The Antaryamin

At first, for many, this Awakening is bliss. However then there often is what could only be thought of as a breaking in period. You actually begin to crave that feeling of loneliness like some kind of a suffering junkie. It is like feeling for a ring that you had worn for a long time and then recently lost.

There you sit with a manifestation of the Divine next to you on the sofa and you wonder when he is going to go away. You want him to go away but on the other hand you are so frightened he will leave you that your heart almost breaks at the thought. I still laugh when my students call or write all excited about the experience of this Awakening that Bhagavan and Amma have given them. At first it is:

"He looks like this, and he did this, he said this and her helps me with this." They will say-like proud parents. "How cute he is! How humorous! How handsome!" But there are some reservations: "What does he eat? Can I still have sex?" What about beer?"

Then later it is: "When is he going to leave? I want to go out dancing. I never feel like I am by myself anymore. I guess I had better clean the house if he is going to stay." With others it is: "You could have told me this would happen. The house was a mess and I was so embarrassed.

Thus is the condition of man-the conflict between what we are and what we want to be. The Supreme Being has awakened in us in a form and ideally we would fall at His/Her feet in a state of bliss but instead we wanted it to be perfect-even with the Divine.

Often it appears very much as if the Antaryamin is extremely compromising and it is a learning for the Divine as well. For example initially Bhagavan would come out of the 8x10 or so Sri Murthi (photo of Bhagavan while is like a gateway to the Source of Supreme Inteliigence) in a very small size and hold out his arms as if to embrace me. I would yelp and back away. He would do it again and again until finally I yelled something at him like he was appearing like Chuckie from the horror movie and it was freaking me out. That I never did like dolls. After that he appeared in the size of a man, and one of the monks gave me a large Sri Murthi, just in case.

In my first year following the awakening of the Antrayamin, I took an industrial sales position. Bhagavan (that is the form of the Divine that relate to) would go with me on sales calls. It was sometimes distracting. I would be meeting with the president of a factory, locking horns with other sales people, mostly men with 50 years of technical experience and sometimes I would forget that no one else could see him. I would say, "Move over and let someone else sit down"- things like people with invisible friends would say. I was always afraid that someone might see him there in his yellow robes and bare feet. After a particularly bad (though in retrospect, highly amusing) sales call, I spoke to him critically as we were walking to yet another factory.

'You are really throwing me off in there. Don't you have any shoes? Aren't your feet cold? It's snowing. What's with the robes? Who wears yellow in the wintertime? What if someone sees you? How can I explain who you are?" On and on.....

I could not imagine what it would be like to have him with me the rest of my life, and at that point I seemed to relate to him as if he was some kind of a foreign exchange student. On the other hand he had become such a part of me it would be like losing a limb if he were to vanish once and for all.

He didn't say anything. He just looked at his feet in the snow and shrugged. I could hear him plodding along behind me. When I held the door open for him, I jumped as I did not recognize him at first. He was wearing a well tailored suit, nice shoes and his beard was neatly trimmed. In his hand was a briefcase. He told me how to make an easy repair on a hydraulic system during the meeting. We made the sale.