Mistakes on the Path

MJ PRESS

HEBDEN BRIDGE, UK.

This is the story of one woman’s experience in a remarkable milieu. It is wholly subjective, and is not meant to be a definitive history. This is the way it was for me; for someone else, any particular event might have been seen differently. Everyone has her/his own commune.

Any factual errors are mine.

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy. Other, brave people have allowed me to use their names.

I want my people to understand it absolutely that unless you become blissful on your own accord, unless your rose opens within your own being, you are just a commodity, just a thing, an object. Meditation reveals your subjectivity. Subjectivity is your consciousness, and your consciousness and its experience makes your life significant, meaningful, eternal, immortal, without any beginning and without any end. A celebration, moment-to-moment a dance.

~Osho, Yahoo! The Mystic Rose, CH 30, Q1

To become a wise old person, you must first be a foolish young one.

~traditional saying

Copyright © I Z K Ewing, 2019

Photos of Osho and his communes, quotes by Osho, © copyright Osho International Foundation.

All other photos are from author’s collection.

Osho’s words spoken directly to me are written from memory.

Not I, but the wind is a phrase from the first line of

Song of a Man Who Has Come Through, by D.H. Lawrence

Cover and interior design by Peggy Sands, Indigo Disegno

Cover photo and painting by author

Author photo on cover by Lucy Cartwright

ISBN 978-0-244-18970-9

Table of Contents

Introduction

A Mysterious Summons

Interlude: San Francisco

Soul Garden

Bouncy Castle

Cowboy Planet

Dipped in the World like a Frosty Cone

Soul Garden in Bloom

A Carnival Decade

Chaos

Healing

Not I, but the Wind

Appendix of Treasures

Books by Madhuri Z K Ewing

madhurijewel.com/books

Impassioned Cows By Moonlight (1975, as Katy Akin)

Love at Dancing Leaves: a Tantra Memoir (2010, as M. K. MacCrae)

More about the Moon (2014)

A Colorful Dessert of Flowers (2016)

The Poona Poems (2017)

To all of us, and all of Him.

Introduction

Ihave heard Osho say, Enlightenment isn’t of the Unknown. It is of the Unknowable. He added that it is helpful for people to try to describe it, even though they cannot succeed.

This, then, is my impossible task: to describe the atmosphere in which I spent thirty years of my life. In retrospect, I would say that the sometimes-grumpy mundanities of daily existence inevitably shrink things in memory: and so retrospection can’t really be accurate.

At the time, magic was the rule, the umbrella over us, the very air we breathed.

Sitting with Osho, or dancing in a great hall where he sat in a chair – we were in a different dimension than the usual. We were suddenly in a place where it was clearly obvious that Love is what things are really formed from; we were subsumed in a greater miracle, a harmonious, healed vibrancy not arrangeable by mere man. It was like being in a room where the whole vast range of the Himalaya had somehow managed to fit itself – impossibly tall, impossibly vast – and we were being shone on – poured through – by a lofty grace rich with joy.

We could only lift up our arms – .

I was a callow, scrawny, rather cynical child of twenty-one when I first went to India, in 1973. This is the story of how I faltered, and erred, and could not hear; and how, eventually, at long last, I stumbled on one or two understandings – with a bit more help, and in a very small way; particular ones Osho had tried to give me, decades before.

This book is a celebration of that most peculiar phenomenon: the-being-who-is-beyond-the-small-self; written by someone very wrapped up in her own world.

Osho told me to write this book; and gave me the title. It’s about the mistakes I made – in the light of a clear sharp empty love-sun; an elegant, spare, sophisticated and luxuriant Zen star.

It’s a bumpy ride.

1

A

Mysterious

Summons

A Mysterious Summons

1973 – 1974

An Aerogram Arrives

On a foggy spring morning I was downstairs on the sidewalk in front of the house, fishing in the mailbox, which was bolted to the wall beside the front steps.

There was a thin blue aerogram. I took it out, noting the squiggly, unfamiliar script printed on it. Carefully, I tore it open along the side, using my fingernail. Something fell out and down to the sidewalk. I bent over and picked it up – turned it right-side-up; looked at it.

It was a small photograph in black and white. A man, bearded, laughing, his mouth open, head back a little. His round head was partly bald, the hair that remained was long and dark.

Something happened inside my body. It was as if some energy entered through my middle and kept going till it touched my spine. Then it fell down into some deep, resonating area inside me. There was no escape from this picture. It had got to me, already. There it was. And my mind said: Why, he’s laughing! I haven’t laughed in… how long?

I took the aerogram back upstairs to show it to my mother. I enjoyed clopping up the two sets of stairs in my dramatic shoes, which made me feel agreeably leggy: I was dressed in thigh-hugging bell-bottom jeans (the bells much-widened by my own denim inserts), a snug, cropped t-shirt with horizontal stripes layered over a long-sleeved, scoop-necked t-shirt, and high platforms with ankle straps, in red and yellow leather, with stars sewn across the toe.

Our apartment was at the top of a stout, plain stucco house set right up close to its neighbors, on Missouri Street, on steep Potrero Hill in San Francisco. For $165 a month, my mother Virginia, little brother Andy and I, had each a room (the living room being one of them, allocated to Andy). There was a light, airy kitchen, and a little wooden back porch set on tall spindly legs, with a fabulous view over the bay, the Bay Bridge with its great swooping supports and spans, and an ever-shifting panoply of ships, sailboats, barges, tugs… the whole ponderous festivity of a busy port.

The letter was from my younger sister in India. She was not quite eighteen. She told us that she had been sitting waiting for the man in the picture to come into a room; he was going to give a talk. Then, she said, he walked through the door… and, I fell forward onto the floor… totally surrendering to him.

She said he had given her a new name: Ma Ananda Sarita, meaning ‘River of Bliss.’

What did this mean? Surrender? I could not fathom it, so I quickly put the whole notion aside. This did not sound like my stubborn, decisive, vulnerable, determined little sister. Or did it? I did not know. There were, I perceived, things I could not know about all this.

Sannyas magazines followed. Our mother read them with the interest born of her life’s desperation. I did not read them, after a glance or two.

Letters from Sarita

August 16, 1973

Dear Araminta,¹

Okay, it doesn’t matter how you approach India. Nothing can be known – only the coming – and this is good. Just being open to let India approach is good – it is enough.

As to differences between Tantra and EST – any comment I might make would either be too long or too short. I have not experienced EST and you have not known Bhagwan so there is no sameness and no difference, nothing to comment on.

I used to have a goal to live – that is why I ever did anything – to find life – to experience – something I could call, This is life, so I could say, Now I am alive. It was in tension I searched. It was as if a thorn was in my foot and in the blindness of pain I kept running over the earth – hoping the intensity of my run would release the thorn. It was driven further & further in, till finally I am forced to stop still and examine myself.

Now the world I was running through is spinning around like a hazy dream. And the goal also, and the search also. I feel a subtle goallessness kind of like delirious honey seeping through me. I don’t know. There is nothing to be known, just the emergence of all the hidden – the spring.

This thinking that you have to come to India, is a door also to nowness. Maybe now it is the right time to come if the thinking is intense. If it wants to be done then just do it totally and it is the ultimate now. Blocking is not totally flowing with what wants to be done, or needs to be done. Don’t listen to me. I’m just picking up words from the evening and putting them here. I don’t know what is said. But if what is said agrees with you then listening will perk up anyway.

Anyhow, I repeat these matters: Come in September – late Sept. is good. The 20th or so and make sure Mama comes in all her childishness and awe. For her it is the most important to come. Your way flows for you – she is afraid of her way. Let her take this jump. Also I might mention I don’t wear prints – shades of orange but not prints. They give me the same feeling meat & eggs do – most peculiar. Just a surge which must be followed; a sensation – a declining.

[...] Just a few days back I scrawled a letter to Mama in reply to one wherein she said she felt it was best I return. What she was saying I felt is that she is afraid to come. She wants to witness my madness before she plunges in.

Mama I can’t give you your own Eastern-ness. I can call you, that is all. You must plunge in to discover this in yourself. It is so wanting to be discovered. You have grown so much in this life. Your seeds have created a forest – your branches are vast and beautiful. But in the subtler depths there are so many roots – the roots of your life energy – the roots of your being – and you must discover these roots – the inner eyes. When the whole is realized then you can be at peace, just the wind passing through your branches, just your presence echoing silent existence.

Bhagwan be with you

Sarita

August 31, 1973

Dearest Katy²

Such a beautiful letter. Have mercy. My breasts are aching with love of you. Please come. Let us discover each other here. Let us know one another from the depths. Please come if only for a minute. All these accumulations and pleasures which inspire your wellbeing can be washed away in a second to be overwhelmed by the ocean of you. So much is here which cannot be explained. What I meant in that previous letter was that you are strong and you will hold yourself up. You are not afraid to recreate your universe. And Mama is scared to discover her universe. Thus Mama needs to come just to discover her universe. You need to come so you can discover there is no need to recreate your universe. All the beauty all the grace of the divine is waiting to be loosed from you. Hear me again and if you hear me, remember, it is you speaking. Come to the feet of the Master and see yourself just as you are. If you feel ripe for discovery, come.

India, our mother, contains many many secrets which are the roots of our existence and yet which we know nothing about. Fairy tales become more real here than any fact of science, because fairy tales are rooted in these cosmic secrets, these currents which guide us. The West is very shallow. It is so new and has forgotten that its dust contains ancestors, it has forgotten the mystery. It is an ignorant child seeking without knowing why or where. The sourcelessness and the dissolution, the eternity and the play of cosmos is all forgotten. The West is lost in its ego and yet the soul of the original source still pulses. But India knows the secrets and guards them well. You must be a true seeker to discover.

Katy dearest, your writing is rare and your very being is even more rare. So much will flow from you if you can see yourself as you are reflected in Bhagwan. I so long to meet both you and Mama at the funky little Bombay airport & take you into this magic realm… I don’t have a home but Bhagwan is here.

Bombay can appear funky like the Date St. House.³ In fact, India and Indians are like the Date St. House at a deeper level. It is a good realm to go exploring in – quite significant for us especially.

So don’t make any choice. Let the choicelessness make you…

Let the poet decide – let the poem of you carry you in its tide.

Sistersistersister

is it that we embrace or are we embraced?

Totally love

Sarita

Dynamic Meditation

My mother and I got out of my blue Mustang convertible in front of the church. There were rust holes all around the bottom of the car, from the salt sea air. It was my first car, the only one that I would ever own. It was as scruffy as every other dented San Francisco vehicle – parking on steep crowded hills is a guarantee of dents and dings. My boyfriend Herb had helped me get financing for the $500 it cost.

It was really Herb’s presence in my life that had given me courage and impetus to pretend, for a while, to be a citizen. After two years spent knocking around Europe having painful romantic and unromantic misadventures, being always broke, and writing a very great deal, I was trying to be an American. This was really just so that I could participate with Herb; to feel his warm, chuckling approval as we sat across from each other at dinner in some expensive restaurant. To sit beside him on the sofa at his house in the hills behind Berkeley, watching the Watergate trials, and derive some strange nourishment from this dry theater, just because he was warm and big and substantial next to me. Herb’s family were first-generation Russian Jewish immigrants, and his patriotism was frank and clear. I was going for a ride on this exotic river of something like normalcy… My family were radicals, and then, some of us, hippies. It was funny for me, diverting, to have a fashionable shag haircut, a rich, successful boyfriend. Herb had designed the computer system for the Trans-America Pyramid building, so prominent on the San Francisco skyline. He was also a professor of computer engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. We’d met at a dream workshop at his house. I was twenty then, he was thirty-nine, a tall, bluff man with a big rounded nose and prognathous jaw, tidy of habit, usually calm, often laughing.

But today brought a new experiment. My mother and I went down some steps and into the big basement of the church. (Coincidentally, it was the same church where she and my father had married, thirty-four years before.) We were greeted by Sushila, a plump, roly-poly woman with shiny cheeks and a frequent riff of rich mirth. We joined the handful of others who had come to experience Dynamic meditation. We were each given a blindfold; then Sushila explained, and demonstrated, what we were going to do.

When the music started, my blindfold was on; the world was gone, and there was only me, and this blackness. Somehow I knew that the only way to do this new thing was totally – and Sushila had also used that word when she was showing us what to do. So I breathed and hopped and used my elbows as a bellows. I let my body fly into an excruciating meeting with itself – all sorts of pains appearing, moving, changing. The first stage – deep, fast, chaotic breathing – seemed to last an hour; but it was only twelve minutes.

Next we were to go completely mad, as Sushila had instructed us. Howls and screams were bouncing off the walls. I was in it, doing my best, pushing myself as hard as I could; my body flinging itself into all sorts of contortions, beating the air with my fists. I was trying to let out any rage or pain I could find in myself.

Then we jumped on our heels, arms high above our heads, pushing the sound Hoo! down into our sex center, feeling the energy shoot back up and out the top of the head. This too went on forever – twelve minutes. Then – a voice came out of the tape machine: ESTOP! and we froze – forever. Oh, the arms ached! Oh, I wanted to move, to relieve myself of the pain of just being, staring myself in the face, here in the dark!

But I didn’t move. I stayed still, and watched as energies shot and crawled in new ways through me.

Then, the blessed music… strange plucking melodious twangs sent me dancing all over the floor, floating, turning about, leaping, not bumping into anyone – Sushila had told us not to worry, we wouldn’t collide.

Then it was over.

When I came out from behind the blindfold, my life had changed. There was a Knowing in me: If I can’t face the simple fact of the inside of me, how on earth can I have the right to live on the outside? So, I must face the inside.

It was that simple. I was stunned, silent, gawping as we went back up the stairs, got into the car.

I turned the key in the ignition. The car started. I released the parking brake, began to back up. But what was happening? I found that the steering wheel would barely turn; I needed all my force to move it even a little. And I needed to press the brake pedal down with all my force to get the car to stop. What was going on? Was it, somehow, the meditation that made the car behave so oddly?

I drove all the way across the City like this – wrenching and wrestling with my arms; pressing and straining with my feet – from near the Presidio to Potrero Hill. Parked on our street, with difficulty. Went to find the cheap-and-ready mechanic down the block, he who had already been sweetly taking most of the money I earned these days.

It turned out the power brake and steering fluid line had sprung a leak. While I was in there yelling.

This struck me as very weird!

Letter from Sarita

September 28, 1973

Dearest Katy

Beautiful Sister

Come with braces.⁴ If I close my eyes I see a pond filled with lotus blossoms. If I close my eyes there is a deep inner falling. I call to you, weeping before existence. The memory is deeper than the West, deeper than any western conceptions because in the West there is not an enlightened master. The blind lead the blind. They search in the right direction, the path is good but not whole. Sai Baba is a miracle maker. He awes people, that is all. So many gurus are just in a power play. When you feel the love, then there can be no thoughts, then you are dissolved.

Imagine the terror of being in the presence of one who knows your very woman-essence much much more totally than you have even glimpsed. It is exalting just to see that core looked into, entered into – and exposed.

The way you are growing is a perfect preparation for Tantra. You don’t have to give up the world, you just have to give up attachment for it and that can be achieved only by going through it. You have been going through it. Now, like Mama, a more total awareness is needed, a more other-world awareness.

Your preparation has been so perfect.

My love please read this not as me talking. I am not saying anything. The pen writes. It can be frightening. I can sound so self-assured, I can inspire expectation; but really I am not anything, not assured, not writing. I feel as a medium for the magnetic flow to reach you and embrace. Something greater than me wants for you to be curious as hell, so curious that you will come to India with braces on your teeth.

Totally love

Sarita

Late in October Sarita sent another aerogram telling us she was in hospital with malaria-like symptoms, which turned out to be typhoid. She was accommodated next to a ward of newborn babies, and shared this:

Dear Mama and Katy

And so it is I find myself ensconced in a hospital for the first time since I was born. I am right next to a ward for newborn babies. The nurses in their white saris pass by my bed with multitudes of the squirming bundles and usually pause to show me the little puckered faces. Once in the ward they seem to begin howling. I suddenly got a feeling of how it would be to hear that cry from something that was expelled from out of my body. It is a strong instinctive feeling of love & protectiveness. In the East they say life begins with a cry because life is a misery. I guess it’s like saying oh shit here I am again. What did I ever do to deserve this repetition of the same old struggle? Bhagwan says to be born is to be expelled from the Garden of Eden. He says the true meaning of Adam and Eve is to be found in birth.

But anyway this hospital seems to be pretty funky but having never stayed in one within the bounds of my memory I’m not one to judge. I must simply shrug as we learn to do here and say, this is India. What will be will be… This is actually an excellent opportunity to be checked because for 1½ years I was a traveler and had not been to a doctor for two years…

And so dearest chickadees all grace be with you.

This hospital smells like food. [...] Most peculiar.

Love

Ananda Sarita

We Are Flying

My mother and I settled ourselves into our seats in the big Air India plane. A sari-clad stewardess brought boiled sweets in crackly little wrappers. This seemed to me a mean, strange offering, and I declined. The plane was airborne.

It was so very odd that we could actually find ourselves here – we who had not had even a five-dollar bill to ourselves for most of our lives. But I simply had to do this thing, this travel to the unknown. The lure was too strong to ignore. I wanted to ignore it; but could not. My mother had wanted to go from the beginning; it was a tragic fact that her money arrived through an insurance settlement for the burning-down of our family home in Southern California; an accident during which a life was lost – an infant I had never met; and grown-up hearts were broken.

Now it was nearly dawn, on 9th December, but still very dark. I looked out the window. There was a full moon shining on the big silver wing. Down below, strangely weak yellow lights glowed fuzzily. The countryside down there seemed ancient, poorly-powered, and yet… there was in me a huge presentiment. I knew that I was coming here to die in some way; that there was to be a cracking-open of all that I had been. I could not know what would come after. I was only full of an ominous tide, like a huge wave arching under me. I could only dive in. I opened my diary, always as close to me as a papoose to a squaw, and I wrote…

entering India

flying into the specter

of my own mystery…

moon, old woman on the wing

below, pools of silver

flash tropical,

go black.

nobody out there.

sadness; and sadness

too whored a word

for the piano keys

it plays –

there was old mrs. swain

lived down at the corner

in a yellow frame house

with the ghost of her husband

in stiff bib overalls

who’d died on the toilet.

to us she was television

and two circles of red

on wrinkled cheeks.

mrs. swain can I have some candy?

can I have a bowl of money?

can I have a bowl of god?

i was born

asking for candy

and for a long time

i will ask, and ask

till I am dead of asking,

till I am dead of asking,

and awake.

Into the Mystery

We stepped out of the plane and down the steps onto the tarmac. The air wrapped itself around my face like a wet wash-cloth smelling of old pee, spices and flowers.

My sister was right there to meet us. She was wearing orange – a short, fitted blouse and a long dirndl skirt. Her hair was long and rippling and she had a big white flower behind one ear. She was beaming and glowing, and I knew right then that the sister I had last seen in Italy in 1971 was no more. This was a new sister; she belonged to something else now, belonged altogether. She was not mine to reach, to know, to companion. Someone much, much bigger had got her. Someone as big as the sky. I was abashed, chastened.

Something in me drew back from this painful seeing, and yet moved even more strongly forward.

We were staying in a wooden house with intricate carvings in the shutters, in a narrow street in a warren of other narrow streets, in this crowded, filthy, decrepit city. Our hostess, a middle-aged Indian woman, was a disciple of Bhagwan, the man we had come to meet. There were servants, and dim rooms with smells of sandalwood and rosewater, unfamiliar spices, and the ubiquitous smells that came in from the streets; of shit, and diesel, and flowers, and unwashed bodies, and dust, and many a thing I could not name.

The city was terrifying to me. It seemed to be post-apocalyptic – as if buildings were eroded and covered with spiderweb; and grey and decaying. Five thousand years old, and looking every day of it. Little dead men lay on the sidewalks, with mucus in their facial hair, eyes staring up, thick-soled bare feet next to the traffic. I had never seen anyone dead before… I gulped. Even buildings under construction, scaffolded by uneven, skewy, skinny tree-trunks, seemed to have already gone into old age and ruin. I wanted to run away. It was all just too strange, too horrible, too old.

We took a bucket-bath in a well-appointed but odd bathroom. I found that such a bath was not too bad – you could get plenty of warm water over you with the big cup. It was good to get the miasma of travel off. But the toilet, in a small adjoining closet, required squatting over a porcelain hole, then washing your nether bits with water from a crusted old cup. My sister had told us how to use this. She had already taught us many things – how to make the taxi slow down – aahista, aahista! or speed up – jaldi, jaldi! That we must wash well, with non-perfumed soap, as Bhagwan’s body was very sensitive. How to waggle our heads when giving instructions to the servants; when thanking our hostess.

My sister was impatient to dress us in orange. Between her and the household, we were lent garments, made of khadi-cloth, or handloom – soft and simple weaves in a plain orange. Then we got into another taxi and set out for Woodland Apartments, where Bhagwan lived.

We drew up in front of a tall block of flats with a few trees in front, went up stairs, and knocked at a plain door. It opened. Inside was a desk, in a hallway; an extraordinary little woman sat behind it. Her eyes were Keane-huge, like those cheesy paintings so popular in the 60’s, but these were no pitiful tear-jerking orbs. They were fierce, glowing, round, dark and yet glistening. She was very thin and slightly bent; of indeterminate age – anywhere from thirty to fifty. She wore an orange cloth on her head, vaguely nurse- or nun-like; pinned to her black hair. She did not smile.

This was Laxmi.

Sarita introduced us gracefully, easily. Laxmi nodded cursorily at our mother and let her pass. Then the full gaze of those round, disapproving eyes rested on me, bored into me. I was clearly found wanting. I sensed that she did not want to let me by; but did, reluctantly, for Sarita’s sake. Sarita… the name suited my sister much better than any name she had ever been known by.

Laxmi nodded towards the hallway, got up, walked stoopingly in front of us, hands behind her back in her orange pleated long skirt and long tailored top, down towards a closed door.

As I walked down that hall I was registering many things at once. Laxmi seemed to me like a being out of a fairy-tale our mother used to read to us; she was either the dog with eyes as big as saucers, or the dog with eyes as big as dinner-plates, which guarded the inner sanctum where the treasure lay. There was a distinct and welcome drop in temperature – it was chilly in this apartment. I smelt a sort of musty tropical fustiness, which I would come to know as typical air conditioning smell in a tropical clime, but which was now entirely new to me. I saw my sister walking ahead of our mother and me, in her orange robe, her thick honey-colored hair down her back; I saw her joy and confidence. I saw my mother with her red-dyed hair, her bulge of tummy from seven babies carried to term, under her borrowed clothes; and though she walked in front of me it was as if I could see too the concavity of her left chest; her worried expression, her brown eyes and the nearly, to us young ‘uns, lugubrious wrinkles of anxiety and care.

I felt my body in the unaccustomed khadi, light and lissome and somehow elevated. And I felt we were approaching the Door…

Laxmi knocked, looked in, said something into the room, stepped away, turned, went back along the hall to her desk. One by one we three entered the room.

I couldn’t pay attention to the others then – for all my attention was on what was happening to me – and all of my attention was incredulous, in shock.

It was as if I stepped over the threshold into a wall of fragrant bliss. It pushed at me, it was unlike anything I had ever known, anywhere; it smelt of a pine forest on a clear cold day. The fragrance and the bliss and the coolness were one; I could barely step into them, I wanted to sink to my knees. But I made myself continue into the room – though inside myself, I had fallen to my knees, was crawling.

There was a man in there, sitting in a chair. Well… he was something like a man – but he was not a man. He was a light, it was shining all around him, filling up the whole room. The light was also a penetration – it saw and knew. I was just a beetle, a deer caught in the headlights of a car, a seen-through wisp of a creature without a name; and there was only one thought in my head, clearly noticeable in the x-ray light: "Why – he’s not an Indian; he’s an Everything!"

And then I dashed forward and tried to hug him.

Darshan

In California, of course, you hugged people when you met them, like shaking hands; or like the French do double cheek-kisses. Not real hugs, not long body-and-energy-exploring let-goes, but distinct, hippie-world, we-are-all-in-the-summer-of-love-together hugs. Brotherly/sisterly.

So that was what I tried to do.

It was exactly as if I’d tried to hug a small iceberg. But it was more than an iceberg – it was a dry-ice-iceberg, vaporous and thus ever-expanding in its field. It did not want to be hugged. It froze at me, repelled me.

Flustered, I drew my arms back, then sat down on the floor a few feet in front of him where he sat in his lone upholstered chair, small bookshelf beside him with books in it. There was nothing else in the room; no other furniture.

My mother and sister sat on the floor nearby. We all looked up at him. He looked at us, beaming first at Sarita, talking with her a bit about where we were staying, and so on. Then he turned to my mother. She gazed at him mutely with her brown, suffering eyes. Her heart was full and her hope entire; I could see this. Bhagwan asked her a few questions – she was circumspect, it seemed to me, in her replies – then he turned and took up a clipboard from the top of the bookshelf, and with a practised motion put it on his knee. He took a pen and wrote something on a piece of paper that was on the clipboard. From somewhere he produced a mala – Sarita had told us about this. It was a necklace with one hundred and eight rudrock beads to represent the one hundred and eight methods of meditation; and hanging from it, an oval pendant with his picture in it cast in plastic. He held this necklace out in a loop using both hands. My mother bent her head and he placed the mala over it, so that now the pendant rested on her chest. He read aloud to her the name he had just written: Ma Devadasi. Will it be easy to pronounce?

He asked how long she was staying – six weeks. Very good, he said. He was glowing love into her, very soft and caring; as if she was an honored veteran, deserving of all tenderness.

Then he turned to me. And he said, So many rings?

It was very simple sitting there in front of him. There was just this – as if the moment had been pumped up with a bicycle pump until it was all there was; this cool bare room, this exact position on the floor where I sat, this odd vast being in front of me with its absolute authority… this sense of levitation, this slowing down so that each detail was seen curiously, as if this was the first morning of the world. I don’t know if my mouth was hanging open, but it certainly felt as if it was.

I looked down at my hands; there was a turquoise-and-coral ring, or a silver ring, on each finger (though not the thumbs). I looked back up at him.

Ready for Sannyas? he asked jovially.

I went into further gap-state, and out of it came – Yes. Purely a polite reflex, because I didn’t know what it was about at all – Sannyas, a Master, a Disciple. Sarita had been telling us many things, about both her own ecstatic surrender and the history and culture of gurus and disciples; but I didn’t feel connected with these ideas. Intellectually I didn’t at all know what this person had to do with me. Energetically, factually, I was agog and in shock, utterly gotten-to. It didn’t matter how many dissertations you delivered over a fissure in the earth somebody had lain a stick of dynamite in. The stick of dynamite mattered, though – very, very much.

Now, Bhagwan was holding up the loop of the mala. I ducked and he placed it over my head, onto my shoulders. I sat back up. He wrote on another piece of paper on his clipboard and then held the paper out to me. I looked at what was written: Ma Prem Madhuri, and the date, 9.12.1973.

He did not tell me anything about the name.

My mother and I had brought a few photos, as instructed by Sarita. They were supposed to be of people very important to us. Sarita was holding them, and now they were produced and Bhagwan looked carefully at each one: our oldest brother Garth, his wife Kathy, and their two small sons. Bhagwan gave each of them a name and a mala, though they had not asked. I showed him a photo of Herb, big and bearded. Bhagwan said, We will make a sannyasin out of him! I showed him photos of one or two friends.

Then he gave me a meditation to do: every day for one hour I was to imagine I was making love. I was to invite the lover of my choice and go through the whole act, with sound and movement and all – not a masturbation, he explained, though if orgasm occurred that was fine – but an acting-out.

I sat with my hanging jaw.

Then he and Sarita discussed what we three were supposed to do until the meditation camp in Mt. Abu in January: Dynamic meditation on Chowpatty Beach in the morning. Lecture the next evening. And then, as soon as train tickets could be got, we were to travel up to Baroda and stay and work at a farm belonging to Sheela’s parents. (Sheela was a young Indian disciple.)

Bhagwan and Sarita had an easy flow between them – she sat with her beautiful big eyes, her full mouth with its perfect square teeth; and she glowed trustingly, sweetly, at him. It was as though this role was more natural and more known to her than any other she had tried to inhabit in her short, rocky life.

Then we were leaving, namaste-ing as we had been shown.

As we went back down the stairs to the street Sarita was explaining to me helpfully that my name meant Sweet Love, and that I had been given it because there was actually a really sweet interior to me (the implication was clear that this was contrary to the exterior, which was obviously a brittle, damaged mess!) She had already explained that Ma meant mother of the universe, and that that is what all women are. The next word, Prem, was a prefix. You were either on the path of love, if it was prem, or the path of awareness, if it was anand. The third name was Bhagwan’s recognition of our personal true being.

Here was a taxi, as Sarita was explaining our mother Devadasi’s name to her: Servant of the Nature Gods, literally, but historically temple prostitutes have been called that; Sarita explained the original meaning and beauty of the custom, but Devadasi was already beginning a long upset-ness over her name! This prostitute business, temple or no, was not at all palatable to her! (I was thinking, though, of her great joy in the woods, in the mountains – to me she seemed to have a direct link with the nature gods.)

But as I sat silently there beside my mother and sister I was noticing alarming symptoms in my body, which continued and increased as the day went on. The mala weighed around my neck, and I felt mildly electrocuted by it in a rather distressing way. We went on a boat to the island of Elephanta, very close to shore, and toured some caves in the heat; Sarita seemed keen on the carvings in them, but I just felt bleak, awkward, un-enthused. Later we went back to the house, where the servants brought to a large dining table little dishes of spicy beans and vegetables and rice and chutneys. Our hostess ate with us and was chatty and solicitous. We bathed again and went to bed… And, god, how strange, all the while a terrific buzzing was going on in a place in the middle of my forehead, just above the eyebrows. It wouldn’t let up… and simultaneously, sharp, queasy electric currents passed through the arches of my feet. It seemed I did not belong to myself any more – bad custodian though I may have been; something had taken me over, and was making life uncomfortable indeed.

Before we went to bed I gave all my rings to the servants. They looked at me reproachfully, as if disappointed. Perhaps they would rather have had something else.

In Bombay

We were roused at 5:30 a.m., hastily donned our borrowed robes in the dimly-lit room, and went out into the pre-dawn dark of the foetid-smelling street, which was already busy with humanity’s to-ings and fro-ings. I was discovering that India never sleeps. A rickshaw took us to a dim, muggy beach where other people were silently gathering.

And once again I jumped into Dynamic meditation, that extraordinary, no-holds-barred, wild discipline I’d done that time in San Francisco.

Something was taking place within me; something I would have no way of describing, not yet nor for a long time to come. I was being Called Out – an invitation had been tendered, by my sister and by Bhagwan (for she had written to us that he had kept asking, When they are coming? When they are coming?) And something in me, some deep place below conscious thought, had understood the vital importance of this beckoning to an abyss. Something knew there was no getting out of this and if there was no getting out, and that recognizing being, Bhagwan, had done the inviting… well, I’d just better go for it! I’d better go into it, whatever it was, with every particle of energy I could muster from anywhere in the Universe, hadn’t I?

So that was what I did. I did not shirk; not then, nor later.

But I suffered. Lord, I suffered. Oh yes. My body did not like this waking up!

So, blindfolded, we all huffed and puffed and then yelled and jumped; and stood stock-still… and when, after dancing about on the beach-sand, we took off the blindfolds and emerged to the light of a muggy new day, there was of course a crowd gaping at us – the inescapable, ubiquitous crowd of India.

I might add here that I had had virtually no spiritual education. Our family were atheists or agnostics. I’d carefully avoided the stray bits of spiritual hectoring I’d come across in my life as a hippie. Instead, poetry was my music, my religion; the poetic state was my bliss. I had participated in a weekend seminar of EST with Werner Erhard, during which we were famously not allowed to pee except once or twice; the whole experience did not really stir my bones. As nearly as I can remember, that seminar was all about coming into the present moment – and this seemed to require a huge amount of talking on Werner’s part. But I cannot claim that anything very ‘spiritual’ happened to me. I’d then told Werner that I was going to India. A look passed over his face… defensiveness? – just for a moment; then he recovered himself and said, It’s all the same. I’m going, I explained, "for the poetry. EST doesn’t feel like that to me."⁵

He had nothing to say to that.

When I was thirteen, a beautiful man, a family friend and a sort of mentor to me, took me to a Zen master in Los Angeles. I was shown into a curtained alcove where sat a beaming little Japanese fellow of indeterminate age. He asked me, If you are walking down the road, where is the Buddha? All around, in the trees and the sky, I replied. The Roshi had then told my mentor/friend that I had potential. I did not know what any of this meant. It had just felt like an openness, an inclusiveness, that meeting.

My sister and I had made a wonderful friend, though, when I was sixteen and she fourteen: Morris Graves, a mystic artist of the Pacific Northwest, who famously painted birds as mystical beings. He was in his sixties, very tall, with dark-ringed eyes and a cultured accent; and he was gay. He lived in a magical Zennish house in virgin redwood forest in Northern California. My sister and I used to row a little boat around on his small tree-dark lake, trailing our silks and scarves. Morris told us of journeys to India, of an out-of-body experience he’d had. His very presence was an incitement to adventure in realms then unknown to us.

And then, just once, when I was eighteen, in Ibiza, I had smoked some pot with my then-boyfriend and various other compadres, and gone alone to a back room to lie down. I’d entered then into an experiment to trace each thought back to its roots. This effort was prompted by the agony of teenage self-consciousness and jealousy, and resulted in an interesting state where something was glued much further back into me, into my body-being, than usual. There was a gap at the end of things; I came to it again and again. I felt rather exalted. I think I had gotten the idea from the only spiritual book I had ever read, The Golden Bough. (This interesting state was immediately and bizarrely challenged when the Guardia Civil burst in and took away everyone’s passports… but that’s another story!) So that was the sum total of my spiritual orientation. (Devadasi had been for a while interested in Zen, turned onto it by my oldest, beatnik brother. But it was all Greek to me.)

Next we three visited Seema, the plump, odalisque-ish daughter of Greek heiress Mukta, one of Bhagwan’s earliest and staunchest Western disciples. Seema had liquid eyes and satiny skin and a sumptuous figure in her loose, low-cut robe. She lounged in a white-walled room where was a bed covered in a green cotton bedspread, a couple of large-leafed green plants in pots; a few cushions on a wicker divan. Sarita explained that Bhagwan advises us to have our houses such: white walls, green bed, green plants. A Tantra room, she explained – a special room for sacred-love meditations – is to have a red circle painted on the floor, and the bed is to stand within it, in the center of the room. (She also told us that Indians generally worship curves in a woman – the plumper, the more beautiful.)

Seema and Sarita had a good gossip about people they knew, while I listened to the unfamiliar names. Then, in the course of the day, I met a few other Western sannyasins. There were not many: Kamal and Gopal, good-looking young Americans; Haridas, a tall German with glowy eyes; Sudha, a Cuban-American friend of Sarita’s with short kinky hair and a bright, wiseacre humor. On hearing about the meditation Bhagwan had given me, she told of a weird experience she’d had: she was living in a room where rats crawled over her at night, and she was completely freaked out by them! Bhagwan told her to catch hold of a rat and caress it as if it was a lover’s penis… (or lingam, which is the Hindi word) and she did this, and the rats calmed down and after that left her alone. She also referred to her own cute li’l raisin-field pussy, a description I thought charming and daring.

Sarita had explained that when people start to meditate they crave sweets. Sweets, it seemed, were a big thing with sannyasins. Bhagwan, in his years of traveling and lecturing all over India, had been given so many boxes of barfi (a sort of fudge made with boiled-down milk, lots of sugar, and various flavorings – cardamom, pistachio, chocolate, rose – and artificial colors; there is silver foil on the top, spread artistically in a sort of half-shredded way) and had eaten them all, in a kind of honoring – that he had gotten diabetes; and thus, the girls said, was impotent. (To me, this news was of only passing interest; it seemed appropriate somehow; and so it remained always. Bhagwan told us many times that when you have experienced the bliss of enlightenment, sexual orgasm is about as exciting as a sneeze.)

Indians traditionally ask gurus to bless boxes of barfi, and then the sweetmeat is called Prasad, or Gift. Once it’s blessed, people eat it and give it to each other. I tasted some at some point during this long strange day and found it disgusting – there was something odd about it, like Mexican candy is somehow odd – cloying and oddly-seasoned, not like American stuff at all.

Sarita said that the disciples longed for candies from their homelands and there was a lot of carrying of them across oceans for each other.

Sarita had earlier written to us, "Through a girl here I came in contact with a certain book called Brighu Samhita – Saptarishi Samhita. It means Seven Rishis. Apparently a couple of thousand or so years ago seven Rishis gathered together and decided to write down everyone’s history and future and present. Such is the nature of their knowing that they can see these things. The way this book is read is by a man who is called a shadow astrologer. He will look at your shadow and make certain calculations which show your pages. Or if it is monsoon the man will measure your hand and make certain calculations which show your pages. Then the Rishis speak. This book is written in Sanskrit. ˆThere are only four of them in existence. Sometimes during a reading the Rishis tell the reader to shut up and read no further or to skip this part or to not read this unless a question is asked, etc. Anyhow, ten of us had a few days of intense madness getting readings. The stories which emerged are truly amazing. Bhagwan first said it was all true which inspired us in our madness. Then after it kind of blew over he said the general outline is true but the details are sometimes incorrect and subject to change. What is written is our destiny and when we take Sannyas we give our destiny to Bhagwan. According to the Rishis, Bhagwan is the Master of the era. Anyway yesterday Bhagwan told us – it was a nice game now forget it… "

And so we went, with a friend as translator, to the Shadow-Reader, who worked from a hot rooftop somewhere in the middle of this huge, scary, superpopulous city. The Shadow-Reader and his son greeted us solemnly and measured our shadows with measuring-sticks. We were allowed to ask questions, and then they told us our futures. I was missing Herb most awfully… him, and also the solidity he seemed to represent. So I asked about him. The senior Shadow-Reader told me I would return to Herb and we would go all over the States together starting meditation centers.

Although I liked the part about being with Herb, I felt enormously skeptical about the rest; as well I might. The projected destiny was not Herb’s style at all, nor was he a biddable fellow. In fact he had insisted that I did not need to go to India, that I was fine as I was. He was so very rooted in his house and his affable know-it-all-ness.

I don’t now remember what Devadasi was told… Sarita’s fate was some stern yet glorious light-filled thing I forget now too. We paid the Shadow-Readers a few rupees and climbed back down the stairs to the street.

Sarita had already told us the story of Sheela’s visit to the Shadow-Reader. We’d met her briefly – she was a punchy, bossy, irascible Indian girl with a tough, matronly look about her even then, in her youth. She had short hair and biggish shoulders and a small mouth. She looked, really, like a policewoman. (It was her parents we were to stay with in the North.) The Shadow-Reader had told Sheela that she had known Bhagwan in a past life but had spurned him. He had gone by in a carriage, enlightened even then, and she had turned her back. In this life she had to embrace Sannyas with him, and one day she would be the leader of his Commune.

In the evening we went to the house of an Indian disciple for the Lecture. In a large, thick-walled room, replete with draperies and alcoves, we sat in front of Bhagwan while he spoke for 1½ hours. I was completely gripped, astonished, amazed. Whatever he said was coming from some spring of complete authority; it was both as fresh as new grass, and ancient as humankind. Each sentence felt so true, so self-evident; with the simplicity of genius, he uncovered what was really going on with the human being, and said it aloud.

I closed my eyes and watched the passionate desires that had begun to surface in me. Desires for… home. For safety; to be far away from this terrible, enchanted land with its filthy streets and immaculate interiors. Desires for particular goodies from my childhood: candy corn, gumdrops, Hershey’s chocolate. Tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches. And I desired to be at Herb’s house, oh Herb’s house… clean, upper-middle-class, with a deck and a view and every sort of comfort. Home, home… I really just wanted to escape what was happening to me.

I was just so uncomfortable! Everywhere I went, the damned buzzing was happening in my forehead and my feet – a kind of incessant electrocution. I felt so strange! So, the next afternoon, briefly alone in the room where we all slept, I removed my mala and put it on the chest of drawers. Instantly I felt relieved. Peace! Quiet! I was free! I stood there, and ordinary life came back to me. I took a deep breath and let it out again.

And I knew that it was wrong. In this mundane stillness, my chance was gone. I could not do it this way.

I lifted up the mala and put it back on.

From my diary:

We were in Bombay for six days in one small room at Mira’s, where kittenish servants brought tea and did our laundry. We went through sister-mother spaces more honest than ever before. We did our meditations each day – arise at 4:30. Immediately on awakening, stretch like a cat and laugh for two minutes. Then down to Chowpatty Beach for the chaotic meditation. Home for showers and tea, then out into Bombay garbage-can for business, or maybe to Woodland to arrange for the camp or to see Bhagwan. Filth and beggars, decaying buildings, dark innocent faces. After lunch, twenty minutes of blindfolded gibberish. Usually we talked or argued for hours. At night each has her special meditation assigned by Bhagwan, and I was embarrassed to do mine in company, so I’ve done it only slightly yet. It is to totally imagine and act out making love. It is what has won me to Bhagwan at all. He is an amazing being and yet not amazing. I love the stories about him. All women sannyasins are in love with him. I am a traveler in a strange land where my old worlds and my longings fly up into my face like alarmed birds as I pass.

The Rishis said that in my last life I had a voice of incredible sweetness, and that I sang. I came to India with a band of people from Austria or Australia, the elder Rishi said. Yogananda was translating, and all was not clear. Herb, said the Rishi, was with the group. He became tired of India and returned home. We had a great attraction for one another which was not consummated then.

Along with my enormous and almost unconscious consideration that it is wrong and frivolous to have a lover, there is the undeniable desire to create that union. In my last life I was very beautiful and loved by many men, and my sex life was most unhappy. It is for me to create the fulfilling of my desire in this life. Life is an unfulfilled desire. All desires must be fulfilled eventually.

It was with great relief that I admitted this desire to myself, and with great joy that I heard the Rishi’s prediction. I will return soon to America. Bhagwan may be my guru, but not heavily. I will be with Herb again. He will make me very happy; I should stay with him. At twenty-three or twenty-four I will marry, and in a few years have two incredible children, a girl and a boy. Between twenty-eight and thirty-two I will find great joy and fulfillment in sex, almost spiritual. It will be a very happy life. I will travel much, and gain recognition in the arts…

(As we will see, psychics are sometimes amazingly right-on; and often, drifting quite askew.)

As I lay in the dark in the decaying gingerbread house in a narrow Bombay lane, in my narrow bed with its clean white sheets, I was elevated and afraid and worn out; exhausted yet energized. And then… as I was drifting towards sleep I became aware of a Presence in the room. I knew it was Bhagwan; I could feel him floating in the air not far away. I knew that he had come to check up on me, see how I was doing. He hovered there, just looking. Then he left.

In the morning, as we had our breakfast of spicy little dishes – idli, sambar – and small, flower-scented bananas, and dahi, or yogurt, and tea and toast, I told Sarita of my experience. Oh, yes, she said. He leaves his body every night and goes to visit his disciples. And when he gets back to his body he is so utterly depleted that his caretaker Vivek makes for him sixteen pieces of toast, and he eats them all. This then grounds him back in his body again.

To the North

We sat in the 3rd-class carriage among a packed mass of smelly, jostling people. The train journey took a day, a night, and half another day. Scrawny, staring men in filthy singlets, like prisoners in a cattle-car, inhabited most of the cars, but we were in the Ladies one, and it was not much better. There was no way to sleep, and we sat on hard slatted seats, just enduring. Our mother Devadasi was freaking out. It was all too hideous!

In the morning when we looked out the window we saw people squatting by the tracks, miles of them in a row, each with his cup of water beside him and his skinny bottom showing beneath his rucked-up shirt. Others squatted in the brush at a distance. The smell was everywhere – before sunrise, during, after.

Finally we arrived in Baroda. We were collected by a car and driver, and soon were on a rutted road going out of the city. After