meeting the Mother, as well as Satprem's friend. Called by Panditji the ‘Boston Brahmin’ for his pronounced predilection to Indian spirituality and pujas, Ananta was an individual of tremendous vitality, harboring all the strengths and weaknesses of a willful personality.
         Whether to protect others or to shield Ananta himself from the intemperate temptations in which he tended to indulge – proclivities to alcohol and sex – the Mother placed him on an islet called ‘Ananta's Island’ situated in the middle of a lazily flowing river some distance from Pondicherry towards neighboring Cuddalore. Isolated – the island only accessed by boat – yet always socially gregarious, entertaining and humorous, Ananta hired Indian Brahmin pujaris to perform his hallmark celebratory pujas more festive than grave.
         Ananta did not intone the Sanskrit mantras – prohibited by Panditji from mispronouncing and twisting them with his Bostonian drawl – ostensibly to avoid provoking disaster rather than the beneficence intended. A Greco-phile by predilection, Ananta was singularly fixated on the Greek gods, peppering the island with their statues. When he asked the Mother, “Are the Greeks coming?” she answered, “I don't know about the Greeks, but the Egyptians are coming.” ...
         Once in a brief encounter during a trip to Rameshwaram, Ananta asked what practice Panditji had given me. “Sri Chakra puja,” I answered. Indicative of Ananta's humorously rebellious temperament, he joked, “Oh, that's spiritual. I'm not interested in that!” Ananta and Satprem were both rebels, but with a crucial difference – Ananta had a sense of humor, Satprem its equal dearth. Somehoe Ananta's humor saved him, while Satprem's gravity plunged him into the depths of darkness.
         According to Suresh Joshi, so called her ‘Messenger’, Suresh had once complained to the Mother about Her financial support of Ananta, as well as Ananta's own behavior, deemed by him highly unconventional and profligate. She replied, “You do not understand. If I can change him, an entire level of consciousness can be transformed.” ”

(Jocelyn:) “At one point Ananta's pump was broken. Ananta asked Mother for money to fix his pump. So she gave money to fix his pump. The next week he wrote, “You have to give me more money to fix my pump, I gave a party for Purna and...” She said “Bon!” And she gave him more money (laugh). She wanted people to love each other, she wanted people to be caring toward one another. Mother's generosity was just outrageous.”

---

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

See also

• Inclusion
• Greece

External links

• YouTube: "Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville in 1971" (Ananta on his island - minutes 15:41-17:45)
• Frederic Bushnell obituary in the Boston Globe, 2015