Conrad Rooks with Swami Satchidananda, Sri Lanka, early 1966.
It was 1966. The Beatles had stopped touring. A generation of young Americans was searching for meaning, for peace, for something the world around them could not seem to provide. From that searching rose the counterculture: restless, idealistic, and beneath all its noise, genuinely hungry for transformation. Into that moment stepped a Tamil Swami from South India — fifty-two years old, tall and dark, with a long flowing beard, and carrying within him the living wisdom of an ancient and unbroken spiritual tradition.
He did not come because he had a mission. He would be the first to say so.
A Filmmaker in Kandy
In the mid-1950s, at the request of his Guru, Sri Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, Swami Satchidananda left the ashram on the banks of the Ganges and went to serve devotees in Sri Lanka. He had been there for thirteen years when a young American filmmaker named Conrad Rooks found his way to him.
Conrad had been staying at a hotel in Kandy. He had heard there was someone in the area who could teach Yoga and asked the hotel owner—who happened to be the mayor of Kandy, and a student of Swami Satchidananda’s—for an introduction. Conrad arrived at the ashram with studied nonchalance. “I’m not going to take much of your time,” he told Gurudev. “Fifteen minutes is enough. I have just one or two questions about kundalini and this and that.”
“Well, fine; come,” Swami Satchidananda replied. “After 10 o’clock everyone at the ashram goes to bed, and I can give you a little time.” Conrad arrived punctually at ten. They began to talk. “We started talking and talking and talking,” Swami Satchidananda would later recall. “All of a sudden, he looked at his watch; it was 4 o’clock in the morning. Something had happened. He wanted to stay with me; he didn’t want to go back.”
And he did stay for weeks, immersed in Swami Satchidananda’s company day and night. Conrad had traveled through India visiting ashrams, searching for meaning, for guidance, for someone who could speak to the burning questions he carried. In Swami Satchidananda, he had found what he was looking for. Only when his lawyers sent urgent telegrams from Paris did he reluctantly leave.
But he did not forget. A few weeks later, without a word of warning, a telephone call arrived at Swami Satchidananda’s ashram. It was British Airlines. A round-trip ticket to Paris was waiting for him. Conrad had sent it without asking. “When are you going?” the caller asked.
“I don’t know,” Swami Satchidananda replied. “Who sent the ticket?” He was told the name. “All right. But I can’t just leave everything and come right away. Give me two weeks.”
Two weeks later, he arrived in Paris. He thought he might stay a month. Whatever lay ahead, he was, as always, entirely in the hands of Providence.
Spring in Paris
Meanwhile, a separate thread of the story had been quietly unspooling in New York City.
Peter Max was one of America’s most celebrated artists—bold, visionary, his work inseparable from the spirit of the era. One night, at two in the morning, he climbed a ten-foot ladder to look down at a large collage he had spent days assembling. It was meant to give him a glimpse of the universe, some revelation about what life was all about. It gave him nothing. Frustrated and exhausted, he closed his eyes and wished for an answer.
“Suddenly,” he later wrote, “I envisioned a cloud that opened up and a man with a white beard appeared through it and said, ‘Relax, everything is okay.’”
Peter Max with Swami Satchidananda, 1960s.
He descended the ladder. An hour later, at three in the morning, the phone rang. It was Conrad Rooks, calling from Paris, asking him to come work on his film Chappaqua. Within days, Peter Max was on a plane.
When he arrived at the Hotel Napoleon Bonaparte in Paris, Conrad picked up the house phone: “Hello, Swami? I’ve got the American artist with me. Can you please meet us downstairs for breakfast?” Peter had heard the word ‘Swami’ before but had no idea he was about to meet a monk. The elevator door opened. “A tall, dark, magnificent man walked out wearing orange clothes and a beautiful long beard,” Peter recalled. “The moment I saw him, I knew that it was the man in my vision.”
The two spent the next five or six days together. Between his work with Conrad, Peter spent every available moment with Swami Satchidananda. On his last day in Paris, he said: “Swami, America needs you very, very much. It would be really nice if you could come to America.”
“America needs me?” Swami Satchidananda asked. “Why?”
Peter told him about the youth and the longing, the searching, the hunger for something real beyond what drugs or politics or money could offer. He told him that the teachings of Yoga were what was needed. Then Swami Satchidananda said: “Okay, if there’s a need, I’ll come.”
July 31, 1966
Peter Max flew back to New York. Three days later, Swami Satchidananda arrived for what was meant to be a two-day stop before returning to Sri Lanka.
Peter went to JFK to meet him and missed the flight. When he got home, Swami Satchidananda was already there, chatting with Peter’s wife, Liz. That evening, Peter called his friends. Word spread quickly. By six o’clock, forty-five people had crowded into the apartment. Swami Satchidananda sat in lotus position on the couch and spoke in his soft, gentle voice. The room stilled. Cigarettes were put out. Those sprawled on the floor sat up and crossed their legs.
After two hours, Gurudev closed his eyes and led the room into meditation. When it was over, everyone moved to the kitchen. The conversation turned to one question: how to keep him in New York. One person put his hands in his pockets and dropped whatever money he had on the Formica table. Everyone followed. Between them, they gathered about a hundred dollars. “And that,” Peter Max later wrote, “was the birth of the Integral Yoga Institute.”
Two days became five months. When Gurudev finally flew back to Sri Lanka, his students were already at work. They had found an apartment. They were setting up classes. Waiting at the airport when he landed was the American Ambassador to Sri Lanka, a close friend, holding the correspondence sent by Swami Satchidananda’s new students asking him to come back, to stay, to make his home among them.
“I don’t know what you have done to our people in America,” the Ambassador told him. “They have sent me letters and telegrams asking me to pack you up and send you back there.”
Swami Satchidananda in New York, with Statue of Liberty in view, 1966.
The Interview
Even then, the path was not straightforward. His students wanted him to come as a recognized religious minister, which was a category the American government had never extended to a Yoga teacher. Six hundred letters arrived on his behalf: from rabbis, Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, all writing to the US Immigration Department. The director called him for a personal interview.
“Why do you want to live in this country?” the director asked.
“Sir, to be honest, I am not very keen about that,” Swami Satchidananda replied.
The director stared. “What? Am I hearing right? Are you speaking correct English?”
“Yes, Sir,” Swami Satchidananda said. “It’s not me. All these people filled out the form. They wanted me to sign it, so I signed it. It’s because of their pressure that I signed and requested to live here. It’s not that I want to come and stay here or do anything.”
The director, moved by an exchange unlike anything in his experience, sent the entire file to the federal government. Within days, the word came back: “Please ask the Swami to stay here; we are processing his visa.” The visa that was granted carried a designation that had never before been issued in the history of American immigration: Minister of Divine Words. Truer words were never spoken.
On October 7, 1966, the Integral Yoga Institute of New York was formally founded.
Providence
Years later, reflecting on all of it—the fifteen minutes in Kandy that had become weeks, the ticket arriving from Paris without warning, the vision a New York artist had had at two in the morning, the hundred dollars on a Formica table, the immigration director’s astonishment—Swami Satchidananda was, as always, perfectly clear about what had actually happened, and who had done it.
“And that’s how I came to America. It was not anything that I did. Something, Providence, pushed me. Sincerely, I am nothing. In fact, compared to many people, I am not even a great scholar or a big man or even a thinker. All I know is that some unseen power is just making me do things and I am doing. I’m comfortable that way. That way, I never have any room for anxiety, worry, or depression.”
Sixty years on, across six continents, in the lives of thousands of teachers and countless students who never met him and yet carry his peace, that unseen power is still at work.
