13 Nov 2008
While visiting francophone Canada, a friend took me to a meditation evening where I sat with everyone in a cramped yet pleasant attic apartment with a wall sloping inward in the living room. There was a fish tank near the dormer window (expanded with mirrors to three times the apparent width) with goldfish that made pleasant bubbling sounds while I sat, bending and erecting myself and changing my legs and listening to the tick-tick-tick of a cuckoo clock, and the sound of the refrigerator motor turning on an off.
After an interminable time of shifting myself trying to get comfortable as possible, the DVD player jumped to life, and we watched a video of Gangaji, a woman who had a guru (Pataji, in the line of Ramana Maharshi) and claims that she is an ordinary person. I believe this. She has a gift of challenging people about the stories they tell themselves, challenging them that maybe it is possible for them to experience radiant inner joy in the present momentj. A person comes up and sits in a chair facing her, with both chairs turned slightly toward the audience. She listens closely to the story, and responds to the language the person uses, choosing words and images from those supplied by her ... ah ... visitor.
Eventually, after much (or little) of Gangaji's inquiry, the person's story and defenses fall away, their face beams, they laugh and tears come and Gangaji takes their hand (the right armrest of her chair is near the left armrest of the visitor) with hers.
I was initially skeptical. In her opening talk, she used words such as immortality, mind, consciousness and ego, that I have little use for at present. As the first person (a good looking man in his thirties, gay I think) went through a long conversation with her and reached closure, I watched with more interest. Surely it is a gift to be able to listen so well, to retain every statement the person makes, even to remembering key points of a conversation on a similar topic when he had met her, on stage, some months or years ago. And to use her perceptions to challenge the stories we tell ourselves.
For the remaining people, I watched with interest: an older woman with white hair and a white outfit who visited for only a minute to share her well-being; a middle-aged woman with black plastic librarian's glasses who, from her eye movements and manner, had bees buzzing inside her head--you could literally see the thinking going on-- finally, a young fresh-faced woman with a question about ego who yielded in moments to Gangaji's questions, and looked beautiful, beaming in the joy exposed in her inner self.
After the satsang ended, I spoke with the two men who hosted the evening. One was from Fresno, California, who wore shorts, had white hair and a cheerful way of smiling and nodding and saying "Oui!" when he resonated with something someone said. His friend, a bearded Quebecois, had humor dancing in his eyes and in the accented rumbling of his spoken English. Both had been associated with Rajneesh/Osho and knew Gangaji when she had sat at the feet of Pataji. We shared their home-brewed beer, I heard about the California man's love of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he experiences God as profoundly (and curiously, in a similar way) to his experiences in the company of Osho. He told of their latest trip, two weeks long, which included a thin woman aged 69 who smoked at every rest, even while they hiked above The Tree line at 12,000 ft (4000m)!! The other man had been on a tetracycline-family antibiotic, and had to hood his face and cover his entire body due to the photosensitizing effect of the medicine, and nevertheless burned terribly, even through his cotton gloves.
I had a chance to tell my story, in brief, while they listened and the Fresno man nodded. I told of meeting ordinary people during the "surveying the world" stage toward the end of my BK period who were happy, mature, self-realized, without using any spiritual concepts to describe themselves or their experiences. I said I had no use for concepts such as mind, ego, even thinking. I cannot distinguish between thinking and the act of my heart beating, both go together, I explained in response to the bearded one's question. "So who witness your heart beating?" he followed on. I went inside, there was a silence, and answered that I don't know. "That is a good place," he said. And the conversation went on in other directions.
I walked home in the still night air among trees, watching the moonlight through clouds, talking, feeling my soul expand into the night air, even tho I don't think of "soul". I packed my bag, slept at 3 in my clothes, and at 6:25 woke to go down to a taxi to the airport.
I found myself speaking with a man from Macon, Georgia while in line at the gate in Chicago, where I changed planes; joining a conversation with a sweet woman from Singapore who was with her husband going back to San Francisco, and with my parents, somehow open, able to listen, to be present, to share of myself responding from my heart. I can be present, even when my mother goes on about things. I can love the sound of voice and the pleasure I hear in my Father's voice when he begins to tell a story. I am learning to find the resonance in my own voice. And communicating deeply with my dear friend Daniel, a crazy bearded auto-didact, geologist, inventor and social revolutionary.
It's a mystery to me that I am writing my story here. In some ways, I consider myself a case-study for ex-BKs. That I could benefit from encounter with a gurulike entity so many years after leaving a gurulike system. Somehow putting a cap on several years of work with a therapist, to be able to enjoy simple things like playing a guitar and singing with my Brother and his girlfriend, or communicating to my mother about the crazy things I remember her saying when I was five years old, when it wasn't appropriate and confused my sense of boundaries, and doesn't even bother me now but great that I can tell her, and the closure I feel when I hear her tell me that she doesn't remember but that it sounds inappropriate hearing it now.
That, my friends, is a slice of my current experience, a feeling of grace and blessedness inside. Blessings to you all.
After an interminable time of shifting myself trying to get comfortable as possible, the DVD player jumped to life, and we watched a video of Gangaji, a woman who had a guru (Pataji, in the line of Ramana Maharshi) and claims that she is an ordinary person. I believe this. She has a gift of challenging people about the stories they tell themselves, challenging them that maybe it is possible for them to experience radiant inner joy in the present momentj. A person comes up and sits in a chair facing her, with both chairs turned slightly toward the audience. She listens closely to the story, and responds to the language the person uses, choosing words and images from those supplied by her ... ah ... visitor.
Eventually, after much (or little) of Gangaji's inquiry, the person's story and defenses fall away, their face beams, they laugh and tears come and Gangaji takes their hand (the right armrest of her chair is near the left armrest of the visitor) with hers.
I was initially skeptical. In her opening talk, she used words such as immortality, mind, consciousness and ego, that I have little use for at present. As the first person (a good looking man in his thirties, gay I think) went through a long conversation with her and reached closure, I watched with more interest. Surely it is a gift to be able to listen so well, to retain every statement the person makes, even to remembering key points of a conversation on a similar topic when he had met her, on stage, some months or years ago. And to use her perceptions to challenge the stories we tell ourselves.
For the remaining people, I watched with interest: an older woman with white hair and a white outfit who visited for only a minute to share her well-being; a middle-aged woman with black plastic librarian's glasses who, from her eye movements and manner, had bees buzzing inside her head--you could literally see the thinking going on-- finally, a young fresh-faced woman with a question about ego who yielded in moments to Gangaji's questions, and looked beautiful, beaming in the joy exposed in her inner self.
After the satsang ended, I spoke with the two men who hosted the evening. One was from Fresno, California, who wore shorts, had white hair and a cheerful way of smiling and nodding and saying "Oui!" when he resonated with something someone said. His friend, a bearded Quebecois, had humor dancing in his eyes and in the accented rumbling of his spoken English. Both had been associated with Rajneesh/Osho and knew Gangaji when she had sat at the feet of Pataji. We shared their home-brewed beer, I heard about the California man's love of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he experiences God as profoundly (and curiously, in a similar way) to his experiences in the company of Osho. He told of their latest trip, two weeks long, which included a thin woman aged 69 who smoked at every rest, even while they hiked above The Tree line at 12,000 ft (4000m)!! The other man had been on a tetracycline-family antibiotic, and had to hood his face and cover his entire body due to the photosensitizing effect of the medicine, and nevertheless burned terribly, even through his cotton gloves.
I had a chance to tell my story, in brief, while they listened and the Fresno man nodded. I told of meeting ordinary people during the "surveying the world" stage toward the end of my BK period who were happy, mature, self-realized, without using any spiritual concepts to describe themselves or their experiences. I said I had no use for concepts such as mind, ego, even thinking. I cannot distinguish between thinking and the act of my heart beating, both go together, I explained in response to the bearded one's question. "So who witness your heart beating?" he followed on. I went inside, there was a silence, and answered that I don't know. "That is a good place," he said. And the conversation went on in other directions.
I walked home in the still night air among trees, watching the moonlight through clouds, talking, feeling my soul expand into the night air, even tho I don't think of "soul". I packed my bag, slept at 3 in my clothes, and at 6:25 woke to go down to a taxi to the airport.
I found myself speaking with a man from Macon, Georgia while in line at the gate in Chicago, where I changed planes; joining a conversation with a sweet woman from Singapore who was with her husband going back to San Francisco, and with my parents, somehow open, able to listen, to be present, to share of myself responding from my heart. I can be present, even when my mother goes on about things. I can love the sound of voice and the pleasure I hear in my Father's voice when he begins to tell a story. I am learning to find the resonance in my own voice. And communicating deeply with my dear friend Daniel, a crazy bearded auto-didact, geologist, inventor and social revolutionary.
It's a mystery to me that I am writing my story here. In some ways, I consider myself a case-study for ex-BKs. That I could benefit from encounter with a gurulike entity so many years after leaving a gurulike system. Somehow putting a cap on several years of work with a therapist, to be able to enjoy simple things like playing a guitar and singing with my Brother and his girlfriend, or communicating to my mother about the crazy things I remember her saying when I was five years old, when it wasn't appropriate and confused my sense of boundaries, and doesn't even bother me now but great that I can tell her, and the closure I feel when I hear her tell me that she doesn't remember but that it sounds inappropriate hearing it now.
That, my friends, is a slice of my current experience, a feeling of grace and blessedness inside. Blessings to you all.
