Dear Diary,
Well so much for being invisible. Up until yesterday I think the only people in the ashram who actually noticed I haven’t been talking were Jenn and Swami Veddy himself. But now everyone knows because Jenn made a big deal out of it.
She made a scene, accusing me, yelling at me. She got exasperated that I haven’t been answering her for weeks. You’d think she would have caught on by now and given up asking me things. But no, the only reason she asks me things is to try to force me to talk to her. And so now she’s decided that the REASON I’m not talking is so that I won’t have to answer HER. As if this is all about her. She actually went to Veddy and told him to make me talk! Like you’d go to an elementary school teacher to make that boy in your class stop hitting you with spitballs.
Veddy told her to respect my walking my own path on the journey and to respect that my path and hers may not lead the same place. That really wasn’t what she wanted to hear and she spouted some bullshit about how she paid my way here so she was entitled to me “being there” for her. Gee, if she’d said she wanted a minion to come with her and support her I might have said “no, thanks.” So much for all her claims that this trip to India was the absolute best thing for ME and that she “would do anything to help [me] find the key to happiness.” She’s a better actress than I realized I guess, because that hadn’t sounded like bullshit at the time. Then again maybe my bullshit detector was out of commission because of everything at BF.
Anyway. Veddy clucked his tongue and shook his head a lot when she said I owed it to her to speak because she’d paid for me. He then dressed Jenn down, but in his gentle folksy pidgin-English way. He is always smiling and seems to be laughing at his own private joke all the time. So even when he criticizes it isn’t like a scolding. But he really told her off, I thought. He told her to focus on her own path and not mine and basically to leave me alone, that being fixated on me was holding her back, etc. Then he sent her off to meditate. More likely she went off to fume, but at least she did it in private.
Then he took me aside and told me a story. God has many faces, he said. (My immediate thought: Can this guy read my mind?) The story was that Brahma, the creator, is pictured with four faces or four heads. Brahma, by the way, he said, is considered the god of creativity and music. “Lord of Speech and Sound” he called him. I have no idea if Veddy knows who I am or that I’m a singer. Obviously he knows I’ve chosen to keep my mouth shut so maybe that’s the big relevance there.
Anyway, the story goes that Brahma actually used to have five heads, not four. Brahma had ten sons and one daughter. One day his daughter was flying away from him and a fifth head rose up above the others. Make all the Freudian inferences you want–you’d be right, because that fifth head represented LUST and also EGO. Apparently Big Daddy had a lot invested in his lone daughter. Shiva didn’t approve of this and cut off Brahma’s fifth head with a sword.
End of story.
Veddy may be a faker but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have insight or that he doesn’t have something to say.
The question the story poses is this: is it possible for me to let go of lust and ego on my own or do I need someone to come castrate me? Even the otherwise benevolent god of creation couldn’t keep his lust from getting out of control. Obviously it’s better to come up with a way on my own than to need the sword method, though. How?
Oh right. Meditate. This is all supposed to work if I meditate.
8 Comments
You’re becoming such a grownup, Ziggy! The people (Daron) who knew you before are going to be astonished–if you stay who you are becoming and not revert to who you were when you go back. –if you go back to them….
(He’ll be back.)
Good to know!
The problem is figuring out how to maintain your zen, and control your urges, when your not meditating in a retreat somewhere, well away and removed from the real world.
I’m loving reading Ziggy’s diary, but I also can’t wait to see Ziggy back out there.
I agree. Can’t remember who said it, but it went something like this: It’s one thing to be zen on a mountaintop, at your mother in law’s kitchen table it’s a different challenge.
So true!
I know. Both he and Daron have had some changing experiences.
When they again meet I expect each will be aware of his own changes, but have difficulty integrating the changes of the other. Each will interpret the other’s actions in a framework of the “Old D/Z.”