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Oh. It’s not too big. Not quite. Not quite quite.

Kundalini was impatient for this stage
.

Keep talking to me, please.

Concentrate. Think of ida. Think of pingala. Energy is rising
.

Mm.

Think of Muladhara to Svadhisthana. Now she leaves the belly and flies to the solar plexus, to Manipura
.

Mmm.

From Manipura to Anahata, the heart. Up, up, to beyond the heart
.

Nn.

Beyond the heart to Vishuddha, the throat. There are many throats
.

Nn
nn
.

Dombi dances in the sambhogakaya. The washerwoman dances in the throat. From Vishuddha—

[
Unintelligible
.] Oh. My God. Goodness me. Now you.

No. I do not do. You do again, Kundalini. And again
.

Really? Isn’t that unfair?

Unfair to you. It puts you into time. It puts you into the clutches of Kali, while I am in samarasa. I have the bliss of vajrolimudra. The energy of the suspended semen enters my spirit and makes me immortal. You die again and again. You are cruelly used
.

If you say so. I keep going?

Keep going
.

Mm. Nn. Oh. Oh yes, yes. God. How do you do it?

Advanced technique. It is called “ujjana sadhana,” “against the current.” It brings, through samarasa, sahaja. It brings the non-conditioned. It brings advaya. Shakti and Shiva, vajra and padma, jiva and ajiva are one. You and I are one. What I will, you become
.

Yes, Master.

If I scratch your fat rump, it is pleasure
.

Pleasure.

If I slap you thus, that too
.

That too.

Come once more
.

Darling, I’m exhausted.

Come. Come, you sopping cunt
.

[
Click: end of tape, side one
.]

Midge, that was the most magical thing of all, the way that side of the tape got used up just as I did. I think my moan drowned out the click in the drawer, but
I
heard it. I really probably should erase that side, but I have this feeling about it that it’s bigger than I am somehow, that my personal modesty is totally unimportant and it wasn’t me in any case but a kind of goddess actually and that what really
is
important is the Arhat’s voice on tape, his fantastic capacity for love. I don’t know how he held it but it stayed just as hard as a rock, only of course smooth—a jewel just like they say. He was the jewel and I was the lotus. It felt just like that, on and on into eternity. And it wasn’t just that once, I’ve been with him a few times since. I’m not sure, though, you should play the tape for Irving and the other girls—only if you think they can take it in the yogic spirit and not as just titillation and gossip. It mustn’t get back to Charles. I’ll leave it up to you, I’ve been away so long now I can’t be the judge of anybody’s spiritual progress and maturity. Please keep it safe for me, though, so some day when I’m old and gray and sitting in some nursing home or Florida condo like my grotesque mother I can play it and remember the times when I was Shakti and Radha with the best of them. I wonder whose Radha
she
ever was, by the way. It’s awfully hard to picture Daddy being Krishna.

What other news? I don’t know what sort of stuff gets onto television back East—I suppose it depends pretty much on what the Russians and Iranians did that afternoon—but Durga and Agni and the rest of her hard core, mostly the guys from security and some of the younger women in PR, stayed up in the canyon a few more days, until their pills and water ran out, but when nobody came after them they began to dribble back to the Chakra and the cafeteria, looking dusty and underweight and sheepish. Durga had expected some
kind of shootout, like they have I guess in Belfast with the British soldiers, but the IRS and Immigration don’t work like that, it’s more a matter of form letters with that dotty kind of printer that only the government still seems to use, these utterly machine-made-looking letters you can keep ignoring because it looks like junk mail until some morning months later the sheriff shows up with handcuffs. These shots I kept hearing were I guess Durga and Satya and the guys having fun, practicing with their infrared gunsights and these other fancy armaments that have been costing the Treasury of Enlightenment an arm and a leg. To avoid an ambush in the pass she came down the Sachchidananda on a rubber raft they had up there, and though there was her old kind of dash in that, she looks basically discouraged. She talks about deporting herself back to Ireland rather than fight the INS. We’ve had a couple of long talks, she and I, now that I use her old office in the Uma Room, and the odd thing is I’m beginning to
like
her, rather—though of course not the abso
lute
ly comfortable way I like you and Donna and Ann Turner and Liz Bellingham.
We
have a language in common, we went to the same sort of schools and dated the same boys more or less and made the same klishta compromises, but a lot of the women here, frankly, are like people from the moon. It’s like they skipped a beat somewhere, and really don’t much care about either death
or
sex. Maybe it’s an East Coast/West Coast thing, or a generation kind of gap, but I don’t think so exactly. Maybe I’ve been standoffish. I came here, face it, to get close to the Arhat, and now that I couldn’t get any closer except by crawling up his asshole—sorry, that’s the way he talks, once you get to know him, with almost a tough-guy kind of American accent, God knows where he picked it up—and now that I’ve achieved my objective and satisfied my really pretty deplorable
phalatrishna, I’m able to relate to these people on more relaxed terms. Durga’s always frightened me but she says now
I
frightened
her
from the start, and if you think of her as just this little Irish village girl you can see I might be frightening. She says she could see at a glance that I had the kind of energy the Arhat eats up. She says he eats people up, psychologically, without meaning to—it’s just that his prana and mahat are so strong they suck you in and spit you out, he’s so incredibly intuitive that he gets impatient, and she and Prapti and Nitya and Alinga and the inner circle were wearing out around him. So she sensed I was going to take over, though of course I haven’t, I still don’t know the half of what goes on around here. She said, Durga, to finish up with her, that she was raised with this terribly restrictive Irish Catholicism and hated it and thought what the Arhat was offering, this freeform Buddhism, would release her but she wonders now if it didn’t actually make her more uptight, all these spiritual possibilities so she was constantly having to choose, and maybe the real way to be free is just to do whatever the priest or husband or boss or whoever says while deep inside
scorn
ing it—that this is
real
asanga, real detachment from your life, instead of coming here and trying to make a new social model and the desert bloom and so on. All I could tell her was that it’s been wonderful for me so far but that I rather did doubt if I or any woman would ever be able to do vajrolimudra, because of the anatomical differences, and so would always be swept along by time. She kissed me then, this big white face of hers swooping down, she said I looked so sweet saying that, when I had just been trying to be serious. I mean,
really
kissed me, but it wasn’t like with Alinga—I have the funny feeling Durga doesn’t have much of a sex life in any direction. Her eyes get softest when she talks about Ireland and her mother
and the two cows they used to keep in the village, the way their spotted big sides steamed just after it rained. She was some sort of artiste in Dublin—I don’t know, do they still have music halls?—but it’s the village and the cows that turn her on. The warm milk—that steamed, too.

I still love Alinga, by the way. I mean we don’t live together like we did but that lazy kind of deep affection is still there. We’re spending a lot of time in the Uma Room together lately, still trying to straighten out the mess Nitya left and to keep ahead of our mail. It seems everybody is suing us, we’re like a whale that’s started to bleed and every shark in the ocean has gone into a feeding frenzy—I love that new term, don’t you? Feeding frenzy. They use it a lot on television now, not just the nature programs but the evening news. Not only are all these governments—local, state, and national—on our case but about three sets of parents are suddenly taking us to court for brainwashing their children—though I don’t see how they can collect damages, since these children are legally adult and if they weren’t here doing work as worship they’d be hanging around their parents’ homes soaking up money and wrecking cars and running up psychiatrists’ bills. Speaking of Nitya—Nitya Kalpana, you remember, our former accountant—she says her head is out of the bad place it was in and she can do with less meditation now—in fact, she wonders if she wasn’t being overdosed in the clinic by Ma Prapti, who, even though she spilled the beans for days to the FBI and everybody, is still under a lot of indictments. The way Durga tried to explain it to me, when we had our nice talk, it was more a philosophical inquiry Ma Prapti was undertaking. She was asking, What is the mind? It can be altered by yoga, O.K., to achieve samadhi, but also by drugs, by alcohol, by fatigue, by hormones, even by things as innocent as the moon and sugar. So why not develop
a purusha pill and get to nirvana that way? A lot of people do, of course—like Marilyn Monroe and all these teen-age suicides the TV commentators keep putting on long faces about. This question of course is very troubling to the old-fashioned rigid Christian philosophical framework but it doesn’t bother Oriental thinking at all, where it’s all maya anyway. Anyway, I really do resent Nitya’s coming out of meditation with all this officiousness. I’ve pretty well got the accounts so I can deal with them and I don’t want her confusing things again. I feel invaded. No matter where you are, or how much enlightenment is around, human relations are tricky.

Midge, that is too bad, what you admitted, or really more implied, about you and Ed. You two always seemed so solid. I used to envy you, in fact—you seemed so satisfied, so unquestioning. I mean, you weren’t expecting the world, and you saw Ed’s limitations, and I know his drinking aggravated you more than you let on, and that loudmouth know-it-all manner that bothered me less than it did Charles because if you listened Ed really
did
know a lot of things, especially about electronic security systems and how car engines work and how the insurance companies and pension funds control the stock market, but nevertheless you never betrayed him by wincing or making sardonic eye-contact like, say, Donna and for that matter Gloria used to do, and whatever your differences your house was a
fun
one to be in. Those lovely lawn parties you two always gave. People are selfish, of course, and when a couple we know breaks up it’s one less port in a storm, one or two less parties a year, one more house in town that begins to look weedy and sad. When I left Charles that was one of my thoughts—how sad it would be for the rest of you, not to have us to swell the scene, as it were. Heaven only knows what Charles is doing with his spare time now—not that he
ever had much. Those little nurses and receptionists he used to screw so happily when he had me as part of his baggage I dare say look (and talk) quite differently now that he’s, so to speak, free. Real freedom is within, Midge. You and I know that. This morning in darshan the Arhat shared with us Buddha’s last words. You know what they were? See if I can recite them, without the accent. “Be a lamp unto yourselves. Be a refuge unto yourselves. Seek no refuge outside of yourselves.” Seek no refuge outside of yourself, Midge—that’s what I’m trying to keep in mind in these hectic last couple of weeks and you keep it in mind no matter what the future brings for you and dear old Ed.

I mean, it’s been hectic here and it’s been not. There’s a lot of positive energy around since the scene thinned out. All along there’ve been a number of not-so-desirable types showing up here in dime-store sunset colors saying they were sannyasins, thinking from what they’ve seen on the news that this is a real gravy train, but now that all the papers are blabbing how we owe everybody fifteen million, or maybe it’s fifty, they’ve pretty well split, and some of Agni’s lavender cowboys too, now that the real fuzz in one form or another is always in and out serving summonses and repossessing computers and earth-moving equipment and running fingerprint checks on people and chemical checks on the cafeteria lemonade and ripping out illegal wiring and I don’t know what all else to protect us against ourselves. Some of these outer-state types are kind of cute in their way and, you know, curious about us, and more open-minded than you might think. I don’t really think you can say the world has subdivisions any more—what with television and modems we’re all operating on the same sattva, and my conclusion so far, after being six months out of our own little North Shore ghetto, is that the world
is
really
slowly getting to be a better place, provided we can keep the population explosion from turning all the land into deserts and asphalt and if the destruction of the ozone by aerosol cans with the greenhouse effect doesn’t melt the ice caps and flood every coastal city out of existence, not to mention the Bomb, which seems to be the least of the problems because at least people agitate about it and picket Army bases.

God, listen to the big philosopher. But one of the things the Arhat has done for me is encourage me to let it out, let out the feelings and thoughts both and get rid of the conditioning that had us trained to keep quiet while all these fathers and husbands and sons and lovers and lawyers and doctors and Indian chiefs talked. All this trying to be not too smart, not too loud, not too sexy, not too wonderful or else we’d overwhelm men that we were subconsciously taught to do like children in Hong Kong apartments trained to live in two cubic feet of space—I say, “Fuck it.” “Fuck it” is what I say now, Midge.