The Rabbit Hole

Sue, an old friend now living in the states after 30+ years in India suggested that I create a blog describing what it’s like to live “in the world” after having “given it up” to live in the presence of the Avatar Sri Sathya Sai Baba.  This suggestion came on the heels of some other friends encouraging me to finish and publish my “memoirs” of that time, as they found the stories to be “inspiring”.

I started writing the India journal in 1999 and wrote enthusiastically until the enthusiasm shifted to boredom.  This process continued until late this summer, when I reached the point in time in the journal when I left India after spending the better part of the years 1978 – 1981 there. I have returned many times to India over the years, but have not lingered long there.  And though the years since that earlier time have been filled with lessons, I have said little about them in the manuscript.  The ‘book’ has been edited through a collaborative effort and is in a “holding pattern” as I write.

So, is it true that I have something to say?  Perhaps the truth is that I have something to hear.  There are so many stations along the way, and nowhere do I find a destination.  So many exquisite experiences of what has been called “Reality” have not culminated in an arrival at a place.  In fact, those experiences of sublime Oneness were just that…experiences that came and went…come and go.

In my worst moments here “in the world” and by THAT I mean my mind, I find myself falling down the rabbit hole and getting lost in the habit of believing myself to be this woman with all of her raging emotions, judgmental thoughts, desires, fears, and attachments.  What use was/are these experiences of “Reality” then, if they are not constant?  And what good has come of my once “giving up the world”?  Good questions.

Perhaps the rabbit holes of the present are not so deep, nor do those experiences last very long before being interrupted by flashes of awareness.  Would this be the case had I never gone to and sat at the feet of Sai?  I don’t know.  But I believe those moments of falling would have taken me over as they had before, and left me hopeless and helpless for weeks instead of minutes or hours.  And even now in moments of falling into them, there is simultaneously an awareness of their falseness.

Before my experience of India (and by India I mean Sai) I cannot say that I knew, believed in, nor trusted the concept of love.  In His presence the ‘I’ or who I think myself to be would dissolve in an explosion of light, or be battered by the question “who is it that…?” until there was nothing left but spaciousness.  That light, and that spaciousness is love.   I believe that was His gift to me.  As I would watch Him day in and day out from the confines of whatever state of mind would possess me at the time, I could see that light and spaciousness in action.