but that never did happen . . ."
After that experience, which was about ten years ago, Richard found himself praying all
the time. His prayer was always the same. He kept begging God, "Please, please, please
open my heart." That was all he wanted--an open heart. And he would always finish the
prayer for an open heart by asking God, "And please send me a sign when the event has
occurred." Now he says, recollecting that time, "Be careful what you pray for, Groceries,
cuz you just might get it." After a few months of praying constantly for an open heart,
what do you think Richard got? That's right--emergency open-heart surgery. His chest
was literally cracked open, his ribs cleaved away from each other to allow some daylight
to finally reach into his heart, as though God were saying, "How's that for a sign?" So
now Richard is always cautious with his prayers, he tells me. "Whenever I pray for
anything these days, I always wrap it up by saying, 'Oh, and God? Please be gentle with
me, OK?' "
"What should I do about my meditation practice?" I ask Richard one day, as he'swatching me scrub the temple floors. (He's lucky--he works in the kitchen, doesn't even
have to show up there until an hour before dinner. But he likes watching me scrub the
temple floors. He thinks it's funny.)
"Why do you have to do anything about it, Groceries?"
"Because it stinks."
"Says who?"
"I can't get my mind to sit still."
"Remember what the Guru teaches us--if you sit down with the pure intention to meditate,
whatever happens next is none of your business. So why are you judging your
experience?"
"Because what's happening in my meditations cannot be the point of this Yoga."
"Groceries, baby--you got no idea what's happening in there."
"I never see visions, I never have transcendent experiences--"
"You wanna see pretty colors? Or you wanna know the truth about yourself? What's your
intention?"
"All I seem to do is argue with myself when I try to meditate."
"That's just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what your ego does. It
keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that
you're flawed and broken and alone instead of whole."
"But how does that serve me?"
"It doesn't serve you. Your ego's job isn't to serve you. Its only job is to keep itself in
power. And right now, your ego's scared to death cuz it's about to get downsized. You
keep up this spiritual path, baby, and that bad boy's days are numbered. Pretty soon your
ego will be out of work, and your heart'll be making all the decisions. So your ego's
fighting for its life, playing with your mind, trying to assert its authority, trying to keep
you cornered off in a holding pen away from the rest of the universe. Don't listen to it."
"How do you not listen to it?"
"Ever try to take a toy away from a toddler? They don't like that, do they? They start
kicking and screaming. Best way to take a toy away from a toddler is distract the kid,
give him something else to play with. Divert his attention. Instead of trying to forcefully
take thoughts out of your mind, give your mind something better to play with. Something
healthier."
"Like what?"
"Like love, Groceries. Like pure divine love."
45454545
Going into that meditation cave every day is supposed to be this time of divinecommunion, but I've been walking in there lately flinching the way my dog used to flinch
when she walked into the vet's office (knowing that no matter how friendly everybody
might be acting now, this whole thing was going to end with a sharp poke with a medical
instrument). But after my last conversation with Richard from Texas, I'm trying a new
approach this morning. I sit down to meditate and I say to my mind, "Listen--I understand
you're a little frightened. But I promise, I'm not trying to annihilate you. I'm just trying to
give you a place to rest. I love you."
The other day a monk told me, "The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing
the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is
quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart.
That's where you need to go."
I'm trying a different mantra, too. It's one I've had luck with in the past. It's simple, just
two syllables:
Ham-sa.
In Sanskrit it means "I am That."
The Yogis say that Ham-sa is the most natural mantra, the one we are all given by God
before birth. It is the sound of our own breath. Ham on the inhale, sa on the exhale.
( Ham, by the way, is pronounced softly, openly, like hahhhm, not like the meat you put
on a sandwich. And sa rhymes with "Ahhhh . . .") As long as we live, every time we
breathe in or out, we are repeating this mantra. I am That. I am divine, I am with God, I
am an expression of God, I am not separate, I am not alone, I am not this limited illusion
of an individual. I've always found Ham-sa easy and relaxing. Easier to meditate with
than Om Namah Shivaya, the--how would you say this--"official" mantra of this Yoga.
But I was talking to this monk the other day and he told me to go ahead and use Ham-sa
if it helped my meditation. He said, "Meditate on whatever causes a revolution in your
mind."
So I'll sit with it here today.
Ham-sa.
I am That.
Thoughts come, but I don't pay much attention to them, other than to say to them in an
almost motherly manner, "Oh, I know you jokers . . . go outside and play now . . .
Mommy's listening to God."
Ham-sa.
I am That.
I fall asleep for a while. (Or whatever. In meditation, you can never really be sure if what
you think is sleep is actually sleep; sometimes it's just another level of consciousness.)
When I awake, or whatever, I can feel this soft blue electrical energy pulsing through my
body, in waves. It's a little alarming, but also amazing. I don't know what to do, so I just
speak internally to this energy. I say to it, "I believe in you," and it magnifies, volumizes,
in response. It's frighteningly powerful now, like a kidnapping of the senses. It's
humming up from the base of my spine. My neck feels like it wants to stretch and twist,
so I let it, and then I'm sitting there in the strangest position--perched upright like a good
Yogi, but with my left ear pressed hard against my left shoulder. I don't know why my
head and neck want to do this, but I'm not going to argue with them; they are insistent.
The pounding blue energy keeps pitching through my body, and I can hear a sort of
thrumming sound in my ears, and it's so mighty now that I actually can't deal with itanymore. It scares me so much that I say to it, "I'm not ready yet!" and snap open my
eyes. It all goes away. I'm back in a room again, back in my surroundings. I look at my
watch. I've been here--or somewhere--for almost an hour.
I am panting, literally panting.
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To understand what that experience was, what happened in there (by which I mean both
"in the meditation cave" and "in me") brings up a topic rather esoteric and wild--namely,
the subject of kundalini shakti.
Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent
experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic
study in order to personally encounter the divine. The interesting thing about these
mystics is that, when they describe their experiences, they all end up describing exactly
the same occurrence. Generally, their union with God occurs in a meditative state, and is
delivered through an energy source that fills the entire body with euphoric, electric light.
The Japanese call this energy ki, the Chinese Buddhists call it chi, the Balinese call it
taksu, the Christians call it The Holy Spirit, the Kalahari Bushmen call it n/um (their holy
men describe it as a snakelike power that ascends the spine and blows a hole in the head
through which the gods then enter). The Islamic Sufi poets called that God-energy "The
Beloved," and wrote devotional poems to it. The Australian aborigines describe a serpent
in the sky that descends into the medicine man and gives him intense, otherworldly
powers. In the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah this union with the divine is said to occur
through stages of spiritual ascension, with energy that runs up the spine along a series of
invisible meridians.
Saint Teresa of Avila, that most mystical of Catholic figures, described her union with
God as a physical ascension of light through seven inner "mansions" of her being, after
which she burst into God's presence. She used to go into meditative trances so deep that
the other nuns couldn't feel her pulse anymore. She would beg her fellow nuns not to tell
anyone what they had witnessed, as it was "a most extraordinary thing and likely to
arouse considerable talk." (Not to mention a possible interview with the Inquisitor.) The
most difficult challenge, the saint wrote in her memoirs, was to not stir up the intellect
during meditation, for any thoughts of the mind--even the most fervent prayers--will
extinguish the fire of God. Once the troublesome mind "begins to compose speeches and
dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing
important work." But if you can surpass those thoughts, Teresa explained, and ascend
toward God, "it is a glorious bewilderment, a heavenly madness, in which true wisdom is
acquired." Unknowingly echoing the poems of the Persian Sufi mystic Hafiz, whodemanded why, with a God so wildly loving, are we not all screaming drunks, Teresa
cried out in her autobiography that, if these divine experiences were mere madness, then
"I beseech you, Father, let us all be mad!"
Then, in the next sentences of her book, it's like she catches her breath. Reading Saint
Teresa today, you can almost feel her coming out of that delirious experience, then
looking around at the political climate of medieval Spain (where she lived under one of
the most repressive religious tyrannies of history) and soberly, dutifully, apologizing for
her excitement. She writes, "Forgive me if I have been very bold," and reiterates that all
her idiot babbling should be ignored because, of course, she is just a woman and a worm
and despicable vermin, etc., etc. You can almost see her smoothing back her nun's skirts
and tucking away those last loose strands of hair--her divine secret a blazing, hidden
bonfire.
In Indian Yogic tradition, this divine secret is called kundalini shakti and is depicted as a
snake who lies coiled at the base of the spine until it is released by a master's touch or by
a miracle, and which then ascends up through seven chakras, or wheels (which you might
also call the seven mansions of the soul), and finally through the head, exploding into
union with God. These chakras do not exist in the gross body, say the Yogis, so don't
look for them there; they exist only in the subtle body, in the body that the Buddhist
teachers are referring to when they encourage their students to pull forth a new self from
the physical body the way you pull a sword from its sheath. My friend Bob, who is both a
student of Yoga and a neuroscientist, told me that he was always agitated by this idea of
the chakras, that he wanted to actually see them in a dissected human body in order to
believe they existed. But after a particularly transcendent meditative experience, he came
away with a new understanding of it. He said, "Just as there exists in writing a literal truth
and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic
anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh;
the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true."
I like it when science and devotion find places of intersection. I found an article in The
New York Times recently about a team of neurologists who had wired up a volunteer
Tibetan monk for experimental brain-scanning. They wanted to see what happens to a
transcendent mind, scientifically speaking, during moments of enlightenment. In the
mind of a normal thinking person, an electrical storm of thoughts and impulses whirls
constantly, registering on a brain scan as yellow and red flashes. The more angry or
impassioned the subject becomes, the hotter and deeper those red flashes burn. But
mystics across time and cultures have all described a stilling of the brain during
meditation, and say that the ultimate union with God is a blue light which they can feel
radiating from the center of their skulls. In Yogic tradition, this is called "the blue pearl,"
and it is the goal of every seeker to find it. Sure enough, this Tibetan monk, monitored
during meditation, was able to quiet his mind so completely that no red or yellow flashes
could be seen. In fact, all the neurological energy of this gentleman pooled and collected
at last into the center of his brain--you could see it happening right there on the
monitor--into a small, cool, blue pearl of light. Just like the Yogis have always described.
This is the destination of the kundalini shakti.
In mystical India, as in many shamanistic traditions, kundalini shakti is considered a
dangerous force to play around with if you are unsupervised; the inexperienced Yogi
could quite literally blow his mind with it. You need a teacher--a Guru--to guide you onthis path, and ideally a safe place--an Ashram--from which to practice. It is said to be the
Guru's touch (either literally in person, or through a more supernatural encounter, like a
dream) which releases the bound kundalini energy from its coil at the base of the spine
and allows it to begin journeying upward toward God. This moment of release is called
