2022 Delivery 11, November 2022

Where we left it at end of Delivery 10:

I could not quite fully trust that she was as committed to our relationship as I was. I was afraid I did not quite meet her expectations. Sometimes at night next to her I had bad dreams, often involving being abandoned in a desert, or searching for family in a huge house, or walking through the city and somehow wandering into streets where gangs hung around waiting for weak people like me.

A business card - on it written a name, “Malvern Brahma Soul-Dancer”, and the information “Consultant Mystician. Private Studio or House Calls” and a phone number. The text golden on a black background with the very faint impression of rain drops filtering down through the words. On the back of the card, a handwritten note: “Aleena, Call me, you won’t regret it”.

I put the card back down into the letter box. I came inside. I sat at my desk unable to work. Around 6pm I heard Aleena come in the front gate, and the letter box open and close. I composed myself, and began typing randomly on my keyboard.

I decided I did not want to find about about “Malvern Brahma Soul-Dancer”. Probably just a crackpot. Aleena did not mention the card and in a few days I forgot all about it.

Time went by, as it does. 

I began to feel Aleena distant to me again. She seemed to want to be by herself a lot in the house. And some evenings she did not come back from work until 9 or 10pm. She said they were busy and she was obliged to help out with overtime. I took it at face value.  A couple of times she went away for a weekend, to visit her family.  I missed her company, but also I felt she seemed to need her space. I wanted to respect that, to put aside whatever feelings I had, to give her whatever she wanted. So I did not mention my lingering sense that something was going on.

Marriage is a big thing, a big change for any of us, and in between my own doubts, I assumed, like me, she was working out her new self-identity. And I was grateful to have found someone who remained, despite the distancing. So I silently agreed to the distancing.

I felt content to spend my days at home. My desire of seeking company was behind me.

Sometimes when she was at work I went for long walks alone on the beach. I felt the life-long sense of being alone in the universe, and yet, somehow tempered now with a presence accompanying me.

I thought of this presence as Aleena, perhaps even as my idealised Aleena. But at times I felt into the presence even more deeply, knowing it as Spirit. 

On these walks I felt more peaceful than I had ever felt before.

 

Photo by Ben Mack at Pexels
Photo by Ben Mack at Pexels

 

But I was often filled with conflicting feelings. Appreciation and suspicion. Peaceful inside and yet anxiety still surfacing. Trust and worry. 

Somehow the seemingly opposing feelings could co-exist in me. They rose and fell like waves on the ocean. I could though feel deep down, a slow strengthening of what I call my soul. And on the surface, even so, the old voice whispering, “This will not last. And there is nobody to blame but myself.”

One evening she came home, and sat down next to me. I had been working on a small architectural drawing project my uncle's firm had sent to me.

She seemed quite distracted. She was fidgeting with her hands and when I asked her about her day at work, she looked at me silently for a few moments and then came out with, "I might quit soon".

This surprised me. She had a cushy job. And I thought she was reasonably happy there. I asked her what was happening.

She replied:

"I'm just not content with the people there. I mean they are not inspiring. Their lives are repetitive. Dead. They don't seem to understand spiritual things. They talk about movies and sport and when I venture more deep they clam up. I want to work with people who understand that we create the universe each time we breathe in and breathe out."

I had to smile inside for a moment, as I caught on that it was not only me who did not quite meet her spiritual standards.

I saw that she was quite effected by what she was disclosing. Aleena did not often cry, but I saw that tears were coming to her eyes. I could see she was holding them back. She reached into the shoulder bag she had carried home from work, to get a tissue.

As she was opening the bag a card fell out onto my desk. The mystic’s card. I recognised it immediately without even reading the text. The raindrops behind the words. The memory of it being in our letterbox returned. I pretended I had just seen it for the first time. I said as calmly as I could, “What’s that Lina?”

She patted her eyes with the tissue, then put one of her hands over the card, and shuffled her hands around like she was trying to make the card disappear. I looked at her face and indeed the darkness in her eyes had returned. She saw my concern. She uttered, “It’s nothing, it's ... it's somebody I’ve been consulting”. 

I picked the card up, from under her hands, and she did not resist.

I read it, contriving to appear as if I were reading it for the first time. Even as I read, a voice in the back of my mind was acknowledging to myself that after all the intimacy Aleena and I had entered into I was still pretending with her. Not only was she hiding something, I was also. I was not only hiding the fact that I had seen the card before, but more than that, I was hiding the fact of my fear of what it meant. I wanted to appear unaffected. And I could not put aside the inner voice declaring that the distancing I experienced was no different than the distancing I had set up all around me for as long back as I could recall. 

But the self-reflective voice in me faded away, in almost an instant, and I placed the card back on my desk.

"Whatever is a Mystician?”, I asked, “and what does he consult about?”

“A Mystician is a practicing mystic, honey.” 

I must have frowned, because she stroked my brow with her finger tips in the way she knows I love.

“Most mystics like to just do their own thing and don’t really care to help other people understand or progress. A mystic with a practice is out there engaging with the problems and thought patterns of normal people, you see. An engaging mystic will help you find the way into your own inner interiority where bliss is, and show you how to remain there whatever happens in the outside world”.

“Hmm”, I said, “and he charges a fee for that?"

“Yes. Morris says people value his work more when they have paid for it." 

“Morris?” I asked, turning up my eyebrows. 

“Oh, … yes his real name is Morris, he just calls himself Malvern Brahma Soul-Dancer professionally.”

“I see”, I said. “He helped you with your thing about limitations? And bliss? And you paid him for that?”

“Yes", she replied, “and I got good value for my money.”

She threw her head back as if to call an end to the questioning and turned away into the kitchen. I could hear her in there operating the coffee machine. 

 

Photo by cottonbro studio at Pexels
Photo by cottonbro studio at Pexels

 

I went to the sunroom and sat on the sofa. Soon she joined me with 2 cups of espresso. 

I sipped the strong black brew. “How many times did you see him, Elly?”

“7 times”, she replied. "He is leading me through a process of inner knowing and acceptance and transitioning into a deeper level of consciousness. It takes awhile. He made me promise before we started that I would persist with the journey until at least I could look him in the eyes and say authentically, ‘I see you, and you are the same as me'. I did try that a few times but each time I started to giggle and got embarrassed and he said ‘Almost but not quite.’"

I considered all this. It sounded a bit cuckoo and I almost opened my mouth to say so. But the voice of tolerance inside me whispered in my mind: “Who am I to judge what people need to do or learn in order to be happy.” And then, “She is my wife, my mission is to allow her to find herself”.

“How much does he charge?” I asked.

She hesitated, then she came out with it, “He charges $720 a session, Stu”. I spluttered in my coffee, almost burning my lips. “Seven hundred and twenty dollars?”

“Yes, and worth every cent”.

“What does he give you for that? Nobody charges that much for these self-development things!”

“It is not self-development honey, Morris says the self needs no development. All he needs to do is tune me into my own frequency so I can connect with my own higher source. And the tuning, he says, is a finely skilled work that took him many many years of diligent study and self-experimentation to come by.”

I stared out the window over the bay.

“And you did not have sex with him?” I asked bluntly as I turned my gaze to her eyes again.

Even as I asked I felt I was out of line. The subject of sex had suddenly appeared in my own mind. I remembered what she had told me about the massage teacher, and how he invited her into his life, and into his bed. And she went there. It was a long time ago, and even before she met me, but, ... people do not change. Not really.

I perhaps saw a shadow cross over her face but I could not be sure. 

She replied “Of course not, you silly goose. Not every man wants only one thing.” 

She began to stroke my earlobes and then she placed my hands against her inner thighs and began to unbutton her blouse. “Come and get your sweetness offering honey, you are the only one it is for”. 

I put aside my doubt, given an offer I could not refuse, and began to enter a familiar world of passion and delight. We had abandoned ourselves together in that world so many times before. It never seemed to matter what was going on between us, or not happening between us, the sacred energies took us, even without us trying.

As we came to our bed we always paused for a moment to recognise the divinity in each other, before we lay down naked.

And inevitably our bodies fused, and our minds emptied.

And then as usual, we slept.

 

Photo by Ana Maria Moroz at Pexels
Photo by Ana Maria Moroz at Pexels


Where we go in Delivery 12:

What is at core of the Narrator's Archaic Concept of  Self?  Perhaps it is clear by now. If not, it may become clearer as we wind up the story.