Saturday, 09 August 2008

• The Missionary Position

  I’ve always loved monks. I never really understood the attraction, I just put it down to their smile, how pure and clear it is, like you can see their hearts opened up to the world.

  Twenty-five years into the world, when I had finally reached a place where the gods of my world, my parents, finally felt they could sit back, relax and say, “We did the right thing,” I went shopping. For books. In a cheap narrow alley on a rainy day in Delhi (almost an oxymoron) where I suddenly found myself staring at the jacket of a book. “love story between a woman and a monk”. It said more than that of course, but that was the only thing I paid attention to, and like all the things that have made sudden startling sense in my life, it was available for me at a price as good as free – twenty bucks. Best of all, as I turned the first few pages over, I rang up my sister and said, “If I would write a novel, this would be it! She writes just like I think!”

  I was working at that time, and I somehow couldn’t carry the book into my workplace, I couldn’t tell why. It was for private time, when I let go of everything I did for the world. I didn’t get beyond the first four chapters when I decided to quit my job, and write a book I had been trying to work on, a story of a soul remembering its past lives as God. I shut myself off from everyone I knew, but only after I took a week’s holiday and visited friends from a time when I had really been struggling with who I was as a person. When I came back, for a whole month, I did nothing but stay quiet and look at my life. I called it “clearing the noise of the world”, ostensibly quietening down to get this book up from the bottoms of my soul but actually going deeper, deeper into my cosmos and wrestling with issues that rose up thickly to the surface. Initially, I had tried to continue reading this one book, but as I read the author’s narrative of a woman struggling between her husband, her lover and her family, and as I grew more disillusioned with the insights I was dredging up about the world and about my old life, I put the book away, at the end of Chapter 32, page 281. I had had enough of the stories of the world, in the way that everything it ever did came from pain even when it was smiling, and I thought about the protagonist, “If she has any sense, she will go back to her husband” – even though it was the monk that I had loved, because I realised with sudden clarity, why I had ever loved monks at all, and even why I had always been attracted to the kind of guy who was naturally nurturing.

  As I struggled with the psychic forces of my being, I gradually fought for my self, for the parts of me that I had always been, no matter how people had tried to change me into being “acceptable in the eyes of the world” and in the eyes of whom everyone accepted as God. I came to a place of absolute clarity, the place where everything is still and then, in the depths of silence, in the rolling hills of Absolute stillness, I heard my own voice, for the first time, speaking, completely clear, with the kind of power that would create the life I always dreamed of. And then slowly, slowly, I came back out, closing myself up because I had to let go of the forces that had led me to that place and gently return to that place again, by myself.

  So I have a book. It is completely different from the book I started out writing. It holds the essence of that book, the principles of how to reach that place inside you that holds completeness. I have been struggling to write it, because what I learned, I learned without words. For the first time, I am writing for someone outside of me, because my journey is complete, and I cannot tell who to write this book for, even though, from time to time, I see old parts of myself in other people asking the same questions I once did. I must use language that doesn’t complete its sentences inside my head, if you know what I mean. No metaphors.

  I called up my dearest friend from my past a couple of days back and explained the book to him, and he took notes and sent them back to me, and I read them last night. Somewhere among all the points was the question he scribbled in, “she did it all by herself?” And I realised that after I stood up for myself and quit my job, what I had done when I took that holiday was to reach out to people who always knew how to hold me with love, no questions asked.

  The trigger-morning that started the journey that inspired the book, I woke up and after exercising, felt a strong urge to meditate. It didn’t make sense because there were other people busy in the room, but I shut my eyes and rapidly entered a deep state I had never been in before, where I felt a strong light hold me and a female presence said “you have never believed enough in me. Ask me for what your heart desires and it will be yours”. The God I have prayed to has always been male, and even when I got to the point where I didn’t care what God’s gender was, or the particular story that people narrated as the origin of God and the world, I just included the female aspect along with the male, though the essential character was always the same. That morning at work, I read a mail that fitted in with the meditation, so I went to the source web site and contacted someone who’d posted a comment there, and turned out to be the person I’d always wanted to meet, the imaginary playmate. He said, “start at the beginning” and I went back to the part of me that I could never explain to my parents, my looseness between different states of consciousness. It was what I learned as I began this journey that made me figure out the book, quit my job, take that holiday, clear my self – and on one night somewhere in the middle, have a vision of God as a woman talking about God being the blueprint of human life, as she smiled at my startlement saying, “Everything is female before it becomes male,” and I remembered how the human embryo changes its sex.

  I sat down and read the paper today, turned to a story my father had talked about during breakfast – a woman who kidnapped a priest because she wanted to have his baby. I thought the story was bizarre, and I felt a little bad for both, that what was love for one was restriction for the other. I suddenly remembered the book, and I thought I would post about my monk fetish as a passing joke, and decided to finish the book to see what Sue Monk Kidd did with The Mermaid Chair.

  Page 315. “My falling in love with (the monk) had had everything to do with his monkness, his loyalty to what lay deep within him, the self-containment of his solitude, that desire to be transformed.” I think it also has to do with the basic thing that monks stand for to me, marriage to God, the Perfect Lover. Something I realised on this journey is that God is everything, that everything came from the Source (Big Bang theory, what d’you call it), that everything that has life has power because God is power, that everything that has life can create because God creates, so when Doomsday comes around, what will be there to condemn? You have done bad things for good reasons and good things for bad reasons, in the end, the only thing you ever wanted was to be at peace with yourself, to be perfect in your happiness – that’s the pilgrimage people nearing death make, and that’s because they seek to be closer to the Source then. This is my way of saying, it isn’t that God is bad or good, but capable of both, and ultimately only making that choice that comes from a genuine regard for all life, and therefore for her/himself.

  Page 318. The woman does the exact same thing I did when I concluded my journey. “I’m not sure he understands any more than I do how belonging to myself allows me to belong more truly to him” – that’s the basis of the book I’m writing now! I can’t believe I am holding the metaphorical version of my journey in my hand, that the book of the book I am writing has already been written and I am reading it at the perfect time, as if to culminate all I have gone through in a blockbuster format. I see now that that which led me to the book, also helped me put it down, and pick it up again, at the perfect time. I don’t care what people call that force, I think it’s natural intelligence, because the Source is in everything.

  And I realised as I shut the book, that I had the central characters in me – the psychiatrist, the artist and the monk (I am trained to be a psychologist, a journalist and a believer); and I love what they all represent in me: mind, body and soul. Metaphor becomes reality.

  A missionary‘s position is to open to the world and hold it with love.

  And somewhere, in all the magic, a new world is born.

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