Hi Mark,
Your visit answered the question “I don’t know what I want,” for which there is not always a verbal answer, because you, the Self, doesn’t have any wants in the first place and secondly because Isvara takes care of our wants before we even know what we think we want. How so?
It puts you on that big heavy gleaming road hog and willy nilly sends you off on an adventure to woods of Oregon, the contours of which are not only absurd, but are driven by a certain healthy logic invariably determined by Isvara itself. Visit the guru! Your much-appreciated and perhaps a tad extravagant devotion, not to mention your tremendous vitality amazes me. The impression I formed from a number of our early conversations was that somehow you were a lazy person still bedeviled by a living room full of cardboard boxes of middle class detritus…useless papers, strings and rubber bands, spawned by an ancient move. But you’re not; that’s just a story, probably calculated, again by Isvara, to attract sympathy, which you don’t need.
You also don’t need to know what Mark wants because Isvara takes care of his wants before he wants to want; one fine day a gleaming blue Indian appears in the driveway. One day he hustles off for a bit of responsible comraderie with his team. When the hormones flare a low-life neighbor ruffies his drink and…I got a good laugh out of that one! Somehow, his beginningless interest in non-duality leads him to John Wheeler, then to the great Ramji.
Why should we know what we want? It’s always taken care of by the merciful Self without comment. I wish I had time to listen to all your stories so I could write your Mystic by Default, which I fear you will never write. But then, so what? Some other idiot like you or me will come along and put pen to paper and HIS story will iterate down the ages, as it does.
By the way, you’re right about Highway 12. We lived in Lewiston, Idaho and journeyed up the Lochsa over Lolo pass to Missoula every summer when I was a kid. Then for most of the subsequent fifty years I traveled back and forth on that marvelous route in my truck, van, whatever, camping out and fishing on the way. If ever anything justifies the words, “God is Great” that stretch of glory does.
I hope all is well.
Love,
James
