Even Enlightened Girls Get the Blues
I reached Kathmandu shortly after dark. The cold windswept streets were all but empty as I made my way to the youth hostel. The Nepalese receptionist greeted me with a smile. I paid her in advance for a week’s stay and then headed upstairs to the dormitory to locate the bed she had assigned to me.
The dormitory was empty. I assumed everyone else was down on the first floor in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I realized I had not eaten all day, and suddenly I was famished. I made my way down the stairs to the hostel’s kitchen.
The smells of coriander, cumin, and other exotic spices that greeted me as I entered the kitchen told me it was “Hurry Curry” night. One or two nights a week the hostel had a potluck dinner. Everyone staying in the hostel would contribute different vegetables, spices, breads, and grains. All the ingredients would be thrown together and cooked with Indian spices, in more of a Western fashion, skipping the painstaking rituals usually associated with the proper preparation of traditional Indian curries.
I joined my fellow travelers just as they were beginning to serve dinner. I contributed money, since I had not brought any of the food that night.
I sat down at a table with a couple of guys who had come from England, and they told me they had come to Nepal to do some serious mountain climbing. The weather in the higher Himalayas had been bad for the past few days and had forced them to stay indoors.
Without trying to look too obvious, I scanned the room for the young woman Master Fwap had mentioned I was going to encounter at the hostel. But aside from a woman from Sweden who was sitting contentedly with her boyfriend, I didn’t see anyone who fit Master Fwap’s description.
After finishing dinner and helping to clean up and wash the dishes, I went back upstairs to the dormitory. I thought I would read a little more from The Handbook for Enlightenment and then crash. I had decided Master Fwap was obviously wrong about my meeting a woman from my past lives, and I was already mentally preparing myself to go snowboarding the next day.
I lay down on my cot, reached over, and picked up The Handbook. I was just about to start the second chapter, “The Preliminary Meditation Practices,” when I heard someone lie down on the bunk next to me.
I glanced over to see who it was, secretly hoping it wasn’t going to be a snoring British mountain climber, but much to my shock and amazement it was her. It was the blond woman I had seen in my dream earlier in the afternoon. She was even in the blue jeans and white turtleneck sweater I had seen her in.
“This is too weird,” I muttered to myself as I closed the book and set it down beside the bed.
She glanced over at me with a kind of bored, sophisticated curiosity that was far different from the straightforward sexuality of American and Canadian women I had dated.
I was trying to come up with a good line, when she spoke to me, in very proper English that was highlighted with a light Danish accent. “My name is Nadia. I have come to Nepal to become enlightened. I have been here a week now, and I have visited many temples and holy places, but I have not yet met a true master. Before I came here I traveled throughout India. Again the same. I saw many buildings and many Hindu priests and yogis, but none of them seemed enlightened to me. Is this not strange? I thought when I left Denmark that this would be easy. I read many books about enlightened Hindu and Buddhist monks. But I can’t find any of them.
“Before India, I was in Thailand and Japan. I asked the Zen masters I met in Japan about enlightenment and asked where I could find an enlightened master. They told me that there is an old Zen saying: ‘When the student is ready, the master will appear.’ So does that mean I am not ready? Is there something wrong with me?
“I don’t know what to do now,” she said as a pained expression crossed her face. “The only places I have not yet gone to are Tibet and Bhutan. But all the holy people have left Tibet; I met many of them in Dharamsala, India. They told me Bhutan is the last pure place where the dharma is practiced anymore. The official state religion there is Tantric Buddhism. I don’t know what to do! What are you doing in Kathmandu? You are American, yes?”
As Nadia was relating her saga to me I had become entranced with her wavy blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, thick pouty lips, and curvaceous body. She was gorgeous in her clothes, and I could only imagine how much more beautiful she would be without them.
I considered telling her about my dream and about what Master Fwap and the Oracle had said about our preordained meeting. But I figured she would think that I was making it all up as a come-on and simply blow me off as a flake.
I opted instead for a somewhat less truthful but what I considered safer approach. “I came to Nepal to snowboard the Himalayas.”
“Why would you want to do that? Are you crazy or something? If you want to snowboard, why not go to Switzerland and use the lifts? There are avalanches here all of the time.”
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” I replied, trying not to look too obviously at her breasts.
“Well, then, tell me!”
“You see, I used to be a surfer. Then this guy invented a way to surf down a mountain on snow, using a thing called a Snurfer. I tried it and liked it. A few other people came out with the first snowboards. I tried them, and they were even better than the Snurfer.
“As the next generation or two of snowboards improved, and better boots and bindings became available, I tried snowboarding down more challenging mountains. I snowboarded just about every mountain in New England, out West, and in British Columbia. One day I woke up and just knew I had to be the first person to snowboard the Himalayas. I don’t know why, but the feeling was so intense that I bought a plane ticket and just came here. I’ve been snowboarding the mountains here for several months now, and it’s like nothing I have ever experienced.”
“How do you get to the top? There are no lifts.”
“I hitchhike a ride as high as I can get, then I climb from there. Then I snowsurf down a mountain and do it again.”
“It sounds stupid, dangerous, and egotistical to me. If you were a mountain climber, I would understand. These are the best mountains for climbing in the world, and there are Sherpa guides and experts to assist you. You Americans! You think you can just go anywhere and do anything, without proper preparation. You have no common sense!”
“Well,” I quickly responded, “how sensible is it for a beautiful woman like yourself to be traveling around alone in third world countries seeking enlightenment? If you haven’t noticed, life and death are pretty cheap around here.”
“I am doing what my soul wants. I am following my spiritual dharma. Nothing bad can happen to me. I am being divinely protected by the powers that watch over seekers of enlightenment. I know I have been enlightened in my past lives; a monk I met told me so. If I could only find a true master, he would show me how to regain my past-life enlightenment. Nothing harmful has happened to me in all of the many dangerous places I have traveled through while trying to regain my past enlightenment.”
“I think you’ve just been lucky, that’s all. If you are so divinely protected, why haven’t you met your enlightened guru or monk yet?”
She quietly sighed. I realized I had hurt her feelings, and I felt like shit. Now, from my point of view, my encounter with her had suddenly developed a level of emotional complexity that made me feel uncomfortable. It was no longer simply a question of whether or not I was going to get laid.
I could see small tears beginning to form in her eyes. Then she looked away from me.
I tried to think of something funny to say that would cheer her up. I have never really known what to do when women cry. I’m just not very good at handling other people’s emotions.
When a woman gets upset, I normally just split and call her later, after she has had some time to get herself back together. It’s not that I don’t want to help, but experience has taught me that whenever I try to comfort a woman in distress, I inevitably say the wrong thing and only make matters worse. For some reason, though, on that particular night it didn’t seem right to walk away from Nadia and leave her alone with her tears.
What followed was a long, uncomfortable silence. I then got an idea.
“Listen, you are probably going to think that I am crazy, and I won’t blame you if you do. But some very weird stuff has been happening to me since I have been here in Nepal, and it concerns a Tibetan master I met and a friend of his, this crazy Oracle guy.”
“What has happened to you?” she asked with a mixed expression of curiosity and sadness.
In my best and brightest shine-on California voice, hoping to perk her up, I replied, “Well, as I mentioned before, I came to Nepal to snowboard the Himalayas. Unlike yourself, I didn’t come here to become spiritually enlightened. Now I know this is going to sound crazy, but shortly after I arrived here I had a dream in which I met a short, bald-headed Buddhist monk.”
“What is so unusual about that? People have strange dreams all of the time.”
“Wait, let me finish and you’ll understand. Several days later, I was out snowboarding, and I ran into the monk I had seen in my dream. As a matter of fact, I snowboarded right into him. Neither of us was hurt or anything, and he said that it was all right because it was my karma to meet him that way.
“He told me that he had been my master in past lives, and his name was Master Fwap Sam-Dup. He was a Tantric Buddhist master and had formerly lived in Tibet. Master Fwap had left Tibet on the advice of his master when the Communist Chinese had invaded their country.
“He was sent to Nepal to look for me. There was some kind of prophecy—his master had told him that he was destined in the future to meet a young man who would come from the West. His master even told him the name of the particular mountain that he was going to encounter me on in Nepal. It was going to be his job, after his initial encounter with this young man, to teach him the secret meditation techniques of their Buddhist order. Eventually the young man would return to the West and practice the techniques for many years until he himself became enlightened. He would then transmit the secret meditation techniques of the Rae Chorze-Fwaz Order to other people in the West, by writing a series of books about the experiences he had during his youth in the Himalayas.
“I thought he was whacked and was just trying to lure me into his Buddhist order or something, but after I got to know him better, I came to realize that he was enlightened.”
“How could you tell if he was enlightened?” Nadia asked with a new tone of curiosity. I felt like I was making progress with her again.
“Well,” I continued, “I don’t know as much about Buddhism or enlightenment as you clearly do, but I saw Master Fwap do things that I just couldn’t explain in ordinary human terms. I spent several months traveling through the Himalayas with him, and I came to respect him very much.”
“What sort of things did you experience with him that were unusual?”
“Well, to start with, I saw him turn gold. When he meditates he becomes surrounded by all of this golden light. I also saw him levitate. But most important, when I began meditating with him, I experienced his mind. He told me that it was some kind of telepathic transfer.”
“What was his mind like? How did you know that it was his mind?”
“I just knew, that’s all. I can’t tell you how I knew, any more than I can tell you how I know that the two of us are having this conversation right now. All I can tell you is that his mind was amazing! It was made up of pure and perfect light and knowledge—it’s hard to describe. When I was inside of his mind, I seemed to become part of everything in the universe. It was like I went away, and there was only eternity.”
“How did you know it was eternity that you were experiencing, if, as you say, you went away?”
“I told you that this was going to be hard to explain. You are just going to have to trust me on this.
“After I had several transcendental experiences with Master Fwap, he took me to visit several Buddhist monasteries, where I met other Buddhist monks. And then just the other day he introduced me to this crazy Oracle of Nepal.”
“Why, I wonder, would someone like you meet an enlightened master, and not someone like myself? I do not mean to offend you in any way, but it doesn’t make sense to me. I came here to find an enlightened master, and so far I haven’t been able to do so. You came to Nepal to snowboard, and you claim to have met the kind of master I have been traveling all over the world to find. It is hard for me to believe all of this. You understand this?”
“Sure, no problem. But I can’t dismiss my own experiences either. That’s one of the first things that Master Fwap taught me. He said life doesn’t usually make much sense, at least not from the human point of view.”
“What does that mean?” she said as she slightly shifted her head to the right, causing a rain of her blond hair to flow over her shoulders.
“The supposed incongruities of life are not really incongruities at all, according to Master Fwap. In order to understand things that don’t make sense from the human point of view, it is necessary to shift our attention to a higher level of consciousness. There are thousands of different perceptual nodal points of understanding in the universe. They vary from dimension to dimension.
“He said that through the twin practices of meditation and mindfulness, a person can reach these higher points, in which confusion becomes clarity. All a person has to do is have enough personal power to get to and keep their mind in these higher dimensional planes as they go through day-to-day life. If they can do that, then everything will make sense to them.”
“Can you do that?” Nadia asked with skepticism.
“Not on a regular basis. I have discovered that I can have more powerful experiences within my own mind, through meditation. It’s rad beyond belief. I mean, I’m into intensity. Before encountering Master Fwap, I thought the most intense things in life were snowboarding, martial arts, surfing, and sex.
“I can now combine meditation with snowboarding and other physical activities. This is what is called mindfulness. I can hardly imagine what it would be like to snowboard, do martial arts, or have sex while my mind was immersed in the ecstasy and extended perceptions of higher-dimensional reality.”
“You do martial arts, too?”
“Yes, I have a first-degree black belt. But I hope one day to get up to fifth or sixth.”
“Why do you do this? What is so attractive about violence? Isn’t there enough of it in the world already? Why make it such an important focus in your life?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s because it feels so good to win. That’s what my Western training teaches me, anyway. I originally got into martial arts out of necessity. I went to a pretty rough high school. There were a lot of gangs, and if you weren’t a gang member—which I wasn’t—some days you would get stomped pretty badly by a group of gang members. I had learned to wrestle in high school gym class, and was pretty good at it, but wrestling techniques didn’t help me to defend myself against four guys grabbing and punching me out all at once. Then I saw this Bruce Lee movie, Enter the Dragon. I had never seen anybody move that way. Bruce Lee inspired me to try out martial arts. He seemed to be capable of mega-violence, and at the same time he was both outwardly composed and coming from a very centered place inside of his mind.
“I visited a martial arts studio in the town where I lived. There was a pretty rough crowd there, but the instructors were really cool. They could do the most fantastic things with their bodies, like double-spin kicks and breaking bricks and boards with their hands. But unlike other fighters I had met, they had a level of personal dignity and respect that I could relate to.
“I have always been interested in high-performance athletics. It’s how I let off steam. I grew up in a home that had a lot of tension in it. I don’t suppose that’s particularly unusual in America. Most of my friends dealt with their tensions through drugs. But I just couldn’t relate to that whole scene. I realized I had two choices: I could do drugs and run away from life, or I could find a better way to deal with things. A lot of my friends got into the heavy drug thing, but they looked a lot worse and were a lot unhappier after they got into drugs than they had been before.”
“I also lucked out because in high school I had this great girlfriend, Jerry. She really helped me get my head together. She was an honor student, beautiful, a great dancer, and she was heavily into this Christian Science thing. She used to talk to me about it sometimes, and it sort of made sense to me.”
“What religion did you grow up in?” Nadia asked.
“Well, it was kind of mixed. My father was a Roman Catholic—actually, he even studied to be a priest, but he dropped out before taking his final vows. My mother was an agnostic. She was an intellectual type, really smart. She went to Barnard College. She taught me how to read before I started going to school. I didn’t see too much of her growing up, because my parents divorced when I was a kid, and she moved to another town and remarried. I ended up living with my dad.
“My two outlets growing up were athletics and reading. They got me through. I just couldn’t relate to the whole Catholic thing, though. I was sent to a Catholic school for a while, and I was even an altar boy, but a lot of the Catholic things just didn’t make any sense. I could relate to Jesus. But most of the Roman Catholic dogma didn’t provide the answers I needed to get through my life, particularly the whole Catholic attitude toward sex.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, sex seems normal to me. We wouldn’t be here without it, right? But the Catholic Church says that sex is the root of most human problems. According to the Catholic Church, if you have sex with someone you’re not married to, you’re supposed to have committed a mortal sin. If you do get married, they want you to have sex to produce lots of new Catholics for the Church.
“To be honest with you, I just don’t get the marriage thing, either. Just because some guy dressed in black robes says a bunch of words while you and your bride stand before him, that’s supposed to take the sin out of sex? And who is this guy anyway, and what gives him that kind of power? I have met lots of priests, and some of them have been the best people I have ever met. But some have not measured up. The whole thing with the pope is just too much for me.
“They told us in Catholic school that whatever the pope said was the word of God. They called it papal infallibility. If you study history at all, which I did when I went to public high school, you learn that a lot of the popes were corrupt. They had mistresses and did all kinds of weird stuff.
“It simply didn’t make sense to me. I just couldn’t buy into the whole heaven and hell thing. I mean, the whole concept that if you make a few mistakes during your life you’re going to fry in hell forever is a child’s fantasy. I mean, would a God of love come up with a game plan like that?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Well, no, not really. Master Fwap says there is no God, at least not like Westerners think that there is. There is no big guy sitting in heaven judging us. Buddhists don’t believe in God. Or if they do, God is nirvana; God is the universe’s mind. We are all a part of it, and it is a part of us. Fwap explains all of this much better than I do.”
I paused for a moment or two before continuing. “As I was saying, I had this great girlfriend in high school, Jerry. We used to ski together at Killington on weekends; she was definitely a much better skier than I was. We used to have sex almost every day after school at her house, before her mother came home from work. Jerry used to say to me that there was nothing wrong with sex, as long as it is not abusive. She felt it was a way of uniting yourself with another being and experiencing their soul, along with their body. Maybe it was part of her Christian Science thing. I don’t know if I was really into her soul, but I was definitely into her body. She was the most beautiful girl in high school.
“I could never quite figure out what she saw in me. I mean, she could have dated anybody. She was the prom queen type, she got straight A’s in everything, plus she was just a really nice human being.
“I spent most of my time hanging around with the black and Hispanic kids in my school. They made more sense to me than most of the white kids did; we related to the same kinds of music and musicians: Santana, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, guys like that. My black friends used to take me with them to see Miles Davis and other great jazz and blues musicians play. I usually ended up being the token white person in these clubs, but I didn’t care, I just got so high listening to the music! My black friends watched my back, so it was cool.”
“Whatever happened to Jerry? Is she at home in America waiting for you?”
“No, we broke up. We went out together throughout high school, and she wanted to keep the relationship going. I think she really loved me. But I was a classic fuckup. I used to spend more time in the principal’s office than in class. I used to have this problem with authority. I mean, I really don’t like people telling me what to do, particularly when they’re wrong.
“We graduated from high school, and Jerry went on to Harvard. I didn’t want to go to college right away. I was burned out on school, and it really bored me. I sensed that there was a big world out there, and I wanted to experience it right away.
“I wasn’t a total screw-up, at least not academically,” I said in defense of myself. “In high school I did well in things that I liked. I always got A’s in English, science, and music. I really liked shop, too. I liked making things with my hands. But if a course bored me, or if the teacher had a condescending attitude, I would just totally flake out and do minimal work. I would cut classes, get detention … that sort of thing.
“My family really wanted me to go to college, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to take a break and figure out what I wanted to do with my life first. They got really heavy about it, so I went for one semester, just to make them happy, but then I dropped out. I told them that I might go back later, but first I wanted to travel and see the world.
“As you might expect, Jerry wasn’t too thrilled by my decision. She was already into thinking about getting married and what china patterns she was going to pick out. Bottom line? She was probably too good for me. I knew that. I just wasn’t as good a person as she was. She worked harder and seemed to have a spiritual side to her that I lacked.
“I just had to go and experience the world. She cried and we talked about it a lot. I felt really bad for her. I don’t know if I loved her, I mean, not in the same way that she loved me. But I did care for her. It was really hard.
“I told her that she could come with me if she wanted to. But she said that she wanted to go to Harvard and study archaeology. It was her thing, and I knew that she would be better off without me.
“What kind of a person am I? I just do what I want to. I’m into extreme athletics, Dostoevsky, and martial arts, and I am just freaked out about taking on responsibilities. I want to be free, that’s all.
“Marriage and children are just not me. I want to experience life completely, not just go through the motions like most people do. I can’t imagine myself in a straight nine-to-five job. I’d go nuts! I mean, most people seem dead to me. It’s like they’re walking around and they’re totally numb to the incredible beauty of life. They just knuckle under to authority, without questioning whether that authority is right or wrong.”
“Do you think that you are better than most people, because you think this way?” Nadia asked, her tone softening slightly.
“No, not really. I feel that most people are better than I am. I mean, I have had great coaches and teachers, and I know spiritual people like Jerry and Master Fwap. Obviously these people are more together than I am. I think the steady job is great for some people. But it’s just not for me, at least not yet.
“Master Fwap told me that someday I was going to become enlightened and go back to college and get a Ph.D. He said I was going to become famous in the West and have a positive influence on millions of people. He told me that I would write books and music that would turn people on to higher consciousness, and also that I would really get into computers!
“I think Master Fwap is way off. Not about Buddhism—that’s his thing, he definitely has his Buddhist monk act together—but he is way off the mark with me. I’m never going to do any of those things. I just want to snowboard the world. I want to see and experience that which is most beautiful while I’m alive and young, now, not when I’m sixty-five and retired in Florida or something.
“But getting back to your question, no, I don’t think that I am better than other people. I mean, you’re better than I am. You left Denmark to find enlightenment. You’re like Jerry, you want to attain something higher in life. Me, I just want to have a good time. I’m just into living each day, one day at a time, for myself. I’m into rock and jazz, sports, and I read a lot of weird philosophy and science fiction.
“So no, Nadia, I’m not better than other people. I’m probably not as good as most people. I’m radical, that’s all. I don’t avoid trying new things because I am afraid of what other people will think of me, or because it hasn’t been done before. Most people make the choices they do in life because they’re afraid, afraid to deviate from what everyone else is doing around them.
“Whenever there is something that I am afraid of, I have to go and try it right away. Not something stupid, where I don’t have a good chance of making it, but ‘no fear’ is definitely my motto.”
“Do you have another girlfriend now?” Nadia asked, with a look of more than casual interest.
“No. I dated a bunch of other girls after Jerry, mainly sports types. But no one could ever measure up to her. I’m alone at the moment. What about yourself? Do you have a guy waiting for you back in Denmark? You must, you’re too beautiful not to.”
“Most men bore me. I have gone out with a lot of European men. They all think that a woman is a plaything, a possession. They do not interest me. No, there is no one special. I have never met a man who had real spiritual qualities. All the men I have known have been selfish. That is one of the reasons why I became interested in yoga. I was bored with men. Sex is good, but the men I have it with are, how would you say it in America, only into themselves? Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s the way we say it.”
There was a short silence, and then Nadia continued, “For now I am looking for enlightenment. I know I was enlightened before, a monk I met in Cambodia told me this. He was very old and very wise. When he said it, something in my heart made me know his words were true. I asked him if I could study with him, but he said no, that I had to travel and find another master. He was not the karmically correct master for me. So, here I am in Nepal, looking but not yet finding. It is ironic, no?”
“Yes, it is,” I said with a yawn. I suddenly realized how tired I was. As entranced as I was by Nadia’s radiant beauty, I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. I put my head down on the pillow and closed my eyes.
“You are so tired,” Nadia said in a soft and gentle voice. I mumbled something to her about traveling a long way on foot over high passes just to meet her. The next thing I knew she was sitting next to me on my bed.
“Take off your shirt and I will rub your shoulders, then you will feel better. I studied massage for a while. Now take off your shirt,” she said in a no-nonsense tone of voice.
“But Nadia,” I murmured, “I don’t know if we should do this here. I mean, it’s not exactly private.”
“No one else is in the room but us. The rest have all gone out drinking. Don’t be so embarrassed, we are all alone. You are not afraid of me, are you? I thought you said that your motto was ‘no fear.’ ”
“No, I’m not afraid of you. I’m just exhausted.” I was so tired I didn’t even know what I was doing. I managed to get my shirt off, and then I lay on my bunk on my stomach, with my face half buried in my pillow. Nadia’s smooth, cool hands started to rub my shoulders gently. I fell asleep in about thirty seconds.
I awoke several hours later, and the lights in the hostel dormitory had been turned off. I heard the gentle sound of someone breathing next to me. It was Nadia. She had curled up beside me in my bed and fallen asleep.
She had covered us both up with one of the thick, coarse woolen hostel blankets. I was afraid to move because I didn’t want to awaken her. Her breathing was very slow and rhythmic. I was still pretty groggy, but I could distinctly feel the heat from her body warming me.
Her skin was against mine. It took me a second to dope out that she had taken all her clothes off and was lying naked next to me.
I still had my pants and socks on. I was unsure what to do, so I just lay in bed listening to her breathe, feeling her soft skin against my chest, staring up into the darkness above us.
Then she rolled over toward me and put her left arm around my waist, mumbling something in Danish. It appeared she was talking in her sleep.
Lying next to her naked body in the darkness, listening to her soft breathing, I began to get very turned on. I thought about touching her, but I didn’t know if it would offend her. I knew that Danish people were much more comfortable with nudity than Americans, so her taking her clothes off wasn’t necessarily an invitation to have sex with her. So I did nothing. I just lay there and wondered how Master Fwap could always be so right about everything.
After lying there for a while Nadia suddenly woke up. She yawned and then put both her arms around me, pulling me close to her.
My heart began to pound. I put my arms around her and held her. We lay like that for a long time, not talking, just holding on to each other, listening to the cold gusts of wind blowing down the streets of Kathmandu in the depths of the Nepalese night.
Nadia moved her right leg gently between my legs and then curled herself around me. Then she softly laughed. She must have felt the fact that I was very turned on and also undecided as to what course of action I should take.
“Take off your pants,” she whispered in a soft, seductive voice. “I think you will find it much easier to have sex with me without them on.”
Without any hesitation, I immediately complied with her request. We pressed our naked bodies against each other, lying side by side.
Our mouths found each other and we began to kiss, first slowly on the lips, and then with our tongues. Kissing Nadia felt very different from any other woman I had ever kissed before. It was both more sensual, and at the same time less physical. I felt like I was meditating.
As we continued kissing deeply, in addition to sensing the softness and strength of her body and her musky smell, I could feel her inside my mind. I wasn’t thinking, only feeling.
Normally, when I have sex with a woman I always think a lot. I think about what to do next, analyze how I feel, or sometimes my mind drifts away to topics that have nothing to do with the sexual activity I’m participating in. With Nadia, sex was completely different. My mind was silent, just as it was when I meditated with Master Fwap or when I do my best snowboarding. She reached her hand out and began to touch my genitals. I was already hard as a rock, and the soft motion of her hand on my penis sent waves of ecstasy through me. I placed my hand gently on her vagina, and she was very wet.
I brought my mouth down and began to kiss and lick her right breast and nipple. She moaned again, this time more deeply, and pushed me toward the edge of the small bed and pulled me on top of her.
I raised my body to make it easier for her, and then, after motionlessly lying on top of her for several minutes, I kissed her again, this time with much greater intensity.
She reached for me, and I slid it into her. Moaning very softly, she began slowly moving back and forth.
Then a very weird thing happened. The room went white. At first I thought that someone had turned on the lights, then I realized that I was seeing Nadia’s aura. It was pale white, the color of the moonlight against the fresh Himalayan snow. We were both moving harder against each other now.
I put both of my hands down underneath her, and she lifted her legs slightly, bending them at the knees. Her musky smell was stronger now than before. As she put her tongue inside my ear, her body began to move faster against mine. As I slid in and out of her, there was a feeling of perfect motion between us. We moved together in a way that I have never experienced before or since, with any other woman.
I felt somewhat dissociated by the bright whiteness of her aura and also by the fact that I wasn’t thinking. In a strange but not unpleasant way, I felt very removed from the sexual activities that Nadia and I were sharing.
She tightened her thighs against me, keeping our movements closer together. I was feeling wonderful, but I could sense by the motion of her body that she was hitting higher levels of ecstatic pleasure than I was.
Then she came. Her body shook convulsively under mine, but she didn’t make a sound.
While I was still indulging in the sense of nonreality of the entire experience I was having with Nadia, she whispered in my ear, “You must come now too. You don’t have to wait.”
It hit me then that I didn’t really care whether I had an orgasm. I was so high on her energy that the entire idea of having an orgasm seemed inconsequential. Never being one to argue with a beautiful woman, I started to drill down to the sensations of my physical body. It took a couple of minutes for me to get fully back into my body, but then my sexual experience with Nadia took off.
I felt the soft hardness of her body completely, which was punctuated by a pulsing, tingling energy that I felt when I entered her more deeply. The pulsing energy inside her body wasn’t physical, though, it was more like the waves of intense Kundalini energy I had experienced while meditating with Master Fwap.
I then experimented with moving my body against Nadia’s body in different ways. By focusing on her energy, and moving my body in harmony with it, her energy became even stronger. Nadia was starting to get turned on again.
She started to perspire more when my movements synchronized with the energy I was feeling inside her. She had another orgasm. This time her body shook even more strongly than before, but still she didn’t make a sound.
Finally I came. It was definitely anticlimactic; I hardly felt it. But she did. She moaned, kissed me, and held me closely to her. We lay together with our arms wrapped around each other for a long time.
Afterward, we turned on our sides, facing each other. She wrapped her legs around me and kissed me again. She put her tongue deep inside of my mouth, moving it gently, probing ever more deeply into my mouth.
Then it was over. I pulled my arms back from around her, and a few minutes I drifted back off to sleep.
Master Fwap and the Oracle were talking to me. I was trying to figure out what they were saying, but I couldn’t quite make it out. I was up on the top of a snow-covered Himalayan peak with Master Fwap and the Oracle, standing on my jet-black snowboard, getting ready to make a run down the mountain.
“I’m dreaming!” I thought to myself. “This is just a dream.”
“That’s right,” Master Fwap chimed in. “Isn’t he clever?” Master Fwap laughed, gesturing to the Oracle. Then they both began to laugh.
“We told you that you were going to get close to her. How was it?” Master Fwap said with a chuckle. Before I could say anything, both he and the Oracle started to howl with laughter.
“Now wait a minute, isn’t anything private around here?” I asked them.
“Absolutely not,” replied the Oracle. “How can anything be private when we are all telepathic? And why should it be? You didn’t do anything wrong, you know; she loves you, even though she isn’t fully consciously aware of that yet. Is the Catholic Church getting the better of you again? Do you feel guilty? Is sex something you have to do in the dark and hide?”
“In Tantric Buddhism we feel that everything is holy,” Master Fwap added. “We believe that all heavens and hells are created inside of your own mind, by your own thoughts. If your thoughts are pure and innocent, then no matter what you do physically, you will live in psychic heaven, but if your thoughts are filled with violence and deception, then no matter how pure your outer experiences may appear, you will live in the spiritual hell of your own mind.”
The Oracle chimed in, “Was it as good for you as it was for her?”
“Now wait a minute. That wasn’t normal sex, and she’s not a normal woman. I could see her aura, and there was a lot of energy running back and forth between our bodies that wasn’t sexual. It was powerful, but it wasn’t very physical.”
“Maybe not for you, but it certainly was for her,” Master Fwap stated factually.
“Perhaps you got a little too high on her energy and missed the best part,” the Oracle added.
“But Master Fwap, I couldn’t do anything else. It was hard to be physical with her. What am I supposed to be with her? I thought that you guys were Buddhist monks, and you’re teaching me how to get away from physical pleasure and to be spiritual instead,” I shot back at them, in a complaining tone of voice.
“No, not at all,” Master Fwap gently responded. “You’re missing the point: Samsara is nirvana. From the Tantric Buddhist point of view, there isn’t a difference between that which is physical and that which is spiritual, unless you create that difference with your own impure thoughts.”
“I’m confused.”
“So is most of the world,” responded the Oracle. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Isn’t enlightenment supposed to put an end to confusion?” I asked hesitantly.
“Yes, of course it is,” Master Fwap said. “But you are not enlightened, nor is the world, so of course you are confused.”
“Well, I thought Buddhist monks were supposed to help unconfuse unenlightened types like myself.”
“Confusion is a necessary first step on the pathway to enlightenment,” Master Fwap began. “Look at it from our point of view for a moment. You just made love to a beautiful woman, had your first transcendental sexual experience, and now you want to be instantly enlightened about everything. Don’t you think you might be rushing things just a little bit? Most of the deeper truths of eternity take many incarnations to understand. Why don’t you just enjoy your time with your Danish friend, and then, when you are ready and your power is up, come with us to the Annapurna range. You still have an important riddle to solve, or have you forgotten about that already?”
“So what am I supposed to do with Nadia? She doesn’t snowboard, and she is looking for an enlightened teacher. Should I bring her along with me on our journey?”
“No, she has other karmic experiences to go through. It is your karma to come with us. Don’t forget the dimensions,” responded the Oracle.
“Now why don’t you stop asking so many questions and snowboard down the mountain,” Master Fwap instructed me. “Make your mind empty, and let the mountain’s second attention guide you. Remember, you are the board; do not allow a mental separation to occur between yourself and your snowboard. Feel that your snowboard is animate, that it is alive, and allow your two energies to perfectly merge. Now, let’s see if you can turn snowboarding into proper Buddhist practice.”
With that, I pushed off and started to carve in and out of the mountain’s granular powder. I did a major spinning jump off a sharp vertical slope, and was just about to touch down, when my dream abruptly ended.