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Yui Sakamoto, Reincarnation, 2022
The Breaking of an Egg
It was at the Theosophical Society that I met Kim Levertov. For
four years, we would talk of building a life together before
acknowledging what we should have known much earlier on: that
there was very little on which we could agree. Two-thirds of the
Primordial Man had stayed beyond manifestation. It was Kim
who would prompt his frown lines to appear.
It was she who would remove the sun from the stage-set of the
Satya Yuga. My cry echoed across the cities of the flood-plain,
once tall, which were atomized.
The Rig Veda says, “Desire came upon that one in the beginning,”
the one who breathed, windless, without a sign, the one whose
breath was suspended on its own concealed intent. It was Kim, in
her form as Shakti, who caused a navel that looked like an iris to
snap open in the void. It was she who dared the poet to give form
to the mists of the non-local field, without knowing—or much
caring, as it turned out—that she had produced such an effect.
“There was impulse beneath; there was giving forth above.” The
name “Brian” came from the same root-syllable as “Brahman”:
“to grow from a seed; to expand; to swell.” In the yearly
Sadhamada, or contest of poets, it was she who had taunted me to
push beyond my six competitors, who, unwilling to offend their
teachers, would not test their ability to see beyond the edge of the
horizon. For this reason, they spoke in formulas. It was she whose
heat had reactivated Soma, having called it from the glaciers of
Saryanavat. From there, a drop had landed on my tongue.
We could not, however, agree on whether calendars were real, or
on how the year should be measured, or on what year it actually
was. It was 1987 when we met. I was off by, at the least, 12,000
years. In her own way, however, Kim was also wrong. Without
asking for my informed consent, it was she who would one day
force me to grow up.
Let us return to 1987, to a second-floor meeting room of the
Boston Theosophical Society. Staring, as if dead, out of the
backside of the mirror, we will have been forbidden to do more
than watch. Let us nonetheless act—at a distance, with stealth,
and as if by accident, for the living are in need of a lot of remedial
education. If our efforts prove successful, we will leave not even a
fingerprint, but our guidance will be, in its own way, heard and
felt. Let us encourage the two main characters in this story to do
what they must do, to learn what they must learn, and to value
the bittersweet fullness of their moment, before they each drift
off into their separate worlds.
The key facts are as follows: Kim and Brian were both members
of a meditation group led by David Doolittle, a
carpenter/psychologist. He spoke quietly, but he had a subtle
manner of exerting pressure and he had trained in a number of
confrontational techniques. Nothing should stay hidden, whether
childhood embarrassment or deep existential fear. Whatever was
lurking under the surface, the group was encouraged to sit with it,
to do their best to translate the experience into words, and at
times to act it out. Layer by archeological layer, they would then
proceed to unwrap some core of “presence.” If the concept was
simple, it was also paradoxical. This presence was simultaneously
an aspect of attention, in which you let go of the future and the
past, a substratum of existence more basic than the “ego,” and a
mystery that stretched into realms beyond the human. The
deeper down you went, the less personal the secrets really
appeared to be. Having no self meant that love should not have to
apologize. Who knew that the Anatman could act badly, other
than the whole population of Nanking? A see-through body/mind
would serve to minimize your shadow.
In those days, death was different from life. Sex had nothing at all
to do with reproduction, or, at best, this was a tertiary function.
The average phallus was still large enough to touch a
constellation. The average female form was space. The average
act of coitus was still hot enough to generate the fuel for cosmic
transport. Of course, due to your attachment to the act of coitus,
you might not actually get to travel very far. The world, if not
solid, was as solid as it needed to be to provide some measure of
resistance for your shoes. The Watcher saw the Watched; the
Watched did not see the Watcher, not often, at least, and not
without some fear. There was only the next step, and the hand of
an archeologist that would reach back from the future.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Sun and Moon, The Aztecs, 1970
Bit by bit, Brian saw that he was becoming very attracted to Kim,
who struck him as highly mischievous, and yet mature. There was
an energetic charge to their eye contact, which could be felt on
any number of levels and which seemed each week to intensify.
Finally, he decided that the time had come to ask her out. Quite
oddly, on this day she had worn a form-fitting and very attractive
purple dress. “Great,” he thought, “she is probably meeting
someone after class.” Usually, at the end of class, the members of
the group would stay around for 10 or 15 minutes to talk, or
sometimes go out for a snack and a cup of tea. On this occasion,
however, Kim disappeared before they had even gotten out of our
chairs. Little did Brian realize that she had left to put on makeup.
“I’ve had two months to say something,” he thought, “and now it’s
probably too late.” Stung by the irony of the timing, he dragged
himself downstairs. As he turned the corner of the vestibule that
led to the front door, he noticed that a woman in a form-fitting
purple dress was leaning against the door frame, a slight smile on
her lips. “Care to go for a walk?” she said.
“You bet!” Brian answered. Thus began the last great romance of
his youth.
From the beginning, Brian realized that Kim was far more
grounded and less prone to self-deception than he was. Aside
from his high school friend Peter Lisitsky—whose parents had
survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, and whose response to
any and all complaints about life’s unfairness was “Stop being
such a baby!”—Kim was perhaps the bluntest person he had
known. If they had any problems to address or issues to work out,
Kim would write up a numbered list and then insist on going
though all items one by one. If he bought Kim a present that was
not quite to her taste, she would say, “I don’t really like it. Would
you mind if we returned it and then looked for something else?”
Would not 80 percent total honesty have been more than
enough? When they first realized how compatible they were—or
rather thought they were—Kim asked, “Can you see us living
together in a year or so? If not, we should probably end things
now. Time is going by, and I don’t want to keep starting over.”
Brian could see such a thing, and the relationship continued.
Luckily, this tendency to mature stock-taking was
counterbalanced by a streak of genuine wildness. Once, when we
were riding our bikes through a rough section of the city, a
carload of Hispanic males began shouting out appreciative
comments on her anatomy. Kim spit on the driver through the
open window and then turned off down a one-way street. “Do you
have some kind of a death wish?” Brian asked. If the majority of
her tendencies were not dangerous, as such, they did serve to
jumpstart an openness to chance, to reawaken attitudes that he
had chosen to put on hold. After many years of living in the city, it
was a great adventure for both of them to rediscover nature. They
spent much time biking by the ocean and getting lost on the back
roads of New Hampshire. On a mountain hike, as soon as they
were out of sight of the car, Kim would generally want to take off
all her clothes. “This isn’t the Yukon,” Brian would say. “Don’t
you realize there may be Boy Scouts around?” After making love
in a field of wildflowers, they would stop for a lunch of bread and
cheese and olives. Kim liked to read while sitting on the edge of a
cliff. “I can see the headlines now,” Brian would say, “NAKED
JEWISH GIRL FOUND AT BOTTOM OF CLIFF WITH BOOK.”
Charles Burchfield, Spider and Grasshoppers, 1948
Once, at sunset in a meadow, as the chirping of crickets rose and fell like a mantra intoned by a single and yet discontinuous
organism, they stumbled across a patch of gigantic spider webs.
These were three to four feet high, with black/orange lightning
bolts zigzagging down the center. Brian had never seen anything
like them before, nor would he see anything like them later on.
“Were there lots of these webs around?” he thought. “Were we
just too preoccupied to notice?” They were like satellite dishes
that had been set up to gather signals from the beyond. For over
250 million years, perhaps, each of their arachnids had been
waiting for its victim! Brian and Kim stopped short, glanced at
one another, and then doubled over laughing at the sheer
outrageousness of the webs.
The whole of space was in contact with their skin; it was a
hieroglyph they could translate with their fingers. Deep energies
leapt back and forth, as they diagramed the closed curves of the
microcosm, and yet their ways of seeing things did not always
overlap. On a rocky beach, Brian would carefully put one foot in
front of the other, and then ease into the 48-degree water step by
step. Kim would run out screaming and then plunge into a wave.
She lived in the world; he was just a non-local visitor. To each
had been assigned a different yet appropriate style of
adventurousness. For Brian, their four years together passed with
the magical inevitability of a dream. Kim was far more aware of
the reality of time passing.
The immediate though not the ultimate cause of their breakup
was a shift in spiritual energy, the very energy that had first
connected them. It had created the cocoon inside of which they
grew, but from which they would separately emerge. In July of
1990, they had both gone to see a presentation on Kundalini Yoga
by Asha (later Anandi) Ma. Upon entering the room, Brian felt
that I had stepped into a violent field of energy. He was picked up
and projected toward an ocean, an ocean scheduled to overflow
the banks of the known world. After many years of suspecting he
had grown far too inert, that his body had become more solid
than it should be, Brian almost immediately felt that something
new was going on. One day, perhaps, he could take back what was
his; he could see with his first eyes; he could travel towards those
shores that he remembered, not half-asleep but awake, not
accidentally but by choice. Kim heard only the content of the
words: just one more lecture, a string of Vedic platitudes. By slow
degrees, and then far more rapidly, they began to drift apart.
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