50th Anniversay of Initiation

 

Hard to believe. Today is the 50th Anniversary of the most important event in my life. If I were to pass away tomorrow, I would kick myself for never sharing these thoughts. So here is my testament. Fifty years ago this day, I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation.

My heart is filled with love today. I bow down, touch the earth with my forehead, and shatter my mind into stars. This is not a bow of servitude, but freedom. What is freedom? Freedom is infinite gratitude.

It is quite easy to rant about fake gurus and false teachers; it is far more difficult to find a true one. And what is the sign of the true one? S/he is the one who awakens the Guru Tattva, the Teacher within you.

Guru Tattva is a seed that has slumbered deep in your heart for a thousand lifetimes. A dark well of melted lightning waits to dance through your spine, flooding every cell of your flesh. Yet this seed must be ignited, this wellspring aroused, by the Beloved.

Awakening the Guru Tattva, a real Teacher frees you from the search. You know you have come Om.

On this day fifty years ago, I sensed that initiation was an important moment, but now I know that learning Transcendental Meditation was the central event of my life, indeed, of many lives.

Sometimes this pathless way was difficult, because it was so ruthlessly simple. No consolation of emotional rapture, no devotional melodrama, no surrogate mommy or daddy: just a razor's edge of naked Being.

Not even the consolation of effort! How our intellectual egos love effort, especially when it involves studying some esoteric philosophy. No such luck: Transcendental Meditation deflates the ego because it is effortless. Intellectuals disdain the wayless.

Sometimes meditation was a lonely trackless wasteland. Sometimes it was like drilling through a mountain of stone - my karma. But because I am both a stubborn Capricorn and a desolate child, I never veered from the razor's edge of daily morning and evening sadhana.

Eventually, on the dark wings of a bare intent, my awareness broke through the clouds, and I soared into my true nature, the clear blue sky of Sat-Chit-Ananda: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.

In this meditation, without control or concentration, awareness flows deeper and deeper inside, following the ever-dissolving bell of the bija-mantra, until it merges with the boundless ocean of transcendental silence. This silence is not a withdrawal from creation, but the source of creation, the womb-dark before God says, "Let there be light."

The flow of awareness back to the source is impelled purely by grace, not by thinking. What a gift the masters of the holy Shankaracharya tradition have bequeathed to us!

Transcendental Meditation is Shiva's sword, so piercing and powerful that only half an hour is necessary for a complete immersion in Source. Through regular dawn and sunset practice, tempered and tested in daily service to the world, the pure awareness which once seemed like no-thing, gradually solidifies into a diamond. But this jewel is weightless, floating in the azure space of eternity at the center of the heart.

And as the radiance of bejeweled awareness reflects off the ephemeral mist of the world, one begins to see God in a dragonfly's wing, the gaze of a baby at the supermarket, the eyes of the mad woman camped on the sidewalk under the Virgin's statue. One sees the Imperishable in the perishing colors of the evening sky. The Guru's voice is the chirp of a cricket, the din of the market, the coyote's howl. Yet for me, this blossoming had a seed: the feather-breath of the Master's touch on my heart at initiation.

When a secret paramour leaves a fragrant blossom at your bedside, is your mind filled with philosophy, with esoteric knowledge, with a set of beliefs and commandments? Or is there just a storm of sweetness in your chest, a groundless hollow between heartbeats?

I plunge into the radiant darkness of that abysmal love, the living silence beyond word and thought, deeper inside me than my soul. And though I know less and less, I Am more and more.

The Beloved has come too near to be known, too close to be separate. Knowledge has dissolved into Presence. Every breath is a gift. And the Guru is the gift inside the gift.

Photo: With Maharishi in 1970, and my college classmate / meditation mentor, Eric.