Sri Krishna Prem Remembered
A Tribute by Penelope Phipps, sister of Sri Madhava Ashish

It came about, on my second visit to the ashram at Mirtola, that I had the good fortune to be initiated, to become a chela, a pupil of Gopalda, Sri Krishna Prem. 

He died some hours after the end of my fourth visit in November 1965, when my mother Lorna Phipps was also there.

This is an account of the man I knew and loved from 1953 onwards, of how he taught me, and my attempt at a tribute to a Realized Man.

I was the three-and-a-half-year-older sister of Sri Madhava Ashish, Gopalda’s acknowledged successor-to-be. Talk of Tibet and Eastern mysteries had always fascinated me. After a somewhat tumultuous emotional life, I had always prayed, ‘If there is anyone alive in the world today anywhere near approaching the stature of Jesus, may I hear of him, and may I have the courage to go and find him, even if he is in darkest Africa.’

After an unexpected legacy in 1952, I wrote and asked to visit the ashram with a friend, Margaret Phillipson, later Turner. We were told, ‘Yes,’ and in the spring of 1953, taking time off from Child Guidance Psychiatric Work, we went by sea to India. I confess to having had hopes that my younger, pretty friend might entice Ashish home!

Ashish met us off the bus at Almora. The following afternoon we started the walk to Mirtola, spending the night in a Dak Bungalow on the way.

Margaret had said, ‘I expect the Guru may come down once a day to see us,’ envisaging an aloof figure. We arrived about 9 a.m. after a nine-mile walk, to be met by Krishna Prem, or Gopalda as we were soon to call him. He was a tall, grey-haired, slightly balding man in a gerua robe and sandals, and he greeted Ashish with a warm hug. We were led to ‘The Cottage’, a small stone lodge with verandah and bathroom, with a western W.C. and cold tap, and a sloping floor. 

Gopalda brought us, from the temple building some fifteen yards away, tea, home-made bread, butter and marmalade. ‘It is nice of you to do this for us!’ we said. ‘He didn’t do it for you,’ Ashish said dryly. Lesson No. 1. We were still to learn that everything was done for ‘Thakur’ – the Inner. 

We stayed for six weeks; we went once a day (in later visits, three times a day) to arati, the temple service, usually in the evenings when, at the end, there would be singing in which we joined. Gopalda, cross-legged on the floor, played the harmonium and appeared to be, as the Christian hymn has it, ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’. The atmosphere was magical.

When I first saw Ashish doing the arati I stood repeating the Lord’s Prayer over and over as if to ward off the devil! By the end of the visit it was as if I saw Jesus standing behind the figures of Radha and Krishna saying, ‘It’s all right, Penelope, we are all One.’

The days were spent helping with jobs: learning to bind sheaves of wheat, weeding, picking tea from the tea-bushes in the garden, sewing, and in the evening going for walks with Dr Alexander – ‘Bob’ – and Daboo the dog. In the evening we gathered in the upstairs room in the temple, with a log fire and an oil lamp, and there was reading out loud and talk and laughter. Ashish read out The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, and Gopalda the Bhagawad Gita (Annie Besant’s translation), commenting verse by verse. This was a most wonderful experience, the feeling stealing over me being ‘For he spake as a man having authority and not as the Scribes’ (as the Bible so pithily words it, in Matthew 7:29). One’s thoughts were often ‘heard’, and answered directly, or later. 

The kitchen was as sacrosanct as the temple and in those days we were not allowed in except for meals. I was allowed to help wash up in the little outside building, squatting next to Gopalda, scouring the brass dishes, bowls and mugs with cold water, grass and ashes. They were dried on a ledge in the sun.

If one transgressed, breaking a rule, a method, a custom, a look or word reprimanded one. One thought, ‘But why does it matter?’ but came to see one was being taught to be more conscious – aware – and cease trying to impose my own opinions so often. ‘I think…’! 

Dreams were recounted and analysed. I began by thinking, ‘You are not psychologically trained!’ but ended by realizing that dreams could be interpreted on levels that I had not known existed. 

I told Gopalda how I liked the Christian verse, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ ‘You are doing this,’ he said, raising his arms in a V-shape above his head. ‘You must look in,’ indicating inside his chest. I did not then really comprehend his meaning fully, but got an inkling of the idea.

On a few occasions Gopalda sat in the lotus position, eyes closed, with something peaceful and wonderful coming from him – something that struck at one’s own proud separateness until it broke, and, with reverence and love, I touched his feet.

While some people may remember more accurately than I some of the stories we were told of their lives there. I still have a vivid recollection of Gopalda’s telling me that when Moti Rani was dying in her early forties of kidney trouble, she had expressed a wish that her body be cremated at Benares. In their old car Ashish drove with Gopalda, on and on, for about two days, as the journey had to be done quickly in the heat, twice falling asleep, and the car twice going off the road. Ashish said, ‘That car was held together by love. I am an engineer and I know!’ Gopalda said, ‘Your brother has been through a lot, Penelope. Not many people could have stood it.’

In the setting of the early 1950s Gopalda had said, ‘Woman’s path is usually best followed in marriage, it requires more self-giving.’ (Nowadays of course he would have said that marriage can be used by both men and women as an aid on the inner path, to develop the attitude of self-giving. – Eds.) While my friend Margaret married her farm manager, Harold Turner, I returned to Mirtola to say my man-friend had suddenly got engaged to a younger woman. ‘Never mind, Penelope,’ Gopalda said. ‘You have got something better now.’  

‘What do you mean?’ I answered. ‘Better?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I asked inwardly: “Couldn’t something be arranged for Penelope?” The answer came, “Do you want her to be unhappy?” “No.” “Then she must find her inner man.” ’

‘I don’t want an inner man,’ I said petulantly. ‘I want an outer man!’

‘That is what you have been told,’ he said. ‘If you don’t accept it, life will bash you till you do.’

And so it proved.

When we left in 1953 Gopalda told us, ‘And if you have anything special to communicate, put it very clearly in your minds.’ After a bit, as I resumed my life in England, I forgot this. On my next visit, I remembered it. Every morning Gopalda came down the path from the temple building to the garden beyond the cottage (where I was staying), to collect flowers for the morning arati. He never spoke before breakfast. I sat up in bed and said silently and clearly in my head, ‘Good morning, Gopalda.’ For the first time ever, he spoke aloud, ‘Good morning, Penelope.’ I ‘jumped’ inwardly. This I did with the same response for three mornings. We never discussed it, but later, on the third day, he said, ‘If you can do that over twenty yards, Penelope, you can do it over thousands of miles. Distance doesn’t make any difference.’

When I had to leave for England, climbing the steps to the plane in Delhi, I said in my head, loudly and clearly, ‘I AM NOW CLIMBING THE STEPS TO THE PLANE!’ I heard, ‘ALL RIGHT, DON’T SHOUT!’

Over the days and weeks, the feeling as of an electric current began to run between us and grew in strength. It was only when this bond was established that Gopalda began to teach me through actions as well as words, showing me my ‘self’ so that ‘Self’ might slowly be disclosed.

I remember things he said. ‘We seek to be people who are afraid of no one, and of whom no one is afraid.’ ‘Our concern is with action, never with its results.’ 

I said on one occasion, ‘You make me feel disloyal to Jesus. As a little girl he was my best friend.’ Looking at me keenly he said, ‘I am sure, Penelope, that, in some form, he is more real to me than he is to you.’ My inner sense told me that this was true, and I was comforted. ‘I know what you mean,’ a Catholic nun once told him. ‘It is what we call “the Christos in everyone”.’ Years later, a next-generation friend, a leading figure in her Church of England church, accompanied me to the ashram. ‘And where did you feel closest to Jesus?’ I asked her on our return. ‘At Mirtola, or in your home town in England?’ ‘Oh, at Mirtola!’ came the unhesitating reply.

I asked Gopalda once, ‘What did Jesus mean when he said. . . ?’

Came the reply, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t there!’ And continued, ‘Even in such a small instance as the child guidance clinic you work in, doesn’t what you say depend on the person you are speaking to, and the circumstances surrounding that child’s problem? If someone quoted your words as to how a child should be treated in all cases for all time, it would be a nonsense. . .’ I asked what he thought of the Virgin Birth. Again, that piercing look. ‘And what is wrong with the ordinary way, Penelope? Haven’t people lost sight of the miracle of that?’ In his day in England, he said, people tended to speak of God, the bank manager, and the lavatory in the same tone of hushed reverence!

On one visit there were, for a few days, only three of us, Gopalda, Ashish and myself. One evening I came to the upstairs room after supper, for talk or reading. This evening, Ashish was still busy somewhere and I entered the room as usual – and drew up sharply. Gopalda was seated in the lotus position, apparently deep in meditation. I stood, feeling awkward. Ashish’s footsteps were heard and as he entered Gopalda unfolded, turned his head and said warmly, ‘Come on in, Ashish, and sit down.’ The next evening I entered a little apprehensively; Gopalda was sitting reading by the light of an oil-lamp. He said quietly, ‘Sit down, Penelope,’ and went on reading till Ashish came. The third night, my ego thoroughly chastened, I came in quite humbly. I was greeted with a warm smile. ‘Come in, Penelope, and sit down.’ I had never before realized that I spread my ego around so much, even when entering a room. 

‘Not many people really want the Inner Path to Self-Realization,’ he said. ‘Not many really want to lose their little egos, but if you don’t want the goods, don’t muck ’em about!’ 

Once, on my second visit, he said, ‘Ashish and I are the same, Penelope.’ 

‘No, you’re not!’ I said. ‘You are quite different.’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘We are the same.’

I thought of the differences: physically, mentally, emotionally, gifts – what did he mean? It was a long time before I understood.  Plato recounts a story at the end of the Republic where souls have to choose from symbols representing various professions or occupations, determining what they will be in their next life – the famous ‘Vision of Er’. Odysseus – his epic, heroic life (narrated in the Iliad and Odyssey) having just ended – was the last to choose, and all that was left lying about, neglected by everyone else, was the lot of the ‘ordinary man’, without ambition or power. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I will have that. But I would have you know that even had I chosen first, this is what I would have chosen.’ 

Seen from the viewpoint of this myth, both Gopalda and Ashish could be called ‘extraordinarily ordinary’. On one occasion, seeing Gopalda squatting in the kitchen by the charcoal and oil fires, red-cheeked, balding head, large hands, I thought, ‘You are a funny-looking old thing!’ 

‘Don’t be deluded by the outer form,’ he said quietly. 

When my mother Lorna and I visited in November 1965, Gopalda lay very ill, having moved down to the cottage for quiet. At one time I was sitting on the floor facing the bed, as Ashish moved about doing small things. It was as if I saw a shimmering in the air going up from Gopalda’s body – the life force leaving him. I thought, ‘He is dying, does he know it?’ in some horror. He ‘heard’ me, lifted his head from the pillow, and gave me a wonderful smile, as if to say, ‘This is wonderful, Penelope.’ Then he looked quickly round the room and back to me, intimating ‘But the others don’t know yet. Do not say anything.’ And I did not, though I tried to believe it was not true. 

I had dreamed in the autumn of 1965, ‘Gopalda has reached his Self-Realization and is making everyone very happy.’ When I told him, he went a little pink in the face, asked when I had dreamed it, and told me, ‘Ma once said to me, “You will see It one day – I don’t know when, but you will see It”.’ And he did. 

The surgeon who was staying wanted to operate on Gopalda with his own team in Jaipur, saying he had examined him and he was strong enough to make the journey. He was carried down the mountain on a simple carrying-chair, a bath-towel strung across two small struts of wood nailed to the back of the chair, to rest his head on, a small skull-cap on his slightly bald head. The atmosphere surpassed that of Pope Pius XII being carried into the audience hall of the Vatican. The story is well known, of how he was driven to Almora in the Sens’ van, where morphia was available. Holding his hand in the back of the van, my ego asserted itself: ‘here I am, holding the hand of this great man as he lies dying.’ For the last time, in his body, he ‘heard’ me. ‘I want to piddle!’ he said. Bang! Back to reality!

He left his body early next morning. Lorna and I had travelled down to Delhi. Leaving the hotel, two fortune-tellers stopped us. At my turn, one of them unfolded his hand, in which was a small piece of paper with ‘Krishna Prem’ written on it. To my silent question of how he was, not having heard the news, he pointed upwards and said, ‘Krishna Prem – God.’ 

Gopalda once told me how he visited Ramana Maharshi. He said, ‘I entered the – was it building or temple? – where Ramana Maharshi was seated. The whole place was echoing silently: “Who are you? Who are you?” I went and stood in front of him and without speaking out loud he said to me, “Who are you?” I answered him silently, “It does not matter who I am; I am His.” He replied, “Who is He?” I said out loud, “I am tired now. I have been travelling all day. I will think about it and give you the answer tomorrow.” Gopalda turned to me, ‘And I’m not going to tell you what I said, Penelope! You can go away and think about it.’ Two days later I told him, ‘The answer should be “. . .”, but I am so far from being able to say that, that I hardly like to say it at all.’ ‘Then until you can, don’t,’ he said. Let the reader fill in what he/she thinks.

Another time Gopalda spoke of death. ‘Some people who have had to fight all their lives,’ he said, ‘continue automatically. They cannot stop, they fight an illness when old, when it might be a chance to go. They survive, maybe to get something worse before long. When your time comes, fix your mind on whoever you want to meet you, and they will be there. At the end of an out-breath, open up your hands, and let yourself go.’

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‘This is all very well,’ Gopalda seems to be saying as I have been writing this, ‘but get on with your work.’