SAJIT IN HIS TEMPLE
experienced poverty or heard the myths
and metaphors of ancient India.
"True, he didn't cure me of my pain. If you expect a teacher to do that for you, don't hold your breath! But he gave me a handle on new ways of seeing and being. And - like the Tantra master he was, he showed me how to transcend personality through the miracle of sex. "If it hadn't been for Sajit, I might never have quit my business, experienced poverty or heard the myths and metaphors of ancient India. "True, he didn't cure me of my pain. If you expect a teacher to do that for you, don't hold your breath! But he gave me a handle on new ways of seeing and being. And - like the Tantra master he was, he showed me how to transcend personality through the miracle of sex."
Sajit and I were smoking hash in his little office. We’d toke, cough and space out. The t.v. - as usual - was on some cacophonous soap opera detailing the minutia of middle class pain. Nobody paid attention to it but me - as usual.
Sajit always claimed daytime t.v. was a school book teaching him The American Way of Life and colloquial English and had it on all the time. For me it was a yoga and a half learning to relax my body to it instead of fighting the noise and insanity.
I was curled up in the big black chair resisting and letting go and watching Sajit shine above the desk full of papers. A young disheveled, bearded face looked in through the door. “May I talk to you?” it asked.
As it came in the door, the face had a lanky hippy body attached to it. Sajit, feet tucked up under him, waved his orange robed arm towards a chair. “Sit down.”
“I want to tell you about my musical instruments.” The boy’s eyes were wide and serious. “The Venusians have given me all these plans so we can make their wonderful instruments on Earth. They’ll make totally heavenly music.” He shook a roll of papers.
“From Venus?” Sajit swiveled his chair towards him and paid attention. “When were you there?”
“I’ve been there a lot. They come and get me. It’s so beautiful up there, Sajit. The cities are clean and shining. Everyone dresses in gorgeous pastel colored robes, and they float around making music and existing in a state of love. They come down to observe us, to see if we’re ready to be really happy yet. If we were, they’d teach us their technologies. But we’re not.”
Hey, wait just a minute here! My heart starts tightening up. This young man is totally insane, and Sajit is listening respectfully and treating him as though he knows what he’s talking about. What’s going on?
“They come and get me, because they know that I’m a musician. They want at least a few of us to understand some of their techniques.”
“What have they taught you?”
“I’ve got these plans”. He unrolls several large pieces of paper. “Take a look.”
Now I’m really upset. Venus?
Why doesn’t Sajit tell him to leave so we can make love?
They carefully examine the plans together. As I space out, their voices come through to me in a mumble, “See, there has to be a handle here.”
“Oh, do you use electricity for that?”
“No, there are higher technologies than electricity; we’ll tap right into the primal energy of the universe.”
Everything is wavering. The t.v. plays a chaotic fugue to their demented conversation. I wander in a black hole, their voices weaving webs around me. A black hole! I’m in a black hole. Betty says to me, “Come back to the room; listen politely to their insanity.”
Another voice in me says, “Stay where you are. Go on. Go on. Go through the black tunnel.”
It is a tunnel. Darkness everywhere; long walls curving around me, like the inside of an artery. Far off in the distance a pinpoint of light. “I’m going to see it,” I cry to myself. Pushing down that endless tunnel, afraid but consummately curious. The light always recedes as I move hesitantly forward. Down, down. Or is it up? Darkness. Fear. Determination to see the light. Something wonderful is about to happen!
And then - woah - I’m out of the gloomy long worm hole into some magnificent brilliance.
It is more than light. It’s an emotion, a happiness, a love. It takes me, laves me surrounds me with instantaneous joy. “This is it,” I cry. I fly in swirls and swoops. I see Betty sitting in her chair, feel her legs a little cramped from being tucked under her, hear the endless murmur of voices talking about Venus. I am free, spirit spread like wings, a fairy dancing in the warmth. This is Venus; I am Venus; you are Venus. Let them talk. Just let me be. It’s all all right. Wheeee.
Then I feel my fingers moving hazily across my eyes, and I am back in my body again, but this time with such love. It spills out of me in droplets, in waterfalls. The men feel it and stop talking. “I’ve got to go,” says the young man.
After he leaves, I say to Sajit, “How could you spend so much time talking to him? He’s never been to Venus.”
“Of course he has,” Sajit said. “He needed someone to really hear him, to understand what he’s experienced. If he was institutionalized, they’d give him drugs and downers, and then nobody would ever even have a chance to hear about the instruments he learned to make on Venus. Some day, if he doesn’t get too frightened, we may even hear him play them.”
It was a great lesson.
We took another toke of hash. Our mouths meet, disintegrate, become one, a wave of wetness in some eternal ocean. Our personalities dissolve in an ocean of slow sex. Wave after wave touches our bodies, diamond dendrites reaching for more, for more. Realities spin and tumble us as this eternal surf moves us out of time/space. There is a throbbing of our separate bodies opening and closing their sacred lust, nerves reaching to each other, probing deeper and deeper.
We are gods on Mount Olympus in great sunfilled fields, rolling and tumbling, laughing our delight. We are the earth itself, primeval earth with great waters swirling its surface. Volcanoes rise, orgasm, and fall. We are images of incest; we are entire star systems birthing. We are the galaxy moving a million miles a minute in its great rotation.
We are Sajit and Betty copulating on a shabby rug transformed to a flying carpet in an old apartment in the Fillmore of San Francisco. It is all happening at once, great swells of golden time encapsulating the multiple nuclei of now. The stars literally burst. The veils between realities fragment, and there is only one, only the great explosion of eternal becoming. We are lost, and we are found.
Slowly, slowly we subside. We breathe in this reality once more; our personalities reclaim our sovereign bodies. We return from The Grand Dream, The All-embracing Drama, to this little, confined dream we call Life. Sajit sits at his desk; the t.v. is still blasting some damn soap opera or other. Our relationship is beyond love, jealousy or need. We are friends on every level and in all times.
We look at each other and smile. I turn and signal goodbye as I walk out the door without talking and put on my sandals. It’s time to get on with the every day drama. As I walk down the long flight of steps, I hear a voice from the t.v. soap opera saying, “Oh, George, what will we do if Sally ever finds out?”
