I saw a woman as old
And wrinkled as devotion
Not even teeth keep her from God

I’ve been one week in it, with Mukeshananda, the Santaram Mandir, Nadiad, Gujarat, India, Mangoland, Earthbound. Barely.

Trying to make sense of the teaching. The teaching is a radially-symmetric hydra of joy. It’s impossible to know where to start, and you start with the pre-Heraclean understanding that there’s no end. Any attempt to write about it immediately sends me towards

a) Gratitude for all those who already have so clearly
b) The impossibility of language (for mortals, not Jesus or Taha Muhammed Ali) to communicate anything worthwhile, the insufficiency of matter to hold the fullness of spirit.

Luckily, there’s music. Even my baritone ukulele, broken string and dusty frets, helps soothe the overwhelming insufficiency of being saturated in love.

This time, three years after meeting Mukeshbhai by accident on my pilgrimage to Dandi (you know, read the book) he’s telling me not to calm any mind nor observation any sensation, nor even focus on the heart or a once and future mantra, but rather, to Love.

“Ankur, Love is very important.”

The “I know” is very tempting. Straight is the gate and narrow is the path. But, “I’ve heard” at least. I wrote my thesis about it (extant somewhere, I believe) and have tried to love people now and again, on subways and mountaintops and even in the privacy of our homes. I tell myself every morning that it’s all there is. In truth, I fear to reveal, it’s been my only ambition for the last four years (since the Amazon): to learn not how to use or employ or act or embrace or accept love, but to Be Love.

During the same period, I’ve been learning how to meditate, according to the sense of the Mangoland tradition: sitting on a mat with a straight back and your eyes closed, building focus and awareness. I’ve experienced some incredibly insights, some flashy psychadelic paraphernalia (which I love), some deep peace. I’ve learned that all life has the potential to be meditation, and that almost everyone I’ve met, when you talk to them late enough at night, after enough drinks, or shortly after a car accident, is ready to reveal that they too have felt that presence of Love, acceptance, totality, presence, or whatever otherwords are equally insufficient as “God”. I’ve learned to recognize and cultivate this feeling while walking, laughing, playing music, painting, gazing, touching, eating, drinking, dancing, driving, sitting, observing, and participating.

It’s everywhere, all around us. And now Mukeshananda, in the fourth year of my training with him, tells me the only thing I should be doing, while I sit with him for hours every day, punctuated occasionally by mini-teachings and flute practices, papayas and coconuts, is to Love.

“Love is like a river flooded,” he says, “Washing away everything to the ocean. It is beyond discerenment and the knowdlge of right and wrong, it takes everything away and leaves you at the ground of pure being.”

When you sit, he tells us, just Love. Just feel, physically, the sensation of that sentiment. Not the emotional love of the body, but the spiritual love of the heart.

I interpret him to mean “body” as our physical incarnation, not narrowly in terms of sex or pleasure. And “heart” for Mukeshbhai, as always, means the soul, the Self, the deep power in us all that is at once unique and universal.

“Heart love not body love”

Hear love is unconditional. Some brother of ahimsa and agape, most hallowed ideals of the ancients in Mangoland and the Mediterranean, which came to me through Gandhiji and Martin Luther King, Jr.

A good teacher knows exactly how to speak to his students. He tells me to think of a Mango tree. The mango slowly ripens over months, and when it falls, it is because it bursting with sweetness and flavor. Be as the mango! Fill you heart fill your heart fill your heart with love: when full it will burst open in sweetness.

This is meditation, this practice of filling your heart with love, of sitting not to imagine nor recall – not with the mind – but to feel (physically, sensorily, I think) the greatest Love you have ever known, and to submit to it, letting it carry you gently down the stream.

The body gets tired,
The mind gets tired,
But the heart
Says Mukeshananda
Is a depthless lake,
And tires not.

Once you focus on this Love
Everything else is revealed.
We awake to see
There is nothing left
to demand
The heart has taken it all.

In the murks of the depths
Of the heart
All is clear
Revealed.

There are some tools of course. Ancient people loved tools. Hand tools and stone tools and calendars and poetry and things you could memorize. Which generally, I don’t, but you can.

He says there are 3 qualities of mind to help us balance and refine that which we learn from meditation to use in our daily lives, to integrate the teachings into our daily practice. He calls them shravan, mananan, and vidhi….

They translate, according to the dear Shivalbhai, with whom I first corresponded due to Mangolandia years ago and only met in person last week!, as follows:

Shravan – careful listening to the teaching, heightened awareness, and deep willinglnss to listen and learn. Openess.

Manann – reflection, going over the teaching 100 times for each time you heard it, churning it like cream, churning and churning until your doubts fall away and the solid gold of your learning extracts itself.

Vidh…. – dedicated practice, holding the gems you’ve churned and honoring them through practice in daily life.

I can’t help this phrase running through my mind – I don’t know from whence it came – “The Heart is Right to Love”. I can see out there, beyond the unseasonal clouds and unwholesome haze, the fear and doubt and gamut of human emotions and psychology that allow us to hold tension, that keep us from relaxing into this Lake of Love all around us. And yet, something deep within me, rising to the surface of the skin during these days of music and meditation and occasional solitude, knows the truth, has no trouble remembering, can feel it in the pulsing of my veins, over and across my mosquito bites and pores, “The Heart is Right to Love.”

“Ankur, Love is very important”.

Ninety-nine more to go.