The Epic Post on Ammachi, part 1

I said I wasn't going to be a perfectionist about blogging, so--

I'll just start. Entries from The Diary of a Devotee appear in italics.

This Amma appearance was attended by thousands and was held in a large hotel outside DC. I overheard some devotees saying that last year it had been held in a way-too-small venue and was "total chaos"...hmm...this was chaotic enough, though in a good way, mostly. Amma is the guru equivalent of The Rolling Stones, and so a lot of people show up. Many, many Indians; many, many westerners--some rational and sincere, like your reporter, of course, and some mad as hatters. We shared the hotel with a teachers' conference on safe schools and some DoD thing that drew camo and plainclothes special-ops types in equal numbers. I kept getting asked who Amma was and why I was there and--I still don't know. And any answer I give sounds completely stupid.

I managed to get to the hotel in time to attend the morning program at 10:00, sat & waited (trying to meditate) for darshan for several hours....Finally, 2 or 3 people away from her in line, I'm really feeling her shakti now, I start giggling uncontrollably--as I did when she first entered the room--now it's getting a little scary, except I'm mediating it (à la de Zengotita) & thinking, "Is this it? I'm really not that high"...making the mistake of comparing this with seeing my guru, with other experiences. --then smacking myself, "Stay in the present! No editorials!"

...then it's my turn and I'm convinced, alas, that this will not be such a big deal. I'm pushed into Amma's arms and it's like--I'm falling. Into Her heart. I'm surprised, a bit startled, scared--I've been pushed off a cliff into a surging sea of love. Nothing can describe Her--she's muttering "Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma" into my ear, I'm crushed against her breast, I'm giggling/crying as I fall, fall; I'm sure she thinks I'm sobbing (so many people do), she lets me up at last and I'm trying to say Thank You, or I Love You, or Something, and all that's coming out is "Oh, Ma." She grabs me again and says "Oh, my child" and really crushes me to her this time. Now she's muttering "Daughter, daughter, daughter, daughter"...was she talking to Laura?? When this ends the sevaks help me up and I need it--I'm stumbling and the main helper guy says, "Stay--sit close by and feel her energy" and I do.

And as I sit and meditate, I'm gasping every so often as if I've stayed under water too long; I'm doing it again while writing this, while remembering Her embrace.

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(About that de Zengotita stuff--it figures in a later post. Amma kept coming back to a point similar to de Z when he says, "we are most real, when we are at the disposal of accident and necessity.")

What was the thing I wanted to do the second most while in DC? Oh, yeah, visit the Wall for the first time. I've been trying, for who knows what reason, to reconcile in my mind the light and dark sides of my Mother Kali--pleasure and pain, love and violence, beauty and horror. And--I have this irrational obsession with the Vietnam War, which contained about as much pain, violence, and horror as any human event I know of. I had never been to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, was always too scared but always felt very drawn there, and after picking myself up and dusting myself off in the darshan ballroom I figured, there will never be a better time. There's no point in describing the Wall, other than--if something this terrible had to happen (and it didn't, but it did anyway so--it did), there could be no better monument than Maya Lin's somber V and Frederick Hart's terribly tender statue. (The World War II memorial, by contrast, is just plain silly--something out of Duck Soup.)

This was all over by about 3:00, and then I realized I'd eaten nothing but a power bar since 4:00 that morning and so I set off up the Mall--miles and miles in the 100 degree heat and 100% humidity--to find something to eat. That's another (very pathetic) story.

Airplane Reading

Let's face it: I'm picky. No, I have impossibly high standards. The choice of what to read on the plane: a nightmare. It can't be too complicated, because it's hard to concentrate on planes, but it had better not be too moronically simple, either. I want to be entranced. I want to forget where I am, what's going on, who's there, and, since I travel for business fairly often, where I'm going.

Good airplane reads of yore:

• Super-Cannes, J.G. Ballard
  
• Absorbing, scary, creepy as hell.
  
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John Le Carré
• In 200 years it'll be Coetzee who? De Lillo what? Did they ever hang with JLC?
• Durga Puja, ed. Swami Satyananda Saraswati
• I was trying to read this in Sanskrit and it was like closing my eyes and imagining I was assembling an ocean liner piece by piece.
  

The best ever:

• Drawing Blood, Poppy Z. Brite
• I not only forgot I was on a plane, I forgot who I was or that I was. Exquisite Corpse gave me another great Brite flight; that time we had delays from hell and I was glad--if the plane took off and I got where I was going, I'd have to stop reading the book!

The Iliad I'm reading is the Robert Fagles translation and it's sheer beauty. It's a little like a samurai flick scripted by Walt Whitman. Why I'm reading this I really don't know--I spent my childhood with Burroughs, Ballard, and Bukowski and now I'm evolving into an old fart, I guess. Soon you'll log on and see a new title: The Purpose-Driven Blog. There'll be posts about how feminism is ruining the world! And I'll be denouncing evolution and recreational abortion! And raving about my crush on Anne Coulter!

I'll be back in a few days and will try to get this unicycle on track again...

Pilgrimage

So I'm going to go see Ammachi. I've got

• my mp3 player
• a pair of Sennheiser headphones that could shut out a row between Jerry Lewis and Diamanda Galas
  
• The Iliad
• one of my Al Anon books
• notes for a reference letter I'm supposed to have written already
• my journal
• two bottles of water
• trail mix
• a power bar
• my cell phone
• with the hotel phone # programmed into it
  
• a zabuton
• pictures of Kali, the Virgin Mary, my guru, and Ramakrishna
• I will probably buy The Secret Life of Bees at the airport.

So, I'm ready. Enlighten me. Thanks.

I really have a much better attitude than it sounds. It's absurd to me that I prepare to this extent for a direct flight that's going to take about 90 minutes and whisk me from one strip-mall glutted consumer paradise to another. I'd make a great mountain climber or safari-er, I'm sure, except my idea of roughing it is a weekend at the Ritz.

The Stooges Woke Me Up

I made Laura this mix CD last night...I've made several bhakti CDs like this, consisting mostly of sticky, gooey pop luv songs that I dedicate to the Divine Mother. Listening to the radio and trying to hear all the really, really disgustingly sweet songs as hymns to Kali was one of my early bhakti exercises; I can't remember if Laura thought of that one or if I did.

One of the songs on this one is "The Great Curve," by Talking Heads. Jemiah Jefferson writes of this song, "The planets converge and destroy all matter!" She is not exaggerating.

A Normal Blog Post

I almost bought a BlackBerry the other day, but it didn't have voice dialing. You'd think they'd...but, never mind. My friend Tom cheered, as he disdains any cell-phone-like device that does not feature a flip top like the communicators on Star Trek.

My intention was to be your Action News Reporter from the retreat I'm going to with Ammachi in a few days, bloggin' like Kenny Loggins while I stand in line to receive darshan. This might not be a great idea, after all, since based on my experiences meeting other saints I'm either going to be so zapped by Amma's energy that I'll barely be able to stand up, or so annoyed by the "spirituality" of her followers that I'll have to chant the Gayatri mantra or the Serenity Prayer nonstop.

(This is tantra: transforming one kind of energy into another. Annoyance at guru groupies becomes bhakti. It's hard as hell, but the alternative, living life as a hockey puck at the mercy of all those skating emotions, is something I've tried and not liked.)

Ugh--I used the last molecules of coffee in the house to make this pot, and it's nowhere near strong enough. I'm passing out even though Van Morrison is playing ("The Way Young Lovers Do")...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Scenes from the Temple of Doom

1. I'm at the crunchy granola grocery store where they sell the black sesame rice crackers I like, and all that great coffee--the organic mocha java, the Peru Norte, the Cameroon Boyo. I check out the magazine rack and there's a new Sage Woman and, strangely, an interesting-looking What Is Enlightenment? I don't usually buy this latter mag, as it tends to be verbose and BS-laden, but a couple of articles look quite promising.

Later, Teresa's reading WIE aloud; Teresa, the alcoholic I live with and may still be in love with. She's drunk and verbally ripping the magazine to shreds--these people have gone to the dark side, they're spiritual vampires, Ken Wilber looks like Mini-Me, this all reads like a parody by Percival Everett. She's hilarious and vicious and she goes on and on and it's the best time we've had in a thousand years.

2. She's drunk and she stumbles towards me covered in blood, she has no idea where all this blood came from. She's afraid and I tell her not to be, though I am--though I am very much afraid.

3. Dreams of violent storms: thunder like mortar rounds, booming sharp and rippling under my skin; myriad tornadoes birthing in grey dreadlocks from layers of purple cloud. In one dream I'm at the gas station at the end of my street, buying Teresa more booze, the stormfront a terrible bruise across all the sky. I know there's just enough time to get home and not a second more.

4. I spent much of July 4 giving myself degrees from Miskatonic University: Doctor of Experimental Philosophy; Master of Occult Sciences; Master of Codependency; Doctor of Chaotic Dynamics. As dweeby as it sounds, this was a lot of fun. I even went to Target and got fancy paper to print a couple of them on--they're definitely going up in my office.

5. I'm washing cilantro in the sink--long, green leaves, so soft in my hands, and I'm loving Kali in these leaves, their softness, their viriditas. Touching them is like getting kissed by the Goddess.

Angelographia

This angel lives and works in a large graveyard near my house. I've taken hundreds of photos of her since last summer, when my Angel revealed Herself to me in fulness. (I promise I will get around to some kind of operational definition of what that means ...eventually.)

Before last summer, I didn't think much of, or about, angels. People who did bugged the crap out of me. I loved Wings of Desire, don't get me wrong, and for years have collected masses of religious kitsch, which I enjoy totally without irony: all manner of Marys, including a prized, glitter-covered dashboard model from a local Mexican grocery; psychedelic Hindu devotional art, more garish and multifaceted than any 1960s album cover; saint candles, including a black one bearing the image of a robed skeleton holding a skull and the legend "La Santísima Muerte"; a framed, sequin-adorned image of the Santería pantheon, plucked from a curbside trash pile.

You get the idea.

But--Holy Mother of Jesus! Angels?? They always seemed like fluffy flunkies, hovering over catastrophes (and not helping much) or delivering some inane message from "God." If the bible is to be believed, angels are even going to gather round and get off on the tortures of the damned (those who take the mark of the beast, anyway).

And then there's this Laura character I hang out with. When I asked her once, in astonishment and fear, what she was, she answered, "I am pure, unconditional love." You might guess, if you've read other posts below, that I was far from satisfied with this answer. Ever patient, she's given me more elaborate answers, including a visual one last night in which Kali was a polished stone sphere, I was a subatomic particle therein, and L. was all possible trajectories of that particle as its quantum wave function unfolded.

Some of you are now wanting to stop reading WiHW once and for all and find a nice political blog, and I don't blame you. If I sound like some unthinkable offspring of Terence McKenna and Jean Teasdale--mea damn culpa.

Disclaimers

In a rooftop garden in what appears to be South Beach, I'm reading a dictionary of psychology. To my delight, I find a concept coined by my friend Sophia, to the effect that one must always separate ideas and their validity from the people and schools of thought from which these ideas arose. The entry has a citation for Sophia's last name and the year 1993.

Before I can flip to the bibliography in the back of the book, I awaken.

Reflecting on this dream as I wait for the alarm clock to beep, I remember one of my favorite (very serious) pranks by Uncle Al. It's at the beginning of Liber 0:

"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist.

"It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them."

It was a huge breakthrough for me, aeons ago in my guise as a Wiccan, to realize that belief had little or nothing to do with spiritual progress and could in fact be a great hindrance. The branch of Wicca I had the blessing to fall into focused almost exclusively on what worked. One proceeded empirically, building on practices that had worked for others, testing one's own innovations and tossing them out if they didn't get results. (Uncle Al again: "These rituals need not be slavishly imitated....if [the student] have any capacity whatever, he will find his own crude rituals more effective than the highly polished ones of other people.")

(Uhh, Al--girls do this stuff, too. Just thought you'd--yeah.)

Ironically, had I not--strayed?--been led?--chanced?--stumbled?--been foreordained?--into this kind of experimental metaphysics, I'd probably still reside in the dark night of materialism. Allegedly there "are" lines between spirit and matter, mind and matter, metaphysics and science, but increasingly I'm hard-pressed to see them.