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Brian George, Homage to Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas # 8, 2023
A sphere, not minding its own business
In the months that followed “Shaktipat,” I felt that all my
previous half-formed wishes, all my other-than-personal
memories, all my abstract speculations had been turned into a
series of daily ultimatums: “Change, and/or die.” My body was on
fire. In pitch darkness, all the objects in my room were as bright
as lamps. The space around me was a web of lightning. A one
-inch orb, which I thought of as the Bindu, would unpredictably
flare up, grow brighter and brighter, then subside. Hovering
above my head or at the edges of my vision, it seemed always
about to suck me into the center of its vortex. Did it see me as its
student, or was I, in fact, a kind of food?
On one three-day holiday weekend, Kim and I were apart. My
meditative focus was continuous. Wave after wave of ecstatic
energy washed over me, picking me up here and depositing me
there, but returning me each time to a calm and luminous center.
“Please,” I thought, “Let Kim also experience this ecstatic energy
!” I envisioned her at the center of a golden egg. This egg was
guarded by a serpent, and through it all necessary information
flowed.
Kim did, indeed, participate in the expansion of this energy, but
the outcome was not at all what I had hoped. For these same
three days, she had become convinced that she was pregnant. She
did not sleep at all, and she wrote almost non-stop in her journal.
It was not clear, later on, why she should have been so concerned,
since her period was only four days late, and this was not at all
unusual. By the time her period arrived, on Tuesday morning, she
had determined that our relationship was over.
Emil Bisttram, Firey Chalice, 1960
With not much warning—or rather none to which I had seen fit to pay attention—a key moment had arrived, a point of turning, in
which the flow of action shifts from one state to another,
sweeping away all obstacles in its path. The world again becomes
fluid, like the glaciers that melted when Agni destroyed Vrtra.
Cliff to cliff, down from the Himalayas, the waters of the Sarasvati
plunged. Gasping for air, I too was swept along. I was not able to
do much more than observe.
“I’ve decided that you’re not at all ready to be a father,” Kim
informed me on Tuesday night, “but I’m more than ready to
become a mother. I turned 35 last week, and I don’t have any
more time to waste. The strength of our erotic connection has
allowed us to play games with time. We’ve had our fun, and now I
need to use this energy to bring new life into existence. You’re
upset, I know, but you’ll soon get over it. It’s not as though you
have any real interest in children. They’re noisy, and you clearly
have more important things to do.” It would have been nice if she
had asked for my opinion on the subject. After having been
militantly opposed to the idea of parenthood for years, my
feelings had quite recently, and through knowing Kim, begun to
change.
But I had had my chance. I would not get another one from Kim,
whatever else might happen later on. One day we were together.
Quite suddenly, we were worlds apart. For, preoccupied with the
care and feeding of my state of perpetual youth, I had already
fallen too far behind the curve.
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