Waiting For Krishna

At the end of this summer I stayed with a friend in Ein Kerem, near Jerusalem. I woke up very early for some reason, before dawn. I went outside, meditated for a while and walked up the hill.

It was almost dawn but deep shadows still lay over the valley. The ring of hills faded into the darkened sky.

Everything was very quiet. The sort of profound silence that is humming with awareness. The sort of peace that you feel in a graveyard, or at the end of a long retreat. Nothing to be said, nothing to be done.

I stood there for a while. All of Ein Kerem was waiting quietly.

The air and the trees were waiting, and the darkness across the valley.

I was waiting too.

It was very sweet, waiting together for our Beloved.

Waiting can be an act of surrender. Patience, simple and content within itself, like the patience of plants and rocks within the rhythm of nature. A willingness to be open receive in due time.

It’s an act of surrender to sleep peacefully in this world, knowing our time to wake up will come. Knowing there is void before and after, and the illusion in between is sacred too. Knowing that the universe and your own evolution are moving at a pace which is beyond you, letting go of the ego struggle to make it all happen here and now.

There is only perfection, there never was and there never will be anything else.

If you are patient, if you are willing to put yourself aside and wait, then sooner or later you will come to the beginning and there is nothing but peace.

It’s a strange, wonderful moment when you realize that what you’re looking for is also looking for you.

“Not only the thirsty seek the water, the water seeks the thirsty,” Rumi says.

We are in love with God. I am and you are, every being in this world, everything that has a spark of life in it is drawn towards that bliss. We don’t feel it most of the time because if we did, if you felt your love for God in its full intensity, unfiltered by personality and illusion, you would be drawn into it and disappear like water into water, and the lila, the cosmic dance of being and non-being, would cease.

We are created things, bodies and personalities that run like a program on causes and conditions, and yet this being can turn to God. It has life inside it and that life inevitably will seek itself. That’s the real magic trick of this existence and the joy to its creator.

The spiritual path feels lonely sometimes, like endlessly reaching towards something which is always just out of reach, but remember that the mystical romance is a two-way street.

God is so in love with us, so happy to receive the soul back where she belongs.

The divine and the individual consciousness are of one nature, yes? How could two halves of the same whole not long for each other with equal intensity?

However much Shakti yearns to be reunited with Shiva, Shiva is yearning to unite with her.

When Radha dances for Krishna, Krishna watches with love and desire. The world is enchanted by Krishna and Krishna is enchanted by Radha.

When you are very quiet and your heart sings into the void, the void will sing back to you.

When Yoga Turns You Into An Alien

I lost my keys.

I lost my sweater and my good bra. I lost my flip-flops.

I wrote notes to myself so I would remember things and I lost the notes.

I lost my temper too.

I left my wallet on Fire Island.

I leave a door open and the cats get into the room they’re not supposed to go into. My spell check app doesn’t work and I send an article full of typos to my boss. My boyfriend asks me to help with some errands and, somehow, I mess up every single one. “Floaty yogini,” he says in dismay.

I’m sorry to everyone who’s suffered from my negligence. Believe me, no matter how frustrated you are with my inability to hold onto things, stick to a schedule or follow basic directions, I am twice as frustrated at least.

I wasn’t always like this. That’s what I envision myself shouting as I plunge into an abyss of missed deadlines, lost items, bad decisions and stunning miscommunications.

The fact is that my connection to the material world, always a bit tenuous, has faded in the past few months, and my spiritual practice has a lot to do with it.

It hurts me to say this, because I would never want to say anything that might discourage people from practicing yoga and meditation. I’ve heard many spiritual teachers promise that meditation won’t make you weird and spacey, I think mostly not to scare people off, because it really can make you weird and spacey. At least for a while.

At least for a while, you might feel like your whole life is falling apart. You might feel like the light inside is shining stronger and stronger, and on the outside everything is slipping away.

It’s part of the path, I think. It’s from the same reason that meditative states sometimes feel like a very blissful type of dying.

Think of it like a movie projected onto a screen. Usually, we have our backs to the projector so we only see the image, all the different colors and shapes, and we don’t see the single beam of white light that they come from. In meditation, you turn around to look into the projector beam. The colors and shapes are there inside it, but you only see white.

Going deeper into meditation is a path of uncreation. Reversing the process of manifestation that generates our incarnated experience.

This is the 36 tattvas in Kashmir Shaivism, the branching path through which the divine descends into material reality and the human being ascends to the divine.

The pure “I am” splits into internal and external, the external splits again and again, more concrete with every movement away from the source. The Self identifies with its creation and becomes limited.

And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. You know this story already.

When you go back into the “I am” you are retracing these steps and erasing them behind you. The infinity of creation which emerged out of consciousness dissolves back into it.

It’s not the end. On the tantric path it’s not enough just to melt into oneness, you have to bring oneness into creation. This world is only samsara if you have a samsaric mind; if you have a divine mind, it is Shakti. The mountain peak, where you leave the world behind and fall into God, is one stop on the road, and from there you turn around.

But it’s a place we all have to go. We have to go alone and we must be prepared never to come back.

For now, I’m not able yet to transform this reality but I’m too bound to it to transcend it entirely. The dim lights of this world lose their color and blur together, but the bright light still seems so far away.

It’s like in the Torah, if you look at the story of the Israelites as the journey of the soul. We go out from Egypt, slavery to the ego, towards the Promised Land of enlightened consciousness. Between those two poles, there’s the desert. The vast open space. No markers, no path except what’s right in front of our eyes.

This is the space of spiritual development. Sometimes things seem more clear, sometimes less so.

Things are less clear for me right now. I walk around like a foreigner in the places most familiar to me, talking to people I’ve known for years and wondering, who are you?

I can’t bring myself to care about the things that most people care about. I meditate in the morning and everything comes together into a single point of clarity, and for the rest of the day I blunder around feeling like I just landed from another planet and I have a map from the wrong decade. I barely recognize my own life. Everything I try to do veers off in the wrong direction.

I see now that I can’t trust my own mind. My emotions do strange, crazy things and I’m not in control of them, I have no part in them except what I give to them. The sense of control over my life, the ability to manage things for myself, is a ripening of a certain karma. It’s a grace.

I’ve neglected and disregarded the material world in the past, and so now I experience the ripening of a different karma.

And that’s also a grace.

The times when things seem clear are more dangerous, I think. We’re in the desert here – if you see an oasis, good chance you’re heading for a mirage.

When you’re lost, you can be humble. You can be in that sacred space of bewilderment where everything is possible and all you can do is laugh.