Darshan.
(a little illumination by Sera)

Last weekend, my lithe, blonde, dancerlicious friend Sukha rang me, breathless with excitement.

Sukha: Do you want to come with me to UCLA to get Darshan from Mother Meera?

Me: Um... yes!

Sukha: I'll be at your house in ten minutes.

Me: Great! Let me find some pants!

Are you wondering what Darshan is? So was I. She may as well have been speaking Sanskrit. Actually, she was. But she sounded really, really stoked, so who was I to turn down the chance to go get... whatever the fuck it was were were going to go get?

From the gods of Wiki:

Darśana (Darshan, Sanskrit: दर्शन) is a Sanskrit term meaning "sight" (in the sense of an instance of seeing or beholding; from a root dṛś "to see"), vision, apparition, or glimpse. It is most commonly used for "visions of the divine," i.e. of a god or a very holy person or artifact. One could "receive darshana" of the deity in the temple, or from a great saintly person, such as a great guru.

We pulled up the sparkling UCLA curb late-late, which didn't bother me at all because I had no idea what was going on anyway. Sukha, however, seemed keen on getting in and feared we would be turned away. So we took off our shoes and ran through the unexpectedly muddy grass, up the hill to the Bradley center. We showed up to the thang a lil' dirty, a lil' sweaty, but no one seemed to judge.

They let us in to what turned out to be a large, carpeted room filled with chairs. At the front of the room, a little stage. On the stage, a big green chair. On the chair, a lady in a lovely sari. Mother Meera. She is Indian, obvs, and extremely holy - an actual avatar, apparently - and UCLA is a stop on her ongoing world tour. (I learned these pertinent deets after the adventure; for some reason I can't entirely explain, I didn't really want to ask S what exactly was going on. I was enjoying just... going with it.)

The gist: you sat your ass down, got quiet, did a little inner whatever-ing, praying or thinkifying or blanking pleasurably, and eventually (we waited about 2 1/2 hours) your turn came and you got in front of Mother Meera.

The big moment: you kneel. Touch her feet. She touches your temples. When she lets go'a your temples, you look into her eyes. You hold each other's gaze until she looks down again.

That's the whole cannoli. It takes like 20 seconds, max.

So, I did it. I had no expectation that anything much would happen. People all around me, though, were quietly, meditationally squeeing. This lady is a big deal. Whatever she's tapped into, it allows her help others by a method that includes staring down hundreds of people a day without ever losing her zen; she's serious business.

Anyway, I got up there, I knelt in front of her, she touched me. I was a little nervous all of a sudden. It felt like... fingertips. So: not magic. Not that I was trying to be skeptical. I'm just reporting. It was nice. In a brief, gentle, fingertippy kind of way.

Then I got the cue. So I lifted my head, and I looked in her eyes.

Hello, fierce. She kind of freaked me out. Perhaps I expected mushy and lovey? Like a Jewish grandma? But she was casual as a heart attack. Time stretched out, and she just looked at me, and we were very much the same, and we were very foreign to each other, and she was very much wiser than me, and she knew a lot that I may never know, and had something to give to me and was giving it to me right then; and I had this sense of her telling me I'm willing to do this for as long as it takes and it made me wonder just what it was she was doing because it must be more than just looking, and then, loud and clear, something inside me was going, what the fuck are you doing trying to crack me open like that, no no no! And then it was over.

I got up and walked back to my chair. I felt pretty good. Calm, because I'd been meditating on and off for the two and a half hours leading up to the twenty seconds. Amused with myself, because it's not too surprising that I'd balk at the intimacy of that amount of searing eye contact from so advanced and over themselves a person. ( Or, possibly, if you subscribe to that particular magazine, from the person-ish incarnation of a goddess.) So... I went and sat down and thought for a little while about how I am an eminently freak-out-able person. Whereas the lady in the green chair is the photo negative of shakeable.

I wasn't bummed, because it wasn't like I'd spent weeks anticipating the moment I received the whatdoyoucallit, and then I got up there and screwed it up by getting kind of scared of the goddess lady. Quite the contrary! I pulled on my inner lab coat and started making notes on my inner clip board. The subject is highly open to new experiences. But quickly detaches from the mood of the crowd. Also, in the face of being peered into at an alleged soul-deep level, subject went all doe-in-headlights. She is so not as chill as she thinks she is.

Sukha, to contrast, looked all dreamy and silken, like she'd been whacked upside the head by a basket of soft furry kittens. But then, unlike this Very Hot Bloggeress, she meditates daily; her every chakra was squeaky clean and ready to receive the divine news flash.

Sukha's aura.

In the car on the drive home, Sukha repeatedly assured me that the light of Darshan gets in despite one's resistance. If it couldn't, who the hell could it reach? Humans are by and large ridonkulously resisty buggers.

Sukha and I went out for tomato soup and nori rolls and talked about men, of course, and I was in a great mood; it's not every day I get to gatecrash an event like that.

Sukha: Do you feel it?

Me: Feel what? Like, it?

Sukha: Yes, it.

Me: Honestly, no, not really, but I feel great so no worries. This soup is really good.

But Sukha disagreed with my notion that nothing specific had been wrought within my being. At one point I said something wry and eyebrowy that involved looking her in the eye. And she squealed with joy, "You got the light! You're all full of the light! You have so much light you're just going to have to give it to people!"

Well, good news, my loin-wrenchingly attractive readers. I'm giving it to you.

Because I figured it out this morning, guys. I figured out how the light - excuse me, Light - gets passed around. I figured out what the Light is, in my world. How it works, how it's transmitted, the whole friggin' enchilada. I figured it out as I was turning left into the Warner Bros. lot and fishing for my ID card with my free hand. It just - BAM. Hit me.

I think this may just be time-release Mother Meera groove in action.

I'm gonna lay it on you in Part Two of this post.

(Don't worry, there's really gonna be a part two. It's mostly written already. I just split them up so this wouldn't be miles long. I ran into this writer at Hugo's on Riverside the other day. We were both getting breakfast in lieu of writing scripts for our respective TV shows. Anyway, he said, "I used to read your blog, but it's always so long and cryptic." So, though Josh won't be reading these words: tune in for more next week.)