Soon the sweetly bedraggled troop trudged excitedly up a hill (looking both ways before they crossed), then loitered outside a tall apartment house with benevolent guard standing sentry. After 15 minutes, he smilingly gave a sign and the procession began, congregants racing up spiral staircase, shoppers at a spiritual fire sale, seeking enlightenment is like crying fire in an empty theater, Chess Herlihy shed his old self with each step, became enraptured on the ascent, the floors—2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th — old and beautiful and wood-oiled, woodclean well-kept, each more ornate than that which preceded, at the same time simpler too this is what the ascent to heaven must be like doors and moldings of residences on each level, made of teak — whoa! the guru owned the whole well why not, why always emphasis on poverty-enlightenment, why not a wealthy guru, without Western-style cynicism attached. Any idiot knew an enlightened man need not walk in rags. Why must it always be cartoonish, stupidly familiar? Why must our gurus live in caves? Why could we not—Chess was now a student of Time — there was so much noise outside, like an orchestra, chanting and hornblowing and shouting everpresent (another thing that for some reason comforted). He was now a student of Time and Her daughter, Space. At penthouse floor the couple removed sandals, placing them in trafficked rack of sole searchers before entering humble spacious suite, someone gently ushered them to a small but airy room inside rooms where they plunked down on cushions, 30 or so guests, shiny distraught obsequious eccentric crazy-vain grateful beings from all over the merciful Lonely blue Planet who had somehow converged on this coordinate, this very Space and this Time, and after a while the old silver-haired man, handsome and fit, came and sat down.
Chess shivered with delight.
Almost unbelievably, Ramesh looked straight at him and said, “Are you a seeker?”
Laxmi smiled and Chester smiled and said yes, he thought so. “A jetlagged seeker.” People laughed and the guru did too.
He asked for Chester’s name.
Then: “And what is it you are seeking?”
“What is it I am seeking?”
“Yes — Chester. What is it you are seeking?”
The visitor smiled, but was silent.
He didn’t want to fail the test.
“You see?” said Ramesh. “No one is ever able to tell me! Some say ‘love,’ but to me love is merely the other side of hate. Yesterday someone asked why the Source manifested itself in the forms that it did: trees, people, objects. Well, I cannot answer that, all I can say is it is energy, the Source contains no creations, nor can it contain dissolution. Without the movement of energy, you are left with ‘dead matter.’ Similarly, without the assertion of the ego in daily life, there can be no world as we know it! We believe that we have free will. Some have the sense their ‘free will’ is counterfeit. In other words, it has been proven that once one makes a decision, or takes action — which one must, each day! try not to, and see what happens! — one has no control over the results. Only 3 things can happen after one chooses an action: you get what you want, you don’t get what you want, or you get something that was completely unexpected—whether that be terrible or wonderful. That’s exactly what happened with Maurie. What I wanted was for him to get hard, then embarrassed; what I didn’t want was for him to walk out of the room the minute he saw the black guy; the completely unexpected thing was the fucking stroke. Hence, free will isn’t free, it’s nonexistent. But if one wishes to believe one has free will, without the awareness of a counterfeit quality, then by all means that is one’s destiny! (To believe that.) If one is to be frustrated, not recognizing that the nature of life contains opposites, beginning with male and female, and extending to good health and disease — if this frustrates one and one falls into self-pity, then that is one’s destiny according to the Cosmic Law! One may understand all of this intellectually, but to have the total understanding, that is a ‘happening,’ just like the monsoon, or the tsunami, or Katrina. Like drought or the Holocaust. There is no meaning to those events, they are merely ‘happenings.’ When one feels sorry for how much one suffers, all one has to do is think of the millions upon millions who would gladly change places with you: then you will thank God for the suffering He has allotted you! All is energy, manifesting itself: without such a manifestation, it would be dead matter—eventually that energy burns out and the cycle begins again. What we are seeking is harmoniousness with our fellow man: with the Other. We have been conditioned to be ‘god-fearing.’ I choose to be ‘god-loving.’
“So tell me, Chester: What is it that
her father choked and said that his roommate and baby would not be — coming home — Joan quashed and muted her own horror and said she wanted to come see him but Ray said best not to, not just now, better to speak over the phone (Oh! she would honor that) and yes, he still wanted their Dining Car dinner—even now, he was thinking of it! — so pleased when she told him—one more lie, forgive me, Lord, just one more—that his son would love to come and so looking forward to meeting him. To meeting his
“Dad,” she said, voice clenched from unending desolation visited upon her family, cruciation and glory as well, now the money didn’t seem such a laurel, it was dirty, a dirty balm, neck and neck with wretchedness, instead of slingshotting everyone far ahead, but her mood was foul and soon she would again feel soothed by it, enveloped, enwrapped and ensorcelled by and through Money. “Dad, listen: I am a rich woman! I am a very rich woman and I am asking you to please come live with me. There is so much time to make up. I am going to buy a house in Malibu, by the water. You always loved the water. Please come live with me. With us”—she didn’t care if she sounded like an abject little girl, didn’t care a witless whit—“I need my family! I’m going to have a baby—you are — going to — you and mom are going to be grandparents! Please. You can help me raise this child as you would have raised the one you lost”—should she have said it, that word, lost, both now choking because they were lost, now and always, all of them children, no matter their age, everyone was and had been lost, but they’d been found, just like the gospel song, they’d been found as well—“Daddy, please come. I’ll help close up your apartment and we’ll move everything to the new house. We’ll have a compound, a family compound, like the Kennedys! Remember the Kennedy compound?” (She knew that was a touchstone.) “I have lots of money, Father, millions and millions of dollars. Will you please come? Will you promise to — will you please say that you’ll come? I am asking you for myself not just because of what happened, but I think you shouldn’t be alone now—I don’t want to be alone, I don’t believe in it, not anymore. I used to think that being alone was everything. But not anymore…”