The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (21 page)

57

The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order. In the search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered you in return for what you’ve given up. Every religion in the world operates on the same common understandings of what it means to be a good disciple—get up early and pray to your God, hone your virtues, be a good neighbor, respect yourself and others, master your cravings. We all agree that it would be easier to sleep in, and many of us do, but for millennia there have been others who choose instead to get up before the sun and wash their faces and go to their prayers. And then fiercely try to hold on to their devotional convictions throughout the lunacy of another day.

The devout of this world perform their rituals without guarantee that anything good will ever come of it. Of course there are plenty of scriptures and plenty of priests who make plenty of promises as to what your good works will yield (or threats as to the punishments awaiting you if you lapse), but to even believe all this is an act of faith, because nobody amongst us is shown the endgame. Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying, “Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.” There’s a reason we refer to “leaps of faith”—because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don’t care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn’t. If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be—by definition—faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be . . . a prudent insurance policy.

I’m not interested in the insurance industry. I’m tired of being a skeptic, I’m irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I couldn’t care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.

58

My prayers are becoming more deliberate and specific. It has occurred to me that it’s not much use to send prayers out to the universe that are lazy. Every morning before meditation, I kneel in the temple and talk for a few minutes to God. I found during the beginning of my stay here at the Ashram that I was often dull-witted during those divine conversations. Tired, confused and bored, my prayers sounded the same. I remember kneeling down one morning, touching my forehead to the floor and muttering to my creator, “Oh, I dunno what I need . . . but you must have some ideas . . . so just do something about it, would you?”

Similar to the way I have oftentimes spoken to my hairdresser.

And, I’m sorry, but that’s a little lame. You can imagine God regarding that prayer with an arched eyebrow, and sending back this message: “Call me again when you decide to get serious about this.”

Of
course
God already knows what I need. The question is—do
I
know? Casting yourself at God’s feet in helpless desperation is all well and good—heaven knows, I’ve done it myself plenty of times— but ultimately you’re likely to get more out of the experience if you can take some action on your end. There’s a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, “Dear saint—please, please, please . . . give me the grace to win the lottery.” This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, “My son—please, please, please . . .
buy a ticket.
”

Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don’t have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift. So now I take the time every morning to search myself for specificity about what I am truly asking for. I kneel there in the temple with my face on that cold marble for as long as it takes me to formulate an authentic prayer. If I don’t feel sincere, then I will stay there on the floor until I do. What worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. Prayers can become stale and drone into the boring and familiar if you let your attention stagnate. In making an effort to stay alert, I am assuming custodial responsibility for the maintenance of my own soul.

Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship—a play between divine grace and willful self-effort. Half of it you have no control over; half of it is absolutely in your hands, and your actions will show measurable consequence. Man is neither entirely a puppet of the gods, nor is he entirely the captain of his own destiny; he’s a little of both. We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses—one foot is on the horse called “fate,” the other on the horse called “free will.” And the question you have to ask every day is—which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it’s not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life—whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can’t rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I’m feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

This last concept is a radically new idea for me. Richard from Texas brought it to my attention recently, when I was complaining about my inability to stop brooding. He said, “Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.”

On first glance, this seems a nearly impossible task. Control your
thoughts
? Instead of the other way around? But imagine if you could? This is not about repression or denial. Repression and denial set up elaborate games to pretend that negative thoughts and feelings are not occurring. What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then—with great forgiveness and fortitude—dismissing them. This is a practice that fits hand-in-glove with any psychological work you do during therapy. You can use the shrink’s office to understand why you have these destructive thoughts in the first place; you can use spiritual exercises to help overcome them. It’s a sacrifice to let them go, of course. It’s a loss of old habits, comforting old grudges and familiar vignettes. Of course this all takes practice and effort. It’s not a teaching that you can hear once and then expect to master immediately. It’s constant vigilance and I want to do it. I need to do it, for my strength.
Devo farmi le ossa
is how they say it in Italian. “I need to make my bones.”

So I’ve started being vigilant about watching my thoughts all day, and monitoring them. I repeat this vow about 700 times a day: “I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.” Every time a diminishing thought arises, I repeat the vow.
I will not harbor unhealthy
thoughts anymore.
The first time I heard myself say this, my inner ear perked up at the word “harbor,” which is a noun as well as a verb. A harbor, of course, is a place of refuge, a port of entry. I pictured the harbor of my mind—a little beat-up, perhaps, a little storm-worn, but well situated and with a nice depth. The harbor of my mind is an open bay, the only access to the island of my Self (which is a young and volcanic island, yes, but fertile and promising). This island has been through some wars, it is true, but it is now committed to peace, under a new leader (me) who has instituted new policies to protect the place. And now—let the word go out across the seven seas—there are much, much stricter laws on the books about who may enter this harbor.

You may not come here anymore with your hard and abusive thoughts, with your plague ships of thoughts, with your slave ships of thoughts, with your warships of thoughts—all these will be turned away. Likewise, any thoughts that are filled with angry or starving exiles, with malcontents and pamphleteers, mutineers and violent assassins, desperate prostitutes, pimps and seditious stowaways— you may not come here anymore, either. Cannibalistic thoughts, for obvious reasons, will no longer be received. Even missionaries will be screened carefully, for sincerity. This is a peaceful harbor, the entryway to a fine and proud island that is only now beginning to cultivate tranquillity. If you can abide by these new laws, my dear thoughts, then you are welcome in my mind—otherwise, I shall turn you all back toward the sea from whence you came.

That is my mission, and it will never end.

59

I’ve made good friends with this seventeen-year-old Indian girl named Tulsi. She works with me scrubbing the temple floors every day. Every evening we take a walk through the gardens of the Ashram together and talk about God and hip-hop music, two subjects for which Tulsi feels equivalent devotion. Tulsi is just about the cutest little bookworm of an Indian girl you ever saw, even cuter since one lens of her “specs” (as she calls her eyeglasses) broke last week in a cartoonish spiderweb design, which hasn’t stopped her from wearing them. Tulsi is so many interesting and foreign things to me at once—a teenager, a tomboy, an Indian girl, a rebel in her family, a soul who is so crazy about God that it’s almost like she’s got a schoolgirl crush on Him. She also speaks a delightful, lilting English—the kind of English you can find only in India—which includes such colonial words as “splendid!” and “nonsense!” and sometimes produces eloquent sentences like: “It is beneficial to walk on the grass in the morning when the dew has already been accumulated, for it lowers naturally and pleasantly the body’s temperature.” When I told her once that I was going to Mumbai for the day, Tulsi said, “Please stand carefully, as you will find there are many speeding buses everywhere.”

She’s exactly half my age, and practically half my size.

Tulsi and I have been talking a lot about marriage lately during our walks. Soon she will turn eighteen, and this is the age when she will be regarded as a legitimate marriage prospect. It will happen like this—after her eighteenth birthday, she will be required to attend family weddings dressed in a sari, signaling her womanhood. Some nice Amma (“Aunty”) will come and sit beside her, start asking questions and getting to know her: “How old are you? What’s your family background? What does your father do? What universities are you applying to? What are your interests? When is your birthday?” Next thing you know, Tulsi’s dad will get a big envelope in the mail with a photo of this woman’s grandson who is studying computer sciences in Delhi, along with the boy’s astrology charts and his university grades and the inevitable question, “Would your daughter care to marry him?”

Tulsi says, “It sucks.”

But it means so much to the family, to see their children wedded off successfully. Tulsi has an aunt who just shaved her head as a gesture of thanks to God because her oldest daughter—at the Jurassic age of twenty-eight—finally got married. And this was a difficult girl to marry off, too; she had a lot of strikes against her. I asked Tulsi what makes an Indian girl difficult to marry off, and she said there are any number of reasons.

“If she has a bad horoscope. If she’s too old. If her skin is too dark. If she’s too educated and you can’t find a man with a higher position than hers, and this is a widespread problem these days because a woman cannot be more educated than her husband. Or if she’s had an affair with someone and the whole community knows about it, oh, it would be quite difficult to find a husband after that . . .”

I quickly ran through the list, trying to see how marriageable I would appear in Indian society. I don’t know whether my horoscope is good or bad, but I’m definitely too old and I’m way too educated, and my morals have been publicly demonstrated to be quite tarnished . . . I’m not a very appealing prospect. At least my skin is fair. I have only this in my favor.

Tulsi had to go to another cousin’s wedding last week, and she was saying (in very un-Indian fashion) how much she hates weddings. All that dancing and gossip. All that dressing up. She would rather be at the Ashram scrubbing floors and meditating. Nobody else in her family can understand this; her devotion to God is way beyond anything they consider normal. Tulsi said, “In my family, they have already given up on me as too different. I have established a reputation for being someone who, if you tell her to do one thing, will almost certainly do the other. I also have a temper. And I’m not dedicated to my studies, except that now I will be, because now I’m going to college and I can decide for myself what I’m interested in. I want to study psychology, just as our Guru did when she attended college. I’m considered a difficult girl. I have a reputation for needing to be told a good reason to do something before I will do it. My mother understands this about me and always tries to give good reasons, but my father doesn’t. He gives reasons, but I don’t think they’re good enough. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing in my family because I don’t resemble them at all.”

Tulsi’s cousin who got married last week is only twenty-one, and her older sister is next on the marriage list at age twenty, which means there will be huge pressure after that for Tulsi herself to find a husband. I asked her if she wanted to ever get married and she said:

“Noooooooooooooooooooooo . . .”

. . . and the word drew out longer than the sunset we were watching over the gardens.

“I want to roam!” she said. “Like you.”

“You know, Tulsi, I couldn’t always roam like this. I was married once.”

She frowned at me through her cracked specs, studying me with a quizzical look, almost as if I’d just told her I’d once been a brunette and she was trying to imagine it. In the end, she pronounced: “You, married? I cannot picture this.”

“But it’s true—I was.”

“Are you the one who ended the marriage?”

“Yes.”

She said, “I think it’s most commendable that you ended your marriage. You seem splendidly happy now. But as for me—how did I get here? Why was I born an Indian girl? It’s outrageous! Why did I come into this family? Why must I attend so many weddings?”

Then Tulsi ran around in a frustrated circle, shouting (quite loudly for Ashram standards): “I want to live in Hawaii!!!”