MELTING DOWN
Dissolving into the One
opening
Ever since you first tasted the elixir of nobodyness, maybe in the midst of meditating or grieving, you have lost your hunger for somebodyness. Mainstream culture conditioned you to construct a persona and defend it with all your might. The endless self-improvement project, fueled by self-loathing and foiled by the realities of the human condition, has only reinforced the illusion that you are separate from your Source. But a combination of spiritual practice and tragic losses ended that game. You, for one, are relieved to surrender.
Your surrender is invisible. You still go through the motions of promoting your work on social media; you make an effort to limit your carbs, practice yoga, pick out interesting things to wear. But that’s not because you actually identify as an individual being, detached from all other beings or from the Earth or from the Holy One. You have come to understand that a functioning ego is a necessary vessel for an incarnate soul. You don’t regard your ego as a problem. You just don’t take it seriously. (Which used to piss your ego off, given its self-important nature. But she’s getting used to it.)
When you were young you recognized Ultimate Reality as Beloved, and you developed a powerful crush. Over the decades your roles reversed and reversed again. You were the seeker; you were the sought. Eventually, in moments of deep stillness or unbearable anguish, lover and Beloved melded. Only Love remained. This state of suchness looked like emptiness but felt like plenitude. You came to understand that not only have you been connected to your Beloved all along but you are that which you had been seeking.
You had expected God to be the prize you would collect after all the hard work of seeking God. It turns out that the object you thought of as you does not exist, which means the subject you called God is not real either.
You would have anticipated such an insight to be devastating, but it isn’t. It’s amusing. Chuckling at the cosmic joke, you get on with business. There are temples to build, curricula to develop, sonatas to compose, start-ups to start up. You did not buy your equanimity cheaply. Frequent firestorms eradicated your opinion on the matter. Multiple meltdowns led you to a place where your only option was to melt. Who knew that dissolving would be so sweet?
Shakti
The dismantling of our false structures is holy work, and it’s inextricable from creativity. The phoenix is born from the ashes. Resurrection does not happen without crucifixion. In Hindu mythology, Shakti is the primal energy of the Universe. She is the embodiment of power and strength coursing through creation, animating and enlivening all that is. All forms are manifestations of Shakti. She is the Great Mother. She is the source from which all the other goddesses spring. She is also the fiery solvent that sometimes, either spontaneously or in response to certain spiritual practices, flows into the soul and dissolves the boundaries of the separate self, restoring our essential unity with the Supreme Being.
Shakti is the consort of Shiva, god of destruction and transformation. This relationship does not in any way imply her subservience. There could be no Shiva without Shakti; they are intertwined and interdependent. While Shiva represents the transcendent nature of the divine reality, Shakti is immanence. She is the force of embodiment, the Word made flesh, the big bang. Shakti is not only the movement of the One into the many, she is also liberation from the illusion of separation.
KUNDALINI
One of Shakti’s favorite forms is kundalini. She resides in the subtle body, coiled as a serpent at the base of the spine, the root chakra. Spiritual practices like meditation and visualization, breathing exercises and chanting can rouse this slumbering life-force. Then, like a bolt of electricity, Shakti rises, radiant, unwinding through each chakra, waking and lighting it up, bursting at last through the thousand-petaled lotus of the crown chakra. In this way, Shakti merges with Shiva, pure consciousness. The manifest melts into the unmanifest and then descends back into form, in an ever-unfolding cosmic dance of becoming and dissolving.
This is not as rarefied a state as it may sound. Like any mystical experience, the awakening of the kundalini is our birthright. There are countless moments in our lives when, in states of profound prayer or art making, of sorrow or lovemaking, we naturally step out of our own way and become a clear channel for the primordial power of creation to flow. This power is the feminine. She is creative, she is wild, and she does not require permission to blast through our being and use us. In tantric philosophy, which emphasizes our relationship with Shakti and recognizes the potency of kundalini, rather than endeavoring to transcend embodied experience, we are guided to harness the energy of life to fuel our awakening.
Some kundalini experiences are dramatic and bequeath to us increased access to ecstatic states for the rest of our lives. Others feel more ordinary. They change us in some ongoing way, yes, but they are more integrated with the tapestry of our days, rather than standing alone as peak experiences.
My friend Dorothy Walters is an example of a spontaneous and utterly transformative kundalini awakening. Dorothy was a college professor of English and women’s studies in Kansas when, at the age of fifty-three and with no context for what was happening, her kundalini suddenly ascended, uprooting life as she knew it and catapulting her onto a path of longing and ecstasy. This formerly political, academic woman became a raving mystic. Now, at ninety, Dorothy still pays attention to the suffering of the world and seeks to alleviate it, but she mostly spends her days writing poetry worthy of the great mystic poets of the past, such as Rumi and Mirabai. To read Dorothy’s poems to the Beloved is not only to bear witness to her experience of divine union but to participate in the direct experience of Love.
Devotion
There are human beings, like the great Indian saint Neem Karoli Baba (whom devotees lovingly call Maharaj-ji), who seem to be especially clear channels for Shakti and whose very presence helps awaken the consciousness and open the hearts of everyone around them. I never had a chance to meet Maharaj-ji in the flesh. But I don’t even remember a time when he was not my window into God. I was nine years old when Ram Dass’s iconic book Be Here Now came out and connected this remarkable holy man from the Himalayas to millions of Western seekers, among them my parents and my friends’ parents, my teachers and neighbors in our countercultural community. This must be what Jesus is like for other people: the sacred ground they grew from and walk upon, the touchstone, home base.
Shortly before his sudden death on September 11, 1973 (when I was twelve), Maharaj-ji abruptly stopped his lifelong practice of writing “RAM RAM RAM” in his little diary and handed it to one of his closest disciples, Siddhi Ma (later called Mata-ji, “beloved mother”), instructing her to continue the repetition of the divine name. After he was gone, it became clear this was his signal that Siddhi Ma was to carry his lineage, to care for his disciples, his temples, and his devotional teachings.
For many years, the “Ma’s” (the Indian women devoted to Maharaj-ji) had kept to themselves in the backrooms of his ashrams, and the Westerners hardly knew they existed. But there they were, tending Maharaj-ji’s every physical need behind the scenes so that he could tend his followers’ every spiritual need out front. With humility and good humor, Mata-ji gathered Maharaj-ji’s far-flung family into her arms after he was gone, and she kept us there until her own death at the end of 2017.
In October 2010, on the ninth anniversary of my daughter’s passing, I made a pilgrimage to the Kainchi Ashram, the main temple where Maharaj-ji had given darshan (the beholding of the Divine in the form of the guru) to westerners in the early 1970s and where Mata-ji still resided in the warm months. The ashram is nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas in the northernmost part of India. It is less than one hundred miles from New Delhi, yet it takes more than ten hours by car to wind up through the dramatic mountain passes and down into the Kumaon Valley.
Being in Kainchi feels like stepping back in time a thousand years. And being with Mata-ji felt like a homecoming. After the loss of my daughter, my road had been harrowing. Although nearly a decade had unfolded, I arrived with a tattered soul and a shattered heart. It wasn’t that Sri Siddhi Ma had some kind of magical powers to mend me (perhaps), or that she possessed a metaphysical vision to see beyond this world (could be), or even that she lavished me with sympathy (she didn’t). It was simple: she looked at me with full attention, and she saw me truly. That’s what happens when a person shows up for you with their full presence. They see you. And to be fully seen is a rare and transformative gift. It seems to me that the capacity for true presence we find among awakened beings is an artifact of their own annihilation: their identification with a separate self has dissolved in the ocean of the One. All that is left is pure presence.
Sitting with Mata-ji and singing to her, prostrating myself at her feet and watching her pranam (bow) before the temple goddesses, melted my cynicism about gurus and allowed my inclination toward reverence to flower. Yet what was most true and real for me about this magnificent woman was not the devotion she elicited in me but, rather, her devotion to Maharaj-ji. Sri Siddhi Ma embodied the guru-disciple relationship and lit it up for all to see and feel and taste. Everything for Mata-ji pointed back to Maharaj-ji. Every good thing belonged to him, and every suffering was an opportunity to follow the trail of fire directly into the garden of his love.
DIE BEFORE YOU DIE
The mystics of all traditions and both sexes sing of the joy of burning. What burns? Our attachment to the false self. The illusion of separation from the Divine. “Die before you die,” said the prophet Muhammad (and also the masterful teacher of the nondual, Ramana Maharshi). Rumi spoke of the blessing of being a trampled grape and becoming the wine of the Beloved or of being a chickpea the Great Chef keeps knocking back into the pot whenever it leaps for the rim. The bhakti poet Mirabai extolled the crazy wisdom of the partridge “who swallows hot coals for love of the moon.”
Our mistake as postmodern citizens of the Western world is to equate self-emptying (known as kenosis in the Christian mystical tradition) with a self-esteem problem. When the mystics aspire to become nothing, we cringe. After all, we have worked hard in therapy to recover from emotional abuse and reconstruct a robust sense of our own worth. Seminars on “prosperity consciousness” and the so-called “law of attraction” are a booming business. We write little affirmations for ourselves and tape them to our bathroom mirrors or slip them into a specially designated “God Box.” We are encouraged to have boundaries; we encourage others to have boundaries.
Boundaries can shut out the Holy One and trap us inside an illusory experience of separation. What about this? Let the margins melt. The way of the mystic is the way of surrender, of dying to the false self to be reborn as the true Self, the God Self, the radiant, divine being we actually are. It’s not that the old self—the personality, the ego, the stories we tell about our lives—is bad or wrong. It’s that when we recognize the essential emptiness of our individual identity in light of the glorious gift of our interconnectedness with the One, independence becomes much less compelling. And that’s the path of the feminine: the path of connection.
THE WAY OF THE LITTLE FLOWER
Connecting sometimes requires dying. The feminine mystic is okay with that.
The more awake and available we can be to all parts of our lives, the more gracefully and graciously we can die. We sacrifice ourselves on a thousand altars, large and small, when we dare wrest our Beloved out of the clutches of rigid belief systems and reclaim our intimacy with the One or when we raise our feminine voice and stand up for Mother Earth. We die each time our children encounter cruelty or illness. Every betrayal is a death, every shattered illusion, every breakup of a relationship. Most mystical traditions will remind us that the way we navigate these endings informs the way we leave this world.
The annihilation of the false self does not have to be harsh, violent, painful. That is the masculine way: to wage war on our delusions. Rather than struggling to override the individual ego, the feminine mystic celebrates interconnection. It can be a simple matter of recognizing our smallness in the face of the awesome majesty of creation. This shift in perspective does not mean that we don’t count or that our actions do not matter. It means we can relax and do our best to contribute something beautiful to the vast cosmos we share.
“It isn’t necessary to do great things but rather to do small things with great love,” said the twentieth-century humanitarian Mother Teresa of Calcutta, paraphrasing the nineteenth-century French mystic Thérèse of Lisieux. Thérèse’s dedication to offering the essence of everyday experience to the glory of God characterized the entirety of her brief incarnation. She referred to herself as “a little flower” in the garden of the Divine, no more important or less magnificent than any other. To be a simple daisy in the divine flower bed is a magnificent thing! A blessed thing.
Although Thérèse was a champion of spiritual nakedness, this did not mean she was passive. Thérèse cultivated her awakening with every fiber of her courageous heart. From the time she could remember, all she ever wanted was to be a saint. Her childhood wish came true. Thérèse died of tuberculosis at age twenty-four, resplendent with physical suffering, ravaged by holy doubt, crazy in love with God. An abundance of miracles following her death, involving spontaneous healings experienced by those who prayed to her and accompanied by the fragrance of roses, is attributed to this saint of holy humility.
Thérèse’s greatness lies in her smallness. The “little flower” continues to strew the path with beauty, reminding us to disappear into the Great Garden, where we find our true being. Each time we resist the temptation to buy some shiny new thing or defend ourselves against false accusations, whenever we choose simplicity over complexity or being kind over being right, we peel off another layer separating us from Love itself.
Kali
As the radiant blackness of divine mystery,
she plays through the lotus wilderness of the sacred human body.
The practitioner of meditation encounters her power
deep in the blossom of primordial awareness
and within the thousand-petal lotus
that floats far above the mind. RAMPRASAD SEN
Lord Shiva is lying amiably on his back. Ma Kali is standing on his chest, bellowing. They are on a battlefield, and the war is over. Kali struck the final blow. Shiva has been her faithful, though mostly silent, ally. In one of her four hands, her sword is still glistening. She holds the head of a foe in another. She extends her two other hands in a mudra of benediction. One says, “Fear not.” The other bestows blessings. Her skin is blue-black, her hair a wild tangle. Her breasts are bare, and her skirt is woven of severed arms.
Kali is the Supreme Mother, and in this legend Shiva is the ground that supports her. Kali’s sword cuts through illusion. The head she holds is the mask of ignorance, now free from the bondage of the ego. Her skin is a starless night sky, mysterious passageway from form to formlessness. Her skirt of arms and hands is woven from the karma of her devotees, freely offered.
Kali would do anything for the liberation of her beloved children. And so she smites the enemies of sorrow and delusion. She eats our too muchness and spits out our not enoughness. You are tired of being petty and jealous? Give it to Kali. You really want to wake up? Ask her to awaken you. Irritable and moody? Selfish and sluggish? Kali will relieve you of your burden. Call on her. “Come, Ma. Remove this obstacle and open the way.”
But, according to my lifelong friend and mentor, Ram Dass (another feminine mystic in the body of a man), you’d better mean it. Ram Dass received direct transmission of Kali’s transformational teachings from his guru, Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj-ji), in India during the 1960s and ‘70s. With Maharaj-ji’s blessings, Ram Dass brought practices back to the West that synthesized traditional Hindu rituals with contemporary Western spiritual perspectives, in much the same way that classical Theravada Buddhist practices blended with Western psychology to birth the American mindfulness movement.
Whatever you give to Kali, Ram Dass has taught me, she will receive. And if you weren’t quite ready, she will come and take it anyway. Her sword will slice you to ribbons. Her fire will turn you to ash. That’s how much she loves you. But the opposite is also true: just as the feminine cannot be limited by attributes of gentleness, neither is Kali exclusively fierce. There is an exquisite tenderness in this goddess of liberating change. Fire doesn’t only burn; it softens and melts that which is hardened and stuck.
It is important to note that Ma Kali is possibly the most commonly misunderstood and culturally appropriated goddess in the Hindu tradition. We risk cultural appropriation whenever those of us from dominant cultures borrow the symbols and spiritual practices from colonized cultures without fully understanding their context or the depth of their cultural meaning. As we open to Kali, we must resist the impulse to confine her by our small personal ideas and Western gaze. Emerging from the tradition of West Bengal but finding universal appeal throughout India and beyond, Kali is no less than God Herself. She is the definition of wild mercy and is the unyielding Divine Mother, relentless in her love and spiritual badassness. The iconography of Kali eloquently speaks to the hearts of seekers from many spiritual backgrounds, and she feels suddenly relevant to the Western psyche in our yearning for the feminine during these unmappable, chaotic times.
Anandamayi Ma
As she played out the lila of child, wife, and spiritual guide, she manifested from moment to moment the different aspects of the Mother: the peaceful serenity of Uma, goddess of dawn; the loving delights of Radha, Krishna’s playful consort; Kali’s protective fierceness; Sita’s dharmic perfection; and the mystical energy of Shakti, the manifest cosmos.
RAM DASS, speaking of Anandamayi Ma
When I was sixteen I was pretty sure I’d be enlightened by nineteen, and I was shocked when I still wasn’t a fully realized being by twenty-two. Now, in my midfifties, I am being called to teach the dharma, but I am nowhere near where I thought I would be. I still find myself getting caught by some of the booby traps my ego is so skillful at setting for me, such as feeling like I’m never enough and always too much. I am alternately impatient with other people’s neuroses and inclined to take things too personally. The separate self is a practical joke I keep falling for.
The image I always held of the perfectly awakened woman was the twentieth-century Indian saint Anandamayi Ma (Bliss-Permeated Mother), who had been roused from the dream of a separate self and left her ego behind. Ma was wild for God. She frequently fell into ecstatic raptures, and when she wasn’t in a trance she was busy dispensing divine wisdom, meeting each pilgrim and devotee exactly where they were along the spectrum of awakening, directly apprehending their souls, and coming up with the perfect solution to their specific spiritual conundrums.
There is nothing wrong (and many things right) about looking to certain great beings as exemplars of states of consciousness to which we aspire. The trouble lies in our preconceived notions of what it means to be awake. I will never be Anandamayi Ma. I live in a different time and belong to a different culture than the one that gave rise to that majestic being. But I in my way—just as you are in your way—am already and always an embodiment of divine wisdom. No, I am not equating my neurotic little self with the Divine Mother incarnate. I am identifying here with my true Self, and it is your true Self I am speaking to when I speak to you.
I have come to realize it is not our many imperfections that are the problem but, rather, our ideas of perfection. It’s not our attachment to what people think about us that creates suffering but our judgment that there is something wrong with and bad about ourselves. In other words, we are supposed to work, not on being less human, but rather on becoming as fully and deeply human as we can possibly be in any given moment. I can be condescending or needy and still love God with every breath in my body, still be worthy of God’s unconditional love. Because, really, I am that love. And so are you.
Anandamayi Ma joins my list of subversive women mystics I adore. When she had her spontaneous awakening at age twenty-six, following as it did upon years of intensive spiritual practice, she initiated herself, simultaneously playing the roles of both guru and disciple. She did not worship one deity to the exclusion of any others, and she engaged religious forms only as a means of transcending form itself. She declined to have sex with her husband, and he became her first and lifelong disciple. Sometimes she was incoherent, weaving her hands in the air in wordless mudras or melting to the floor in a swoon, and other times teachings flowed from her lips in a sublime wisdom stream. She advocated no methods, and she welcomed all beings of every caste and any spiritual tradition. She was iconoclastic yet passionately devoted. She paid no attention to gender and yet was a thoroughly embodied woman.
I guess I still want to be Anandamayi Ma, to speak with clarity and wisdom, and also to throw propriety to the winds. I want to sanction myself and surrender to the One. I want to dissolve, while still being of use in this burning world.
The Poetry of Emptiness
I carry a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other:
With these things I am going to set fire to Heaven
And put out the flames of Hell
So that voyagers to God can rip the veils
And see the real goal. RABIA
Rabia of Basra was an eighth-century Sufi mystic who escaped captivity to live as a holy hermit in the Arabian Desert. Rabia was born into a desperately poor family and eventually sold into slavery after her parents died. And yet she did not let captivity get in the way of her love affair with the Divine. Consumed with a lifelong desire for a direct encounter with Allah, Rabia managed to pass her days engaged in physical labor and spend all night in prayer.
One night her master awoke to the sound of a cry coming from the roof of his house. Climbing the ladder to investigate, he discovered his servant, Rabia, with her forehead pressed to the ground in submission, calling out to God. She was enfolded by a luminous field that grew brighter the more intensely she prayed. When she lifted her head, sparks seemed to fly from her eyes. The air vibrated with divine Love.
“How could I hold such a being captive?” the master mused. And so, in the morning, he summoned the woman he now recognized as a saint and made her an offer. “Either you can stay here and all the members of my household will serve you as you dedicate your life to prayer, or you may have your freedom and go wherever you wish.” Rabia went to the desert.
It’s not that Rabia was engaging in some kind of penance or self-mortification to pay for having done something wrong. She wasn’t disappearing into the desert for the sake of it. Her life of renunciation was driven by pure and radiant Love. Her only goal was to get out of her own way so that she could get to God.
Rabia was the embodiment of the Sufi path of fana, annihilation of the separate self, which leads to baqa, divine union. Because she was a brilliant teacher and a sublime poet, Rabia drew the attention of throngs of spiritual seekers who followed her into the desert to sit at her feet. She banished them. Her personal presence was so radiant that many men, often rich and powerful men, wished to marry her. She laughed them off. With a rock as a pillow and a broken jug to carry sometimes water and sometimes food, Rabia roamed the barren landscape praising the One who transcends all naming.
I exhausted myself, looking.
No one ever finds this by trying.
I melted in it and came home,
Where every jar is full,
But no one drinks.
At the end of her life, Rabia attained a state of no self, and all her striving dripped into the sands. “What is the secret?” the people wanted to know. “How is it that you have met the Beloved and dwell with him here?” “You know of the how,” Rabia said. “I know only the how-less.”
Like so many great mystics, the twentieth-century Indian teacher Ramana Maharshi had a near-death experience that led to spontaneous self-realization. It wasn’t illness or injury that brought him to this sacred threshold. It was an experiment in consciousness. He took himself through a process of radical self-inquiry, imagining his own death in detail and paying attention to what it is that remains when what we generally identify with falls away. He realized that we are not our body alone, that we are more than our personality, that there is some abiding spirit that endures, a loving witness, the true Self.
Assume your favorite meditation posture and ask yourself this simple question: “Who am I?” Cultivate your curiosity and open-mindedness. Be willing to peel back the layers of superficial self-definition and go deeper. “I am a woman.” Neti neti (not this, not that). “I am a mother, a daughter, a lover.” Neti neti. “I am an activist, an artist, a physician, a baker.” Neti neti.
You are not denying that you love to make bread or dance your ass off or that you care about carbon emissions or your children’s education. What you are doing is lifting the layers of dualistic consciousness and returning to your true, essential, vast, and spacious nature. From this place of luminous emptiness, you can fully engage with your life without being tossed away.