by Sharon Janis
Part of the Night Lotus Productions multimedia spiritual retreat
Fare forward,
you who think you are voyaging.
You are not those who saw the harbor receding,
or those who will disembark.
– T.S. ELIOT
Chapter Ten
MAGICAL MEETING
A FEW MONTHS LATER came an opportunity for me to meet the swami in person. There was going to be a “Health and Healing” workshop in the upstate New York monastery, and I was going. Beneath my lighthearted anticipation played a soft note of apprehension. I had been going to chants and programs at the Ann Arbor meditation center for several months. During that time, I'd developed quite a friendly relationship with this teacher through the big bright picture in front of the hall. It is one thing to relate to somebody through a photo, and quite another to meet them in person.
But mainly, I was thrilled and excited. Once again I was moving into the unknown, taking a leap off the cliff of the ordinary. Who would ever have thought someone like me would be making a pilgrimage to meet an Indian guru?
It was a twelve-hour drive to New York. I traveled with my professor, his wife, and another student. We spoke a bit here and there about when to stop for gas or change drivers, but for the most part we drove quietly. It was a very yogic way to begin the pilgrimage, sitting still for twelve hours in silence.
We arrived just in time for the evening program. I dropped my suitcase off in the dorm room, and made my way to the meditation hall. My professor and his wife were going to introduce me to the teacher in what was called a darshan line of greeting. I became more excited as the moment of meeting came near. I expected that the swami would be happy to see me. After all, I had come from so far to see him, and had heard about how he was filled with pure and unconditional love for everyone.
We moved forward slowly in the line of greeting, until finally I could see his face. He looked very different, and not quite as handsome as the photo I had come to relate to. I thought he looked better with the beard. Yet, there was a brilliant glow of energy around him, an intense visual and kinesthetic brightness that went beyond what I had perceived from his photo.
The swami was seated in a slightly elevated chair as the line of people came forward to bow their heads in front of him. While brushing them gently on the head or back with a big wand of peacock feathers, the swami would interact with up to four to five people at any given time. My professor, his wife, and I knelt down in front of the swami, and my professor introduced me to him as a student from Ann Arbor.
A beautiful Indian woman translated his words into Hindi. The swami looked at me with a very serious face, and grunted. No smile, no hug, no "Where have you been, O great disciple?" Just a serious look and a grunt. My professor and his wife got up to leave, and I realized that the meeting was over.
I began to walk away disappointed, when a bolt of energy shot through my body. At first, I thought I was angry. "How could he snub me like that!" I had never felt this kind of force in my body before. The closest label my mind could create for the sensation was the adrenaline rush of being really angry, and so it pinned that fabricated anger on the most obvious target.
I ran out of the hall and practically flew up to my room. Nobody else was there. I jumped onto an empty bunk and plopped down on my stomach. As soon as I hit the mattress, my consciousness became immediately and deeply focused inside. There, I broke through into new levels of awareness.
These inner spaces were different from the places I had tapped into during my earlier self-hypnosis-style explorations. These were more active, and more colorful. A series of visual images surfaced in my awareness, playing out like a dream, except for the minor detail that I was wide awake. This was a new experience for me. I had never hallucinated with such vivid visions, even when taking drugs as a teenager.
At one point, I was shocked by images of lizards with big scary teeth, glaring at me. With this image came another big rush of energy. Lying there on my stomach, my arms and legs jerked up, totally out of my control. It was like the reflex action when a doctor hits your knee. My arms and legs continued to fly up and then come back down, filled with more energy each time.
You might think I would have been frightened by these bizarre experiences, but it seems my endorphins had kicked in. I was witnessing it all from a soothing and peaceful state. My brain's consistency-making mechanisms had stepped in to save the day.
Our minds have a latticework of defense mechanisms in place to keep us from having to confront the discomfort of new information that might disrupt our ever-nebulous sense of personal control. When an event happens for which we have no pre-established context of understanding, our minds will often flip into "make it okay" mode and either ignore or construe some reason for the incongruous information. My body was doing things it had never done before, and I didn't even think anything was strange. My mind interpreted the experience as more or less ordinary, just as the woman in my hypnosis class more than a decade earlier had convinced herself that jumping up and down like a gorilla was normal behavior.
After a half-hour of this inner carnival ride, I went back downstairs to the big meditation hall to hear the swami's lecture. I no longer felt angry or snubbed. Instead, I wanted to know more about this man who's energy had affected me so strongly.
The swami's voice was melodic, his manner jovial. Every now and then he would break into a deep, growling chuckle. I couldn't help but smile. He was so wonderfully animated. As he spoke, my attention was drawn to his hand movements. There was something about the way he moved his hands that intrigued me. He appeared so graceful and free. It was almost as though his hands were dancing. Sitting there amidst hundreds of people, I began to imitate his hand movements. It's not that I thought about it or intended to imitate the swami. In fact, I was feeling a little embarrassed about my strange behavior. Fortunately, the audience around me was intently focused on watching him, or I'm sure they would have thought I was odd. I became puppet-like, spontaneously reflecting the swami's movements. My hands were moving as though I were in the middle of an animated conversation.
Finally, I thought, "This is ridiculous. What am I doing?" I made myself stop imitating him, and put my hands in my lap.
He put his hands in his lap.
I quickly moved my hands out to the sides. He moved his hands out to the sides. I was shocked. He wasn't even looking in my direction! This happened several more times, as I’d move my hands a certain way and watch as this swami moved his hands in a similar way. First I felt confused, then amused – he was playing with me!
The next evening I had an idea. I would make the swami interact with me by requesting a spiritual name. Most of the people involved with this path had received Indian names from him. First, it was considered a blessed gift to be given a name by this great saint. Then, there was the psychic element: What would this supposedly omniscient person name you? I thought a name request might at least start us off on some friendly conversation – hopefully more than a grunt!
I arrived at the front of the darshan line, and asked the swami for a name. He looked into my eyes for a moment, reached over to a little business card holder on his side table, and handed me the top card. It said, "Kumuda."
I couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed that this teacher had just pulled the top card at random. I'd expected him to take a good, careful look at my karmas or whatever and come up with a special, perfectly appropriate name on his own. Even I could have picked a card from the top of a stack! I had not yet grasped the concept that universal perfection can express even through apparently random circumstances. Later, I looked up the Sanskrit name, and discovered several meanings for the word Kumuda. Two of my favorites were "one who gladdens the earth" and "a night-blooming lotus flower that grows in mud without being sullied."
I thanked the swami for the name card and went back to my seat. As I sat down, the strangest thing happened. It was as though someone had inserted a big straw into me, blowing me up like a helium balloon. I felt my body getting bigger and bigger, really fast, and really big. I experienced myself expanding to fill the whole room, and kept expanding and growing, until I seemed to encompass the whole city, and then more. I knew this was impossible, yet I was experiencing it clearly – not in a dream state, but right here in the supposedly trustworthy waking state. The sensation felt normal and strange at the same time. I seemed to be in the wrong dimension. We're not supposed to do things like that here.
But again, I wasn't scared. Rather, the experience was ecstatic. It was extremely pleasurable to have so much energy inside me that I had to expand to contain it all.
It was interesting to see how quickly I was able to let go of everything I held dear – my very conceptual structures of reality – as soon as this new experience came into the picture. No longer was I just a person sitting there in this meditation hall. I was now an energy field, expanding far beyond my body. Thus ended day two of my visit.
On the third and final night, I went up to see the swami one last time. Ever the optimist, I hoped we would be old friends by now. Surely, he would be aware of all the amazing breakthroughs I had been experiencing. Clearly, they were a consequence of being in his presence. I reached his seat, knelt, bowed my head, and looked up. The swami was looking everywhere but at me. I waited for a few moments, then gave up and walked away, disappointed by the lack of attention, but still feeling a tangible, warm vibration invigorating my body.
With each step, I started getting more upset. We were scheduled to leave the next morning. This might be the last time I would ever see the swami in my life. Why hadn't he at least connected with me to say good-bye?
I sat down near the back of the hall and felt bad – not as an adjective, but a noun. I felt myself feeling bad, without actually quite feeling bad. I began to experience the whole set of electrochemical and hormonal patterns that create the sensation of feeling upset and abandoned. I was able to watch objectively as my body synthesized the necessary ingredients for this "rejection soup" that I had cooked up so many times before. I watched myself preparing to, and then feeling bad. It took the subjective experience to a completely new level, where I was witnessing the emotions without being stuck in them. The psychophysical factory was synthesizing this recipe of rejection, while I watched from an inner balcony.
Then, a strong force began to spiral up my body. From my detached perspective, I could see that this energy was the pattern of rejection emotion. It was the archetype, the root from which so many painful branches had flowered and faded away throughout my life.
Through the swirling energy, I began to see face after face of people who had abandoned or rejected me from childhood on. A montage of images moved across the screen of my mind, opening old pockets of repressed emotional energy that had been trapped inside the memories. I must have gone through years of psychotherapy in ten minutes, becoming aware of various people and painful experiences that I had long ago forgotten. Some individual faces were prominent, but the experience was essentially an indistinguishable mass of associated images and feelings spiraling up my body. I was shaking with deep emotion. It felt as though every system in my body had been activated.
Had I not been in a room with hundreds of people, I might have burst out sobbing with the intensity of grief energy that was moving through me. Yet I sat quietly, with streams and rivers of tears pouring out of my eyes. Not a few drops here and there, but the holy bath of deephearted tears.
It was as though a "karmic Roto-Rooter" had been sent to purge my system of this mass of psychic tissue that had grown inside me through the years. The vine of childhood rejection had wrapped itself around the events of my life, coloring them with its painful flowers. Now it was being pulled out by the root.
Eventually, the emotional force began to subside, and I opened my eyes. There was the swami, still seated in his chair at the front of the hall, with a long line of people waiting to greet him. I felt myself yelling to him with my mind, "What are you doing to me!?!"
To my utter amazement, he began to disappear. I could see the lines of the chair's upholstery through the image of his body. My eyes opened wide. As the swami completely disappeared, a bright blue circular flame formed in his place. It became a big, swirling, blue ball of flame. It was such a bright blue, that it almost looked like a cartoon. I watched this extraordinary sight for some time.
After an hour or so, the program ended and I walked back up to my room. All night long my body and mind were pulsing with the powerful vibrations of all that had just happened.
The next morning, my car-mates and I met in front of the main entrance. As we began to put our suitcases into the trunk, I looked up and saw the swami walking directly toward us from across the street. What a surprise! His orange robes shimmered in the rising sunlight as he returned from his morning walk. One woman who had just arrived flew into his arms with a big hug. I felt a twinge of sadness that I could never hug him like that – I was way too shy.
The swami continued walking toward us and stopped as he reached the front of our car. He stood right in front of me and looked into my eyes. I looked back at him with a breathless innocence. Right there, he gave me the big, beautiful smile of recognition I had been longing for, and he waved at me. From three feet away, he waved. I smiled shyly and waved back.
Though the interaction only lasted a few moments, there was a sense that we had met one another on a deeper level. With this simple gesture, I felt that we silently accepted the respective roles of teacher and student. It was like a handshake. He agreed to guide me, and I agreed to learn. I would continue my life-journey on this path.
My teacher turned to go into the monastery, leaving me with a big, goofy smile on my face. As we began the drive home, my eyes gently closed. It felt as though I was being dragged into a deep pool of consciousness, like taking a bath in golden light that was more than just visual. It was like waves of golden bliss, folding me into the depths of consciousness as they caressed and hugged me. The smile remained on my face throughout the twelve-hour drive. Every now and then, I would “come up for air,” becoming aware of the car and the external world for a few moments through a thick molasses of peace. Then I'd be pulled under again into this pool of shimmering sweetness.
On to
Chapter
Eleven
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