NEVER TO RETURN:
A MODERN QUEST FOR ETERNAL TRUTH
A Multimedia Spiritual Adventure Memoir
by Sharon Janis
The soul is never born,
nor does it die at any time.
Nor, having been, will it ever cease to exist.
It is unborn, eternal, indestructible and everlasting.
– THE BHAGAVAD GITA
Chapter Twenty
HOW COULD HE BE GONE?
ACCORDING TO ANCIENT INDIAN PHILOSOPHERS, when a free soul leaves this world, it is not just called a death. That would be like calling the valedictorian cum laude just another student. Their death is called mahasamadhi, the great, final absorption. They get to move on to college, whereas most of us will be returning back to this world for another year of high school, or perhaps another stint in detention hall!
With mahasamadhi, an individual soul breaks free from the walls of space and time. Freed from the ropes of illusory self-identification, the soul merges with its Beloved. No longer is the soul bound to this post of the physical body, with all of its sensory inputs and mental constructions. The karmic strings are cut, and a kind of graduation takes place.
I am created from the ecstasy of love and
when I die, my essence will be released
like the scent of crushed rose petals.– RUMI (this is part of the poem written on Rumi's tombstone)
October 2nd, 1982, was one of those days when I woke up thinking it was going to be just another day, but instead it became a day I will never forget. My teacher had been in India for nearly a year and was expected back in New York the following summer.
The manager and I had been having an ongoing battle. Joe wanted to show movies to the residents, while I felt it was not appropriate. If someone wanted to see a movie, they could watch it at a theater in the nearby town. To me, this ashram was a place to focus on the eternal, to break free of illusion. And what was a movie if not illusion? Joe and I had gone back and forth on this many times, always ending with no movie being shown. Admittedly, I was a little smug about my victory.
However, one week earlier Joe had called and told me that on this day, I was to show the movie "Harold and Maude" after lunch. "Don't argue about it. Don't try to discuss it. We are showing the movie, and that is final."
"Harold and Maude" was a strange choice for an ashram movie, since it is a dark comedy dealing with a young man's obsession with death. He keeps faking his own gory death, and then falls in love with a 70-year-old woman. This was the only movie we had in the video department. I don't remember how we had acquired the copy, but somehow it was there, alone on the movie shelf.
I had no choice but to show it. Joe was the manager, after all, and he was pulling rank on me. So after lunch, I asked Mark, a fellow who helped out in the video department, to help me set up the big screen projector. It was a particularly beautiful day outside. The next six months would be filled with freezing temperatures, snow, sleet and ice. Why show a movie after lunch, when this might be the last day we'd have to enjoy the outdoors? I grumbled on about this while setting up the screen.
Then, something hit me. I was overcome by a feeling of exhaustion so overpowering that I literally could not go on. I had to go to my room and lie down. I told Mark that we were not going to show the movie.
"But Joe said. . . ."
"It doesn't matter," I told him. "We are not going to show it, and I have to go lie down right now."
I went to bed and felt myself being carried into swirling waves of consciousness that spun my being around in circles, like water moving down a drain. I remained semiconscious for a while, watching the visual energy patterns. Then the whirlpool overtook my conscious awareness, and poured me into deeper spaces, from which I could no longer maintain memory-based awareness. I stayed in this sleeplike state for two hours.
Upon awakening, I headed over to the video room to continue my work. Clearly, I was going to get in trouble for having refused, once again, to show the movie. But I was still in a groggy and dazed space, not yet worried about the repercussions ahead. As I entered the alcove outside my office, there was music coming from one of the meditation halls. This confused me, because it was the middle of the afternoon. We never had chanting programs scheduled during that time. I listened closely. People were chanting our teacher's name.
I froze.
Several months earlier, we had asked for permission to sing our teacher's name during chants. He had been in India for nearly a year, and we missed him.
But the reply came back that we were not to sing our teacher's name as a chant until he leaves his body. It was only to be sung after his death.
As I walked into the alcove, still woozy after the strange experience of having my consciousness sucked into that deep, unconscious space, I heard the words of the chant being sung in the meditation hall. It was his name.
I sat down on the floor as the implication hit me. Tears welled up, and my heart broke open. My teacher had left this world. I would never see him again. I remembered our communion as he left one year before. It truly was the last time I would ever see him.
Shocked, I went into my office and played one of his videotapes. There he was, alive as ever on the screen, talking and laughing, walking and singing. How could I be so sad when he was still right in front of me? It was only the thought that he'd left that was making me feel a loss. Nothing else had changed. Today was the same as yesterday. I could still feel him in the air.
I pondered what had happened during those two hours while I slept. What was that strange swirling mass of consciousness? Where did I go? I wondered if I had been given a glimpse into the death experience itself, this flow into another dimension. Or maybe I’d attended a bon voyage party on an astral plane. I really didn't know, but do know one thing. I will be forever grateful that we didn't show "Harold and Maude" on that holy day.
On to
Chapter
Twenty-One
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