her head and smiled, knowing this: If I believed that this state of bliss was something that
could be taken away from me, then I obviously didn't understand it yet. And therefore, I
was not yet ready to inhabit it completely. I would have to practice more. At that moment
of realization, that's when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last
compassionate, unspoken message:
You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.68686868
The retreat ended two days later, and everyone came out of silence. I got so many hugs
from people, thanking me for having helped them.
"Oh, no! Thank you," I kept saying, frustrated at how inadequate those words sounded,
how impossible it was to express ample gratitude for their having lifted me to such a
towering height.
Another one hundred seekers arrived a week later for another retreat, and the teachings
and the brave endeavors inward and the all-encompassing silence were all repeated, with
new souls in practice. I watched over them, too, and tried to help in every possible way
and glided back into turiya a few times with them, too. I could only laugh later when
many of them came out of their meditations to tell me that I had appeared to them during
the retreat as a "silent, gliding, ethereal presence." So this was the Ashram's final joke on
me? Once I had learned to accept my loud, chatty, social nature and fully embrace my
inner Key Hostess--only then could I become The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple,
after all?
In my final weeks there, the Ashram was imbibed with a somewhat melancholy
last-days-of-summer-camp feeling. Every morning, it seemed, some more people and
some more luggage got on a bus and left. There were no new arrivals. It was almost May,
the beginning of the hottest season in India, and the place would be slowing down for a
while. There would be no more retreats, so I was relocated for work again, now placed in
the Office of Registration, where I had the bittersweet job of officially "departing" all my
friends off the computer once they had left the Ashram.
I shared the office with a funny former Madison Avenue hairdresser. We'd do our
morning prayers together all alone, just the two of us singing our hymn to God.
"Think we could pick up the tempo on this hymn today?" asked the hairdresser one
morning. "And maybe raise it to a higher octave? So I don't sound like a spiritual version
of Count Basie?"
I'm getting a lot of time alone here now. I'm spending about four or five hours every day
in the meditation caves. I can sit in my own company for hours at a time now, at ease in
my own presence, undisturbed by my own existence on the planet. Sometimes my
meditations are surreal and physical experiences of shakti-- all spine-twisting,
blood-boiling wildness. I try to give in to it with as little resistance as possible. Other
times I experience a sweet, quiet contentment, and that is fine, too. The sentences still
form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought
patterns so well now that they don't bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like
old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather endearing--Mr. and Mrs.
Yakkity-Yak and their three dumb children, Blah, Blah and Blah. But they don't agitate
my home. There's room for all of us in this neighborhood.As for whatever other changes may have occurred within me during these last few
months, perhaps I can't even feel them yet. My friends who have been studying Yoga for
a long time say you don't really see the impact that an Ashram has had on you until you
leave the place and return to your normal life. "Only then," said the former nun from
South Africa, "will you start to notice how your interior closets have all been rearranged."
Of course at the moment, I'm not entirely sure what my normal life is. I mean, I'm maybe
about to go move in with an elderly medicine man in Indonesia--is that my normal life? It
may be, who knows? In any case, though, my friends say that the changes appear only
later. You may find that lifelong obsessions are gone, or that nasty, indissoluble patterns
have finally shifted. Petty irritations that once maddened you are no longer problems,
whereas abysmal old miseries you once endured out of habit will no longer be tolerated
now for even five minutes. Poisonous relationships get aired out or disposed of, and
brighter, more beneficial people start arriving into your world.
Last night I couldn't sleep. Not out of anxiety, but out of thrilled anticipation. I got
dressed and went out for a walk through the gardens. The moon was lusciously ripe and
full, and it hovered right above me, spilling a pewtery light all around. The air was
perfumed with jasmine and also the intoxicating scent from this heady, flowery bush they
have around here which only blossoms in the night. The day had been humid and hot, and
now it was only slightly less humid and hot. The warm air shifted around me and I
realized: "I'm in India!"
I'm in my sandals and I'm in India!
I took off at a run, galloping away from the path and down into the meadow, just tearing
across that moonlit bath of grass. My body felt so alive and healthy from all these months
of Yoga and vegetarian food and early bedtimes. My sandals on the soft dewy grass made
this sound: shippa-shippa-shippa-shippa, and that was the only sound in the whole valley.
I was so exultant I ran straight to the clump of eucalyptus trees in the middle of the park
(where they say an ancient temple used to stand, honoring the god Ganesh--the remover
of obstacles) and I threw my arms around one of those trees, which was still warm from
the day's heat, and I kissed it with such passion. I mean, I kissed that tree with all my
heart, not even thinking at the time that this is the worst nightmare of every American
parent whose child has ever run away to India to find herself--that she will end up having
orgies with trees in the moonlight.
But it was pure, this love that I was feeling. It was godly. I looked around the darkened
valley and I could see nothing that was not God. I felt so deeply, terribly happy. I thought
to myself, "Whatever this feeling is--this is what I have been praying for. And this is also
what I have been praying to."
69696969By the way, I found my word.
I found it in the library, of course, bookworm that I am. I'd been wondering about my
word ever since that afternoon back in Rome when my Italian friend Giulio had told me
that Rome's word is SEX, and had asked me what mine was. I didn't know the answer
then, but kind of figured my word would show up eventually, and that I'd recognize it
when I saw it.
So I saw it during my last week at the Ashram. I was reading through an old text about
Yoga, when I found a description of ancient spiritual seekers. A Sanskrit word appeared
in the paragraph: ANTEVASIN. It means "one who lives at the border." In ancient times
this was a literal description. It indicated a person who had left the bustling center of
worldly life to go live at the edge of the forest where the spiritual masters dwelled. The
antevasin was not one of the villagers anymore--not a householder with a conventional
life. But neither was he yet a transcendent--not one of those sages who live deep in the
unexplored woods, fully realized. The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a
border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And
he was a scholar.
When I read this description of the antevasin, I got so excited I gave a little bark of
recognition. That's my word, baby! In the modern age, of course, that image of an
unexplored forest would have to be figurative, and the border would have to be figurative,
too. But you can still live there. You can still live on that shimmering line between your
old thinking and your new understanding, always in a state of learning. In the figurative
sense, this is a border that is always moving--as you advance forward in your studies and
realizations, that mysterious forest of the unknown always stays a few feet ahead of you,
so you have to travel light in order to keep following it. You have to stay mobile,
movable, supple. Slippery, even. Which is funny, because just the day before, my friend
the poet/plumber from New Zealand had left the Ashram, and on his way out the door,
he'd handed me a friendly little good-bye poem about my journey. I remembered this
verse:
Elizabeth, betwixt and between
Italian phrases and Bali dreams,
Elizabeth, between and betwixt,
Sometimes as slippery as a fish . . .
I've spent so much time these last years wondering what I'm supposed to be. A wife? A
mother? A lover? A celibate? An Italian? A glutton? A traveler? An artist? A Yogi? But
I'm not any of these things, at least not completely. And I'm not Crazy Aunt Liz, either.
I'm just a slippery antevasin-- betwixt and between--a student on the ever-shifting border
near the wonderful, scary forest of the new.70707070
I believe that all the world's religions share, at their core, a desire to find a transporting
metaphor. When you want to attain communion with God, what you're really trying to do
is move away from the worldly into the eternal (from the village to the forest, you might
say, keeping with the theme of the antevasin) and you need some kind of magnificent
idea to convey you there. It has be a big one, this metaphor--really big and magic and
powerful, because it needs to carry you across a mighty distance. It has to be the biggest
boat imaginable.
Religious rituals often develop out of mystical experimentation. Some brave scout goes
looking for a new path to the divine, has a transcendent experience and returns home a
prophet. He or she brings back to the community tales of heaven and maps of how to get
there. Then others repeat the words, the works, the prayers, or the acts of this prophet, in
order to cross over, too. Sometimes this is successful--sometimes the same familiar
combination of syllables and devotional practices repeated generation after generation
might carry many people to the other side. Sometimes it doesn't work, though. Inevitably
even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for
everybody.
The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always
surrounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers
would meditate on God. The only problem was that the saint had a young cat, an
annoying creature, who used to walk through the temple meowing and purring and
bothering everyone during meditation. So the saint, in all his practical wisdom,
commanded that the cat be tied to a pole outside for a few hours a day, only during
meditation, so as to not disturb anyone. This became a habit--tying the cat to the pole and
then meditating on God--but as years passed, the habit hardened into religious ritual.
Nobody could meditate unless the cat was tied to the pole first. Then one day the cat died.
The saint's followers were panic-stricken. It was a major religious crisis--how could they
meditate now, without a cat to tie to a pole? How would they reach God? In their minds,
the cat had become the means.
Be very careful, warns this tale, not to get too obsessed with the repetition of religious
ritual just for its own sake. Especially in this divided world, where the Taliban and the
Christian Coalition continue to fight out their international trademark war over who owns
the rights to the word God and who has the proper rituals to reach that God, it may be
useful to remember that it is not the tying of the cat to the pole that has ever brought
anyone to transcendence, but only the constant desire of an individual seeker to
experience the eternal compassion of the divine. Flexibility is just as essential for divinity
as is discipline.Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors,
rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures
say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way
whatsoever that mortals choose to worship--just so long as those prayers are sincere. As
one line from the Upanishads suggests: "People follow different paths, straight or
crooked, according to their temperament, depending on which they consider best, or most
appropriate--and all reach You, just as rivers enter the ocean."
The other objective of religion, of course, is to try to make sense of our chaotic world and
explain the inexplicabilities we see playing out here on earth every day: the innocent
suffer, the wicked are rewarded--what are we to make of all this? The Western tradition
says, "It'll all get sorted out after death, in heaven and hell." (All justice to be doled out,
of course, by what James Joyces used to call the "Hangman God"--a paternal figure who
sits upon His strict seat of judgment punishing the evil and rewarding the good.) Over in
the East, though, the Upanishads shrug away any attempt to make sense of the world's
chaos. They're not even so sure that the world is chaotic, but suggest that it may only
appear so to us, because of our limited vision. These texts do not promise justice or
revenge for anybody, though they do say that there are consequences for every action--so
choose your behavior accordingly. You might not see those consequences any time soon,
though. Yoga takes the long view, always. Furthermore, the Upanishads suggest that
so-called chaos may have an actual divine function, even if you personally can't
recognize it right now: "The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident." The
best we can do, then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to
practice holding equilibrium internally-- no matter what insanity is transpiring out there.
Sean, my Yogic Irish dairy farmer, explained it to me this way. "Imagine that the
universe is a great spinning engine," he said. "You want to stay near the core of the
