45
Going into that meditation cave every day is supposed to be this time of divine communion, but I've been walking in there lately flinching the way my dog used to flinch when she walked into the vet's office (knowing that no matter how friendly everybody might be acting now, this whole thing was going to end with a sharp poke with a medical instrument). But after my last conversation with Richard from Texas, I'm trying a new approach this morning. I sit down to meditate and I say to my mind, 'Listen-I understand you're a little frightened. But I promise, I'm not trying to annihilate you. I'm just trying to give you a place to rest. I love you.'
The other day a monk told me, 'The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go.'
I'm trying a different mantra, too. It's one I've had luck with in the past. It's simple, just two syllables:
Ham-sa.
In Sanskrit it means 'I am That.'
The Yogis say that Ham-sa is the most natural mantra, the one we are all given by God before birth. It is the sound of our own breath. Ham on the inhale, sa on the exhale. (Ham, by the way, is pronounced softly, openly, like hahhhm, not like the meat you put on a sandwich. And sa rhymes with 'Ahhhh…') As long as we live, every time we breathe in or out, we are repeating this mantra. I am That. I am divine, I am with God, I am an expression of God, I am not separate, I am not alone, I am not this limited illusion of an individual. I've always found Ham-sa easy and relaxing. Easier to meditate with than Om Namah Shivaya, the-how would you say this-'official' mantra of this Yoga. But I was talking to this monk the other day and he told me to go ahead and use Ham-sa if it helped my meditation. He said, 'Meditate on whatever causes a revolution in your mind.'
So I'll sit with it here today.
Ham-sa.
I am That.
Thoughts come, but I don't pay much attention to them, other than to say to them in an almost motherly manner, 'Oh, I know you jokers… go outside and play now… Mommy's listening to God.'
Ham-sa.
I am That.
I fall asleep for a while. (Or whatever. In meditation, you can never really be sure if what you think is sleep is actually sleep; sometimes it's just another level of consciousness.) When I awake, or whatever, I can feel this soft blue electrical energy pulsing through my body, in waves. It's a little alarming, but also amazing. I don't know what to do, so I just speak internally to this energy. I say to it, 'I believe in you,' and it magnifies, volumizes, in response. It's frighteningly powerful now, like a kidnapping of the senses. It's humming up from the base of my spine. My neck feels like it wants to stretch and twist, so I let it, and then I'm sitting there in the strangest position-perched upright like a good Yogi, but with my left ear pressed hard against my left shoulder. I don't know why my head and neck want to do this, but I'm not going to argue with them; they are insistent. The pounding blue energy keeps pitching through my body, and I can hear a sort of thrumming sound in my ears, and it's so mighty now that I actually can't deal with it anymore. It scares me so much that I say to it, 'I'm not ready yet!' and snap open my eyes. It all goes away. I'm back in a room again, back in my surroundings. I look at my watch. I've been here-or somewhere-for almost an hour.
I am panting, literally panting.
46
To understand what that experience was, what happened in there (by which I mean both 'in the meditation cave' and 'in me') brings up a topic rather esoteric and wild-namely, the subject of kundalini shakti.
Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine. The interesting thing about these mystics is that, when they describe their experiences, they all end up describing exactly the same occurrence. Generally, their union with God occurs in a meditative state, and is delivered through an energy source that fills the entire body with euphoric, electric light. The Japanese call this energy ki, the Chinese Buddhists call it chi, the Balinese call it taksu, the Christians call it The Holy Spirit, the Kalahari Bushmen call it n/um (their holy men describe it as a snakelike power that ascends the spine and blows a hole in the head through which the gods then enter). The Islamic Sufi poets called that God-energy 'The Beloved,' and wrote devotional poems to it. The Australian aborigines describe a serpent in the sky that descends into the medicine man and gives him intense, otherworldly powers. In the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah this union with the divine is said to occur through stages of spiritual ascension, with energy that runs up the spine along a series of invisible meridians.
Saint Teresa of Avila, that most mystical of Catholic figures, described her union with God as a physical ascension of light through seven inner 'mansions' of her being, after which she burst into God's presence. She used to go into meditative trances so deep that the other nuns couldn't feel her pulse anymore. She would beg her fellow nuns not to tell anyone what they had witnessed, as it was 'a most extraordinary thing and likely to arouse considerable talk.' (Not to mention a possible interview with the Inquisitor.) The most difficult challenge, the saint wrote in her memoirs, was to not stir up the intellect during meditation, for any thoughts of the mind-even the most fervent prayers-will extinguish the fire of God. Once the troublesome mind 'begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work.' But if you can surpass those thoughts, Teresa explained, and ascend toward God, 'it is a glorious bewilderment, a heavenly madness, in which true wisdom is acquired.' Unknowingly echoing the poems of the Persian Sufi mystic Hafiz, who demanded why, with a God so wildly loving, are we not all screaming drunks, Teresa cried out in her autobiography that, if these divine experiences were mere madness, then 'I beseech you, Father, let us all be mad!'
Then, in the next sentences of her book, it's like she catches her breath. Reading Saint Teresa today, you can almost feel her coming out of that delirious experience, then looking around at the political climate of medieval Spain (where she lived under one of the most repressive religious tyrannies of history) and soberly, dutifully, apologizing for her excitement. She writes, 'Forgive me if I have been very bold,' and reiterates that all her idiot babbling should be ignored because, of course, she is just a woman and a worm and despicable vermin, etc., etc. You can almost see her smoothing back her nun's skirts and tucking away those last loose strands of hair-her divine secret a blazing, hidden bonfire.
In Indian Yogic tradition, this divine secret is called kundalini shakti and is depicted as a snake who lies coiled at the base of the spine until it is released by a master's touch or by a miracle, and which then ascends up through seven chakras, or wheels (which you might also call the seven mansions of the soul), and finally through the head, exploding into union with God. These chakras do not exist in the gross body, say the Yogis, so don't look for them there; they exist only in the subtle body, in the body that the Buddhist teachers are referring to when they encourage their students to pull forth a new self from the physical body the way you pull a sword from its sheath. My friend Bob, who is both a student of Yoga and a neuroscientist, told me that he was always agitated by this idea of the chakras, that he wanted to actually see them in a dissected human body in order to believe they existed. But after a particularly transcendent meditative experience, he came away with a new understanding of it. He said, 'Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true.'
