In which I use my passport! And spend eighty hours in airports and airplanes!

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for most of a month now, because I wasn’t sure how, since it wasn’t really a touristy trip. I went to see my Sadguru, an enlightened person, an avatar, for spiritual purposes, and most of what I have to observe was the ways my mind does what it does and how I reacted to that. It’s not like I went to any restaurants or shows or on any hikes or cruises.

view from the footbridge facing toward the Amritapuri ashram

The trip was Walla Walla to Seattle to Vancouver to Delhi to Trivandrum. I never left the airports, and it took a couple days each way. Absolutely exhausting. The shape of the trip was dictated primarily by politics; from what I’ve been told (by a Keralan living in Canada I met on a return flight) you’d typically rather go through Dubai.

The way over I was exhausted in every way: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. My relationship has its struggles, I’ve been in the same entry-level job for six years with no promotions or recent raises, I’m older and fatter than I’ve ever been, and I live a life of, essentially, laziness and dissipation. I read a lot, I sleep a lot, I drink too much, I don’t bother to have a social life, and while I know the shape of my life would be perfect for sadhana I just don’t do as much as I wish. I was unhappy in every quarter. Which is why I wanted to go see Amma so bad. Get my priorities straight. You spend a lot of your evolution believing in doing things, but then comes the realization you’re not doing anything, you’re not the doer, and yet you have to do things to achieve states, and it’s all some bullshit Buddhist koan, and you need your guru.

After determining that I wanted to go and why, with literally no effort on my part, everything just fell into place. Suddenly there was money to go, and tickets, and a month off work with zero push back, and literally everything I needed was just… provided to me. (Thanks, dad!)

~+~+~

So one morning around three AM we got in the car and went to ALW, which is my favorite airport because you can go from the door all the way through security in literally four minutes. (I hate airport security for its waste, irritation, and ineffectiveness. It’s theatre and its tedious.)

Anyway, flight to Seattle. Few hours layover, I got a coffee but I don’t think I ate. Then flight to Vancouver, which is a really well-done airport. Nice to look at, immigration was a breeze, wifi, all the kiosks worked, nice art.

Flight to Delhi was either fourteen or sixteen hours, I can’t remember which, and by then my extremities were bloated and I was miserable because the seats are for takeoff and landing, not a dozen-plus hours of actual flight, and I’m too old and fat now to get my feet underneath me or curl up. I did sleep but it was terrible quality, weird and jittery.

Airplane food

The food was pretty good, though. They fed and watered us probably four times. I had a window seat and so had to bother my row mates twice to get out, walk, stretch, and pee. The bathrooms were still familiar plane-style weird little closets with toilet paper.

Weirdest part of the whole journey was that it never got dark. You’re just flying over the lid of the world with the sun. So, so many hours of bright daylight.

Then another few hours in Delhi, to get out through immigration and back in through security. The Delhi airport is a fucking people-moving disaster, the signage is either not there or useless, and both times I went through it I had no idea where I was supposed to be going in spite of being in possession of a reasonably high intelligence and a general concept of how to get through an airport. The airport employees I asked were contemptuous (which I do understand, I work customer service too, and being asked the same fucking question over and over does get annoying) and unforthcoming and rude.

The immigration guys were bored, grumpy, gruff, and slow. Yes, I had all my documents ready: passport, boarding pass, visa. Your job sucks, whatever, at least you’re sitting down for it, you huge baby.

Security in India is segregated by sex, so you give your bags to the machine for scanning and then have to hike way over to where the women are being screened, leaving all your belongings utterly unsupervised, to be wanded in private in a cubicle by a female soldier-slash-cop. (These were friendly and pleasant, and one even complimented me on my hair.) Then at peak disorientation, tired in a strange airport where you don’t understand the majority of the languages, you have to remember which carousel has your bags and figure out how to get back sans signage. It’s a trip.

Then a last three-hour flight to the final airport, Trivandrum. Except they kept delaying the flight. By the time we boarded it was something like five hours late. I’d been texting my ashram taxi driver until the wifi pass expired; by then I didn’t have time to go get another password from the kiosk. My Minternational Pass (Mint is my phone carrier, and their roaming was supposed to work in the whole of India) had activated fine but didn’t seem to be working. I figured I’d mess with it later.

Arrived Trivandrum, knowing from an ashram email that there would be no wifi once I exited the airport, and yet somehow I managed to suddenly be exiting the airport?! How the fuck am I already outside?! No wifi means no Whatsapp means no way to communicate with my taxi. Fuck. I nearly cried.

Trivandrum airport’s arrivals area

It was mid-morning, I was burnt the fuck down, I had no local currency, my ankles were three inches wider with fluid, and I had no Google Translate.

Eventually I figured out that I had the taxi driver’s phone number in a Whatsapp chat, so I dialled it and it rang through and he answered and came and picked me up. I had been unable in two different Indian airports to locate either a currency exchange or an ATM, so I asked him to find me an ATM on the way, which he did; a fun little booth where I withdrew six thousand rupees and paid not one but two $2.50 fees (one to the ATM and one to the card itself).

It’s a serious-looking stack of cash but it turns out it’s maybe seventy-two dollars. Disorienting.

Three hour drive to the ashram. I was supposed to be making this drive in the middle of the night, so mid-morning was actually much better. The state of Kerala has decided to put in a giant freeway down its center, and instead of doing it in ten mile increments or something reasonable, they gouged a huge goddamned corridor through the middle of the country, right through countless villages, literally knocking down any parts of buildings or houses that crossed into this area (you could see into these buildings because the roadward sides are just gone, ripped off, leaving the rest of the building intact, it’s incredibly weird) and then having what seemed like only two crews to work this massive scar?

Okay, India, whatever.

~+~+~

Got to Amritapuri. The taxi drove me right up to the International Building, which looks like a British Raj set piece with wooden bank teller windows facing onto a covered veranda. Unbelievably cute. Had to wait a bit until they opened again after lunch break.

the ashram’s International Office

A devotee, an older Western woman resident all in white, checked me in, and in what seemed like a rush of genuine care and good will, offered me a room on the beach, a newly remodeled one, very nice, do I like the sea? Yes, I like the sea, that sounds wonderful. She even called a passer-by, another devotee resident, to lead me to my quarters.

I’d changed into lightweight, all-cotton Indian clothes in Delhi because it was so humid (even indoors! with the air conditioning!) that my chic black polyester airport outfit was like wearing a ziplock baggie. The humidity walking across the ashram was mind-blowing. It was probably 75%, and the temperature in the high 70’s. I was so tired, and my body hurt, and she led me off of the paved area in front of the Kali temple onto literal sand? With my wheelie suitcase? Okay.

We crossed a busy little road (note to self: look right then left, not left then right, the cars are on the other side!) and passed through a gate and there it was: the sea. Right there! Maybe a couple hundred yards away, and my building, three stories, with a columned porch and big, old, wooden doors, right on the beach!

porch of the building I stayed in for three weeks (featuring a napping feral dog and my luggage) with the Arabian sea visible just beyond

We went in. No lighting (well, there are lights, but they’re rarely on). Up three flights of stairs I could only manage through sheer force of will, hauling my luggage, my shoes cutting into my feet and leaving wounds, everything hurting and buzzing and swollen and tired, so tired. We turned down an unlit but marble-tiled hallway. She unlocked my door and gave me the key (the doors are secured with padlocks) and explained that my room was very, extremely nice. Really nice. One of the nicest. As in, aren’t you lucky nice.

It had white marble floor, white walls and ceiling, a counter with a sink, windows, and a weird Indian bathroom. The furniture consisted of nothing but a hard single bed on a wooden frame, and a plastic lawn chair. I later found a couple little rugs in a cupboard.

After she left I figured out how to turn the ceiling fan on high (thank God) because the electrical switches are all upside down, so on is down and off is up, made the bed (they give you two sheets and a pillowcase when you check in), and unzipped my suitcase where it lay on the floor. I think I looked at the welcome brochure for the ashram schedule, then took a nap that was shocking in its brevity; I would have expected to sleep for eight or more hours, but I was up an hour and a half later. I put my few things where you put them: tiffin by the sink, shampoo in the bathroom, wrap on the bed like a blanket.

all my crap on the counter by the sink after I’d been there awhile

Every morning, without an alarm, I woke and walked across the ashram to attend group meditation in the Kali temple, where I meditated for an hour. Without an alarm. If you know me at all, you know that that in itself constitutes a clear and inarguable miracle. By the time I finally slept too late for group meditation, I’d already booked my return taxi.

Afterwards, I’d eat, usually a tasty vegetable omelet with hash browns and a ‘milk coffee’ from the coffee wallah. I’d also write in my journal during breakfast, using a lightweight, battery-powered Bluetooth keyboard with Obsidian on my phone. Many people found this setup to be pretty great, and indeed it worked much better than hauling a laptop.

You bring your own dishes to get food. There are dish washing stations on both sides of the big central hall (a 30,000 square foot open-sided building where bhajans are held and food is eaten and in which there are very nearly always people doing one thing or another) where you clean your cup, fork, and plate. You always carry dishes, and you always carry an umbrella, and you always wear a dupatta.

a dupatta—also called chunni, chunari, chundari, lugda, rao/rawo, gandhi, pothi, orna, or odhni—is a long shawl-like scarf traditionally worn by women in the Indian subcontinent

Plus you’re hauling your asana (a small rug for sitting on, since all the floors are stone), whatever you’re reading or whatever you’ve purchased, and water. Maybe a sweater if it’s night. I bought a back pack for all this. You walk everywhere and carry all your stuff with you.

I did not wear shoes, however, for days, because in the humidity my puffy feet would stick to any shoes I tried, and the skin would tear, and scabs would form, and it hurt too bad. I bought two or three pairs of used and/or cheap shoes my first week there, none of which failed to hurt like hell, but then finally ended up with a pair of too-large Croc knockoffs that have LIFE IS WONDERFUL molded into the sides of the soles. I donated all the shoes before I left, because I will never need pink plastic foam slides!

After eating, I’d go do seva. My seva ended up being dishes. Fucking dishes. DISHES. Luckily it lasted maybe an hour a day, but it was still dishes. Wash the dishes from the kitchen, bowls and whisks, pans and pitchers, dry them by hand, and return them to their places in the kitchen for the staff to make the next meal. Not onerous, and a job for which I am utterly qualified, but still: dishes.

(This is only funny if you know how many times I have complained about dishes, in both my job and my own home, and how I joked that when I signed up for seva in Amritapuri “it would probably be dishes.” One function of ashram life, or indeed life in general, is to give us opportunities to transcend our likes and dislikes.)

During one of my dish sevas I stood next to a kid who spoke three languages and was studying physics and he told me about white holes. For the rest of my stay there if we happened to cross paths he’d nod at me.

After seva, shopping! There are many stores and shops in the ashram itself, because the ashram has around three thousand permanent residents and people need soap and flip flops and instant soup and cookies. And guests like me need spiritual books and jewelry and idols and clothes and swimming dresses (there’s a pool in the ashram but you can’t wear Western swimsuits) and malas and umbrellas and water bottles. There are drinking water stations all over, so everyone carries a bottle and fills it as needed. I came to assume that some, or many, of the buildings the renunciates lived in did not have either running or filtered water, because you’d see them walking along carrying four or six gallons of water, and nobody drinks that much water so it had to be for laundry or bathing.

I’d brought a bottle with me so didn’t need to buy one. I’d also bought a tiffin, but I got a new one (and donated the one I’d brought) because whenever I held mine out for curry, whoever was serving would make a little moue because my dish wasn’t easily wide enough for the ladle.

If not shopping, a nap. If not a nap, then a wander around the ashram. Go sit in the Kali temple. Go see the kalari, or Lakshmi the elephant, or Amma’s childhood house, or the cows in the cow shed, or the sea. Sit and people watch. Meditate. Read Vedanta. Update my journal.

the front entrance of the Kali temple, lit up for a Karthika puja

I never did get online. My phone service provided SMS texts and calls, but no data. I made huge efforts to troubleshoot this, or buy a SIM or find a place to get online, a cafe or something, but they didn’t work out. The internet diet was wonderful. Social media is absolutely fucking terrible for you.

~+~+~

A week later my mind was screaming with complaints. It didn’t like the humidity, it didn’t like seva, it didn’t like the food availability (the food was tasty but there were three distinct mealtimes and if you missed out, you didn’t eat). It didn’t like the bed, it didn’t like the restrooms, it didn’t like this it didn’t like that it didn’t like. I just watched it like you’d watch an annoying and bitchy older relative at Thanksgiving: with a dull sense of burden. It would not shut the fuck up.

There was a concurrent tremendous, terrifying, and wholly unexpected crisis of faith. Okay, yes, Amma herself experiences an exalted state, I not only believe this but would defend it because I know it to be true and can list my reasons why. But where is the evidence that any form of effort can result in any of us experiencing such a state? I mean, have you made any sincere effort to fucking control your mind? It’s INSANE, is what it is, and it’s also completely OBVIOUS that all suffering actually does originate in this uncontrollable motherfucker, and how is anybody ever going to do that much sadhana, the amounts the saints do? There’s no way. It’s unpossible.

All these monks and nuns, these renunciates who have lived here for three, four decades, they all seem like normal people, and they’re around Her all the time. I have spent barely a fraction of that much time in Her presence; what hope is there for me, if, indeed, the goal even exists? Maybe it’s all bullshit. Maybe it’s a rare and generous form of insanity that occasionally plagues someone, and so they tell us about God and bliss and spend their lives giving; maybe Amma and Ramakrishna and Babaji and all of them aren’t what I’ve always understood them to be. Maybe I’m a gullible goddamned idiot who will know nothing but suffering until I die.

It was fucking excruciating. Awful, sickening, the absolute worst. I watched it, I considered it, I did not like it because it hurt, but in spite of it I eventually concluded that I would… continue anyway. With my religion. I mean, so what if I never get enlightened, I know that my Guru is good and does good things—I mean, the charity work alone, without even mentioning my own experiences—I know I feel better when I meditate regularly and make genuine efforts to regulate things like anger or gluttony, and that’s enough. Anything else is gravy. Whatever. Fuck it. I made a firm choice to let the crisis do what it would, as it would; I would continue on my path anyway. Worst case scenario, there’s suffering, which is pretty much guaranteed. Best case scenario, this choice is correct and there’s less suffering. I prayed daily for help because it sucked so, so bad.

Each evening, there are bhajans in the big hall. Amma comes, the whole band sets up, and there’s two hours of devotional singing. I cannot explain the power of this. It absolutely destroyed me every single night. I could probably explain it to a devotee with a mind and a path and an experience like mine, but to anybody who does not have a Satguru, it’s gibberish. Every song was chosen by Amma specifically to tell me something, right then, something I absolutely had been questioning and required an answer to, about the mind, about discrimination or dispassion or devotion, or fiddly questions about vedantic doctrine. Every song, every night, the entire time I was there, in order, answered my questions and relieved my doubts and filled me with love and understanding, humility, and strength.

There were on average at least a thousand other people at bhajans each night, all of them devotees of Amma’s, most if not all of them also having similarly profound inner experiences. I do not know how it works, only that it does. Sometimes I have long experiences that there are, in fact, only two consciousnesses in the manifest, phenomenological universe, and one is God, manifest as everything, and the other is me.

After bhajans, darshan. As a short-term guest, I had darshan four times while I was there. Basically you get darshan when you’re newly arrived, again when departing, and otherwise every five days.

~+~+~

Another week later, I have lost probably twelve or fifteen pounds. Sure, a lot of water, but not all. I can get up and down all the various buildings’ stairs without agony. (There are so, so many stairs in Amritapuri.) My feet are still scabbed, but pain free and healing. I’m sleeping wonderfully, I meditate frequently. Lots of walking, lots of water, no alcohol, no cigarettes, very little sugar. Clean food (I frequently ate kitchari and sprouted salad for lunch). I have the ashram schedule down. I sign up for a Sanskrit class.

I’m incredibly soft: my feet have been smoothed by walking barefoot on sand and stone, and my skin from all the moisture is like a rose petal.

My mind is much less agitated, I am beginning to really understand the purpose of concentration.

the Arabian sea is a spectacular place to meditate; somehow it seems the tide is always coming in and never going out

I have absolutely no desire to move to Amritapuri full time. This surprised me, when I noticed it. The place is totally, as they say, in my milieu: it’s gorgeous, beautiful, handmade. Definitely something you’d not be wrong to label as a hippy vibe. It’s on the ocean. I’ve dreamed about coming for going on thirty years. There’s a zero waste policy and incredibly thorough recycling. The food is vegetarian. The coffee is great. Everybody there has an understanding of what God is and what the purpose of a human life is. You can, if you want, just move there for as long as your visa lasts: years. If you’re frugal and eat the free food and don’t buy anything, you could do it on a pittance.

There’s a woman there who puts in a full day sitting at a table in the big hall making rudraksha malas by hand. Another who makes clothes for Amma dolls. I met two who knit scrubby loofa sorts of things to sell and then they donate the proceeds to their local ashram in Australia somewhere. There are volunteers doing everything from TV shows to publishing a magazine to working in hospice. And the focus isn’t on worldly things, it’s on getting your mind right, on divine love. Shit I actually care about.

But I guess it took too long for me to get there; I didn’t cry because I couldn’t stay, I didn’t want to stay. I once knew a girl who begged Amma to let her move to Amritapuri, several times if I remember right, and Amma told her she could come if she must but that it wouldn’t be good for her; she grew up to get married and have kids and is a total householder. She probably would not have been suited for ashram life.

I can tell you now I know I would very much rather not have to haul eight gallons of water to my weird little room every week, I’m too much of a desert baby to enjoy being constantly and permanently damp (sleeping on damp sheets and donning damp clothing is ugh), and I love having a washer and dryer. I am in no way too good to wash my clothes by hand in a bucket in the bathroom, I’ve done it, but I’d just rather… not have to? When I have perfectly good appliances in my house? Yeah.

I loved the walkability, the art and beauty, the not having to cook, the wild crows, the amazing monsoon rains, the sea, the Kali temple, the meditation, and seeing Amma every day. I did not love the sand, the damp, the lack of hot running water and cold showers over the toilet, having to hand wash my clothes and hang them in my room to never really get dry, hauling dishes everywhere, or the grand total of zero comfortable furniture anywhere. (I mean, I’m not high maintenance, but I am pushing 60. Nothing to sit on but a hard bed, plastic stacking chairs, and stone floors is kind of a lot of wear and tear.)

Oh, wait, there was a chair. A low, wide wooden seat in Amma’s childhood house, to the right of the front door. That thing was extremely comfortable. I wish I had one.

~+~+~

Anyway, the ashram asks you observe a contemplative attitude and not take pictures while staying in the ashram. So I took very few pictures, and most of them not literally in the ashram.

money money money money

I did, however, get to do something I have, for no good reason, always wanted to do: buy stuff with coins, like you see Brits do in period pieces. You can get a milk coffee for 20 Rs. I did this several times and it amused the shit out of me. Imagine buying a latte at Starbucks with change, it’d be SO MANY COINS. But there are ten and twenty rupee coins!

The plants in India are just normal plants, doing exactly what you’d expect, but if you look closely you realize you’ve never seen anything like whatever it is you’re looking at, and I enjoyed that a lot. Oh, look, a plant in a pot. Oh, look, it’s subtly strange, how fucking cool.

what even is this spiky thing

The utter loneliness was another weird aspect. Surrounded by thousands of people, but I didn’t know anybody there. (I recognized some of the brahmacharis and brahmacharinis from years of Amma’s tours, others from online satsangs and retreats. I saw a few ashram residents I’d seen before over the years, but none I knew by name. One woman, younger than me, that I crossed paths with way back in my Iowa days, who I exchanged nods with when passing.) The only times I spoke with anyone was while buying things or doing dish seva or accidentally bumping into someone on a narrow path. The rest of the time I was alone, wandering around in the monsoon rains with a backpack clanking from steel dishes and no shoes on.

Aloneness is good for a seeker, as it allows one to focus inwardly, but my mind certainly bitched about it.

...TO BE CONTINUED