The boy frisked me for weapons or drugs-I had to laugh, but then felt I was undercutting some little performance he must do, like when you betray children who are being very serious about reciting a poem or shaking hands the way they've been taught to-and he gave me a card to put on my windshield, and from a checkpoint down in the ashram they took me to a place where several trailers had been put together to make offices. They call this hodgepodge the Uma Room, I know now. After a rudely long wait I was finally taken into this windowless place where a striking but not very pleasant red-haired woman with a black pearl in one nostril put me through an inquisition. So I wanted to become a sannyasin, she said. How come? I explained with what dignity I could «muster how I'd fallen in love with the Arhat through listening to his tapes and meditating on his photograph in a yoga class I'd been taking. Oh really? she said. Did I have any venereal disease and how much money was I bringing to the Treasury of Enlightenment? I explained to her I had left my successful doctor husband on a more or less sudden inspiration and all I could bring away was eleven thousand dollars. I had thought of saying ten, but eleven sounded more like it really was all I had. She said-her name, I should be explaining, is Durga, and she is sort of the Arhat's right-hand person, he's of course above the day-to-day details, and she has one of these quite red-headed complexions, with a face pale as ice, that opaque ice that builds up in the refrigerator, and furious green eyes and a cleft chin, which I think are generally handsomer on men-she said that didn't seem like very much and was there any way I could get any more? Did I have credit cards? Access to jointly held securities? To make a long story short, I got very dignified and said I had brought my body and mind and atman and what more could the Arhat in his transcendent wisdom desire? She got uppity on her own side and said the Arhat desires nothing, his name and the concept of desire should not even be put in the same sentence, but that his work was great, as I no doubt must have noticed while driving in as an uninvited trespasser. I said I bad noticed and marvelled and firmly intended to put myself at the service of this work. She asked me what my skills were, and I said those of a homemaker and helpmeet who had completed only two years of college intending to major in French philosophy, and she said it would certainly take some ingenuity to put those skills at the service of the Arhat. She spoke in this stilted way, like the high priestess in the old Cecil B. DeMille extravaganzas, but with this lovely Irish lilt that kept coming through. I wondered if she were exactly sane, but now that I've learned she had been an artiste of some sort in Dublin once, I suppose that explains it.

Really, it wasn't all that intimidating, because outside the little windows of the trailer I could see these other sannyasins going by laughing and looking so happy and peaceful and hugging and kissing each other whenever they felt like it. She gave me a speech about how work here was worship, and the harder the work the more fervent the worship, and she doubted I could do hard labor. I said I had been an active gardener in my old life-my old life, Midge! as if I already had a new one-and played tennis twice a week all summer, and would she like to arm-wrestle? It just popped out, a little like the things Irving sometimes says to us at the beginning of a session, to cleanse our minds and shock us into satori. I would never have been so fresh and aggressive in my normal life. Already I was liberated. The Arhat's love was in the air here and giving me courage. You could see Durga was stunned for a second, her eyes narrowed and this chin of hers, like Gary Grant's only of course on a woman not so eflfective, this chin of hers lifted a little inch, and all she said was I should save my internalized violence and hostility for the dynamic-meditation session. So that implied I was accepted, but, Midge, if I'd known what a dynamic-meditation session was I might have gotten back into my car, but they had taken my keys and driven it away, like valet parking, and in fact I never have been able to find out what happened to it, so tell Charles, if by any chance you see him, that I can't help whatever notices from Hertz he keeps getting-they're not my fault. The rest of that day was spent filling out forms indemnifying them against all sorts of damage and taking Rorschach and personality tests to see if I was mentally healthy, enough, for my own protection as well as theirs they explained, and having a really very thorough examination for venereal diseases-very disagreeably done-though when I asked for a Contac for my cold they said it was just maya and to ignore it.

Oh God, I am tired. And now I hear people outside coming from the disco and I don't want them to hear me talking to you on this thing-people steal here, there's nothing really against it in the Arhat's philosophy, and they say Durga has spies everywhere and is really paranoid about betraying our secrets to the outside world-so I'll say good night and tuck you into my sweater. You and the other girls would hardly know me. I sleep in my clothes and pretty much stink of sweat and cement, but after a while you don't mind it, in fact you rather like it, your own smell. Here they all come, high as kites.

Next day. Just a few minutes before I go and face the hideous dinner brawl. I really shouldn't say that; they do a wonderful job here organizing things, but the Arhat's spiritual magnetism has just overwhelmed the facilities-a setup designed for four hundred is being asked to house and feed nearly a thousand, with a lot of day trippers and curiosity seekers on the weekends. It's what Charles used to say of the hospital-no matter how many beds you put in, there's always one sick person left over. I've found a place to be by myself a few minutes, though some of our group leaders tell us a wish for privacy is very pro-ego and anti-ashram. I don't know-Buddha was always doing it, and the Arhat never tells us to go everywhere in a noisy smelly bunch like some of these sannyasins seem to want to. Obviously, you need to be by yourself just for spiritual sanitation now and then. When I think of all those days rattling around in my old house, going from room to room picking up, waiting for Pearl to get back from school or Charles from work or for somebody just to call or the mailman to come up the drive with his Laura Ashley catalogue-fourteen rooms and four baths and two and a half acres of lawn all for me-it seems obscene in a way and yet a kind of paradise. Isn't it funny how paradise always lies in the past or the future, never exactly in the present? Just last night in his darshan, the Arhat said there can be no happiness in the present as long as there is ego. He pronounces it "iggo." As lonk as sere iss iggo, the happiness-I really can't do his accent, he has the strangest, longest "s"s, different from any sound we make-sub happiness fliesss avay. Like sub pet bin and sub pet catt, zey cannot exists in ze same room. Ven sub Master doess nut preside, sub vun eatss se utter. I make it sound ridiculous, but in fact I could listen for hours, it's like a fist inside me relaxing, like a lens that keeps opening and opening to let in more and more light. Even when I don't understand the words-literally, from the way they're pronounced-something very beautiful is going on inside me, by orderly stages, the way something grows, a few more cells every day.

For instance, Midge, I'm sitting out in the rocks about a half-mile from the Chakra-you know, where the Fountain of Karma plays-and there's a kind of natural bench-out here where I am, I mean-under what they call an Arizona cypress, with these drooping gray-blue limbs and little brown berries seamed like tiny soccer balls, and I wish I had words to say how charged it all feels, how pregnant just the rockiness of the rocks seems-the little silvery veins of some mineral, the little loose heaps of rosy dust, the parallel ridges showing all the millions of years of sedimentation-and then too the'breeze and the cypress with its resiny essence and the distant mountains like wrinkled tissue paper-how sacred, really, and the whole matter of whether God exists or not, which I always thought rather boring, is just plain transcended, it seems so obvious that some thing exists, something incredibly and tirelessly good, an outpouring of which the rocks and I and the perfect blue sky with its little dry horsetails are a kind of foam, the foam on the crest of all these crashing waves, these outpourings all through the aeons of time, and yet terribly still, too-I know I'm not expressing it very well. There is something in everything, its wness, that is unutterably grand and consoling. I just feel terribly. I feel-how can I put this?-like I'm carved out of one big piece of crystal and exactly fitted into a mold of the same crystal. Tell Irving I feel motionless. Ask him if this is samarasa. My happiness is deeper than I've ever felt happiness before. It's as if there is a level the sun has never reached before. He makes it possible, the Arhat, he permits it-his voice, his glow. God, I love him, even though he makes me suffer. Love-luff, he says-is agony. A-go-ny, Midge.