In which I want to go see Mother so much it hurts.

I thought maybe I wasn’t going to be able to deal with the Creator of a reality that contained within it the death of my beloved pet and companion, and in fact I pretty much only looked at my meditation corner over the next few days to glare at it and think angry thoughts, but not much time passed before I found myself sitting in tears in a hopelessly heartbroken Why? phase. (The Fuck You, how could You allow this phase didn’t even last a week, mainly because I knew it was coming; I’d known from the day I adopted her that she’d die first. So.)

The incarnation of my Satguru being physically so far away, for answers I had to resort to that most revered of traditions: opening books at random. Daughter of Fire was several pages about how the guru doesn’t do anything any more than the Sun “does” anything. The Sun is just the sun, but because of the Sun, flowers open and all life on Earth is sustained. The Awaken Children volume I pulled at random was an entire chapter about the same thing: how one must be in the presence of the guru to experience forward motion on the path. The other book I’d been reading, Autobiography of a Yogi, was in the middle of a similar exposition as well.

Let’s take as a given that the world contains suffering. Let’s accept, because I’ve seen it with my own eyes and why the hell not, that there is available to the human being a state of consciousness that transcends suffering. Let’s also find meaning in the fact that the very same message was found in three different books, and agree that, through some mechanism we don’t understand, it’s better to be physically near the teacher than far.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.

I’ve been more or less demanding that a love of meditation be instilled in me; I’ve been doing it for a very long time and it’s never been more engaging than the outside world. Which has always troubled me, because every philosophical text I’ve ever read repeats that meditation is “more precious than gold,” and I’ve always felt like a loser for not absolutely loving it.

Remember Be Here Now? That old Ram Das book? (I used to have a signed copy of it. I bought it at Powell’s when I was twenty. It sat at my dad’s in a box the first time I moved to Iowa, then it got stored here in the attic at my maternal grandparents’ and the second time I moved to Iowa, G’ma threw it out along with the other few boxes of belongings I’d left here. Easy come, easy go.) The the book popped into my head with some sort of volition; it wasn’t random synapses firing, it was a message from mySelf. Blah blah blah, without re-writing that which has already been written by better souls than I, meditating has been much cooler lately, and I’m doing a lot of it.

Other more esoteric stuff is becoming accessible. Passages that I’ve read before are suddenly clear; none of the material was occluded but we just can’t parse it until we’re ready. The saints literally just tell us over and over and over what their experience is like and how to have it ourselves, yet for so long it seems complicated and obscured and ineffable.

Mother will be in California in a few weeks. I have just enough money in my savings account to fly down there. (Of course, then I won’t be able to pay my taxes in February, but that’s next year.) I’m going to see if the San Ramon dates will conflict with anything school-related. If not, I’ll probably just buy a plane ticket and go.

Anybody know how to get lodgings and ground transportation to the ashram on the cheap? I don’t have a job anymore – the QA thing ended last week – so cheap is not only good, but necessary. I’ve never been to San Ramon, so I don’t know anything about those programs. All I know is that I want to see Mother so bad it aches.