S. (13 page)

Warm regards,
Sarah Worth

June 18

Dear Dr. Epstein—

I enclose a check for $180 to cover our last two appointments as billed by you. I trust that this clears up our accounts. I feel
I
should render an accounting of what I’ve been up to—as if the pseudo-daughterly guilty feelings that you led me to override in regard to Charles remain undischarged in regard to
you
. Looking back at my years of therapy, I confess that it all now seems much more patriarchal and Judeo-Christian than it did at the time. Far from being my ally against Charles as I fantasized, you were
his
ally against my liberation. Not
that I blame you: I, too, was resisting my liberation, since I had no confidence of my finding a place in any world but the atrophied Puritan theocracy in which I had been raised, by parents whose sense of their own worth was inordinately tied to ancestral achievement, to being “our sort” of New Englanders. My father took, I think, real and dimly perverse pleasure in doing the absolutely predictable thing, in doing his piddling trust-officer thing in Boston and going to his clubs and dressing like a Harvard undergraduate to the day of his death, in striped tie and gray flannels and oxblood cordovans with little waxed laces.

Even at the time when I was most enchanted with our process it
did
cross my mind that Freud’s notion of what went on inside Viennese women was somewhat absurd. I was once a little girl, for example, and until I was four, when my brother was born, I had no idea that little boys had penises, let alone that I should envy them for it. His looked like quite a comical little button, as I remember. My father always dressed in his room and once forbade me to go with him and Mother to a nudist beach on Martha’s Vineyard, as I more than once told you. You never commented on whether or not this had been repressive of them.

I wonder now if the precious classic therapeutic silence isn’t just another version of the Victorian father’s silence, his awe-inspiring absence except at dinnertime, with the same disciplinary implications, at least as regards women. My knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist psychological thought is very imperfect but the notion of the subconscious as a pool of eddies (
vasanas
) that originate in memory and feed the conscious eddies (
chittavrittis
) and which certain exercises can eventually erase in a blissful motionless (
nirvana
= without wind) state of
samadhi
has—this way of putting things—a certain
intimate, non-terroristic simplicity that appeals to me. Western psychology interfaces—to use a fashionable term—with society and morality, and Eastern with the body, with physiology—which rather better fits with the way, most days, I feel. I mean, should the game be to referee the war between superego, ego, and id, or to relax the whole system, by letting the ego and its harassing entanglements just fade away?

At any rate, you did your best by your lights and that is all any of us can do. I don’t want to harass
you
with a long letter—though your bill gave me a shock, arriving out of a world of petty finance I had rather forgotten and showing by its resubmission that Charles has abandoned his responsibilities toward his wife’s medical care. In fact, I
can’t
write a long letter, since this motel where I am waiting for some friends to pick me up isn’t very generous with its stationery to those who are not staying here as guests. I obtained my present supply by sauntering around outside and then nipping into a room that the Mexican maid had left open and stealing from the desk. Our old Sarah wouldn’t have done that, would she? But once you perceive that all material and intellectual phenomena are just threads in a great weave of illusion (
maya, samsara
) it becomes oddly easy to act on your impulses. Property is not only theft, it’s nonsense.

My best to Mrs. Epstein. All those years of Mondays I used to wonder and wonder what she was like and what
it
was like being married to such a marvellous understanding man. I suppose I was madly jealous of her—I know that’s the kind of thing you people like to hear, it’s all grist to your “transference” mill. But now she can be Bianca Jagger for all I care, and good luck to you both.

With warm regards,
Sarah Worth

June 18

Dear Martin—

Your mother in a nice letter to me thought it would help if I sent you a card. I’m sorry you’re in jail but I have recently learned that all the material world is a jail. Develop inner
peace
.

Your well-wisher,
Sarah P. Worth

June 18

Dear Eldridge—

This is a mesa, which is Spanish for “table.” There are a lot of them here, and you’ve probably seen some in television commercials—the one with the Nissan truck.

Your friend,
Sarah P. Worth

[
tape
]

“Sarvasam eva mayanam, strimayaiva vishishyate.” This is from an ancient Mahayana text and says, “Of all the forms of illusion, woman is the most important.” For Buddha and his followers, woman is the portal of release. She is that within the world which takes us out of the world. She is that being through whom is made manifest the karuna, the compassion, of nirvana, of non-being. She is the living wonder of the world. The mounds of her body are like temple-mounds; they symbolize nirvana. The lotus of her body is the lotus of Sahasrara, of final illumination. “Buddhatvam yoshidyonisamsritam.”
That is a very important saying. Repeat, please. “Buddhatvam yoshidyonisamsritam.” [
Responsive mumble
.] It means, “Buddhahood is in the female organ.” The yoni. The cunt. Buddhahood is in the cunt. OM mani padme HUM. The jewel is in the lotus. The jewel is the mind. The lotus is nirvana. The mind dissolves in nirvana. But also the jewel is the linga, the cock. The lotus is the cunt. The cock in the cunt. This is bliss, rasa. This is samarasa, the bliss of unity. This is Mahasukha, the Great Bliss. This is Mahabindu, the great point, the Transcendental Void. This is maithuna—fucking. This is Shiva and Shakti united, purusha and prakriti united to make bliss; this is sahaja. Sahaja is the state of non-conditioned existence, of the pure spontaneity. We must learn to acquire the pure spontaneity. When Kundalini unites with Atman, this is also sahaja. That is why we learn our mantras, learn our mudras. That is why we learn pranayama. That is why we strive to cleanse ourselves inside and out. To be non-conditioned, to have the pure spontaneity. Ommmm!

Buddha was not a nice boy. He was not a nice quiet boy with fat cheeks always sitting with his hands folded in his lap. He conquered Mara by the technique of maithuna, of fucking. Mara means “death.” First Mara came to Buddha in the form of Kama, desire. When Buddha was not deterred from enlightenment by seductive desire, Mara got rough. Mara assailed Buddha with visions of many horrors, demons, animals, monsters with very bad-smelling breaths and armpits, shrieking ghosts. Among these horrors danced a little naked black woman bearing in her hand a skull and wearing a necklace of many little tiny skulls. This was Kali. She is death. Also she is desire and delight. She is the goddess of time. Death and desire are the children of time.

But our Lord Buddha had done his maithuna, his fucking.
He had fucked his wife, Yashodhara, and made Rahula, his poor abandoned son. A prince in those days had many other ladies also. His father, Shuddhodana Gotama, had built for his son, called then Siddhartha Gotama, a pavilion of much luxury and equipped it with many ladies skilled in the ways of music and dance and love. So Mara could not shake Buddha. He who has known love has passed through the center of the world and cannot be shaken. Krishna among the Gopis knew endless love. Radha, his favorite mistress, became a goddess, bruised as she was by love, scratched and bloody with love, her clothes torn by love, her hair tangled, her body wet with the sweat of love, which is sweet. Again and again Radha faints. Again and again the touch of Krishna restores her to vigor and to love. Then he multiplies himself nine hundred thousand times and copulates with nine hundred thousand Gopi women. The gods and the goddesses and the sages in the heavens watch with dumbfoundment. The goddesses faint many times while watching but in the desire to learn maithuna ask to be born all over India in the form of little princesses in the palaces of kings. They are born then. This is the fact. This is what happened in the glades of Vrindavan, as reported faithfully in the Brahmavaivarta Purana. OM mani padme HUM.

Once a Brahmin sage comes to Buddha very indignant. “What is all this fucking?” he says. “It is not in the Vedas!” Buddha says to him, “Women are the gods. Women are life. Be ever among women in thought!” This is a true historical saying. There is this evil thought in religion: Women are impure. Women distract men away from God. They are like dirt on the lens. Their rajas are impure. This is evil superstition. The rajas of women are no more impure than the sukra of men. Sukra is bindu, the point from which all comes. All life comes from sukra and rajas. They are joy. The lotus has its seed deep in the muck of the pond, and then its flower blooms
on the surface, in air. That is why the lotus is the symbol of wisdom as well as the symbol of woman. The lotus is the symbol of Lakshmi, the wife of Vishnu. She is the Mother Goddess. Now, what does a mother do? She sends the children out to play, then she calls them back in, back home. She calls them home to earth, to death. The lotus is nothingness. You in the West fear nothingness. “Save me from nothingness, great bearded Jehovah!” you cry and imagine He says from the cross, “Today thou shalt be with Me in paradise,” when in fact He says only, “I thirst.” You in the West fear nothingness and the beauty of the lotus. You must learn to worship the lotus. Men and women alike must learn to worship what a woman has at her root. There is this phrase, “lotus-eaters.” It means someone who is asleep. But in fact the lotus-eater is not asleep, he is wide awake, his consciousness has ascended to its limits, his consciousness is no longer captive to his ego. What is ego? It is ahamkara. “Aham” is the sound “I,” ego is making the sound “I.” As soon as in evolution prakriti learned to say “I,” it first felt fear, and then desire. That is ahamkara.

He who learns to worship the lotus, to dissolve his chittavrittis in consciousness of the lotus, that man—or woman, it might be, for woman is in the man and man is in woman—that man or woman says “thou,” knowing that “thou” is the same as “I.” Tat tvam asi: that thou art. Thou art atman, thou art brahman, thou art adipurusha, the Universal Man. He or she who knows that is wide awake. He or she eats the lotus. He or she drinks the rajas, which means not just blood but all female secretions. The rajas are nectar. The rajas are angel food. The rajas are rasa, which means “bliss.” Rasa also means “sap.” The divine sap rising in the woman, that is rajas. A man who is not enlightened has this fear of nothingness that comes from saying “I.” When a man has this fear, he turns to woman. She is mother. She is common sense. She has no
fear. She is prakriti before it thought “I.” He turns to her. He makes love to her. He inhales her aroma. He looks into her black eyes and sees the redness of her mouth when she laughs. There is a poem that says, “Put away the idea of two and be of one body.” The fear that he has goes away. She is maya, she is nothingness. Who knows the name of the mother of Buddha, whose father was called Shuddhodana? [
Distant shout
.] Yes. It was Maya. Buddha was born of Maya.

You in the West fear nothingness because you think God is a big bearded fellow in the sky who will crush you. You think, “How can I make that Big Guy like me better?” You think, “I will hate myself, then He will like me. I will hate all cunts, because they give me bliss. Then God will like me very much.” In India too, they torture themselves, to burn away the ego and its fear. They sit naked on burning rocks. They stare at the sun until the eyeballs are all white and quite blind. They make fists until their fingernails grow out the other side. You ask, “Is it hurting?” They say, “No, it feels fine. I am enjoying samadhi.” That is one way. That is the way of “neti neti”—“not this, not that.” Not anything, and then what is left will be good. That is the way of yoga. There is another way, the way of bhoga. Bhoga means “pleasure.” The way of bhoga says “iti iti”—“it is here, it is here.” Buddha and Brahman are in everything. In kama, pleasure. In rasa, sap. Say no to nothing. Brahman, Buddha are in you also. You are the same mystery. When ego dissolves, purusha is there. Eat the lotus. No Big Guy will crush you. You are Brahman. [
Loudly
] OM. Buddha is yours. You carry him about like a little fetus curled in the shadow of your mind, and in this same way he carries you. [
Louder still
]
OMMM
.

[
end of tape
]

June 26, 1986

Gentlemen:

To follow up our letter of May 24: our former chief accountant, Ma Prem Nitya Kalpana, has due to the mental stress of her responsibilities taken a permanent leave of absence, and the matter of your unpaid bills for six Lincoln limousines is being investigated by her successors. The disorder of the accounts is formidable, but we hope to be getting back to you soon.

With every good wish,
Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.
Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/k

July 2

Dear Jerry—

What a pleasant surprise to hear from you! Yes, I am well, and trust you are the same. Caracas must be lovely this time of year—but, then, it’s lovely all the time of the year, isn’t it, being on the equator and a plateau and near the sea all at once? Here it is
hot
, 110° is not uncommon, but as I work in an air-conditioned office I don’t really mind it, except that in changing from the chilly indoors to sizzling outdoors I’ve caught one of my wretched colds. When we were growing up I used to blame the germs you brought home from the boys’ gym or locker room—I can’t do that now, can I?

I don’t know what alarming stuff Mother has been feeding you but your implied chastisements are really rather amusing. And old-hat! This is a spiritual place but also a hard-working place, and my colleagues are not outmoded flower-children
and drug-dazed losers as you sweetly put it but well-educated and highly integrated men and women trying to create here an alternative life-style for so-called
Homo sapiens
, based on our higher instead of our baser attributes. We are not the first and won’t be the last to beat against the tide of consumeristic materialistic capitalistic garbage, but the effort is at least as worth making as your life which as far as I can tell is spent sucking up to the Venezuelans who are getting rich sucking the oil out of poor helpless Lake Maracaibo. I don’t judge
you
, and when you made the South American move it was I, at that time Mommy’s good little girl, the typical doctor’s wife tending the garden of her typical lovely North Shore home, who stuck up for Kid Brother and suggested, albeit timidly since Mother was still in her fearsome prime, that approaching thirty maybe you had a right to your own life. You’re welcome, though I don’t recall getting any thanks.