by Anne Cushman
Occasionally, I picked up some of the ashram pamphlets to leaf through the teachings of the deceased master. “Waking is long and a dream short; other than this there is no difference. Just as waking happenings seem real while awake, so do those in a dream while dreaming.” A house. How had Tom managed to buy a house? I couldn’t even afford a crib. But it shouldn’t surprise me—Tom always had been a real grown-up. Whereas Matt and I had always felt like kids, gleefully ducking out of all the trappings of adulthood, like mortgages and business suits and savings accounts and matching eight-place flatware settings. Now I was having a baby, the ultimate grown-up gesture. But part of me still believed I was just the nanny, snooping through the closet to try on the real mom’s clothes.
Midmorning on our tenth day at the ashram, Devi Das sat down on the side of my bed. “It’s time to get up and get going. You can’t just lie here forever.”
“Give me one good reason why not.”
“Well, for one thing, we’ve been hearing about a teacher you probably should check out. She holds satsang for her devotees in a house just down the road. She’s supposed to be a fully awakened being. Several people have told us that just being in her presence can destroy the I-thought for the rest of the day.”
“Or the We-thought, in your case.”
“Her name is Saraswati. She’s from Santa Barbara.”
I’ll give her a call when I get back to California. Maybe we can go rollerblading together.” But I heaved myself up to sitting, yanked my shirt down over my belly. “Okay. Where’s my notebook?”
After over a week in the ashram, it was a shock to be out in the streets again. Buses roared past, sending chickens and pigs scrambling. Bicycle rickshaws painted with bright flowers zipped past bullock carts laden with burlap bags of grain. When we finally made our way into the small house where Saraswati held her satsang, it had already started. Twenty or thirty devotees were sitting around the living room on puffy silk meditation cushions. At the front of the room, reclining in an armchair draped in royal-blue silk, was a petite woman with short platinum hair and turquoise eyes, dressed in a white sari. On a table to her left was a vase of jasmine, a crystal bowl half full of scraps of paper, and a tall glass of water. She flashed a smile at us as we entered. Her teeth were so white they were practically translucent.
We sat down on cushions in the back of the room. Saraswati reached into the crystal bowl, drew out a slip of paper, and read it aloud. “Beloved Saraswati. Your presence in my life has opened my heart to a vastness that I never dreamed I would touch.” She nodded and smiled. “But when I am away from you, my spiritual practice feels dry and arid. I do yoga and meditate and pray, but I cannot find my way back to the waters of bliss I feel in your presence.”
Saraswati looked around the room. “Beloveds, this is a common complaint. Who wrote this letter?” She spoke with a slight Indian accent overlaid over a Valley-girl drawl.
A wiry woman in yoga pants came forward and sat before Saraswati, her body rigid with hope and anxiety. Saraswati looked at her and shook her head. “You are trying so hard, running so fast. And yet you get nowhere, is that correct?”
The woman nodded. Tears began trickling down her face.
“The bliss you feel in my presence does not come from me. It is you. You are able to feel it simply because you have stopped striving, for a moment, to be somewhere else.” Saraswati looked around the room, stern. “I say this to all of you—do not do yoga. Do not meditate. Do not fast and pray. Do not chase around India looking for one guru after another to show you the door to enlightenment. Simply be who you are.”
Oh great. My book was doomed.
“But I don’t like who I am!” wailed the woman in yoga pants, as if reading my mind.
Saraswati leaned forward. “Who is the I who does not like you? And who is the you she does not like? Ask yourself that! Then you will be free.”
The yogini walked back to her seat, sniffing. Saraswati pulled another slip of paper from the bowl. “Beloved Saraswati-ji. Thank you for the blessings with which you have showered me. Since coming to you and seeing my true nature more deeply, I rest in bliss on a daily basis. But I still cannot stop thinking about women.”
A stout, middle-aged German man came forward, looking simultaneously proud and embarrassed. “Who is it who can’t stop thinking? Not you!” said Saraswati. “Thoughts come and go, and there is no thinker. Freedom from thoughts is an illusion. So is bondage to them. Let go of thoughts, let go of no-thoughts. Let go of women, let go of no-women.”
“Thank you.” The man looked as if he were longing to ask her out on a date. “You have helped me so much.”
“I have not helped you, because I and you are both constructs of your mind. You have the illusion that you are this person, Gustav, in this place, India, on this day, March 10. But those concepts have nothing to do with who you really are.”
Wait a minute…March 10? Was it really March 10? I’d lost track of the date. My birthday was March 14. In four more days, I would be thirty years old. No wonder I was depressed. I was three decades years old, I was broke, I was pregnant, and I was nowhere near enlightenment. By the time my next birthday rolled around, I would have a nine-month-old baby.
Gustav was walking back to his seat. I remembered my last birthday, when I turned twenty-nine. I had broken things off with Tom and gotten back together with Matt just a couple of months earlier, and I was still swimming in the blissful delusion that things were going to be different this time than they had always been before. For my birthday, Matt had taken me to a hot-springs resort in the mountains north of the wine country. We had plunged naked into the steaming sulfur bath, so hot that it hurt to move, hurt to even breathe; then dipped into the icy spring-fed tub next to it, so cold it knocked the air out of me. Hot, cold, hot, cold—by the time we lay side by side on the wooden deck, I was dizzy and stoned.
The stars were glittering chips in the dark velvet sky. Matt had reached out and took my hand. “I love you,” he had said. “But sometimes I feel like I should warn you to keep away from me. I’m not the kind of guy you make a life with. Being with me is like falling in love with a forest fire.” I’d rolled toward him. “So go ahead,” I’d said. “I dare you. Burn me up.”
So here I was, a year later, sitting in the ashes. Would he even remember that this was my birthday? And if he did, wherever he was, would he care?
Devi Das dug his elbow into my side. Everyone in the room was looking at me expectantly. Saraswati’s turquoise eyes drilled into me.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t quite catch that.”
“I asked, and what about you? What is the question that has brought you here? And what is the story playing in your mind that is so compelling that it takes you away from this unfolding moment?”
“Oh. Well.” Was I supposed to go up and kneel in front of her? I stood up, then sat down again. “I don’t know if you really want to hear my story.”
“Go ahead, beloved. Do not be afraid.”
If she calls me beloved again, I’m going to clock her. I stood up again. “Okay, here’s the deal. My life is a mess. I’m pregnant and I don’t have a partner. I’m trying to write a book, and it isn’t going very well, but if I don’t finish it I won’t have any money to support me and my baby.” To my horror, my voice was starting to quaver. “And frankly, all this talk about ‘I am not my thoughts’ isn’t helping very much. I mean, give me a break. If ‘I’ is just a concept, who’s going to write my book? Who’s going to pay the rent? Who’s going to take care of the baby?”
Saraswati shook her head. “Do you think it is you who is growing this baby inside you? Are you designing eyebrows, making bones, crafting intestines and eyes and brain? You do nothing—but a baby grows.
“It is the same with your book. It will be written. But no one will write it. The baby will be born, and mothering will happen. But let go of the idea that you are the mother, that you are the writer. Then you will be free.”
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Amanda, congratulations on your exciting news. After talking it over, Ishtar and I have decided that it will be fine for you to have the baby here at our house, although naturally it will increase your rent. We’ll have to figure out by how much. The baby won’t really count as a whole new person since it won’t have its own room. We could calculate it by weight, in which case a baby would be about a twentieth of an average adult; or we could do it by noise level, in which case it will probably be about six times a normal adult, unless we’re comparing it to the African drum teacher who lived there before you. I’ll think about it some more and let you know. P.S. Now that you’re a mother, will you be wanting life insurance?
“SARASWATI GOT enlightened just waiting for a bus,” a middle-aged German woman named Maya informed me and Devi Das that evening, at the potluck dinner she and her husband were hosting for Saraswati devotees. She was a tiny woman, with a perpetually startled face and blue eyes opened so wide that there was a little ring of white around the iris. She was on a six-week vacation from her job as a home health nurse specializing in rehabilitation after head and spinal cord injuries.
“Which bus was that?” I asked, hopefully. Holding my plate of rice salad in one hand, I looked around the room, which was full of people, most of whom I recognized from Saraswati’s satsang that morning: two Swedish girls with dreadlocks; a couple of surfers from L.A., who told me they’d first met Saraswati at a satsang at a yoga studio in Hollywood.
“The bus was late, and Saraswati was getting more and more stressed and impatient,” Maya’s husband chimed in, ignoring my question. He was a philosophy professor on sabbatical from a university in Berlin, with a mane of reddish-blond hair, a bushy beard, and a booming voice. He had introduced himself as Siddhartha, but Maya sometimes slipped and called him Hans. “Her impatience was like a vice, clamping down on her. Then, suddenly, she heard a voice saying in her head, ‘Where is it you think you are going? You are always right here.’ And the world dissolved into light and joy, which has never abated.”
Across the room, a few people had pulled out guitars and were beginning to strum Sanskrit chants and Beatles songs. A few more chimed in on tablas and shakers. “Arunachala Shiva,” they sang, passing a joint from hand to hand. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night…”
“Actually, it wasn’t an ordinary bus,” Maya corrected Siddhartha. “It was a limo. She usually says ‘bus,’ though. It makes the experience more accessible for ordinary people.”
For the next hour, Maya and Siddhartha regaled me and Devi Das with enlightenment stories: the Zen master who got enlightened by hearing a grain of rice drop to the bottom of a pot. The Indian schoolboy who realized his true Self while contemplating his own death.
During all my time researching a book on enlightenment, this was the first time I’d heard anyone use the word so casually. The yoga students were more comfortable talking about the nuts and bolts of the body: the state of their psoas muscles, the alignment of their lumbar vertebrae, the precise muscles that gripped in their pelvises when they tipped into a forward bend. The Buddhists had droned on about sensations, emotions, and thoughts, putting each present moment, no matter how tedious, under the microscope until it fractured into an explosion of microscopic details. Sri Satyaji had mainly been obsessed with controlling the impulse to experience anything pleasurable. Sure, enlightenment was supposed to be the brass ring that everyone was grabbing at. But it had always seemed kind of tacky to talk about it too much, like admitting you fast-forwarded through an artsy French film just get to the sex scenes.
But the Saraswati devotees weren’t afraid of trotting their spiritual ambitions right out in the open for everyone to look at. In their view, enlightenment was highly contagious, like Ebola, and they could get it just by being in the presence of someone who had it. I started to feel my spirits lifting. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it’s possible. I just have to find the right teacher. Maybe my book won’t be such a disaster, after all. And maybe with an enlightened mother, my baby won’t even miss having a father.
“So you really think enlightenment is possible for anyone?” I asked. “Even for someone like me?”
“You already are enlightened!” Siddhartha assured me. “You just have to realize that fact.”
He leaned back and put the tips of his fingertips together. In the corner, an elderly Italian man stuck two pieces of lit incense into his tangle of gray hair, flung off his orange robes, and began to dance in his boxer shorts.
Fax from: Mom
To: Amanda
Darling, I am just remembering this day 30 years ago, when you arrived and destroyed my life as I knew it. Happy birthday!
THE MORNING OF my thirtieth birthday, I walked up the mountain, up a red stone-cobbled path, to sit in the cave where the ashram guru had lived for seventeen years in God-intoxicated solitude. He’d eaten one meal a day, I’d read; he had sat for hours staring unblinking into the sun and into his own Self. The sadhu who lived there before him had meditated so deeply that he had spontaneously combusted into a pile of ashes.
It was hot, and I’d forgotten my hat; I could feel my cheeks scorching. Great, now I had a sunburn on top of a pimple so big a sadhu could live inside it. From outside the cave, I could see the town sprawled out below me, with the spires of the ancient Shiva temple rising out of a haze of smog. Inside, it was hot and airless. The cave was about fourteen feet in diameter, with a smooth black marble floor. No one else was there. On the altar, candles flickered next to a sculpted red replica of Mount Arunachala. I sat down and closed my eyes to meditate. The baby rolled inside me.
“Erase the thought of me, of mine,” Saraswati’s voice admonished me in my head. I was sure that if I’d mentioned my birthday to Devi Das, he would have celebrated with me. But for some perverse reason, I’d avoided telling him. It was as if I’d wanted to guarantee I would feel as miserably alone as I truly was. Sweat dripped down my ribs. I wished I could combust into a pile of ashes; surely it would be better than remaining as I was. I am not my thoughts. I am not the stories I tell about myself. Then who am I? If this was what “already enlightened” looked like, I was in trouble.
“Amanda?” said a voice at the entrance to the cave. I opened my eyes and looked up.
Tom was standing silhouetted in the sunlight. He was wearing khaki shorts, a yellow polo shirt, and sunglasses; he was carrying a daypack. He looked like the cover of a J.Crew catalog.
“Lori told me what was going on with you. I got on a plane a week later.” He stepped closer and held out his arms. “Happy birthday. Can I take you out to dinner?”
Who you are is already on the other shore, already free, already the source of all wisdom, clarity, and beauty. Who you are is what all is, stillness itself.
—Gangaji (1942–)
CHAPTER 21
TO ENLIGHTENMENT.” Tom raised his wineglass.
“I’ll drink to that.” I clicked it with my tumbler of apple juice.
I was sitting across from Tom at a little vegetarian restaurant in the fanciest hotel in town. I’d spent the afternoon in the ayurvedic spa downstairs, getting a haircut, a pedicure, and a massage with warm sesame oil—the birthday treat he’d insisted on. I’d taken a long nap in the room he’d booked for me, right next door to his, then put on the maternity outfit he’d brought—a silk pant suit that was the cleanest thing that had touched my skin in months. My blow-dried hair flew around my face in a soft cloud.
“You look fabulous,” said Tom. The weird thing was, I could tell that he meant it. I smiled back at him happily. “So do you.” It was such a relief to see a guy who wasn’t wearing ripped jeans or a lungi. I felt like there was solid ground under my feet for the first time in months. I was remembering what I found so appealing about being with Tom: When I was with him, I could relax a certain vigilance that I carried with me almost all the time, a sense of being braced against some unknown
threat that might appear from any direction. Tom had kept me safe in a fortress of kitchen appliances and digital media systems and matching towel sets. It had felt like a trap, back then. But now it felt as if an apartment with a coffee table and matching end tables might just keep me from slipping into the void.
I studied the menu, which looked like it had been lifted from a California café. Pasta with pesto, corn chowder, fettuccine with mushrooms—I tried not to drool too obviously. I told Tom what I wanted, and he ordered for both of us when the waiter came—a habit that had always annoyed me before. But now it was a soothing buffer between me and the rest of the world.
“So I hear you bought a house!” I reached for a crust of baguette and dipped it into olive oil. “Things must be going well.”
He nodded. “Apple picked up the last piece of software I designed and is using it as a training module for all their new salespeople. Want to see the house that Mac built?”
He pulled out his Treo and showed me pictures: a wraparound redwood deck overlooking the ocean. A master suite with floor to ceiling windows. A kitchen with acres of granite counters, miles of stainless steel appliances. The refrigerator alone looked big enough to house an Indian family.