Authors: John Updike
Anyway, Durga comes up with this same icy face she had the day I pretended to have no credit card, and told me to join the typing pool. I said to her I had the impression she hated my guts—you learn to say such things here, everybody does it, it gets the garbage out and clears the air—and she said her feelings and mine were of no consequence, all that mattered here was our service to the Arhat, though she
had
observed that women of my social class tended to play at enlightenment for a few weeks and then go on to some other style of vacation, and once we were out tended to be very cozy with both the press and the law-enforcement authorities—she has these phobias about the FBI, the IRS, the CIA, and the Immigration Service, not to mention the local sheriff. She said the Master had become aware of my presence, and the executive committee had concluded I had the requisite energy and karmic potential to serve at a higher level than skimming concrete or even operating a backhoe. My heart sank. I loved that big sweet sleepy yellow thing, a brand-new diesel John Deere. But, softhearted me, I said O.K. and have been working in the Uma Room for three days now. It’s all little cubicles. They give you these form responses and after a while you can elaborate on them to suit your own style, within limits, but even so it’s not really en
larg
ing labor like the other was, the outdoor work. One advantage, it brings you quite close to the Arhat, though I haven’t seen him yet—he lives in the original ranch hacienda, which has been remodelled and connected to these fitted-together trailers by a kind of
breezeway. They say Durga is always slipping in to consult with him, and some of the others. The executive committee is mostly all women—the Arhat has this theory that women are stronger in selflessness than men, which may be a nice way of saying they’re subservient. I couldn’t wear my ratty muddy work clothes to the Uma Room, and the other typists wear saris, so I’ve gone and bought myself a couple at the Varuna Emporium and spend about a half-hour every morning trying to fold it so it doesn’t fall off or get all sloppy whenever you lift your arm. They offer quite a line actually of clothes in these sunset shades of purple and violet and dusky lavender and even burgundy and magenta and a very attractive rosy brown. The Emporium puts out a catalogue I’d be happy to send you, along with the order form for the moksha videotape if you and the girls want to get it.
I keep waiting for
this
tape to run out, since my Puritan conscience, it must be, won’t let me send it off to you until I’ve filled every inch. You and Irving and Ann and Liz and Gloria too and Donna, if they’re around Wednesday, do the same and send it back—I’m not so far gone into prapatti and all that as not to miss a lot of the good things I’ve left behind. The ocean must be full of sails by now on the weekends, and the tulips up everywhere. I’ve missed the daffodils, the apple blossoms, and the hawthorns. Above all, Midge, I miss your friendship. The women here try to be nice and friendly but they tend, frankly, to be from different social circles from what you and I are used to. A lot of them of course are very young, for one thing—just teen-age runaways or dropouts still acting out their adolescent crises. The Arhat is what they’re doing instead of bulimia or drugs or turning tricks on Sunset Boulevard. They’re young but not very often glamorous—rather the opposite, dumpy in fact, though how they get fat on the diet of rice balls and artichoke paste they serve in
the mess hall I have no idea. I’ve lost seven pounds, myself. Then the ones that are older were hippies, many of them, fifteen years ago, or beach bums, and the drugs left some short circuits in their heads—little gaps they just smile through as if what they said made perfect sense. I’m not speaking of the psychotics and addicts, though we have a few of those too. But they don’t push themselves on you, they tend to stick to themselves and are rather shy. It’s the women of some quality and education who are so disappointing. They have this—I don’t want to be unkind, but—this Midwestern blandness, even when they come from the West Coast. There’s no history really where they’re from except old Spanish missions or Russian fishing settlements or Mickey Mouse back when he was Steamboat Willie—that’s as far back as the collective memory goes. They’ve been to college, a lot of them, and some have advanced degrees evidently, they’re not exactly dimwits, but really they don’t speak my language—everything has only one dimension for them, there’s no
double entendre
and the
double voir
that goes with it—it’s just impossible to have with them the kind of
silly
fun we used to have. There is one, I should say—from Iowa, of all unlikely areas—called Alinga, with
some
refinement and subtlety. That reminds me, a fascinating thing Alinga
did
tell me this morning about the
[
end of tape
]
May 12, 1986
Dear Ms. Grumbach:
It filled me with limitless happiness to receive your precious letter and to hear of your perfect love. Selfless and loyal love such as you profess is one of the greatest weapons Man
and Woman can have in their ceaseless struggle to escape the cruel cycles of karma and enter into everlasting moksha and sachchidananda. I accept your love, my dear pilgrim, and would welcome you at Ashram Arhat if certain technical requirements can be met.
Millennia of yogic experience have determined that the individual spirit cannot return to the atman if encumbered by worldly possessions. I ask merely that for the duration of your life here under my protection and guidance—may it be eternal!—your financial savings be placed in the care of the vigilant and efficient custodians of our Treasury of Enlightenment. Their infallible wisdom and the irresistible success of our communal enterprise will ensure that your assets shall be returned to you greatly enhanced if you ever were, most regrettably, to decide to leave our company.
Demand for places amid our limited facilities is such that we must ask a minimum deposit of ten thousand dollars (U.S.). In addition there are fees totalling eight hundred dollars monthly to cover a modest portion of the unavoidable expenses of your food, housing, health and accident insurance, lecture and darshan fees, and supervised meditation. Sannyasins are of course expected to practice worship in the form of constructive labor for twelve hours a day and either to bring with them sturdy boots, a sleeping bag, a sun hat, and appropriately colored garb or else to purchase such supplies at the Varuna Emporium located to the right of the ashram Chakra, with its famous fountain. A mala of beads of sacred sandalwood ending in a beautiful hand-carved pendant containing a color photograph of myself plus a hair from my head or beard will be provided free, as a benison of Buddha, and should be worn at all times, save when bathing or (at the wearer’s discretion) engaged in sexual intercourse. A full range of contraceptive
preparations and devices may be obtained at the Karuna Pharmacy; and various iconographic aids to life at Ashram Arhat, including incense and other purifying inhalants, can be purchased at our shops, as described in the enclosed catalogue.
These aids, and my inspired and unexpurgated books, videotapes, and audio cassettes, not to mention posters depicting my present (and final) physical incarnation, selected Hindu deities, tantric visualizations, and ritually constructed mandalas can of course be ordered and utilized by those who do not yet feel able to cut their sordid earthly ties and surrender to the new order of existence established here at Ashram Arhat, amid the immemorial peace of the healthful semi-arid Sonoran Plateau.
Dear Gladys Grumbach, I return your love a millionfold and with tranquil exultation await your reply. Come and join me! You and none other ignite my heart’s flame. As the Lord Buddha asked, “Who shall find the Dhammapada, the clear Path of Perfection, even as a man who seeks flowers finds the most beautiful flower?”
Shanti,
Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.
Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat
/spw
May 13, 1986
Sir:
Your recent editorial in the Forrest
Weekly Sentinel
condemnatory of the Ashram Arhat as a “glorified summer camp” for “bored yuppies” and “pathetic societal strays” would be
beneath our notice were we not sincerely anxious to cultivate good relations with our fellow-citizens of Dorado County and to have our substantial contributions to the regional economy recognized. A barren tract of exhausted range has been transformed into productive agricultural land at no cost to the water table. Our extensive irrigation and sanitation draw solely upon an aquifer confined to the valley of Gritty Creek, now happily renamed the Sachchidananda River and not to be confused with the miserable alkaline trickle the good “citizens” of Forrest have amusingly dubbed Babbling Brook.
To correct a few other misapprehensions or deliberate misstatements: (1) Our facilities for meditation, therapy (both physio- and psycho-), non-soil-depleting agriculture, and hand manufacture have never claimed tax-exempt status; via real-estate tax and other levies the ashram has contributed $46,742.07 to Dorado County coffers in the fiscal year ended this March, in return for which we have received precisely
no
public services—neither police protection nor trash pickup nor highway maintenance nor water nor sewer mains nor anything but the forced enrollment of sixteen of our children in public schools where, after sickeningly long bus rides, they are bullied and tormented by their teachers and fellow-students alike and subjected to a bowdlerized, anti-evolutionist, rightwing curriculum that would insult the intelligence of a chuckwalla. (2) Our armed security forces exist solely to defend our property and personnel against the attacks of trigger-happy rednecks and beered-up adolescents who have repeatedly damaged and fired upon our water tanks, our outlying pump-houses and tool sheds, our faithful watchdogs, and our signs of welcome in many languages. (3) Our so-called “orgies” are in fact exercises in the ancient art of tantric yoga, wherein the participants worship one another as Shiva and Shakti, the
fundamental forces of the cosmos; sexuality and spirituality are forms of one energy, proclaims our Arhat, whose love unites us all and in ecstatic love of whom we are all made new.
With united voice, therefore, we remind you that this is supposedly a free country. Accredited lawyers among us stand ready to defend our constitutional rights. Defamatory and false information infringes these rights. Ashram Arhat holds out the hand of peace to its neighbors in Dorado County and the “city” of Forrest. Let us live side by side and strive to make our hitherto sadly neglected region the paradise it can become. The world is weary of the old agendas; let us welcome in the new agendas. Vindictive and mendacious editorials such as yours feed the atmosphere of hate that has grown up needlessly, and in his ineffable sorrow our Master has empowered me to compose this letter of friendly correction.
Yours most sincerely,
Ma Prem Durga
Executive Director, Ashram Arhat
/spw
May 23
My dear Charles,
I was sorry to receive your letter. I am
so
sorry that Midge gave you my address, after I begged her not to. She is still, as I must not forget, very much of your world, very much attached. Even Irving, I fear, is just playing at dvandvanabhighata—the cessation of trouble from pairs of opposites. You and I, my dear, I see now, were such a pair of troublesome opposites.
You speak of our bank accounts and stocks. You even write
the slanderous word “theft.” Were not those assets joint? Did I not labor for you twenty-two years without wages, serving as concubine, party doll, housekeeper, cook, bedwarmer, masseuse, sympathetic adviser, and walking advertisement—in my clothes and accessories and demeanor and accent and even in my body type and muscle tone—of your status and prosperity? How can you be so mired in prakriti as to care what numbers are printed on the bank statements that you never used to read anyway? Those numbers flowed effortlessly and inevitably from your work—you did not work to produce those numbers. I always did the accounts and the budgeting. For you as well as for us here at the ashram, work is worship—but you worship a stupid god, a stodgy pudgy god of respectability and outward appearance, a tin snob god of the “right” cars and shoes and country clubs, of acceptable street addresses and of acquisitions that dissolve downwards into démodé junk rather than, as for those who take the path of yoga and non-ego, dissolve upwards, into samadhi and the blissful void of Mahabindu. I pity you, darling. Your anger is like that of an infant who with his weak little rubbery arms beats his mother’s breast and produces no effect but her loving, understanding laugh.
You dare drag in our daughter. You say Pearl is appalled. You threaten me with the loss of not only her love but all communication with her. You say she will renounce me. How absurd. One cannot renounce a parent. A parent can renounce a child, for purposes of future inheritance, but a parent is unrenounceable—a parent, however inconvenient, is a fact. Facts cannot be renounced, though they can be not known, through avidya, or, through vidya, transcended. A parent can be, if not transcended, survived—you have survived your own father but carry him with you like one of those fetuses that
in some unfortunate women turn to stone—every time you cleared your throat with one of those prissy little “ahem”s it was your father clearing his, fat old poker-faced Freddy Worth—you even had his supercilious rapid eyeblink when you were trying to put something over on one of us—me or some gullible misdiagnosed patient or one of those poor doctor-crazy nurses you persuaded to spread her legs in their grotesque white stockings—a parent
should
be transcended, I’m trying to say, as a snake sheds its skin. Pearl and I are women and on the same continuum, and, having contributed your microscopic ridiculous sperm with its bullet head and wriggling tail, you can stand there all you wish, clucking and wringing your hands and telling her to hate me. She won’t. I am her mother. I am she as she was once I. At the age at which I very immaturely married she is trying to become a free intelligent woman among her boyfriends and girlfriends and the scenery and ancient glories of England and shouldn’t be bothered with our old spites and injuries and your impotent rage. Don’t you see, dear muddlehead, we were a
wave
, a certain momentary density within the maya-veil of karma-events that produced Pearl, but now she is moving on and we must too. Let go of her and me. You have the houses and the New Hampshire land and all the silver that didn’t come from either the Prices or the Peabodys—the Worth stuff is clunky but sterling and you could sell it on consignment through Shreve’s if you’re feeling so desperately poor. You have your profession and society’s approbation. I have nothing but my love of the Arhat, and he promises me nothing. Nothing is
exactly
what he promises—that my ego will become nothing, will dissolve upwards.