people have tried to hold on to that state of blissful perfection through all sorts of external
means—through drugs and sex and power and adrenaline and the accumulation of pretty
things—but it doesn’t keep. We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy’s
fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every
passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure—your
perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the
mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. The kundalini
shakti—the supreme energy of the divine—will take you there.
This is what everyone has come here for.
When I initially wrote that sentence, what I meant by it was: “This is why these one hun-
dred retreat participants from all over the world have come to this Ashram in India.” But actu-
ally, the Yogic saints and philosophers would have agreed with the broadness of my original
statement: “This is what everyone has come here for.” According to the mystics, this search
for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. This is why we all chose to be born, and
this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile—just for the chance to ex-
perience this infinite love. And once you have found this divinity within, can you hold it? Be-
cause if you can... bliss.
I spend the entire retreat in the back of the temple, watching over the participants as they
meditate in the half-dark and total quiet. It is my job to be concerned about their comfort, pay-
ing careful attention to see if anyone is in trouble or need. They’ve all taken vows of silence
for the duration of the retreat, and every day I can feel them descending deeper into that si-
lence until the entire Ashram is saturated with their stillness. Out of respect to the retreat par-
ticipants, we are all tiptoeing through our days now, even eating our meals in silence. All
traces of chatter are gone. Even I am quiet. There is a middle-of-the-night silence around
here now, the hushed timelessness you generally only experience around 3:00 AM when
you’re totally alone—yet it’s carried through the broad daylight and held by the whole Ashram.
As these hundred souls meditate, I have no idea what they’re thinking or feeling, but I
know what they want to experience, and I find myself in a constant state of prayer to God on
their behalf, making odd bargains for them like, Please give these wonderful people any
blessings you might have originally set aside for me. It’s not my intention to go into meditation
at the same time the retreat participants are meditating; I’m supposed to be keeping an eye
on them, not worrying about my own spiritual journey. But I find myself every day lifted on the
waves of their collective devotional intention, much the same way that certain scavenging
birds can ride the thermal heat waves which rise off the earth, taking them much higher in the
air than they ever could have flown on their own wing-power. So it’s probably not surprising
that this is when it happens. One Thursday afternoon in the back of the temple, right in the
nora
(Nora)
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