CHAPTER 34

HEART 2 HEART

I’m an island boy now. Monday is my regular beach day. We pack the car with life jackets, floats, towels, and the amphibian wheelchair, and off we go to a spot where the Pacific surf is usually gentle. I love swimming in the ocean. Sometimes I go when my caretakers think the swell is too big. I still love taking risks.

Maui does not get old. We go out on the whale-watching boats or visit the neighboring island of Lanai. Lei‘ohu Ryder, my Hawaiian priestess friend, has taken us up to a sacred spot on West Maui and to the Iao Valley, another sacred place. We’ve been up the ten-thousand-foot Haleakala volcano peak to watch the sunset, and we’ve driven the rough perimeter road around the back side of the island.

On Maui I don’t feel the pull to return to India. There’s something of India here on this sacred island. I sense oneness in the wind, the birds, the sky, the waves. Floating on the ocean swell, I begin to dissolve into the oneness with nature, with Maharaj-ji.

I let my mind dissolve into the ocean of love in my spiritual heart. As the mind quiets, the spiritual heart is the gateway to the soul, the place where we are one without distinction.

I associate that place with Maharaj-ji’s being. He exists on the threshold of self and no-self, of the individual soul and God. As we come together in the spiritual heart, there’s just pure being, no experiencer, no subject-object. Just the vast oneness. Sometimes, imagining what it’s like at that edge, I go out, into sleep or samadhi or some other state. When I reenter my personality, my conceptual mind, my ego, I have no words to describe where I’ve been, a place beyond form where I am.

For years I’ve taught others how to shift from identification with the thinking mind to the spiritual heart, from discursive thought to simple awareness, from the multiplicity of experience to the ground of being, from the ego to the soul. That shift is at the core of what came from Maharaj-ji. It is the greatest teaching and the most subtle.

Perception from the soul plane is all in the moment. Be Here Now is an expression of that. When I am fully in this moment, it is timeless.

Especially when I am by myself, I can slide into the soul rather than be distracted by my body and the barrage of the sensorium. The soul doesn’t do anything; the soul is not a thing. The soul just is. The witness function, the calm, nonjudgmental observer, comes from the soul.

Since I am a bhakta, a devotee on the path of love, from the soul perception I see the world around me as love, as the Beloved. The trees moving in the wind are love. The universe is love. I am a loving point of awareness in the vastness. This consciousness is part of the One. The One is another word for God. God uses your consciousness or my consciousness to talk to himSelf or herSelf, to ourSelf. We are writing this book and reading it to ourSelf.

Before meeting Maharaj-ji, I didn’t comprehend the unity of these planes. Psychedelics took me up and down through planes of consciousness, but I was still perceiving and experiencing them as a separate ego. Psychedelics traverse the astral planes of visions and vivid dreams and colors and archetypal beings. Then there’s the causal plane, where you see how it all works according to the laws of the universe. Beyond all that is the soul plane and the One.

Psychedelics led me through the astral plane, to an encounter with the soul. The first glimpses of being beyond time and space on the soul plane, at home in the heart, were what propelled all my spiritual journey.

Then I met Maharaj-ji, who lives on the cusp of the soul and God, the jivatman and the Atman. That’s what a Siddha, a perfected being, is. For him there is no discontinuity, no going up and down between planes, no going, no coming. He kept saying, “Sub ek,” it’s all One. An integrated whole.

I still shift between my ego and soul. I get irritated, impatient, and all the rest. I am often in pain. I have diabetic neuropathy in my toes, which costs me sleep at night. I have to deal with the discomforts and dependency of poststroke paralysis.

But mostly I live in the soul. There’s a story about a woman who came to Maharaj-ji who was very sad. She said, “My life is so much suffering.” Maharaj-ji said, “I love suffering. It brings me closer to God.” The place in me, in us, that is Maharaj-ji loves everything.

Like the sun, Maharaj-ji radiates love. Like the waves, he washes us in love. It’s a state of being rather than an interpersonal relationship. But it’s not a fixed state, it’s ever-changing as are we. Maharaj-ji is in my soul, and he’s here on Maui. He once said he would come to America and wear a suit. I haven’t seen the suit. Would I recognize him in a suit? Did he mean a bathing suit?

Being with other people is sharing Maharaj-ji’s unconditional love. Every week I have online counseling appointments with individuals. It is one of my favorite things. I call them Heart 2 Heart sessions. I speak with people from all over the world. We meet on the screen. There’s a long waiting list. People ask me their questions, and I answer by getting quiet and listening to them and to Maharaj-ji inside.

I use the light of the computer camera as the person’s third eye, so I can make contact with their soul. I transmit love into that third eye, and this brings us into our shared identity, behind thoughts, behind roles, into our souls.

Working one-on-one is deep work. A person’s karmic movie emerges as we witness our life issues together, soul to soul. Sometimes I can be a soul mirror for them, just as Maharaj-ji is for me, a mirror of love. When someone reveals a problem, I listen for where in their being the question comes from. I try to address that place in their inner being. Depending on the need, I offer a psychological or spiritual approach.

These are soul-to-soul meetings, but my psychology training as a therapist mixes with the soul view. Psychology shows me the layers of emotions and motives, self-imaging, and relationships. I look intuitively at how the mind has fastened on the person’s situation, where they are clinging. Of course, I know the limits of psychology. Psychedelics first showed me that. My yoga training also shows me planes of consciousness.

At the beginning of a session, I ask, “What is your sadhana, your path?” We may go into that spiritual history. I enjoy solving the puzzle of another’s mind and body and soul.

Maharaj-ji said, “I hold the keys to the mind.” Me, I’m kind of figuring it out as I go along. I have a whole ring of keys, from psychology, psychedelics, and spiritual practice. I try them out until I find one that fits.

Sometimes I can tell if the person I am interacting with is part of Maharaj-ji’s satsang, connected from past births. Mostly I don’t know. I am just listening, intuiting what is needed in the moment, hearing what resonates behind the talk, the flavor of the soul behind the personality.

I also look at where I may be stuck in relation to that person. I work on what keeps me from seeing them as a soul. If I’m getting trapped in our individual differences, I use humor as a tool that opens the way. Or we look into each other’s eyes through the e-thers. Because the eyes are windows of the soul, I feel Maharaj-ji’s love when we see eye to eye. I just turn it over to Maharaj-ji until there’s only one of us.

I use my bag of therapist tricks to help people work with their mind stuff. I look at the attachment, the place where they are holding on or wanting it to be a certain way. That can be like Vipassana or going back to Freudian fixations. I see where a person is in their inner journey.

I go into my soul to mirror their soul, to help them free up their attachments and come into the heart. That’s what Maharaj-ji did for me. I don’t feed my personal curiosity about their issues; I look behind the eyes, behind the thoughts flickering between us. I tune in to Maharaj-ji, and I say what comes into my mind. As both of us become aware of the karma of the situation or how they are holding onto a particular point of view, a moment of letting go can happen.

When we go back to their questions and look at them from that witness point of view, the person may no longer identify so much with the difficulties and obstacles that caused distress. Problems become impersonal phenomena; often they just dissolve.

Even without being in a body, Maharaj-ji’s presence comes through to those who need it. What he transmits between beings and across generations is soul love.

Nowadays the mantra I give everyone is “I Am Loving Awareness,” which is my own simple practice. The love is bhakti, the awareness is Buddhism: awareness and love, wisdom and compassion, formless and form, consciousness and love.

Awareness and love are like two sides of a coin. Awareness is not aware of itself, it’s just aware. In that sense, the entire universe is aware. A spiritual master with siddhis knows the universe from inside itself.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke described a quality he called “in-seeing,” which is changing one’s point of view to inside another being. “This describes my earthly bliss: ‘in-seeing’ in indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments.” That’s when your awareness merges into Awareness. Then you are inside everything as well as outside, because it’s all One. That’s why it’s called the Universe. This is the mystical root.

Maharaj-ji said, “You can plan for five hundred years, but you don’t know what will happen the next moment.” Giving up experiences of the past or expectations of the future leaves only this present moment. Everything is present in this moment—everything! When I burrow into this moment, there is nothing else. If I am fully in the moment, my own death or someone else’s is just another moment. The spiritual journey is less about our timeline from birth to death than from separation to oneness. Rather than a small being soon to be extinguished, I am simply a spark of an infinite awareness.

Maharaj-ji’s unconditional love lives in each ordinary instant, love without expectation, without desire, without need of an object. The vastness of emptiness is completely full of love. To be here now in this vastness, I have to let go of the desires and expectations that keep me time bound. This is the essential surrender of the bhakti path. Letting go allows the self of everyday experience, my ego, my thinking mind, to merge with my higher self—my true nature. To merge with the Beloved, I have to let go of my experiences, of even being an experiencer. That is how this jumble of my thoughts and sensations and emotions is forged into one, in the fire of love.

The nineteenth-century Indian saint Ramakrishna likened himself to a salt doll melting into the vast ocean. That ocean is pure consciousness and love. Though I have only one arm that works to swim, I love to float in the Pacific. On land, my paralyzed body is a burden to be carried around, but once in the water I am buoyant and free, and I can be that salt doll.

Surrender is difficult for westerners to accept. We see ourselves as rugged individualists whose creative energy and willpower and constant striving make our lives better and the world a better place. We think our power is the power of our minds to conceive new ways of manipulating objective reality. Our minds are our very being—or, as Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” What we think of as reality is a conceptual thought of how we think it is. We’re afraid that if we give up thinking, we give up our power and free will, and we may succumb to someone else’s power and lose ourselves forever.

That’s the fear. But it turns out giving up conceptual thinking is not so scary after all—in fact, it’s a relief! I keep telling people, “You are not who you think you are!” So-called objective reality is only relatively real compared to the deeper reality of the Self.

Mindfulness is an easier sell in the West, because people think it’s about controlling thoughts, which are at the foundation of our Cartesian reality. The paradox is that to really practice mindfulness, you have to let go of thinking. The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. Our attachment is to the thinking mind, which dies with the brain and the body. Getting past the thinking mind allows the essence of our deeper being to shine forth. The soul is beyond conceptual thinking, beyond space and time. When you give up thinking you are catapulted into being.

Surrender on the bhakti path is a different proposition from giving up ego power. It is the surrender to the Beloved that is no surrender: first, because the attraction to that state of being is so blissful that it subsumes all else; and second, because who or what one really surrenders to is no other than our own being. Call it our true nature, the Self, God, Krishna, nonduality, or in Sanskrit sat chit ananda, existence-consciousness-bliss.

Maharaj-ji represents that kind of surrender for me. He’s the direct reflection of my innermost being and the purest expression of unconditional love I’ve found. In that oneness, there is such peace, joy, and bliss that even the idea of surrender dissolves. Who is there to surrender what to whom?

As the inner guide, Maharaj-ji is overseeing my transformation in the most minute detail. From the moment I met him, I never questioned that I was on a spiritual path or that he was directing it. To my amazement, I just flowed into it; I just changed. His love is the ground for that change. You can surrender to love, even if surrendering to another being is scary.

My personality is still here. What has really changed is my point of view. Maharaj-ji reflects pure being. He is a mirror for the soul, and in that mirror, I began to see myself as he sees me, as a soul, a part of the one. That subtle shift in perception alters the entire universe.

Maharaj-ji said, “Love is the greatest power.” That conversion, from power to love, is perhaps the most significant transformation of my human existence, and yet when I met Maharaj-ji I barely noticed his love because I was so fascinated by his power. This is not something that happened once upon a time. It’s continual. Love is a verb: it’s changing and present; it’s both transitive and intransitive. It’s a state of being, but an active state. Maharaj-ji doesn’t love me or you. He is love.

I’m not a finished being, a Siddha like Maharaj-ji. As the allure of desire subsides and the dissolution of this body approaches, I live in the heart more and more. Maharaj-ji is taking me under his blanket. My mind is quieter. Words are fewer. Love blankets everything like a warm mist.