22 | Jaya

August 2014

Jaya had purchased her tickets as soon as they’d gone on sale three months earlier, when it was announced that the Guru was coming to town. He was scheduled to speak at the San Jose Convention Center for five days—full days, from ten in the morning until eight at night. Now, as she shuffled along slowly in the entry line that wrapped around the convention center and into the parking lot, she felt her excitement, which had been building over the past couple of weeks, climb to an intensity that took her by surprise.

Her cousin in India had sent Jaya a CD of the Guru’s lectures a few years back, after Prem died and Keith moved out, but she hadn’t opened it until after Karina left for college. Once Jaya started listening, the Guru’s words captivated and lifted her. Human life was full of suffering, and all suffering was caused by attachments; this was an essential truth in the Gita and many other scriptures. In pursuit of simplicity over the past few years, Jaya had shed the things with power to hurt or distract her: her work, her husband, her friends. She could focus exclusively on connecting to the higher spiritual force guiding the universe when she sat in Prem’s ashram and find solace there. But once she left that room to rejoin the outside world, with its attendant perils and reminders, her fears and guilt returned. She felt compelled to do everything in exactly the right way—from her prayer rituals to her Ayurvedic food preparation—to avoid the disaster and penance she always felt lurking. Jaya realized, after listening to the Guru, that she had simply exchanged one form of suffering for another. He explained how it was possible to not just numb her pain temporarily, but to rise above it. His words guided her gently through an exploration of her grief, probing her feelings as an inner witness who was present and yet could stand apart from them. Jaya was eager to continue this process of detachment, from not only external pressures, but those internal feelings as well; to reach the higher plane of consciousness of which he spoke.

The Guru’s words brought her peace when she thought of Prem. All our lives on earth were fleeting, connected to who we were before and everything that would come after, he explained. In this way, she was never really separated from her son. Jaya had been acquainted with reincarnation since she was a child—the cycle of birth, life and death repeating itself over time, throughout the ages—and believed it to be true in a nebulous way. But now she found herself looking for signs of Prem everywhere: his smile on a newborn baby, the joyful squeal in a younger child scrambling across a hanging rope bridge. At times, she felt his presence so strongly, it was as if he was right next to her, telling her something funny to make her laugh out loud, guiding her gently away from the dark abyss of sadness. Other times, it felt like an effort in vain, like she was trying to recapture something that was forever gone.