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 myself every 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 tim
e 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 was heaven, 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 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.
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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 norma
l 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.