And so, having escaped over, twenty years ago, I still greet you. I wanted to apologize to you for letting everybody bully me into marrying Charles Worth when you did more for my blood, my rajas, my ego, and the atman that lies beyond and within the ego. (My marriage, as you can guess, is kaput, though it produced one lovely child-a fair-haired daughter-and twenty-two years' worth of distractions and genteel pretense.) I wanted you to know, in case I die here or am put into prison for some technical reasons I won't bore you with, how your texture, your voice (so quick, and sensitive, and yet sweetly tentative, and even lulling), your chest with all its downy hair, and the milky musty smell of us entwined together were woven into my nerves and will never be unwoven. Having apologized, dear Myron, and having mailed you this rather heavy-breathing bit of the past (scientists, I just read in the Samana Cay Gazette, are doing things with "old air" captured inside hollow brass buttons and tightly corked bottles), let me ask you for two tiny favors: please stamp and mail the enclosed two letters. Again for technical reasons, I don't want the recipients to have any idea where I am, and a Los Angeles postmark would be. a wonderful parting gift to
Your unextinguished old flame,
Sarah née Price
Revered Master-
To quote the blessed Dhammapada: "I have conquered all; I know all, and my life is pure; I have left all, and I am free from craving. I myself found the way. Whom shall I call Teacher? Whom shall I teach?"
Forgive me for leaving unceremoniously. Our farewell was implicit in our every encounter, and within the cycles of karma meetings and partings are hardly to be distinguished. If Nitya Kalpana is now recovered enough to resume supervision of the Treasury of Enlightenment, kindly explain to her that any apparent discrepancies she notices in the books must be blamed upon the irregular methods of accounting which I, having never attended business school, had to improvise; and if that does not explain everything, blame the diabolic machinations of the perfidious Durga. In return for this courtesy, rest assured that our personal relations and whatever revelations they brought are sealed in my vasanas, to remain there as speechless vidya forever. If not, not-if you take my meaning. Neti neti, that is to say, or iti iti. I think our mutual reticence forms a beautiful harmony-a balance of sublime negativities-and pray that you will agree. At our last, and frankest, discussion there was a tape recorder between my breasts, my breasts which you were always kind enough to admire! In my allocation of recently received artha, more than half has been left in your discretionary fund. 300 K ain't hay. May the ashram prosper, along the lines of Hinayana as you mentioned.
Where am I? I feel you asking "Where are you?" much as I was asked, on arriving at the ashram three seasons ago, "Who are you?" We know now who I am: I am Kundalini, the energy-serpent that rises. Master, I have come to that place which always interested me-where purusha, in its eternity, immutability, and utter freedom, very slightly wrinkles (as I picture it) and makes the infinitesimal concession whereby it permits itself to be wed to prakriti in all its tragic tumult of phenomenality and flux. Or perhaps (the distinction, like so many in your teachings, remained a bit obscure to me) I have merely come to that site within prakriti whereby the three gunas are ever so delicately jostled out of their perfect equilibrium and precipitate mahat, which then evolves into ahamkara, the first rude perception, the first dim ego, which then bifurcates into the subjective and the objective, in the latter of which, asl recall, the five tanmatras, subtle and potential, give rise to the relatively coarse paramanu and sthula-bhutani-atoms and molecules! The subjective equivalent would be (as I conceived it) the chittavrittis, the eddies of consciousness it is the purpose of yoga to suppress.
I fear I was a bad sannyasin, for all the flattery and tutorial zeal you and Alinga and Vikshipta lavished upon me, because I was never able quite to let go of my chittavrittis-I was afraid of the void beneath them. For what is life, this illusion which we live and wish to sustain, but this very same skin of fluctuating awareness, of unsteady and no doubt unworthy nibbles and glimmer and halted thoughts and half-sensations? Isn't this, this thin impalpable skin of color and flicker, this and only this the ecstasy of existence that we wish to prolong forever, to prolong beyond that palya after which even the shining protons of the diamond-strewn Buddha Field fall into decay? The terrible unending stillness of samadhi was for me indistinguishable from death, and I dreaded falling into it inadvertently while in some asana-I was terrified that moksha would swoop down and render me blank. In these last several weeks I have often reflected upon you and conclude that you are not, as I may in a moment of female pique have implied, a fraud: no, truly you are a jivan-mukta, a living blank who simultaneously sustains the chitta-vrittis while locating his being beneath them, in that utter indifference which is purusha and the atman. Just so, the body of a man on death row mysteriously continues its operations-its fluid exchanges and molecular haggling-even to the grotesque extent that on the evening of his execution this body falls asleep and in the morning it consumes breakfast, a meal its enzymes and digestive juices are still busily attacking when the electric current fatally surges through and melts all connections. You have relocated your life, Master, and that is what I am still seeking to do.
When I came to the desert I thought my environment greatly simplified, but it was a seething crowded place compared with where I am now. In most directions there is merely the line where samsara makes its vast sad horizon with nirvana. Sattva, rajas, and tamas are all in such nearly perfect balance here that the merest smudge in the sky serves for a cloud, a single small yellow-breasted bird for a flock, and a trip to the local bookstore for an adventure, a pilgrimage. Your books and your posters are on display, and my love for you is slowly being restored to the love it was before reality intervened. For, yes, we do wish to live entirely in our chittavrittis yet cheat them by hoping they are not all there is, and any demonstration we can make of our ideality-loving a man on a poster, for instance-natters this hope. The pleasure of love, you taught me, lies in love's stalling, in vajrolimudra. How you did wickedly delight in my dying again and again while impaled on your inflexible ungiving all-giving vajra, your darling thunder-jewel! For a woman, the equivalent of such nivritti-since our female instrument of love is the entire body, even to the eyelashes and the toenails-is removal, denial, betrayal even: love's expression must become absence and silence.
My absence you already have, the silence will follow this letter. I fear you will not greatly care. Mahima will make my void her plenum. There are many Shaktis. And the human hunger for a god will always reward those with the temerity-the inner density and vacuity-to call themselves gods. Something like that happens whenever a woman falls for a man. But the suffering a woman endures for the same mute Shiva, the same stony linga, over and over! My entire subtle body aches; I awake to this ache and fall asleep impaled upon it. Also, I have caught a cold, as I tend to when I travel. These ignoble constant sniffles and sore throats of ours, and twinges in the teeth-are they, do you suppose, scratches that as it were geologically remember prak-riti's being extracted from purusha?