On first glance, this seems a nearly impossible task. Control your thoughts? Instead of the other way around? But imagine if you could? This is not about repression or denial. Repression and denial set up elaborate games to pretend that negative thoughts and feelings are not occurring. What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then—with great forgiveness and fortitude—dismissing them. This is a practice that fits hand-in-glove with any psychological work you do during therapy. You can use the shrink’s office to understand why you have these destructive thoughts in the first place; you can use spiritual exercises to help overcome them. It’s a sacrifice to let them go, of course. It’s a loss of old habits, comforting old grudges and familiar vignettes. Of course this all takes practice and effort. It’s not a teaching that you can hear once and then expect to master immediately. It’s constant vigilance and I want to do it. I need to do it, for my strength. Devo farmi le ossa is how they say it in Italian. “I need to make my bones.”
So I’ve started being vigilant about watching my thoughts all day, and monitoring them. I repeat this vow about 700 times a day: “I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.” Every time a diminishing thought arises, I repeat the vow. I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore. The first time I heard myself say this, my inner ear perked up at the word “harbor,” which is a noun as well as a verb. A harbor, of course, is a place of refuge, a port of entry. I pictured the harbor of my mind—a little beat-up, perhaps, a little storm-worn, but well situated and with a nice depth. The harbor of my mind is an open bay, the only access to the island of my Self (which is a young and volcanic island, yes, but fertile and promising). This island has been through some wars, it is true, but it is now committed to peace, under a new leader (me) who has instituted new policies to protect the place. And now—let the word go out across the seven seas—there are much, much stricter laws on the books about who may enter this harbor.
You may not come here anymore with your hard and abusive thoughts, with your plague ships of thoughts, with your slave ships of thoughts, with your warships of thoughts—all these will be turned away. Likewise, any thoughts that are filled with angry or starving exiles, with malcontents and pamphleteers, mutineers and violent assassins, desperate prostitutes, pimps and seditious stowaways—you may not come here anymore, either. Cannibalistic thoughts, for obvious reasons, will no longer be received. Even missionaries will be screened carefully, for sincerity. This is a peaceful harbor, the entryway to a fine and proud island that is only now beginning to cultivate tranquillity. If you can abide by these new laws, my dear thoughts, then you are welcome in my mind—otherwise, I shall turn you all back toward the sea from whence you came.
That is my mission, and it will never end.
59
I’ve made good friends with this seventeen-year-old Indian girl named Tulsi. She works with me scrubbing the temple floors every day. Every evening we take a walk through the gardens of the Ashram together and talk about God and hip-hop music, two subjects for which Tulsi feels equivalent devotion. Tulsi is just about the cutest little bookworm of an Indian girl you ever saw, even cuter since one lens of her “specs” (as she calls her eye-glasses) broke last week in a cartoonish spiderweb design, which hasn’t stopped her from wearing them. Tulsi is so many interesting and foreign things to me at once—a teenager, a tomboy, an Indian girl, a rebel in her family, a soul who is so crazy about God that it’s almost like she’s got a schoolgirl crush on Him. She also speaks a delightful, lilting English—the kind of English you can find only in India—which includes such colonial words as “splendid!” and “nonsense!” and sometimes produces eloquent sentences like: “It is beneficial to walk on the grass in the morning when the dew has already been accumulated, for it lowers naturally and pleasantly the body’s temperature.” When I told her once that I was going to Mumbai for the day, Tulsi said, “Please stand carefully, as you will find there are many speeding buses everywhere.”
She’s exactly half my age, and practically half my size.
Tulsi and I have been talking a lot about marriage lately during our walks. Soon she will turn eighteen, and this is the age when she will be regarded as a legitimate marriage prospect. It will happen like this—after her eighteenth birthday, she will be required to attend family weddings dressed in a sari, signaling her womanhood. Some nice Amma (“Aunty”) will come and sit beside her, start asking questions and getting to know her: “How old are you? What’s your family background? What does your father do? What universities are you applying to? What are your interests? When is your birthday?” Next thing you know, Tulsi’s dad will get a big envelope in the mail with a photo of this woman’s grandson who is studying computer sciences in Delhi, along with the boy’s astrology charts and his university grades and the inevitable question, “Would your daughter care to marry him?”
Tulsi says, “It sucks.”
But it means so much to the family, to see their children wedded off successfully. Tulsi has an aunt who just shaved her head as a gesture of thanks to God because her oldest daughter—at the Jurassic age of twenty-eight—finally got married. And this was a difficult girl to marry off, too; she had a lot of strikes against her. I asked Tulsi what makes an Indian girl difficult to marry off, and she said there are any number of reasons.
“If she has a bad horoscope. If she’s too old. If her skin is too dark. If she’s too educated and you can’t find a man with a higher position than hers, and this is a widespread problem these days because a woman cannot be more educated than her husband. Or if she’s had an affair with someone and the whole community knows about it, oh, it would be quite difficult to find a husband after that . . .”
I quickly ran through the list, trying to see how marriageable I would appear in Indian society. I don’t know whether my horoscope is good or bad, but I’m definitely too old and I’m way too educated, and my morals have been publicly demonstrated to be quite tarnished . . . I’m not a very appealing prospect. At least my skin is fair. I have only this in my favor.
Tulsi had to go to another cousin’s wedding last week, and she was saying (in very un-Indian fashion) how much she hates weddings. All that dancing and gossip. All that dressing up. She would rather be at the Ashram scrubbing floors and meditating. Nobody else in her family can understand this; her devotion to God is way beyond anything they consider normal. Tulsi said, “In my family, they have already given up on me as too different. I have established a reputation for being someone who, if you tell her to do one thing, will almost certainly do the other. I also have a temper. And I’m not dedicated to my studies, except that now I will be, because now I’m going to college and I can decide for myself what I’m interested in. I want to study psychology, just as our Guru did when she attended college. I’m considered a difficult girl. I have a reputation for needing to be told a good reason to do something before I will do it. My mother understands this about me and always tries to give good reasons, but my father doesn’t. He gives reasons, but I don’t think they’re good enough. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing in my family because I don’t resemble them at all.”
Tulsi’s cousin who got married last week is only twenty-one, and her older sister is next on the marriage list at age twenty, which means there will be huge pressure after that for Tulsi herself to find a husband. I asked her if she wanted to ever get married and she said:
“Noooooooooooooooooooooo . . .”
. . . and the word drew out longer than the sunset we were watching over the gardens.
“I want to roam!” she said. “Like you.”
“You know, Tulsi, I couldn’t always roam like this. I was married once.”
She frowned at me through her cracked specs, studying me with a quizzical look, almost as if I’d just told her I’d once been a brunette and she was trying to imagine it. In the end, she pronounced: “You, married? I cannot picture this.”
r /> “But it’s true—I was.”
“Are you the one who ended the marriage?”
“Yes.”
She said, “I think it’s most commendable that you ended your marriage. You seem splendidly happy now. But as for me—how did I get here? Why was I born an Indian girl? It’s outrageous! Why did I come into this family? Why must I attend so many weddings?”
Then Tulsi ran around in a frustrated circle, shouting (quite loudly for Ashram standards): “I want to live in Hawaii!!!”
60
Richard from Texas was married once, too. He had two sons, both of whom are grown men now, both close to their dad. Sometimes Richard mentions his ex-wife in some anecdote or other, and he always seems to speak of her with fondness. I get a bit envious whenever I hear this, imagining how lucky Richard is to still be friends with his former spouse, even after separating. This is an odd side effect of my terrible divorce; whenever I hear of couples splitting amicably, I get jealous. It’s worse than that—I’ve actually come to think that it’s really romantic when a marriage ends civilly. Like, “Aw . . . how sweet . . . they must’ve really loved each other . . .”
So I asked Richard one day about it. I said, “It seems like you have fond feelings toward your ex-wife. Are you two still close?”
“Nah,” he said casually. “She thinks I changed my name to Motherfucker.”
Richard’s lack of concern about this impressed me. My own ex-spouse happens to think I changed my name too, and it breaks my heart. One of the hardest things about this divorce was the fact that my ex-husband never forgave me for leaving, that it didn’t matter how many bushels of apologies or explanations I laid at his feet, how much blame I assumed, or how many assets or acts of contrition I was willing to offer him in exchange for departing—he certainly was never going to congratulate me and say, “Hey, I was so impressed with your generosity and honesty and I just want to tell you it’s been a great pleasure being divorced by you.” No. I was unredeemable. And this unredeemed dark hole was still inside me. Even in moments of happiness and excitement (especially in moments of happiness and excitement) I could never forget it for long. I am still hated by him. And that felt like it would never change, never release.
I was talking about all this one day with my friends at the Ashram—the newest member of whom is a plumber from New Zealand, a guy I’d met because he’d heard I was a writer and he sought me out to tell me that he was one, too. He’s a poet who had recently published a terrific memoir in New Zealand called A Plumber’s Progress about his own spiritual journey. The plumber/poet from New Zealand, Richard from Texas, the Irish dairy farmer, Tulsi the Indian teenage tomboy and Vivian, an older woman with wispy white hair and incandescently humorous eyes (who used to be a nun in South Africa)—this was my circle of close friends here, a most vibrant crowd of characters whom I never would have expected to meet at an Ashram in India.
So, during lunch one day, we were all having this conversation together about marriage, and the plumber/poet from New Zealand said, “I see marriage as an operation that sews two people together, and divorce is a kind of amputation that can take a long time to heal. The longer you were married, or the rougher the amputation, the harder it is to recover.”
Which would explain the postdivorce, postamputation sensations I’ve had for a few years now, of still swinging that phantom limb around, constantly knocking stuff off the shelves.
Richard from Texas was wondering if I was planning on allowing my ex-husband to dictate for the rest of my life how I felt about myself, and I said I wasn’t too sure about that, actually—so far, my ex still seemed to have a pretty strong vote, and to be honest I was still halfway waiting for the man to forgive me, to release me and allow me to go forth in peace.
The dairy farmer from Ireland observed, “Waiting for that day to arrive is not exactly a rational use of your time.”
“What can I say, guys? I do a lot with guilt. Kind of like the way other women do a lot with beige.”
The former Catholic nun (who oughtta know about guilt, after all) wouldn’t hear of it. “Guilt’s just your ego’s way of tricking you into thinking that you’re making moral progress. Don’t fall for it, my dear.”
“What I hate about the way my marriage ended,” I said, “is that it’s so unresolved. It’s just an open wound that never goes away.”
“If you insist,” said Richard. “If that’s how you’ve decided to think about it, don’t let me spoil your party.”
“One of these days this has to end,” I said. “I just wish I knew how.”
When lunch ended, the plumber/poet from New Zealand slipped me a note. It said to meet him after dinner; he wanted to show me something. So after dinner that night I met him over by the meditation caves, and he told me to follow him, that he had a gift for me. He walked me across the Ashram, then led me to a building I’d never been inside before, unlocked a door and took me up a back set of stairs. He knew of this place, I guessed, because he fixes all the air-conditioning units, and some of them are located up there. At the top of the stairs there was a door which he had to unlock with a combination; he did this swiftly, from memory. Then we were up on a gorgeous rooftop, tiled in ceramic chips that glittered in the evening twilight like the bottom of a reflecting pool. He took me across that roof to a little tower, a minaret, really, and showed me another narrow set of stairs, leading to the tippity-top of the tower. He pointed to the tower and said, “I’m going to leave you now. You’re going to go up there. Stay up there until it’s finished.”
“Until what’s finished?” I asked.
The plumber just smiled, handed me a flashlight, “for getting down safely when it’s over,” and also handed me a folded piece of paper. Then he left.
I climbed to the top of the tower. I was now standing at the tallest place in the Ashram, with a view overlooking the entirety of this river valley in India. Mountains and farmland stretched out as far as I could see. I had a feeling this was not a place students were normally allowed to hang out, but it was so lovely up there. Maybe this is where my Guru watches the sun go down, when she’s in residence here. And the sun was going down right now. The breeze was warm. I unfolded the piece of paper the plumber/poet had given me.
He had typed:
INSTRUCTIONS FOR FREEDOM
1. Life’s metaphors are God’s instructions.
2. You have just climbed up and above the roof. There is nothing between you and the Infinite. Now, let go.
3. The day is ending. It’s time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, let go.
4. Your wish for resolution was a prayer. Your being here is God’s response. Let go, and watch the stars come out—on the outside and on the inside.
5. With all your heart, ask for grace, and let go.
6. With all your heart, forgive him, FORGIVE YOURSELF, and let him go.
7. Let your intention be freedom from useless suffering. Then, let go.
8. Watch the heat of day pass into the cool night. Let go.
9. When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.
10. When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.
For the first few minutes, I couldn’t stop laughing. I could see over the whole valley, over the umbrella of the mango trees, and the wind was blowing my hair around like a flag. I watched the sun go down, and then I lay down on my back and watched the stars come out. I sang a small little prayer in Sanskrit, and repeated it every time I saw a new star emerge in the darkening sky, almost like I was calling forth the stars, but then they started popping out too fast and I couldn’t keep up with them. Soon the whole sky was a glitzy show of stars. The only thing between me and God was . . . nothing.
Then I shut my eyes and I said, “Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender.”
What I had wanted for so
long was to have an actual conversation with my ex-husband, but this was obviously never going to happen. What I had been craving was a resolution, a peace summit, from which we could emerge with a united understanding of what had occurred in our marriage, and a mutual forgiveness for the ugliness of our divorce. But months of counseling and mediation had only made us more divided and locked our positions solid, turning us into two people who were absolutely incapable of giving each other any release. Yet it’s what we both needed, I was sure of it. And I was sure of this, too—that the rules of transcendence insist that you will not advance even one inch closer to divinity as long as you cling to even one last seductive thread of blame. As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff of it is bad for you. I mean, what kind of prayer is this to imbibe—“Give us this day our daily grudge”? You might just as well hang it up and kiss God good-bye if you really need to keep blaming somebody else for your own life’s limitations. So what I asked of God that night on the Ashram roof was—given the reality that I would probably never speak to my ex-husband again—might there be some level upon which we could communicate? Some level on which we could forgive?
I lay up there, high above the world, and I was all alone. I dropped into meditation and waited to be told what to do. I don’t know how many minutes or hours passed before I knew what to do. I realized I’d been thinking about all this too literally. I’d been wanting to talk to my ex-husband? So talk to him. Talk to him right now. I’d been waiting to be offered forgiveness? Offer it up personally, then. Right now. I thought of how many people go to their graves unforgiven and unforgiving. I thought of how many people have had siblings or friends or children or lovers disappear from their lives before precious words of clemency or absolution could be passed along. How do the survivors of terminated relationships ever endure the pain of unfinished business? From that place of meditation, I found the answer—you can finish the business yourself, from within yourself. It’s not only possible, it’s essential.