came to see the great master and admitted to him that she feared she was not a good
enough devotee, feared that she did not love God enough. And the saint said, "Is there
nothing you love?" The woman admitted that she adored her young nephew more than
anything on earth. The saint said, "There, then. He is your Krishna, your beloved. In your
service to your nephew, you are serving God."
But all this is inconsequential. The really amazing thing happened the same day I'd
jumped out of the building. That afternoon, I ran into Delia, my roommate. I told her that
she had padlocked me into our room. She was aghast. She said, "I can't imagine why I
would've done that! Especially because you've been on my mind all morning. I had this
really vivid dream about you last night. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it all
day."
"Tell me," I said.
"I dreamt that you were on fire," Delia said, "and that your bed was on fire, too. I jumped
up to try to help you, but by the time I got there, you were nothing but white ash."
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It was then I decided I needed to stay here at the Ashram. This was so totally not my
original plan. My original plan had been to stay here for just six weeks, have a bit of
transcendental experience, then continue traveling all over India . . . um . . . looking for
God. I had maps and guidebooks and hiking boots and everything! I had specific temples
and mosques and holy men I was all lined up to meet. I mean--it's India! There's so muchto see and experience here. I've got a lot of mileage to cover, temples to explore,
elephants and camels to ride. And I'd be devastated to miss the Ganges, the great
Rajasthani desert, the nutty Mumbai movie houses, the Himalayas, the old tea plantations,
the Calcutta rickshaws racing against each other like the chariot scene from Ben-Hur.
And I was even planning on meeting the Dalai Lama in March, up in Daramsala. I was
hoping he could teach me about God.
But to stay put, to immobilize myself in a small Ashram in a tiny little village in the
middle of nowhere--no, this was not my plan.
On the other hand, the Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in
running water, only in still water. So something was telling me it would be spiritually
negligent to run off now, when so much was happening right here in this small, cloistered
place where every minute of the day is organized to facilitate self-exploration and
devotional practice. Did I really need to get on a bunch of trains and pick up intestinal
parasites and hang around backpackers right now? Couldn't I do that later? Couldn't I
meet the Dalai Lama some other time? Won't the Dalai Lama always be there?(And, if he
should die, heaven forbid, won't they just find another one?) Don't I already have a
passport that looks like a tattooed circus lady? Is more travel really going to bring me any
closer to revelatory contact with divinity?
I didn't know what to do. I spent a day wavering over the decision. As usual, Richard
from Texas had the last word.
"Stay put, Groceries," he said. "Forget about sightseeing--you got the rest of your life for
that. You're on a spiritual journey, baby. Don't cop out and only go halfway to your
potential. You got a personal invitation from God here--you really gonna turn that
away?"
"But what about all those beautiful things to see in India?" I asked. "Isn't it kind of a pity
to travel halfway around the world just to stay in a little Ashram the whole time?"
"Groceries, baby, listen your friend Richard. You go set your lily-white ass down in that
meditation cave every day for the next three months and I promise you this--you're gonna
start seeing some stuff that's so damn beautiful it'll make you wanna throw rocks at the
Taj Mahal."
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Here's what I caught myself thinking about in meditation this morning.
I was wondering where I should live once this year of traveling has ended. I don't want to
move back to New York just out of reflex. Maybe a new town, instead. Austin is
supposed to be nice. And Chicago has all that beautiful architecture. Horrible winters,
though. Or maybe I'll live abroad. I've heard good things about Sydney . . . If I livedsomewhere cheaper than New York, maybe I could afford an extra bedroom and then I
could have a special meditation room! That'd be nice. I could paint it gold. Or maybe a
rich blue. No, gold. No, blue . . .
Finally noticing this train of thought, I was aghast. I thought: Here you are in India, in an
Ashram in one of the holiest pilgrimage sites on earth. And instead of communing with
the divine, you're trying to plan where you'll be meditating a year from now in a home
that doesn't yet exist in a city yet to be determined. How about this, you spastic fool--how
about you try to meditate right here, right now, right where you actually are?
I pulled my attention back to the silent repetition of the mantra.
A few moments later, I paused to take back that mean comment about calling myself a
spastic fool. I decided maybe that wasn't very loving.
Still, I thought in the next moment, a gold meditation room would be nice.
I opened my eyes and sighed. Is this really the best I can do?
So, that evening, I tried something new. I'd recently met a woman at the Ashram who'd
been studying Vipassana meditation. Vipassana is an ultraorthodox, stripped-down and
very intensive Buddhist meditation technique. Basically, it's just sitting. An introductory
Vipassana course lasts for ten days, during which time you sit for ten hours a day in
stretches of silence that last two to three hours at a time. It's the Extreme Sports version
of transcendence. Your Vipassana master won't even give you a mantra; this is
considered a kind of cheating. Vipassana meditation is the practice of pure regarding,
witnessing your mind and offering your complete consideration to your thought patterns,
but allowing nothing to move you from your seat.
It's physically grueling too. You are forbidden to shift your body at all once you have
been seated, no matter how severe your discomfort. You just sit there and tell yourself,
"There's no reason I need to move at all during the next two hours." If you are feeling
discomfort then you are supposed to meditate upon that discomfort, watching the effect
that physical pain has on you. In our real lives, we are constantly hopping around to
adjust ourselves around discomfort--physical, emotional and psychological--in order to
evade the reality of grief and nuisance. Vipassana meditation teaches that grief and
nuisance are inevitable in this life, but if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough,
you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely)
does eventually pass.
"The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing
the terms of the world," says an old Buddhist teaching. In other words: Get used to it.
I don't think Vipassana is necessarily the path for me. It's far too austere for my notions
of devotional practice, which generally revolve around compassion and love and
butterflies and bliss and a friendly God (what my friend Darcey calls "Slumber Party
Theology"). There isn't even any talk about "God" in Vipassana, since the notion of God
is considered by some Buddhists to be the final object of dependency, the ultimate fuzzy
security blanket, the last thing to be abandoned on the path to pure detachment. Now, I
have my own personal issues with the very word detachment, having met spiritual
seekers who already seem to live in a state of complete emotional disconnect from other
human beings and who, when they talk about the sacred pursuit of detachment, make me
want to shake them and holler, "Buddy, that is the last thing you need to practice!"
Still, I can see where cultivating a measure of intelligent detachment in your life can be a
valuable instrument of peace. And after reading about Vipassana meditation in the libraryone afternoon, I got to thinking about how much time I spend in my life crashing around
like a great gasping fish, either squirming away from some uncomfortable distress or
flopping hungrily toward ever more pleasure. And I wondered whether it might serve me
(and those who are burdened with the task of loving me) if I could learn to stay still and
endure a bit more without always getting dragged along on the potholed road of
circumstance.
All these questions came back to me this evening, when I found a quiet bench in one of
the Ashram gardens and decided to sit in meditation for an hour--Vipassana-style. No
movement, no agitation, not even mantra--just pure regarding. Let's see what comes up.
Unfortunately, I had forgotten about what "comes up" at dusk in India: mosquitoes. As I
soon as I sat down on that bench in the lovely gloaming, I could hear the mosquitoes
coming at me, brushing against my face and landing--in a group assault--on my head,
ankles, arms. And then their fierce little burns. I didn't like this. I thought, "This is a bad
time of day to practice Vipassana meditation."
On the other hand--when is it a good time of day, or life, to sit in detached stillness?
When isn't there something buzzing about, trying to distract you and get a rise out of you?
So I made a decision (inspired again by my Guru's instruction that we are to become
scientists of our own inner experience). I presented myself with an experiment-- what if I
sat through this for once? Instead of slapping and griping, what if I sat through the
discomfort, just for one hour of my long life?
So I did it. In stillness, I watched myself get eaten by mosquitoes. To be honest, part of
me was wondering what this little macho experiment was meant to prove, but another
part of me well knew--it was a beginner's attempt at self-mastery. If I could sit through
this nonlethal physical discomfort, then what other discomforts might I someday be able
to sit through? What about emotional discomforts, which are even harder for me to
endure? What about jealousy, anger, fear, disappointment, loneliness, shame, boredom?
The itch was maddening at first but eventually it just melded into a general burning
feeling and I rode that heat to a mild euphoria. I allowed the pain to lose its specific
associations and become pure sensation--neither good nor bad, just intense--and that
intensity lifted me out of myself and into meditation. I sat there for two hours. A bird
might very well have landed on my head; I wouldn't have noticed.
Let me be clear about one thing. I recognize that this experiment wasn't the most stoic act
of fortitude in the history of mankind, and I'm not asking for a Congressional Medal of
Honor here. But there was something mildly thrilling for me about realizing that in my
thirty-four years on earth I have never not slapped at a mosquito when it was biting me.
I've been a puppet to this and to millions of other small and large signals of pain or
pleasure throughout my life. Whenever something happens, I always react. But here I
was--disregarding the reflex. I was doing something I'd never done before. A small thing,
granted, but how often do I get to say that? And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I
cannot yet do today?
When it was all over, I stood up, walked to my room and assessed the damage. I counted
about twenty mosquito bites. But within a half an hour, all the bites had diminished. It all
goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.57575757
The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order. In the search for
God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You
abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that
something greater will be offered you in return for what you've given up. Every religion
in the world operates on the same common understandings of what it means to be a good
disciple--get up early and pray to your God, hone your virtues, be a good neighbor,
respect yourself and others, master your cravings. We all agree that it would be easier to
sleep in, and many of us do, but for millennia there have been others who choose instead
to get up before the sun and wash their faces and go to their prayers. And then fiercely try
to hold on to their devotional convictions throughout the lunacy of another day.
The devout of this world perform their rituals without guarantee that anything good will
ever come of it. Of course there are plenty of scriptures and plenty of priests who make
plenty of promises as to what your good works will yield (or threats as to the
punishments awaiting you if you lapse), but to even believe all this is an act of faith,
because nobody amongst us is shown the endgame. Devotion is diligence without
assurance. Faith is a way of saying, "Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I
embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding." There's a reason we
refer to "leaps of faith"--because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a
mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently
scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to
you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn't. If faith were rational, it
wouldn't be--by definition--faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch.
Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in
advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our
belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it
would just be . . . a prudent insurance policy.
I'm not interested in the insurance industry. I'm tired of being a skeptic, I'm irritated by
spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don't want to hear
