S

Where am I? I feel you asking "Where are you?" much as I was asked, on arriving at the ashram three seasons ago, "Who are you?" We know now who I am: I am Kundalini, the energy-serpent that rises. Master, I have come to that place which always interested me-where purusha, in its eternity, immutability, and utter freedom, very slightly wrinkles (as I picture it) and makes the infinitesimal concession whereby it permits itself to be wed to prakriti in all its tragic tumult of phenomenality and flux. Or perhaps (the distinction, like so many in your teachings, remained a bit obscure to me) I have merely come to that site within prakriti whereby the three gunas are ever so delicately jostled out of their perfect equilibrium and precipitate mahat, which then evolves into ahamkara, the first rude perception, the first dim ego, which then bifurcates into the subjective and the objective, in the latter of which, asl recall, the five tanmatras, subtle and potential, give rise to the relatively coarse paramanu and sthula-bhutani-atoms and molecules! The subjective equivalent would be (as I conceived it) the chittavrittis, the eddies of consciousness it is the purpose of yoga to suppress.

I fear I was a bad sa

When I came to the desert I thought my environment greatly simplified, but it was a seething crowded place compared with where I am now. In most directions there is merely the line where samsara makes its vast sad horizon with nirvana. Sattva, rajas, and tamas are all in such nearly perfect balance here that the merest smudge in the sky serves for a cloud, a single small yellow-breasted bird for a flock, and a trip to the local bookstore for an adventure, a pilgrimage. Your books and your posters are on display, and my love for you is slowly being restored to the love it was before reality intervened. For, yes, we do wish to live entirely in our chittavrittis yet cheat them by hoping they are not all there is, and any demonstration we can make of our ideality-loving a man on a poster, for instance-natters this hope. The pleasure of love, you taught me, lies in love's stalling, in vajrolimudra. How you did wickedly delight in my dying again and again while impaled on your inflexible ungiving all-giving vajra, your darling thunder-jewel! For a woman, the equivalent of such nivritti-since our female instrument of love is the entire body, even to the eyelashes and the toenails-is removal, denial, betrayal even: love's expression must become absence and silence.

My absence you already have, the silence will follow this letter. I fear you will not greatly care. Mahima will make my void her plenum. There are many Shaktis. And the human hunger for a god will always reward those with the temerity-the i

In all those blissful months, even while wimpy Yajna whacked miy jaw and Vikshipta turned sadistic and the shots were ringing out during Durga's last stand, your spirit sheltered me and I felt no fear. Now I feel fear. Master,-having already bestowed upon me the mudra of dama (your boon more generous than perhaps you knew), do not withhold your abhayamudra. Fear not!-what all the gods say, like so many suns burning through the mists of circumstance.

[unsigned]

Dear Charles-

The disgusting news that you are to marry Midge Hibbens knocked me for a loop, I confess. She babbled away blithely about it in the last of these tapes we've been exchanging-as of course you know. You know everything, it turns out, though I must say the image of you and Midge holding hands and God knows what all-heavy petting, let's call it-while listening to your poor betrayed wife's gushing taped confessions is one of the least appetizing images of courtship I have ever entertained. With her really remarkable insensitivity, Midge assumed I'd be pleased by her news! She said she'd been detecting all sorts of guilt in my references to you and this should ease it! She bad mumbled a bit in her tape before the last one about her and Ed "having troubles" (of course leaving out that the main trouble was her wish to switch over to you), and in response to that I girlishly mentioned this dream in which you and I were making love, and it must have been in response to that that she popped her gladsome tidings. I do think she took a fright of jealousy from just my dreaming about you! Talk about possessive!! And not even in legal possession yet.

I wonder how much you really understand about Midge. She is crass, Charles. She is lively but not sensitive. In our sessions with Irving she has never shown the slightest grasp or interest in the philosophy and cosmology underlying hatha-yoga. As far as she's concerned it's just a slimming exercise-which she does need, granted-but as far as spiritual energy goes she might as well be doing aerobics to the Bee Gees. I'm sure she's wonderful in bed-any woman is, when there's a conquest to be made-but aren't you going to get tired of that brassy laugh, those unreal paprika-colored curls, the way she says "doggie" instead of "dog" and "din-din" instead of "di