I wish you could meet Alinga and get to know her. Like you, she has blond hair, but with less body and radiance than yours. How I used to love, when you were little, to give you a shampoo in the tub, just for the tingly way your clean hair smelled afterwards and the angelic way it fluffed out about your head as it dried!-we assume little girls play with dolls in anticipation of motherhood but it could almost be we become mothers just so we can play with dolls again. Up to about the age of eight you did resist it so, screaming about the soap in your eyes. Children feel everything so much more keenly than adults-a bad taste is mountainous, and a single particle of soap in your eyes was the horrid blinding end of the world. I bought something for you called baby shampoo (No More Tears, the label said) but I could never make it lather near as well. Alinga's hair lies flat to her elegantly narrow little skull and falls utterly without a curl away from a central parting so bone-white it's like a chalk line drawn in a diagram. I love that innocent prim straightness, it reminds me of how we girls used to look in the morning at Miss Grandi-son's Day School before the day mussed us up. She-Alinga, of course-is I believe thirty-one and has been around the world several times since leaving Cedar Rapids and arriving here, and I know you and she could share so much-through her, my dear elf-child, I often feel drawn closer to you. She can be very funny and irreverent, even about the Arhat, and you would enjoy that, with your wicked sense of humor that you inherited from my sly father. From almost the time you could toddle and babble you used to poke fun at me a bit, mimicking my expressions, I was such a serious mother, so earnestly playing with my doll, my poor paperback copy of Spock consulted absolutely to tatters the way people's Bibles used to be.

Of course I was amazed and chagrined to hear that your father is flying to England to see you. In all the years of our marriage I could never persuade him to take the time off to.go to Europe with me, except that disastrous trip to Florence, when he couldn't find the Uffizi or any place to park the car we had rented and clung to the strange idea that The Last Supper should be somewhere nearby and complained he couldn't sleep because of all the motor scooters echoing off all those stone walls-it became my fault because I could fall asleep-I was so tired after all day of trailing around behind him getting lost every minute and assuring him that the Italians weren't cheating him as much as he thought, I could have slept in an auto-body shop. Even with the Cape house that you and your friends enjoyed so much (remember all those potato chips!) his idea seemed to be to park me in it among all those gloomy pines whose needles everybody's bare feet kept tracking into the house while he stayed up in Boston-ministering to the sick and, I'm afraid, to the healthy too. He is of course your father and you must love him. Love him if you must, but don't show him my letters. I very absurdly keep feeling guilty about this rented car of mine that disappeared when I arrived here and I know is costing our charge card forty-five dollars a day at least. His ability to instill guilt in me was always tremendous, don't let him do it to you. His very courtship began in the odor of guilt I was supposed to feel over a few dates with this sweet shy boy Myron Stern and, looking back at it, I see that Charles took up right where my parents left off, as enforcers of the stale old order. I do hope we never struck you as such ogres as our parents appeared to us. They bad to, I suppose, since they had all these imaginary ogres leaning over them-not just the Russians but outsiders of any sort who might push or tempt them and their children into falling off the creaky old bandwagon of respectability. Well, your mother has done gone and fallen.

But I'm letting my "wiggles" run away with me. I am so happy, darling. This A-frame looks directly across the flat rooftop of the Chakra mall at the scrubby rocky hills that separate us from the territory on the north, where a lot of our legal trouble comes from. The rocks have this strange soft globby look and the Saguaro cactuses instead of being green and formidable as I pictured are weathered and blackened and battered like rather pathetic old giants. You rarely see one in good condition. A hummingbird comes to visit the little cactus flowers in the rock garden Alinga and Nitya made in the shade of this hairy old box elder. It's lovely to sit out here in the evening cool before dinner, feeling serene and changeless purusha underneath and at the beginning of all things and thinking of you in wet green England with its meadows and mossy spires and iron fences and layer upon layer of the human presence-generations, each doing their busy little bit to cover purusha up. You can talk to your father when he comes about the expenses of your jaunt to Holland -he has total charge of the family finances now, when he never so much as balanced a checkbook before in his life. I did all that for him, without pay and without thanks. He has all the worldly possessions we once supposedly shared, and I live here as free and as poor as the gray-throated flycatchers that dip about in the lengthening lavender shadows-poorer, since I'm not quick enough to catch flies in my bill. In my day, of course, a young man would either pay for such an excursion as the one Jan proposes or else not invite the young lady to come on it. I must leave it to your judgment, to what extent it is still true that a young woman compromises and cheapens herself by openly lending herself to the companionship of young men, with all that that implies. Boys pretend to scoff at such things but I don't think they do really-they like us to be pure and at their mercy or else whores who needn't trouble their consciences. But whores at least get paid. To me you are a pearl of great price whose value will never diminish, but, then, I am your intensely loving

Mother

Vikshipta-

Your conduct toward me during meditation today was unforgivable. It is one thing to "let the garbage out of your system" and another to spew it all over another person. Our relationship was always somewhat primitive and tinged with your acculturated hysteria and sadism but your remarks spoken before the entire appalled group were beyond all bounds. I am no doubt the humblest of fledgling sannyasins; the other person, however, whom you named in your grotesque fit of jealousy and abuse is close enough to the Arhat, I believe, to see you removed from your present pseudo-psychiatric position of petty tyranny and stationed instead for your own therapy in the farthest, hottest artichoke field, where the Sachchidananda can just barely be coaxed to insert its trickles. I will not mention this degrading incident to her. In return for my tact I ask-demand-respect, restraint, and relinquishment from you.

Sincerely,

Kundalini

Dear Mother-

'"Please don't send me any more trashy clippings from the Miami and Fort Lauderdale papers. It is sensationalist untruth based on third-hand rumors, by reporters who wouldn't know a spiritual value if it came and bit them on the ankle. If Charles hadn't somehow found out where I was and told you and you hadn't told all your neighbors they wouldn't be upsetting you by showing you all these stupid clippings. There are no orgies here. There is just love in its many forms. The only hot tubs are for religious purposes, to give sensory-deprivation drills and to encourage people already inclined that way to have out-of-body experiences. If you knew anything about yoga or Buddhism you would know the idea is to get out of the body for good, not to achieve physical pleasure. The state we all strive for here is perfect indifference. As to the Arhat's legal troubles back in India, which these so-called "investigative reporters" keep digging up, any government now has so many rules and regulations that if the officials get it in for you they can hound you into jail or out of the country if they want, as happened in his case. It's the same sad story here. The immigration people and the land-use technocrats and the local ranchers' hired legal guns are doing everything to crush our beautiful experiment in non-competitive living. The Arhat preaches peace and serenity in a world whose economy is based on war and agitation. The commercials on all those shows you poison your mind watching all the time (did you get the packet of the Arhat's pamphlets I sent you?-try for starters Transcending Abbinivesba: Beyond the Will to Live, or maybe the one on the three gunas and the fifteen sub-modalities, to give you a necessary frame of reference)-what are they all doing (the commercials) but agitating you to want something you don't have? Not you personally-you should have all the things you want and need, thanks to Daddy and both my grandfathers, not to mention all the ancestors before thenv piling up earthly goods to signify divine election-but people in general, the American people. No other people in the world is expected to get as whipped up over wanting as we are. The consumer society needs people in a constant state of material agitation but not so much so that the agitated people violate others' property rights-if you can't hold on to a thing you have less motive to acquire it, and that's what drugs and all the crime with them are doing, de-materializing America to an extent. That's why every city keeps a police force the size of an army, to keep the wanting and buying feasible. Our police force does nothing but guard our fences and screen visitors. People at peace within themselves and non-attached from material things don't steal and don't need laws. We do what we want, but under the Arhat's gorgeous influence we all want the same thing-his love and approval. One of your articles, I forget which-I got so mad I threw the whole batch into the shredder the office has here at the back, in case the federal authorities ever descend-called us brainwashed yuppie slaves but the fact is work is worship for us, and when you are in the right space spiritually the more you give the more you have. It's even in the Bible but no Christian believes it any more.