I have two loves that I am unfaithful to. One is the writer. The other is the mystic. I tell myself that they cannot live together so I live a shallow life to avoid choosing. Not choosing is the way I learned to never be disappointed. Not choosing is killing me. My choice at the moment is to write about my mystical experiences. Perhaps in this way they will serve each other.
Perhaps the mystic in me can calm the writer when she is certain that nothing she says is important. Perhaps the mystic will have compassion and suggest she meditate until an original thought comes. When the writer thinks no one will ever read a word she writes except for her husband with her holding a gun to his head, the mystic can suggest a mantra.
I want to buy a rope and a knife and keep them on my desk to remind myself of the Marathon Monks. These determined beings set a goal of running a thousand marathons in seven years on the slopes of Mount Hiei in Japan. If they fail, they vow to hang or disembowel themselves. I want to make a vow like that. If I haven’t written this book in three years, I will just end it all.
What is the writer to me? It is that ambitious part that still wants personal recognition for my talent and wisdom. Somehow I think that name and fame will bring me fulfillment. What is the mystic? The one that knows that all the striving and attempts to be happy and content by becoming rich and famous are futile. When I touch the Absolute, I long to be in that truer home. I long to give up the mortal world, I long to be at one with God. I long to go wild into the unknown, to be a wild person like Jesus, breaking all the rules of the Sabbath, breaking all the laws of physics; to walk on water, to calm the seas to heal a leper. I want to be as crazy and alive as Jesus, Lao Tsu, and Bodhidharma.
The mystic was awakened in me one evening in Cambridge, Mass. My son was three months old. I was twenty-two. My husband was going to Harvard. Every Monday night I would trudge through the snow to a “Sensitivity Group.” One night, instead of doing exercises to promote higher consciousness, we listened to a three hour tape by Ram Dass. He had just come back from India. It was 1969. I believe there were only two people left by the end of the tape. I was one of them. His tape eventually became his first book, Be Here Now. In it he described his journey from becoming a professor at Harvard, to becoming a crazed, acid taking counter culture leader, to going to India and meeting his guru. Ram Dass stayed in India, studying meditation and living the life of a saddu (a holy man) until his guru sent him home to tell his story in America.
A few months after listening to the tape, I attended a lecture in Cambridge given by Ram Dass. I asked him for a book to read that could give me a better understanding of what he was talking about. He told me to read The Bagavagita.
Through this chance encounter with Ram Dass, the Bagavagita, mantra, chants, the Jesus prayer from The Way of a Pilgrim, the ‘60’s, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the drugs, my tendency to be bi-polar, alcoholism, and my longing to belong, a life was molded. All these human, disoriented, tortured, incompatible, desperate parts of me cried out to an idea I and many others call God, (if you’re Jewish or Christian,) or the Absolute if you are Buddhist. Only the Absolute, or God if you will, knew anything that could bring these parts together. Only a miracle that is general fair for this state of consciousness could help.
My knowing that the Absolute existed was the only glimmer of hope while at the mercy of my discordant parts. There was a part of me that knew from experiences I had as a child that when I got desperate enough there would be a shift and I would be motivated enough to seek God again.
Why, once I came into the realm of God would I leave? Why would I stop saying the mantra, chanting, praying without ceasing? I don’t know. What keeps us coming back to this existence? What is so irresistible about teaching, mating, chocolate, relating?
I could understand if you could make a living in this world and find some satisfaction in a family, or enjoy knowing if the Dodgers won the pennant. Why would you try to find freedom if fate blessed you with such an ability for contentment? Or perhaps you simply don’t believe in God or the Absolute. This book is not for you. This book is for those who know they could find freedom if they went on a forty day fast but can’t make it through the first day. Or, know they could find happiness if they left their abusive husband but they are terrified to be alone. Those people who know if they meditated four hours a day they would be at peace and all their warring selves would become harmonious, – but they can’t sit down.
Perhaps the writer and the mystic are the Absolute’s way of drawing me closer to It. Writing I can pretend I’m not sitting still. By recording the events of experiences trying to reach the Absolute perhaps I will arrive less bloody at It’s door.
