Many Masters

“I thought about you as I read these pages today.” My mother-in-law said smilingly as I stepped out onto the deck yesterday. I had just got home, given Chip his milk, peanuts, raisins, apple, milk again, juice (grape not apple), peanuts again. Finally getting tired of the game, I had given Chip an ultimatum, poured myself a glass of juice, helped myself to the Chivda the MIL had made and stepped out on the deck. The MIL was reading, or rather re-reading after a decade, Many Masters Many Lives, sitting on the swing, a cup of coffee in hand.

The MIL and I have many things in common and over the years have bonded over it. Astrology (I never cease to amaze, do I), spirituality, classical music, cooking, gardening, metaphysical phenomena. Which is not to say we are similar in personality. She is garrulous, I am the quiet sort. She thinks too much about what the extended family will think and say, me not at all, partly because I live half a globe from all that. She has tremendous amount of faith, and me? I don’t know. We are both married to hyper-rational geeks, the aloof, mind your own business types and we bond over that. I call her Kaku – which means Chachi/Auntie. Never called her mom, aie, or any other maternal terminology. And I was forthright about it. When BigGeek and I decided to get married, I should have started calling her something motherly, but I asked her if she would be OK with Kaku and she was. There is only one mother, I reasoned. The one that raises you. And she gracefully accepted that. Despite BigGeek’s aunts being shocked that she let me call her Kaku and not Aie. But I go off on a tangent here, but well not really, it’s important to get an idea of what the MIL is like.

Which pages, I wanted to know. She flipped back the pages. “It’s when Catherine talks about one of her lives while in the trance. The time when she was born in a Victorian period.” For five minutes the MIL read out a couple of pages to me. In them, Catherine talked about what she had learnt from that lifetime. She had learnt to have faith in the masters. She did not believe in them, not in that lifetime, she did not. But at the end of it she realized that had been her lesson. To have faith in the larger scheme of things.

This was very slightly uncanny. Because while reading the book, this is exactly what I thought my task for this life was. To learn to have faith. In the really bigger picture. The MIL has this faith. From where it stems from I know not. But through out this ordeal she has remained so calm that I have to admit I have questioned if she realized the seriousness of it all.“We don’t have masters (guru) in real life. I wish we did but we don’t. " She was telling me. Maybe these are our Masters, she said meaning the book’s author Brian Wiess.

I am definitely in a crisis of faith here. The MIL is happy not knowing all the answers. She is not bothered when her Whys go unanswered. She accepts that not all can be reasoned by the mind. The self, on the other hand, acknowledges that rational thought has its limits, but that conclusion, like a strange loop, is reached though logic. So, here I am, trying to break that loop and take a leap of faith. I just wish it wasn’t so damn hard.

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BigGeek Update: He had his first day of Cardiac Rehab and it went OK. The shoulder pain shifts from one to the other and into the neck and comes and goes. It’s wait and watch. I am praying it goes away soon.

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P.S. I know I am in a funk. I’ll be back to the old self in a few days.