Chapter 6: Walking Out

I. The Morning

The last morning. The bell at four-thirty. She had not slept much, and had not expected to. She had packed the night before, leaving out only what she needed for the final practice — a long-sleeved shirt, a shawl she had borrowed from the woman in the bunk below, a bottle of water she would leave behind because she had not drunk from it for two days and did not trust her own memory of whether she had capped it clean. The room was gray with the pre-dawn that is not yet light. She dressed quietly. The other women in the room were still asleep or pretending to be. She walked down to the main hall in her sock feet with her shoes in her hand because the boards were loud and she did not want to be the first one to speak.

The final sit ran an hour. She sat near the back, close to the wall, where she had sat most of the five days. She did not try to feel anything in particular. She had stopped trying, sometime on the third day, and had found that when she stopped trying, more was available. The room was very quiet. She could hear the person behind her breathing, and the sound of someone else's cushion creaking as they shifted weight, and, very faintly, outside, a bird whose species she did not recognize. She watched her own mind do what it did, and noticed again, as she had noticed for days now, that the watching and the minded were not quite the same thing, and that the distance between them was not a distance she had made.

The bell ended the sit. The teacher stood. He said a few words she would not remember afterward — brief, kind, nothing that asked anything of anyone. People rose slowly. Some embraced. Some stood alone with their hands over their hearts for a long moment before they moved. The schoolteacher from Vermont wiped her eyes with the flat of her palm. The young man with the shaved head sat for another minute and then stood and walked out without looking at anyone.

She packed up her cushion, bowed to the altar the way the teacher had shown them on the first day, and carried her bag out to the porch.

II. The Path

Her car was parked on the far side of the gravel lot, under a maple that had not yet leafed out but had begun to show the faintest flush of red in its buds. The morning was cold. The sun had just cleared the ridge to the east and the light was that particular early-spring light that makes everything look sharper than it is — not warmer, not softer, but sharper, as if the edges of things had been freshly cut.

She put her bag in the trunk. She did not immediately get in the car. She stood with her hand on the warm metal of the trunk lid and looked back at the barn. The barn was just a barn. The converted farmhouse beside it was just a house. The altar inside was a table with flowers on it. She thought: If I walk to the car and drive away now, I will have done a very full five days, and nothing more needs to happen.

She did not walk to the car. She walked back up the path.

The path from the gravel lot to the main building ran alongside a low stone wall and a strip of grass still brown from the winter. She walked it slowly. She did not have a plan. She had a question — the one that had been sitting in her chest for two days like something she had swallowed and could not bring up, the one that had interrupted her friend's question mid-sentence and had embarrassed her afterward, the one that had been underneath all her other questions for longer than she had been at this retreat.

The teacher was standing near the porch, a tea mug in his hand, talking with two other retreatants she did not know well. She waited until the others drifted off. She approached. He looked up. He had the expression he had worn for most of the five days — alert, friendly, not quite smiling but not neutral. He had the air of someone who has been doing this work for a long time and who has learned how to be available without performing availability.

"I wanted to ask," she said, and then stopped, because she did not quite know how to ask.

He waited.

"Could I have a hug?"

She added, without meaning to: "Or is that just for advanced retreat?"

He laughed — a real laugh, not a performed one — and said it was not. He set his mug down on the porch railing and opened his arms. She stepped in. The hug was brief and not theatrical. It was the hug of a person who had hugged a great many students in a great many variations of the same moment and had no special investment in this one. And yet — she would note this later, in the car, driving south — the lack of special investment was itself the thing. She had not needed to be a special student. She had needed to be any student. The hug had been available the whole time.

They stepped apart. He picked up his mug.

She asked the question.

III. The Question

She had not rehearsed it. She had carried it for two days, which was also to say she had carried it for twenty years in various disguises, and the disguises had all fallen off some time during the Kali practice on the fourth afternoon, and by the last night she had known the form the question would take if she ever let it say itself.

"If something were destroyed," she said, "what would change?"

He looked at her. He took a small sip of tea. He said nothing for a moment that was not quite a silence and not quite not one.

"Nothing would change," he said.

She had expected many possible answers. She had not expected that one, delivered plainly, without softening. She felt the sentence land somewhere in her chest.

"Nothing?" she said.

"Nothing fundamental. Consciousness does not suffer from the rearrangement of its forms. Nothing is lost, because nothing was ever separate to begin with."

She held the answer. It was, on its face, the answer the tradition gives — she had read it in his book, she had heard him say something like it during a teaching on the third day. But there was a difference between reading the sentence and having the sentence said to you on a path in the morning with your bag already in the trunk of your car. The sentence, said that way, was not a doctrine. It was a report.

"But the tradition talks about reincarnation," she said. "If nothing would change — why reincarnation at all?"

"That is different."

"How is it different?"

He shifted his weight. He did not look away. He looked like a person who had been asked this question before, by many students, and who still gave the answer as though he were working it out.

"The rearrangement of forms is random in one sense," he said. "In another sense, there is a pattern. A continuity. A thread that the rearrangement is pulling through itself. The absolute view sees no loss because nothing is ever separate. The relational view sees the thread. Both are true."

"There is a pattern that continues."

He nodded.

She stood with that for a moment. The sun was higher now. Someone was moving a suitcase in the lot behind them; the wheels clicked on the gravel.

She asked the question she had been afraid to ask.

"What about — if the rearrangement is not random. If the rearrangement is chosen."

He looked at her carefully.

"You mean suicide."

She did not answer, because she could not quite answer and because he had already understood.

He said, "In the tradition, that is not considered a problem in itself. The forms rearrange. The consciousness that was holding them remains. What the tradition cautions is about how — not whether. If one does it in a way that carries trauma in the body, the pattern carries the trauma. The pattern continues. So the caution is about method, not about outcome."

She had not expected this either. She had expected prohibition dressed as compassion, or compassion dressed as prohibition. What she got was a technical observation, delivered with the same tone he had used to answer the reincarnation question, as though the question of destruction and the question of pattern were the same kind of question — which, in the frame he was describing, they were.

She stood with that. The answer was not a permission. It was also not a condemnation. It was a description of how the tradition thinks about a specific class of events, offered in the same register as everything else he had said.

She would, later, understand something else about the answer. The answer was not portable out of the container in which it had been given. The container was the five days that had made the question askable, the teacher who knew the student, the community at the edge of the circle, the goddess-work that had loosened what the question was riding on, the hug that had preceded the asking, the morning light on the path, the car already packed. The answer was a report of how the tradition thinks from inside the container. It was not an instruction for how any particular life should be lived, and the narrator — even then, on the path, with the answer still landing — did not carry the answer out as an instruction. She carried it out as a report. The difference would matter for the rest of her life, and it would matter more for any reader who tried to extract the exchange from the pages that contained it.

She said: "What about the hole, though."

He tilted his head slightly.

She tried again. "If one form leaves. In the absolute view, nothing changes. In the relational view — what about the hole? The people left. The child. The husband. The parents. The work. The — the hole."

She heard, as she said it, how her voice had risen slightly, and she felt the heat of tears somewhere behind her eyes, though she did not cry.

He looked at her for a long moment.

"There always is," he said.

"There always is?"

"There is always a hole."

She stood with those four words as though they had been set down on the path between them like a stone.

He did not say anything further. He did not need to. The absolute view sees no loss. The relational view sees every loss as real. The tradition does not choose. There always is. Always. Every rearrangement leaves a hole. The absolute knowing that nothing was ever separate does not make the hole less real for those who live in the relational field. The relational field — the child, the husband, the community, the unsent message, the unfinished book — is not an illusion to be seen through. It is the field through which the absolute is pervading, and the pervading does not erase the shape of the hole.

She understood, standing there, that this was what the book she had been writing in her head would have to carry. Not a resolution. Not a choice. Both views, held at once, without collapsing into one.

"Thank you," she said.

He nodded. He picked up his mug, which had gone cold in his hand. He walked back toward the porch. She stood on the path for another moment, long enough to register that she was not going to cry and that she was not going to be pierced by the answer in the way she had thought, for two days, that she might be. She was going to carry it. That was different.

She walked back to the car.

IV. Inside the Car

The car, when she got in, was warm from the morning sun. The steering wheel was warm. She put her hands on it. She did not start the engine.

She sat with the phrase there always is running through her chest like a quiet tone. It was not a sad tone. It was not a happy tone. It was a true tone. She felt the way you feel when a piece of music ends exactly where it needed to end — the relief of accuracy, the small ache that accuracy always carries.

She thought of her daughter, who at this moment was probably on the living room floor in her pajamas playing with the small dragons she refused to put away at bedtime. She thought of her husband, who at this moment was probably making coffee and reading the news on his phone. She thought of the friend she had interrupted mid-question on the third afternoon — the friend whose deep question had triggered her intrusive what would change? — and she understood, with a small clean shame that did not hurt but was precise, that she had not interrupted the friend because she wanted to know what the friend thought. She had interrupted the friend because the question was the one she herself needed answered, and she had not yet had the courage to say so.

She would tell the friend, later. She would apologize. The friend would be gracious, as friends often are.

She started the engine.

V. What She Would Carry

The absolute says: nothing is lost.

The relational says: there is always a hole.

The tradition does not choose.

Courage is what you do when the ground has dissolved. Freedom is what the dissolved ground turns out to be made of.

Courage is the act, from inside the finite self, of standing in the void that is the fourth layer. Freedom is the recognition, from inside the totality, that the void is pervaded by Consciousness all the way through. Courage from the side of the part; freedom from the side of the whole. They are not two events. They are one event under two descriptions. The part letting go of itself as part is the whole recognizing itself as whole.

Courage is svātantrya owning itself in the dark. Svātantrya is courage in the light.

She drove south with the radio off and the window cracked, and she did not try to resolve the sentence that was still forming in her chest. She let it form. The road ran between fields that had not yet been plowed for the season, and the sky was very blue, and the coffee she had brought in a thermos was still warm against her leg, and the phone on the passenger seat was dark.

Somewhere past the state line, she cried for about ten minutes, and then she stopped, and then she drove the rest of the way home with the kind of quiet that is not empty.

A note from the author, outside the narrator's voice: the exchange rendered in this chapter is offered as a report of how the tradition thinks about one of its harder classical teachings, given inside the specific container of a five-day retreat to a student who had earned the question. It is not a statement of what any reader should do, and it should not be read as permission, instruction, or counsel. A living tradition does its work inside a living relationship with a teacher, a community, and clinical support when needed. If you are carrying the question this chapter carries, please do not carry it alone.

If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available: in the US, 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, call or text); international hotlines at findahelpline.com.