In which I talk about seeing Amma this year.

One of the swamis said in an evening satsang that various scriptures describe and define the state of being experienced by people such as Amma. A phrase used often, he said, was that these incarnations or avatars are ‘drunk on the Self.’

I tried to imagine what that feels like. Drunk on the Self. Like being in love, only without the duality of needing an external object to be in love with? What do I have inside that I find more engaging than the world outside?

Not meditation, certainly. I enjoy it, but not above the relative. Not even in Amma’s presence (where meditation is extraordinarily easy and deep) do I not want to come out. I sometimes feel extraordinarily content within myself, but it isn’t more intoxicatingly interesting than the world outside me, and it certainly isn’t permanent.

Later, when Amma was singing bhajans, I thought, “She’s singing to Devi, which is an iconic representation of the qualities within Her own Self. She’s singing to herself.” As I was sitting so close to the stage I had my elbow propped up on it, I was very close to Mother. As I thought these thoughts, She turned her gaze to me for a moment.

Which is just yet another cool thing She does. I’ve had several experiences over the years of having a realization confirmed by Her glance. The first few times I doubted it, but now I take it as a done deal: since She perceives everything as Herself, my thoughts are Hers. It’s really not that astonishing, once one accepts Vedic descriptions of enlightenment. I’ve talked to countless other devotees who’ve had the same experience: they think something, and Mother responds as if they’ve said it out loud. I’ve been sitting tens of yards away from her in a hall crowded with thousands of people and had Her unerringly glance up at me from giving darshan to confirm a realization.

The autumn after I met Her, I went through a nasty breakup. I was working a crappy cubicle farm data entry job in San Francisco and spending hours in heart-wrenching pain, thinking about Amma. After a week or so of it, I had the experience of Her soothing presence and the smell of Her perfume in my cubicle. It’s been my experience that God really does take a thousand steps toward a devotee if she takes only one step toward God.

“The goal” is a phrase often used around Mother. It’s ‘important to stay focused on the goal,’ or ‘such a practice will help one realize the goal.’ This year I think I began to realize what it means. Not a life of rigid or ritualistic behaviors, but a life inwardly directed toward experiencing the full fruition of human potential. Unity, oneness, enlightenment, freedom from duality… there are so many descriptions of what the saints say is our birthright, but none of them mean anything until by the guru’s grace one has a brief taste of it.

I’m so accustomed to always wanting something: sleep, food, companionship, privacy, to be at home, to be at work, to have some circumstance other than whatever it is that I’m experiencing right now. I spend nearly all my life preparing to do something else and virtually none experiencing what’s happening right now, and if I reflect honestly on my cushy Western life, whatever it is that’s happening right now is usually not much different from what’ll happen in a few hours.

Amma says that the past and the future are only ideas; that only the present is real. Such a simple statement, but so hard to grasp.

I’ve also been thinking about preferences. It’s said that enlightened people explain that they have none; it makes no difference to them if they’re hot or cold, tired or rested, hungry or full. We take that to mean that enlightenment is some dry state of non-attachment, but I am beginning to feel that it means we don’t become lost to these things, they’re simply states and no one is better than the other. That instead of always wanting something else, we’re so full of the effulgence of Self that it simply ceases to matter if dinner is now or in an hour. It’s not that an enlightened person doesn’t feel the body’s hunger, the state just isn’t defining. There’s no ego there to be upset. Hunger is another of many experiences, like eating or fullness. All things that exist are equally true. Furthermore, if everything that exists is Self, it’s all equally charming.

For instance, the real difference between surfing the web from my bedroom or surfing from my desk at work is virtually nil, and yet one experience is ‘fun’ and the other isn’t. I compared knitting with doing laundry for NLW the other day: they’re almost identical in terms of difficulty, and yet one is leisure and the other a chore. These distinctions are products of intellect and ego and utterly useless in terms of attaining happiness.

I still haven’t wrapped my head around what it would feel like to perceive all of manifestation as Self, though. Clearly rocks aren’t conscious, at least not as I define consciousness, but at the smallest resolution they’re just as filled with empty space as my own body is… perhaps with sufficiently refined awareness, it’s all just a soup of Self-ness interacting in a grand play to amuse itSelf.

When devotees approach Mother and tell her they’ve suffered a death in their family, She’ll cry. She cried when She went to visit tsunami refugees. She says that non-attachment is not emotionlessness, and She makes a distinction between being ruled by emotions and allowing them to occur. She uses anger as an example: if someone walks up to you and asks you get mad, you’ll say you can’t just get mad, that it’s something that happens to you.

Only ego gets mad, I suspect, because only ego has expectations that fail to be met. I want this or that and am not getting it, therefore I’m angry… If I perceive all things as Self, I can’t perceive lack, and therefore I won’t get angry because it’s all here now being what it is.

Now I’m getting obscure.

Point being that one can’t act non-attached in order to become non-attached; one has to do something else instead. That something else seems to be to delve within and find something more wonderful and charming and interesting and intoxicating than the ever-changing, always disappointing world of the relative. Every single saint ever written about has said that meditation is more precious than gold, so apparently spending time within one’s self and not involved in the world is how one begins to find this treasure within.

If only I didn’t find sitting for meditation so freakin’ irritating… I once prayed to Mother to help me remember to do my japa, and for a few years afterwards I’d get these little mental reminders. I got lazy, and it stopped happening, but it seems that the Self will respond to requests. Perhaps I will pray for the desire to meditate. I need to think about it, though… it’s important to be very careful with what you wish for, I’ve found. The last thing I need is to spend more time feeling guilty about not wanting to meditate; I just got rid of that albatross a few years ago and don’t want it back.

The sense I got this year is that realization is not an ardurous, infinite journey. The goal is closer than close, it’s here, it’s mine, I simply need to perform some little trick that cannot be taught but only learned by the doing, and return to my Self, from which I’ve never been parted. The point of those silly “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” aphorisms becomes clear: there are questions the mind cannot answer, there are things that can only be done or experienced and which cannot be conveyed with language or even held within the tiny confines of intellect.

I’ve always rejected the guilt I thought I was supposed to feel about things like lying, having sex, drinking or doing drugs… I never felt that any of those things were inherently anti-spiritual, and it pissed me off to no end to have little, tight-hearted people pointing their fingers at me and calling my choices vulgar. If God is love, which I believe it is, then I’ve found most of the love in my life while sitting in a booth in a bar, getting drunk and really communicating with people. If love in action is listening, hearing, commiserating, and giving solace, then love is not absent from all places of “sin,” and guilt is, in my opinion, the very antithesis of love, being a place where love can’t go.

I’ve come to believe that some things are ‘louder’ than others: it’s easy to quit searching for Self when one’s forever drunk or scheming, but it’s not impossible to continue along a spiritual path if that path winds through bars or casinos or whatever, but guilt will kill light in moments flat. Feelings of shame and failure are the path-enders, not the activities themselves.

Not that I think we should all go get drunk and quit meditating; but I do think we should all quit feeling like shit for being children of Kali yuga.

I reject misinterpretations of scripture in every tradition and from every epoch. Fuck that noise. The whole point of all that crap is not, as it appears, to give rule-makers an arsenal with which to hurt others. The point is to remind us that our birthright is enlightenment, that a human mind is a great tool but also a limiting prison, that beyond the tiny range of what we think of as ‘consciousness’ is an attainable state wherein everything is us and we are perpetually ‘drunk on the Self.’

“Religion is necessary despite the fact people are only ready to die for it, not live for it. It provides a certain safety, like a fence. But you shouldn’t just stay inside that fence always. That will be like getting into a boat to cross the river and then, once you reach the other end, not getting down. Or like pointing to a fruit on a tree but doing nothing else. Your hunger won’t be appeased by just pointing at it. Only if you climb the tree, pluck the fruit and eat it, you will be satisfied. Same way, religion is only the vehicle. To attain god, you need to act.” — Mata Amritanandamayi, in an interview with Rediff.com, 2002.

News from 2007 Midwest Tour

Healing with hugs, Chicago Tribune, July 5, 2007 (video embedded)

‘Hugging saint’ pays visit to Coralville, WCFcourier, July 3, 2007

Embracing the world, The Daily Iowan, July 3, 2007