S. Read online

  Can you hear the supper blast? It's an old foghorn that used to be on a boat in San Francisco. They use it to call us'to dinner, or in case there's nuclear war. You can hear it for miles, way out in the artichokes, and it reminds me of the only thing of my old life I miss, besides you and the girls and Irving—the sea, the triangular piece of it I could see from our front windows. It was never the same. Every day, every hour, it was a slightly different color, responding to the wind, and the sky, and my mood. Do you think I was going stir-crazy?

  It's still me, Midge, a few days older and wiser. Happy Mother's Day. I must finish this tape and get it off to you. There's just so much happening. I know your image of us, and mine too used to be, is of people in lavender robes sitting around in a trance, but what we are'trying to do here isn't escape the world but revolutionize it—offer up a model of creative activity without ego and competitive antagonisms, so that from our central crystal here in the desert human society will spontaneously restructure itself, like certain chemicals when you put in just a pinch of the right precipitant; Vikshipta explains it better than I can; he used to be a chemist. He gets quite lovely when he talks about the new world we'll concoct here. He worked in West Germany for some huge I. G. Farben spin-off until it seemed to him everything they were making—fertilizers, industrial additives, pesticides, even medicines and drugs—was poison, that the whole human species was a kind of poison, worse even than rats and cockroaches and viruses, and he left his wife and little child and went into the world to search for purity. This was in the Seventies sometime, when you and I were being suburban. He went to Nepal and the Himalayas but it was too'cold there, no matter how pure, and he kept getting parasites, and then, drifting south to visit the great carved caves at EHora, he came across this little ashram run by the Arhat in this pale-green farmhouse on the edge of town. It was like, he says, a carnival—absolute freedom and a lot of abuse of the freedom, of course, but in the still center of it all this utterly calm and rather humorous man who just radiated vidya, and prakhya. Not that he ever said so much, he still doesn't and, when he does, afterwards it's almost impossible to remember what was said, you just have this wonderful feeling of being washed 'clean inside, of everything klishta, everything impure and painful, having been gently purged. What Vikshipta liked about the Arhat was that unlike a lot of gurus he didn't demand quiescence, he invited dynamism, and instead of just being a slave word by word to what Patanjali wrote about yoga over two thousand years ago he had heard of Freud and modern psychotherapeutic techniques and in this cosmically good-humored way of his was willing to give anything a shot. There weren't these usual repulsive little anatomical stunts like sucking things back up through your anus and cleaning out your sinuses with a silk string, but a lot of group encounter, and hydrotherapy, and some primal scream, and strange things like food fights and blue movies—anything to wake people up, was the Arhat's approach. He embodies or localizes, that is, purusha to such an extent that it leaches away all the prakriti in the people around him. What / find sweet, in all this, and not so chauvinistic as it sounds, is that purusha, motionless inactive spirit, is male, and prakriti—active nature, you could > say—is female, so that in the ideal maithuna, that's what they call fucking in Sanskrit, the woman does all the work! The men always sit and she is always on top, the way Shiva and Shakti do it! I was shy at first but now I like it, its being up to me, so to speak, even when there's all these men in one of these groups. They sit in a circle called the shri Chakra and what you do is called Chakra puja, or purnabhisheka, the complete consecration. You have to see them all as motionless purusha and your yoni as a purifying fire. Midge, it does work! It gets very impersonal, and that's not such a great loss, it turns out. You become all yoni and your spirit gets delightfully unattached.

  Enough of my lecturing. For God's sake don't tell any of this to Charles or even to Irving. What other news do I have? I still haven't figured out where my rental car went to, and I know Hertz must be bugging Charles, but what can I do? That cold I had when I came is still hanging on. I must say there's a lot of minor illness around here, colds and fevers and aches and pains. I think people get groggy, the twelve hours of work as worship is too much physically, though wonderful spiritually. Even the girls who come to make the beds and tidy the trailers in the morning with the most radiant look on their faces have these awful coughs and sniffles. I've changed jobs again, just when I was getting so good at the backhoe some of the guys would let me scratch their backs with it as a joke. I guess it's a promotion, though I miss the healthy mindless outdoors—you get hardened to it, and there's always a satisfaction when your body responds to a challenge. It settles the mind into silence, physical labor. But Durga came to me and asked if I could type. She didn't like me from the start and I believe she hates me now because of Vikshipta, though I don't know what their relationship was before me. She is beautiful in a way, with those pale-red eyebrows and that black pearl above her nostril, and wears those flowing robes to make the best of her figure, but she doesn't give off really man-pleasing vibes—she seems too angry at something, and it could be is too close to being a man herself. Wimpy types like Yajna are terrified of her and whine all the time about how she's abusing the Master's trust, the way she runs the place along these kind of paranoid lines. But for some reason I'm not scared of her. I said I wrote a mean letter but never had typed professionally. She said they needed another typist in the Uma Room pool to answer the Arhat's mail. It pours in from everywhere—Europe, Australia, Africa, even the South Sea Islands. Our run-ins with the local ranchers and the state land-use freaks have gotten us some national publicity, you may even have seen some of it on the seven-o'clock news, after Natalie Jacobson. People send checks, just for what seeing the Arhat on "Sixty Minutes" has done for them. They fall in love just like I did. He really is a master of the interview—so funny and relaxed and sweet and respectful and solemn and sly, like the baby of the family that's always been made much of. Actually, his early life was very hard and cruel. A person's moksha is supposed to erase his past, but the story you hear is that his father wanted to mutilate him as an infant to make him a more effective beggar but—this was all in Bombay, where as everybody knows the poverty is terrible—but his mother hid him under a heap of rags or cow dung and smuggled him to her sister in the countryside near Ellora, and that's where he grew 'up. 'He's enchanting to me on TV because the camera gets so close to him; otherwise he's whizzing past in a limousine, and even onstage he seems very far away, and dwarfed by this huge silvery-polyester armchair he likes to sit in, and on weekends, when the day trippers and who knows what crazies are there—if they shot John Lennon they'll shoot anybody that appeals to them—he's behind a curved Plexiglas shield that makes him even harder to focus on. But on TV you can see exactly the way his slightly chubby cheeks kind of tense up when he's speaking on an allegorical level, and the beautiful way his mouth moves in his beard, especially that amazing "s" he makes, his front teeth not quite together like he's holding something between the back ones, and his really incredible eyes—they seem absolutely to have no reflected highlights, just this smooth dark bulgy inky brown that goes in and in. I love his lids, too—they're so sculptural somehow, and how the lower ones get this funny bunchy extra wrinkle when he's said something sly, that you can take two ways. And his hair, the kinky energetic grayish bits you can see at the edge of the turban. It's hard to know how old he is. He might be our age. Or ten years older or younger. There's a new videotape, made since the one on ego-negation and prapatti we used to watch together—on sachchidananda and moksha, it's really wonderful, for $39.90, and if you order it direct from us never mind about the five-percent Arizona-state sales tax, nobody pays it around here because we're a religious organization. Do let me know if you don't adore it as much as I do.

  Anyway, Durga comes up with this same icy face she had the day I pretended to have no credit card, and told me to join the typing pool. I said to her I had the impression she hated my guts—you
learn to say such things here, everybody does it, it gets the garbage out and clears the air—and she said her feelings and mine were of no consequence, all that mattered here was our service to the Arhat, though she tad observed that women of my social class tended to play at enlightenment for a few weeks and then go on to some other style of vacation, and once we were out tended to be very cozy with both the press and the law-enforcement authorities—she has these phobias about the FBI, the IRS, the CIA, and the Immigration Service, not to mention the local sheriff. She said the Master had become aware of my presence, and the executive committee had concluded I had the requisite energy and karmic potential to serve at a higher level than skimming concrete or even operating a backhoe. My heart sank. I loved that big sweet sleepy yellow thing, a brand-new diesel John Deere. But, softhearted me, I said O.K. and have been working in the Uma Room for three days now. It's all little cubicles. They give you these form responses and after a while you can elaborate on them to suit your own style, within limits, but even so it's not really enlaging labor like the other was, the outdoor work. One advantage, it brings you quite close to the Arhat, though I haven't seen him yet—he lives in the original ranch hacienda, which has been remodelled and connected to these fitted-together trailers by a kind of breezeway. They say Durga is always slipping in to consult with him, and some of the others. The executive committee is mostly all women—the Arhat has this theory that women are stronger in selflessness than men, which may be a nice way of saying they're subservient. I couldn't wear my ratty muddy work clothes to the Uma Room, and the other typists wear saris, so I've gone and bought myself a couple at the Varuna Emporium and spend about a half-hour every morning trying to fold it so it doesn't fall off or get all sloppy whenever you lift your arm. They offer quite a line actually of clothes in these sunset shades of purple and violet and dusky lavender and even burgundy and magenta and a Very attractive rosy brown. The Emporium puts out a catalogue I'd be happy to send you, along with the order form for the moksha videotape if you and the girls want to get it.

  I keep waiting for' this tape to run out, since my Puritan conscience, it must be, won't let me send it off to you until I've filled every inch. You and Irving and Ann and Liz and Gloria top and Donna, if they're around Wednesday, do the same and send it back—I'm not so far gone into prapatti and all that as not to miss a lot of the good things I've left behind. The ocean must be full of sails by now on the weekends, and the tulips up everywhere. I've missed the daffodils, the apple blossoms, and the hawthorns. Above all, Midge, I miss your friendship. The women here try to be nice and friendly but they tend, frankly, to be from different social circles from what you and I are used to. A lot of them of course are very young, for one thing—just teen-age runaways or dropouts still acting out their adolescent crises. The Arhat is what they're doing instead of bulimia or drugs or turning tricks on Sunset Boulevard. They're young but not very often glamorous—rather the opposite, dumpy in fact, though how they get fat on the diet of rice balls and artichoke paste they serve in the mess hall I have no idea. I've lost seven pounds, myself. Then the ones that are older were hippies, many of them, fifteen years ago, or beach bums, and the drugs left some short circuits in their heads—little gaps they just smile through as if what they said made perfect sense. I'm not speaking pf the psychotics and addicts, though we have a few of those too. But they don't push themselves on you, they tend to stick to themselves and are rather shy. It's the women of some quality and education who are so disappointing. They have this—I don't want to be unkind, but—this Midwestern blandness, even when they come from the West Coast. There's no history really where they're from except old Spanish missions or Russian fishing settlements or Mickey Mouse back when he was Steamboat Willie—that's as far back as the collective memory goes. They've been to college, a lot of them, and some have advanced degrees evidently, they're not exactly dimwits, but really they don't speak my language—everything has only one dimension for them, there's no double entendre and the double voir that goes with it—it's just impossible to have with them the kind of silly fun we used to have. There is one, I should say—from Iowa, of all unlikely areas—called Alinga, with some refinement and subtlety. That reminds me, a fascinating thing Alinga did tell me this morning about the

  [end of tape]

  May 12, 1986

  Dear Ms. Grumbach:

  It filled me with limitless happiness to receive your precious letter and to hear of your perfect love. Selfless and loyal love such as you profess is one of the greatest weapons Man and Woman can have in their ceaseless struggle to escape the cruel cycles of karma and enter into everlasting moksha and sachchidananda. I accept your love, my dear pilgrim, and would welcome you at Ashram Arhat if certain technical requirements can be met.

  Millennia of yogic experience have determined that the individual spirit cannot return to the Atman if encumbered by worldly possessions. I ask merely that for the duration of your life here under my protection and guidance—may it be eternal!—your financial savings be placed in the care of the vigilant and efficient custodians of our Treasury of Enlightenment. Their infallible wisdom and the irresistible success of our communal enterprise will ensure that your assets shall be returned to you greatly enhanced if you ever were, most regrettably, to decide to leave our company.

  Demand for places amid our limited facilities is such that we must ask a minimum deposit of ten thousand dollars (U.S.). In addition there are fees totalling eight hundred dollars monthly to cover a modest portion of the unavoidable expenses of your food, housing, health and accident insurance, lecture and darshan fees, and supervised meditation. Sannyasins are of course expected to practice worship in the form of constructive labor for twelve hours a day and either to bring with them sturdy boots, a sleeping bag, a sun hat, and appropriately colored garb or else to purchase such supplies at the Varuna Emporium located to the right of the ashram Chakra, with its famous fountain. A mala of beads of sacred sandalwood ending in a beautiful hand-carved pendant containing a color photograph of myself plus a hair from my head or beard will be provided 'free, as a benison of Buddha, and should be worn at all times, save when bathing or (at the wearer's discretion) engaged in sexual intercourse. A full range of contraceptive preparations and devices may be obtained at the Karuna Pharmacy; and various iconographic aids to life at Ashram Arhat, including incense and other purifying inhalants, can be purchased at our shops, as described in the enclosed catalogue.

  These aids, and my inspired and unexpurgated books, videotapes, and audio cassettes, not to mention posters depicting my present (and final) physical incarnation, selected Hindu deities, tantric visualizations, and ritually constructed mandalas can of course be ordered and utilized by those who do not yet feel able to cut their sordid earthly ties and surrender to the new order of existence established here at Ashram Arhat, amid the immemorial peace of the healthful semi-arid Sonoran Plateau.

  Dear Gladys Grumbach, I return your love a million-fold and with tranquil exultation await your reply. Come and join me! Yoxi and none other ignite my heart's flame. As the Lord Buddha asked, "Who shall find the Dhammapada, the clear Path of Perfection, even as a man who seeks flowers finds the most beautiful flower?"

  Shanti,

  Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.

  Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

  /spw

  May 13, 1986

  Sir:

  Your recent editorial in the Forrest Weekly Sentinel condemnatory of the Ashram Arhat as a "glorified summer camp" for "bored yuppies" and "pathetic societal strays" would be beneath our notice were we not sincerely anxious to cultivate good relations with our fellow-citizens of Dorado County and to have our substantial contributions to the regional economy recognized. A barren tract of exhausted range has been transformed into productive agricultural land at no cost to the water table. Our extensive irrigation and sanitation draw solely upon an aquifer confined to the valley of Gritty Creek, now happily renamed the Sach-chidananda River and not
to be confused with the miserable alkaline trickle the good "citizens" of Forrest have amusingly dubbed Babbling Brook.

  To correct a few other misapprehensions or deliberate misstatements: (1) Our facilities for meditation, therapy (both physio- and psycho-), non-soil-depleting agriculture, and hand manufacture have never claimed tax-exempt status; via real-estate tax and other levies the ashram has contributed $46,742.07 to Dorado County coffers in the fiscal year ended this March, in return for which we have received precisely no public services—neither police protection nor trash pickup nor highway maintenance nor water nor sewer mains nor anything but the forced enrollment of sixteen of our children in public schools where, after sickeningly long bus rides, they are bullied and tormented by their teachers and fellow-students alike and subjected to a bowdlerized, anti-evolutionist, right-wing curriculum that would insult the intelligence of a chuck-walla. (2) Our armed security forces exist solely to defend our property and personnel against the attacks of trigger-happy rednecks and beered-up adolescents who have repeatedly damaged and fired upon our water tanks, our outlying pumphouses and tool sheds, our faithful watchdogs, and our signs of welcome in many languages. (3) Our so-called "orgies" are in fact exercises in the ancient art of tantric yoga, wherein the participants worship one another as Shiva and Shakti, the fundamental forces of the cosmos; sexuality and spirituality are forms of one energy, proclaims our Arhat, whose love unites us all and in ecstatic love of whom we are all made new.