coming in from Mexico, from the Philippines, from Africa, from Denmark, from Detroit
and it feels like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfuss
and all those other seekers have been pulled to the middle of Wyoming for reasons they
don't understand at all, drawn by the arrival of the spaceship. I am so consumed by
wonder at their bravery. These people have left their families and lives behind for a few
weeks to go into silent retreat amidst a crowd of perfect strangers in India. Not everybody
does this in their lifetime.
I love all these people, automatically and unconditionally. I even love the pain-in-the-ass
ones. I can see through their neuroses and recognize that they're just horribly afraid of
what they're going to face when they go into silence and meditation for seven days. I love
the Indian man who comes to me in outrage, reporting that there's a four-inch statue of
the Indian god Ganesh in his room which has one foot missing. He's furious, thinks this is
a terrible omen and wants that statue removed--ideally by a Brahman priest, during a
"traditionally appropriate" cleansing ceremony. I comfort him and listen to his anger,
then send my teenage tomboy friend Tulsi over to the guy's room to get rid of the statue
while he's at lunch. The next day I pass the man a note, telling him that I hope he's feeling
better now that the broken statue is gone, and reminding him that I'm here if he needs
anything else whatsoever; he rewards me with a giant, relieved smile. He's just afraid.
The French woman who has a near panic attack about her wheat allergies--she's afraid,too. The Argentinean man who wants a special meeting with the entire staff of the Hatha
Yoga department in order to be counseled on how to sit properly during meditation so his
ankle doesn't hurt; he's just afraid. They're all afraid. They're going into silence, deep into
their own minds and souls. Even for an experienced meditator, nothing is more unknown
than this territory. Anything can happen in there. They'll be guided during this retreat by
a wonderful woman, a monk in her fifties, whose every gesture and word is the
embodiment of compassion, but they're still afraid because--as loving as this monk may
be--she cannot go with them where they are going. Nobody can.
As the retreat was beginning, I happened to get a letter in the mail from a friend of mine
in America who is a wildlife filmmaker for National Geographic. He told me he'd just
been to a fancy dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, honoring members of the
Explorers' Club. He said it was amazing to be in the presence of such incredibly
courageous people, all of whom have risked their lives so many times to discover the
world's most remote and dangerous mountain ranges, canyons, rivers, ocean depths, ice
fields and volcanoes. He said that so many of them were missing bits of themselves--toes
and noses and fingers lost over the years to sharks, frostbite and other dangers.
He wrote, "You have never seen so many brave people gathered in one place at the same
time."
I thought to myself, You ain't seen nothin', Mike.
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The topic of the retreat, and its goal, is the turiya state--the elusive fourth level of human
consciousness. During the typical human experience, say the Yogis, most of us are
always moving between three different levels of consciousness--waking, dreaming or
deep dreamless sleep. But there is a fourth level, too. This fourth level is the witness of
all the other states, the integral awareness that links the other three levels together. This is
the pure consciousness, an intelligent awareness that can--for example--report your
dreams back to you in the morning when you wake up. You were gone, you were
sleeping, but somebody was watching over your dreams while you slept--who was that
witness? And who is the one who is always standing outside the mind's activity,
observing its thoughts? It's simply God, say the Yogis. And if you can move into that
state of witness-consciousness, then you can be present with God all the time. This
constant awareness and experience of the God-presence within can only happen on a
fourth level of human consciousness, which is called turiya.
Here's how you can tell if you've reached the turiya state--if you're in a state of constant
bliss. One who is living from within turiya is not affected by the swinging moods of the
mind, nor fearful of time or harmed by loss. "Pure, clean, void, tranquil, breathless,selfless, endless, undecaying, steadfast, eternal, unborn, independent, he abides in his
own greatness," say the Upanishads, the ancient Yogic scriptures, describing anyone who
has reached the turiya state. The great saints, the great Gurus, the great prophets of
history--they were all living in the turiya state, all the time. As for the rest of us, most of
us have been there, too, if only for fleeting moments. Most of us, even if only for two
minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and
random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside
world. One instant, you're just a regular Joe, schlepping through your mundane life, and
then suddenly--what is this?--nothing has changed, yet you feel stirred by grace, swollen
with wonder, overflowing with bliss. Everything--for no reason whatsoever--is perfect.
Of course, for most of us this state passes as fast as it came. It's almost like you are
shown your inner perfection as a tease and then you tumble back to "reality" very quickly,
collapsing into a heap upon all your old worries and desires once again. Over the
centuries, people have tried to hold on to that state of blissful perfection through all sorts
of external means--through drugs and sex and power and adrenaline and the accumulation
of pretty things--but it doesn't keep. We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like
Tolstoy's fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies
from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your
treasure--your perfection--is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy
commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of
the heart. The kundalini shakti-- the supreme energy of the divine--will take you there.
This is what everyone has come here for.
When I initially wrote that sentence, what I meant by it was: "This is why these one
hundred retreat participants from all over the world have come to this Ashram in India."
But actually, the Yogic saints and philosophers would have agreed with the broadness of
my original statement: "This is what everyone has come here for." According to the
mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. This is why we
all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is
worthwhile--just for the chance to experience this infinite love. And once you have found
this divinity within, can you hold it? Because if you can . . . bliss.
I spend the entire retreat in the back of the temple, watching over the participants as they
meditate in the half-dark and total quiet. It is my job to be concerned about their comfort,
paying careful attention to see if anyone is in trouble or need. They've all taken vows of
silence for the duration of the retreat, and every day I can feel them descending deeper
into that silence until the entire Ashram is saturated with their stillness. Out of respect to
the retreat participants, we are all tiptoeing through our days now, even eating our meals
in silence. All traces of chatter are gone. Even I am quiet. There is a middle-of-the-night
silence around here now, the hushed timelessness you generally only experience around
3:00 AM when you're totally alone--yet it's carried through the broad daylight and held
by the whole Ashram.
As these hundred souls meditate, I have no idea what they're thinking or feeling, but I
know what they want to experience, and I find myself in a constant state of prayer to God
on their behalf, making odd bargains for them like, Please give these wonderful people
any blessings you might have originally set aside for me. It's not my intention to go into
meditation at the same time the retreat participants are meditating; I'm supposed to be
keeping an eye on them, not worrying about my own spiritual journey. But I find myselfevery day lifted on the waves of their collective devotional intention, much the same way
that certain scavenging birds can ride the thermal heat waves which rise off the earth,
taking them much higher in the air than they ever could have flown on their own
wing-power. So it's probably not surprising that this is when it happens. One Thursday
afternoon in the back of the temple, right in the midst of my Key Hostess duties, wearing
my name-tag and everything--I am suddenly transported through the portal of the
universe and taken to the center of God's palm.
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As a reader and seeker, I always get frustrated at this moment in somebody else's spiritual
memoirs--that moment in which the soul excuses itself from time and place and merges
with the infinite. From the Buddha to Saint Teresa to the Sufi mystics to my own
Guru--so many great souls over the centuries have tried to express in so many words
what it feels like to become one with the divine, but I'm never quite satisfied by these
descriptions. Often you will see the maddening adjective indescribable used to describe
the event. But even the most eloquent reporters of the devotional experience--like Rumi,
who wrote about having abandoned all effort and tied himself to God's sleeve, or Hafiz,
who said that he and God had become like two fat men living in a small boat--"we keep
bumping into each other and laughing"--even these poets leave me behind. I don't want to
read about it; I want to feel it, too. Sri Ramana Maharshi, a beloved Indian Guru, used to
give long talks on the transcendental experience to his pupils and then always wrap it up
with this instruction: "Now go find out."
So now I have found out. And I don't want to say that what I experienced that Thursday
afternoon in India was indescribable, even though it was. I'll try to explain anyway.
Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I
suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the
room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void,
but I also was the void and I was looking at the void, all at the same time. The void was a
place of limitless peace and wisdom. The void was conscious and it was intelligent. The
void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way--not
like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God's thigh muscle. I just was part of God.
In addition to being God. I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size
as the universe. ("All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the
ocean merges into the drop," wrote the sage Kabir--and I can personally attest now that
this is true.)
It wasn't hallucinogenic, what I was feeling. It was the most basic of events. It washeaven, yes. It was the deepest love I'd ever experienced, beyond anything I could have
previously imagined, but it wasn't euphoric. It wasn't exciting. There wasn't enough ego
or passion left in me to create euphoria and excitement. It was just obvious. Like when
you've been looking at an optical illusion for a long time, straining your eyes to decode
the trick, and suddenly your cognizance shifts and there--now you can clearly see it!--the
two vases are actually two faces. And once you've seen through the optical illusion, you
can never not see it again.
"So this is God," I thought. "Congratulations to meet you."
The place in which I was standing can't be described like an earthly location. It was
neither dark nor light, neither big nor small. Nor was it a place, nor was I technically
standing there, nor was I exactly "I" anymore. I still had my thoughts, but they were so
modest, quiet and observatory. Not only did I feel unhesitating compassion and unity
with everything and everybody, it was vaguely and amusingly strange for me to wonder
how anybody could ever feel anything but that. I also felt mildly charmed by all my old
ideas about who I am and what I'm like. I'm a woman, I come from America, I'm talkative,
I'm a writer-- all this felt so cute and obsolete. Imagine cramming yourself into such a
puny box of identity when you could experience your infinitude instead.
I wondered, "Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the
entire time?"
I don't know how long I hovered in this magnificent ether of union before I had a sudden
urgent thought: "I want to hold on to this experience forever!" And that's when I started
to tumble out of it. Just those two little words-- I want!-- and I began to slide back to earth.
Then my mind started to really protest-- No! I don't want to leave here!-- and I slid further
still.
I want!
I don't want!
I want!
I don't want!
With each repetition of those desperate thoughts, I could feel myself falling through layer
after layer of illusion, like an action-comedy hero crashing through a dozen canvas
awnings during his fall from a building. This return of useless longing was bringing me
back again into my own small borders, my own mortal confines, my limited comic-strip
world. I watched my ego return the way you watch a Polaroid photo develop,
instant-by-instant getting clearer--there's the face, there are the lines around the mouth,
there are the eyebrows--yes, now it is finished: there is a picture of regular old me. I felt a
tremor of panic, mildly heartbroken to have lost this divine experience. But exactly
parallel to that panic I could also sense a wit-ness, a wiser and older me, who just shook
