Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  By the end of my first week at the ashram, my days had begun to fall into a rhythm as steady as a well-ordered kindergarten. Up at dawn, for morning meditation. Breakfast of porridge, fresh boiled milk, and tiny, sweet bananas. Then off to clean the cowshed—a task that, to my surprise, had become my favorite time of the day. The shed smelled like hay, earth, and milk. The cows were small and dish-faced, with velvety noses and luminous, intelligent eyes, like deer. Sometimes I’d bring them scraps from breakfast—pineapple rinds, banana peels—and let them eat them out of the palm of my hand. Two of the cows had baby calves, still spindly legged and wobbly on their feet. Leaning over the edge of the fence, watching them suck, I felt a strange tugging deep in my own belly. What would it be like, to have a baby feeding off my body? I’d always been small-breasted. But now they were starting to swell and get tender, the nipples chafing against my bra.

  Sometimes, as I wheeled the wheelbarrow out to dry the cow dung in the sun, I’d catch a glimpse of Devi Das on his way to his yogi job—weeding the vegetable garden just past the cowshed. We never spoke. But once, as I spread the patties in the sun, I caught his eye, and he lifted his hand in a silent greeting.

  I wanted to stay with the cows all day. But, of course, I couldn’t. After work meditation was done, I’d walk to the meditation hall for another lecture and meditation session with Sri Satyaji. These sessions were perpetually bewildering to me. I felt as if I had stumbled into a graduate course in quantum mechanics when I hadn’t even taken basic arithmetic yet. Not only that, but I was expected to write a dissertation.

  It wasn’t that the teachings were terribly complicated. Day after day, they were variations on the same theme: restrain the senses from chasing after tastes, sensations, sounds, smells. Renounce the transient pleasures of the body; rest in the eternal joy of pure spirit. How could I argue with that? My life in the world had brought me nothing but trouble.

  But the more I struggled to be peaceful, the more chaotic my inner life became. No one else at the ashram, I was sure, was secretly pregnant. No one else lay awake at midnight fantasizing about a lover who had left her and worrying about getting through labor without an epidural. No one else spent her meditation sessions imagining what she’d tell Oprah about enlightenment. No one else burst into tears when her wheelbarrow full of cow dung hit a rock and tipped over. Each afternoon, we’d gather with candles and oil lamps for puja, or worship. We’d stand in front of a white-draped altar, chanting prayers in Sanskrit, while the room filled with sweet sandalwood smoke and the music of a harmonium played by a Danish man with the face of an angel. And I’d feel as if I were locked outside in a snowstorm, looking in through an impenetrable glass window at a hearth by a blazing fire.

  “When you meditate, does your mind wander?” I asked Darshana one morning. We were standing side by side in the bathroom, performing our morning kriya: a ritual cleansing of the sinuses that Sri Satyaji said helped prepare the body for meditation.

  She shook her head. “Meditation brings me immeasurable bliss,” she said. She scooped a cupful of warm, salty water from a metal bucket and poured it into her neti pot, a small spouted cup that looked like a miniature watering can. Then she leaned over the sink, tilted her head to one side, and poured the water into one nostril, letting it flow out the other.

  Well, goody for you. I grabbed my own neti pot, leaned over the sink, and poured. The water tickled the back of my nose, and I gagged, coughed, and sneezed a spray of snotty water all over the sink.

  Darshana was just too perfect: Her sari always clean, her face always calm, her movements always graceful and precise. Everything about her grated on me: the way she stood next to me at the sink every morning, cleaning her tongue with a metal tongue scraper. The way she sat next to me in the meditation hall, her straight spine a silent reproof to my own slumping and squirming. Every night, she changed into a lacy white nightgown, while I put on an old sweatshirt of Matt’s, with his karate dojo’s name stamped on it in Chinese characters. It was comforting to have it wrapped around me—the only piece of Matt it was safe to get close to. I’d drift off to sleep in its fuzzy embrace, listening to the soft snuffle of Darshana’s snores—a small imperfection that I found somehow reassuring.

  “I think I’m defective. I don’t think I even have any purusha,” I whispered to Devi Das one afternoon, when I ran into him behind the cowshed. I was spreading the patties of dung in the sun to dry. He had come there to pick up a load of them to take down to the garden. “I try to concentrate on hum sah and instead my mind keeps playing that music from Survivor that means you’re about to get voted off the island.”

  “We have the same problem,” he whispered back. “But we keep playing cat food commercials.” Both of us were trying not to move our lips and mouths, pretending to focus on the cow dung, in case we were being observed.

  “So is this normal?” I patted the tops of the cow patties down with the shovel.

  “We are perhaps not the best person to ask about what is normal. But we have heard it said many times that when you begin to purify the mind, all that comes up at first is the obstacles to purification.”

  “But that’s what I’m saying.” I looked down at the piles of manure, flecked with bits of undigested hay and corn. “I’m starting to think that all I am is obstacles. I mean, if you take away my thoughts and opinions and body and feelings, what’s left?”

  “Maybe that’s what Sri Satyaji wants us to find out.”

  I was silent. My favorite cow meandered up, a brown heifer with glowing golden eyes and a sickle-shaped white spot on her forehead. I’d christened her Crescent, and secretly saved the juiciest scraps of papaya and pineapple for her. She butted her head against my hand like a cat, and I scratched between her eyes. Was this the prakriti I was supposed to be disentangling myself from? This world of cow, and manure, and pineapple? What about the child growing inside me, with its tiny beating heart? Earlier that week, checking my email in the ashram, I’d skipped over to HeyBaby.com. “Your baby has grown to roughly the size of a jumbo shrimp and weighs just an ounce,” I’d read, while the British receptionist glowered at me suspiciously from her desk. “Despite the small proportions, there’s a fully formed baby inside your womb now! His head is a third of the size of his body. His tiny, unique fingerprints are already in place.”

  “Devi Das?” The question came out of nowhere, fully formed, as if I’d been waiting all week to speak it. “Can you tell me more about how your brother died?”

  Devi Das leaned on his pitchfork. He was silent for a long time. “We had both just gotten our driver’s licenses,” he finally said. He wasn’t whispering any more. “We tossed a coin to see who got to drive to the swimming pool. I won.” Outside the meditation hall, the bell had begun to ring, calling us to afternoon puja; a sonorous clang carrying over the green fields. The cows flapped their ears at its sound, but kept on eating.

  “We were following a car that a friend of ours was driving—this girl named Ellen that we both had a crush on. We looked alike, of course, but for some reason the girls always went for him first. I was saying that this time, he should let me have a chance to ask her out. Her car made a left turn on a yellow light. I pulled out after her without even seeing that it had turned red. The car coming from the right slammed into us.”

  I could hear the chanting beginning, the singsong Sanskrit already getting more familiar to me after a week in the ashram: Om thryambakam yajaamahe sugandhim pushti-vardhanam urvaarukamiva bandhanaan mruthyor muksheeya maamruthath…I’d memorized the translation at the bottom of the blurrily xeroxed chant sheets: We worship the three-eyed One who is fragrant and who nourishes all beings. May he liberate us from death for the sake of immortality, even as the cucumber is severed from its bondage of the creeper.

  “Oh, Devi Das. I’m so sorry.” I wanted to give him a hug. But what if someone saw me? We could both be expelled from the ashram.

  He leaned his pitchfork against the cowshed wall. “We should go,”
he said. “We’re late for puja.”

  “HAVE YOU EVER been in love?” I asked Darshana that night.

  I was lying on my bed, watching Darshana brush her hair. She brushed it exactly the same way every night: a hundred strokes with a boar-bristle hairbrush with a silver handle she told me used to belong to her grandmother. The hair crackled with static electricity, lifting and floating in threads of spun gold. Freed from its severe braids, it looked like it had a life of its own—as if it might walk out the ashram gates and set out down the road, carefree and passionate, leaving Darshana behind to meditate without it.

  “Sri Satyaji says that human love is but a pale mirror of the divine love that awaits us in meditation.” The brush beat with a steady rhythm: twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty…

  “I know what Sri Satyaji says.” I wished that Lori were here, lying on the bed opposite me. I missed our all-night conversations, giggling about men and sex and chocolate. For that matter, I missed men and sex and chocolate. “But I’m talking about before. Before you were Darshana.”

  Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty. Oh well. What was I thinking, trying to be girlfriends with an enlightened German lingerie stylist? I rolled over on my side, pulling my blanket around me. I wondered where Matt was right now. I put my hand on my belly, just slightly swelling. I could feel the lump of my uterus, hard as an apple. I wondered what my baby would look like. Would it have my wild curls? Matt’s mismatched eyes?

  “Before I was Darshana, I was Angelika.” Darshana’s voice startled me. I had already started to drift into sleep. “And yes, I was in love. In fact, I was married.”

  “Really? Married?” I saw Darshana walking down an aisle in a cloud of white lace, a handsome German man slipping a ring on her finger. “For how long?”

  “Five years. I was thirty-six when I met him. We were married within six months.”

  “So what happened?” I kept my eyes fixed on the ceiling, afraid that if I looked at her the conversation would stop.

  “Children were very important to him.” The steady beat of her brushing went on. “And as it turned out, I was not able to have children. After my third miscarriage, he left me for another woman. They now have two little boys.”

  Darshana—Angelika—rolling in fetal position in the corner of the bed, her arms crossed over her empty belly, sobbing. “I’m so sorry,” I said, for the second time that day. Who would have thought that Devi Das and Darshana both were carrying so much pain? No wonder yogis wanted to dwell in pure purusha. Prakriti was nothing but trouble.

  Ninety-nine, one hundred. She lay down the brush and began dividing her hair, preparing to bind it in braids again. “It has all turned out for the best. Without that sorrow, I would not have come to spiritual practice and opened to divine love.”

  But does divine love wrap its arms around you when you are crying? Does divine love tell you funny stories until you laugh so hard you beg it to stop? Does it run on tiny feet through your apartment, spill juice on your carpet, snuggle in your lap? “I was in love once, too,” I said. “In fact, I think I still am.” I waited for her to ask for my story. We’d swap advice, commiserate about how men are from Mars and women are from Venus. We’d raise my baby together here at the ashram. It would be the child she’d never had. She’d be the sister I never had.

  But she got up and turned away, sliding the hairbrush back into her top drawer. “It is almost time for the lights to go out,” she said. “We should not be talking this way. We should be fixing our minds on God.”

  From: HeyBaby.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  Welcome to Week 13! Congratulations, you’re almost in the second trimester! Your uterus is now the size of a small grapefruit, and with any luck, your morning sickness is just about over. You can blame those wild mood swings on your raging hormones!

  Now that you’re out of the risky first trimester, your thoughts are probably turning toward creative ways to share the exciting news with your loved ones. You might try gathering them together for a group picture—then just before you snap, instead of saying “cheese,” say, “We’re pregnant!” Then click, and you’ll have their reaction preserved forever!

  From: Lori647@aol.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  Just wanted to let you know that I ran into Tom yesterday at the Green Expo, looking at solar panels. He asked how you were doing. He was trying to act casual, like it didn’t really matter, but he couldn’t pull it off. He’s obviously still obsessed with you. Of course I didn’t tell him you were pregnant. But some day you’re going to have to.

  And speaking of making announcements—have you said anything to your mother yet?

  “IS THE MIND beginning to rest in pure spirit?” Sri Satyaji asked me.

  Three weeks after I’d come to the ashram, I was sitting across from him in his chamber, both of us cross-legged on cushions, for my first private interview on the progress of my spiritual practice. He sat slightly above me, on a raised dais, so my face was about at the level of his belly. I had to crane my head to look up at him.

  “Um, yes. I think so,” I said. “A little bit.”

  “Are there distractions clouding the mind?” A small, brightly painted clock on the wall clicked, whirred, and began playing “It’s a Small World After All,” about twice as fast as I’d ever heard it.

  “Yes, a few.” The song wound down and the clock struck three times, also too fast, although as far as I knew it was late morning.

  “What are these distractions?”

  “Um…” I’m pregnant? I want to strangle my roommate with her mala beads? I’m worried that my book on enlightenment won’t ever get written, and I’ll have to pay back the advance by answering calls for my roommate’s phone sex line? “Things here are very simple,” I finally said. “But my life—outside—is complicated. My relationships are complicated. And I don’t know how to bring the simplicity and purity that I find here into the world outside.”

  He nodded and stroked his beard. “It is common to be distracted by sexual thoughts, especially for someone of your age,” he said, as if that had been what I was talking about. “The practice of celibacy is an essential tool in disentangling the spirit from the bondage of the flesh. By practicing celibacy, you harness the mighty river of sexual energy and use it to turn the wheel of liberation.”

  “Yes, I can feel how powerful celibacy is.” I felt like I was presenting a make-believe version of myself for my spiritual teacher, like the false set of accounting books Ernie had helped me concoct just for the IRS. It was like washing your hair before going to get it cut, or shaving before getting your legs waxed: I didn’t want the person whose job it was to clean me up to see just how far I had let things go. I tried to shift the conversation onto less volatile ground. “I’ve been told that doing yoga poses, too, is a useful way to channel physical energy into spiritual form.”

  He looked as if I had suggested that disemboweling small children would be helpful as well. “Yoga postures must be avoided at all costs. They are a corruption of the path. They pull you deeper into the trap of sensual entrapment. I hope that you have not been tempted to experiment with this very dangerous technique?”

  I’d actually been doing Downward Dog that very morning between our beds, while Darshana was in the shower, trying to loosen the knot between my shoulder blades that got so tight during meditation. I wondered what would happen if I told him that. Would he break out in a head-to-foot rash? “No, of course not. It was just something I heard about.” Who would have thought the path to enlightenment would involve so much pretending?

  The clock chimed again, six times. Sri Satyaji looked over at it solemnly, as if its timekeeping had some direct correlation with reality. “Our time together is finished,” he said. “But before you go, I will give you your dharma name. You may kneel before me.”

  I knelt and bowed my head down to the ground, as I had seen Darshana do in the meditation hall. His feet were bare; his toes were an inch or so before
my face, their nails beautifully manicured, thick black hair sprouting around the knuckles. I wondered if he clipped his nails himself or if his assistant did it. “Your name is Santosha,” he said, extending his hands in the air about six inches over my head. “This is a Sanskrit word that means contentment. When you are feeling unhappy or distracted, focus on this, your true name, and you will feel better.”

  FOR THE NEXT week, I tried as hard as I could to be Santosha. And it definitely beat being Amanda.

  Amanda, frankly, was kind of a drag to be around—constantly worrying about whether she was eating enough B vitamins and iron, about whether she’d get her book written before her money ran out, about whether anyone would ever want to make love with her after she was all stretched out from having a baby. She was given to bouts of uncontrollable weeping or giggling during morning puja, and she had developed an anxious habit of gnawing on the skin next to her thumbnail.

  But Santosha—Santosha was serene. Her mind settled on her mantra and didn’t waver. She ate her meals slowly, savoring each bland bite of rice and dal and overcooked vegetables. She sang along at the pujas with the Sanskrit chants, whose words she was gradually starting to learn. She tried not to let herself feel the gradual tightening of her waistband over her slight but expanding potbelly. Because if she felt it, she would snap back into being Amanda again.

  As Santosha, I began to fall in love with the ashram: the clanging of the bells that woke me at dawn; the whispering of the trees as I fell asleep; the white-robed figures gliding in silence from kitchen to garden to temple; the sonorous sound track of the Sanskrit chanting. Sri Satyaji was the wise and beneficent father I had never had, presiding over an island of peace and purity in a messy, crazy world. And all I had to do, to belong to this family, was become peaceful and pure myself.

  As Santosha, I walked slowly toward the meditation hall one morning. The sky was a brilliant blue; I imagined drawing its color into me with every breath, until my whole soul was a cloudless sky. The hibiscus bush outside the meditation hall was a blaze of crimson. I had never felt so happy. I had finally found somewhere that I really belonged. I could stay at this ashram forever.