A story by Santosha Tantra from Nov 22, 1999
Sudra had an intuition that a most unusual meeting was about to take place. Would it take place at a formal dining restaurant while indulging in expensive dead meat, glasses of wine and cheese and glazed nut salad? Or would it take place at the seashore while the setting sun reflected pink colors upon the waves that met the shore? Or would it take place on a hiking trail in the desert as she stopped to take a photo of the jumbo rock formations? Or would she hear a knock upon her door and then stop typing and wait, wait to hear the knock again before she pushed her wheeled office chair away from her computer desktop? Who is it? she wondered. Oh, but I know, she thought. I can’t share this intuition.
As her hand wrapped around the doorknob and right before she pulled the door open, she felt that moment—you know that moment—the one that happens before your life is about to change in a most dramatic way—the moment that says, “So this is really going to happen, you are really going through with this.” That moment, Sudra loved that kind of a moment. That knowing, feeling moment, that anticipation, that intuition of welcoming the unknowable right into your living room and saying with an air of bemused style, “I had a feeling you were coming.” And! You know what he said, “Well, I had a feeling it was about time I showed up. It’s been too long, way too long since we indulged in the pleasure of seeing each other’s human form.”
“I’ll grab my coat and let’s wander down by the river. What name are you going by these days?”
“I hear you are using the pen name of Sudra. What happened to Freea, Thunderheart, and Kat?”
“Oh, they’re still around somewhere living out their lives in the worlds they were penned in. I remember that Kat used to call you Do-Feelin Wopper. You probably don’t even remember that.”
“Oh, on the contrary, Do-Feelin was one of my favorite aspects, a natural man all the way. I’ve had a lot of names along the way and even now. So, Sudra, why don’t you call me that sweet name, you know the one, that you whisper when you are rambling in creation taking a picture of everything that moves…”
“. . . and doesn’t move as well.”
“That name, I like how you whisper it as you click that shutter button of yours.”
“Okay, Blissy Be. Mind if I take a few images of you as we wander? Blissy Be, you’re here! How astounding!”
Sudra was really happy that her significant very self was ambling with her by the river. They hadn’t seen each other in years and she had reflected from time to time on what a strange marriage it was—being that they had never really ever lived together. She knew that it was probably best that way as his life was involved in a great purpose while hers was just a play of meaningless meaning. Their lives were the same in love despite the appearance that a life of great purpose and a life of meaningless meaning seemed to contradict each other.
They walked and Sudra watched the play of the sun’s light dance upon Blissy Be’s form. Oh, I wish I had my digital camera with me. Darn it! I’ll just have to enjoy the play of bliss and light without my usual clicking away. What was it like to be with Blissy Be after all the passages of bodies aging? It was the most natural of moments so Sudra couldn’t feel any edge to measure anything about it. All the voices of all the unfulfilled voices were absent in their walk and so they felt each other without his great purpose and even without Sudra’s meaningless meaning. There was no purpose to their togetherness and yet the question arose in Sudra, “How can others account for our marriage and our living apart?”
Blissy Be smiled at Sudra and held her hand. He spoke sweetly and said, “Our love—our marriage is the marriage of consciousness and existence. We have played our parts both knowing ourself in thes marriage of consciousness and energy. You my dear Sudra, appear as energy and play in existence. You play in your way with light, always observing and shining the light of true feeling, of absolute beauty lived in and as the forms of all. You play in this way using photography and video and all the arts as your darshan play with energy and existence. This is the way you teach and live others, feeling them and revealing them into and as the marriage of energy/existence and consciousness. You use light feeling.”
“Yes, that is the way of me, of my meaningless meaningful play and your way of great purpose, Blissy Be.”
Blissy Be faced the sun and stared into it for a brief moment and then faced Sudra. “My way of great purpose is the story and life of our marriage. My teaching work is the story of our love, of how consciousness and energy fell in love with each so fully and so completely that they can never be separated. The source and the manifested are the same bliss; they are consciousness itself. Light and consciousness are the same.
“All those years of teaching made the way for your livingness of light/energy/consciousness. You came down with me and courted me as experience and desire and when I needed and wanted to love you more, you showed yourself to me as the mother/Shakti and then as lover/Shakti and when I couldn’t bear to live without you even for a second, you showed yourself as my very self: as the perfect union of consciousness and energy. In the realization of no separation between manifestation (energy) and consciousness (source) our marriage began.”
Blissy Be cleared his throat and smiled sweetly at Sudra. “My teaching years were involved in the great purpose of allowing the form of you to be conscious of this marriage.”
Sudra spoke, “I know it was a most difficult work to bring this form into the marriage of understanding.”
“Yes, but my love, it was my heart’s great purpose to bring you here, fully manifested in the understanding of this marriage. And then my task was even harder for I had to leave you alone and let you play as you are so you could accomplish your meaningless play.”
“And I wanting so much ever to be with you had to allow my play of meaningless meaning to dance its way. To be without your physical company was also harder than any other task that was put before me. But we are the same, you with your great purpose, and I with my meaningless meaning. Over time my aloneness birthed the understanding of ‘I Am She’ which was the knowing that I Am She was the marriage of energy and consciousness and this gave play and purification of the idea of the feminine principle as only deluding force.”
“Yes, Sudra, you had to play out in a feminine form, apparently separate from my form but of course not separate in understanding—we were truly married in the truest sense—no difference—from source or manifestation, you had to play it out this way . . .”
“To show women the truth of their true condition.”
“Yes, to end the battle of the sexes, the fight between knowledge and feeling, the difference between head and heart, between light and consciousness . . .”
“Yes, and when the battle of the feminine as warrior of the heart, not seductress of experience, was won in understanding I declared victory not only as ‘I Am She’ but also as ‘I Am She-I Am He’.”
“Yes, the time to reveal the understanding of the marriage of consciousness and energy manifested and cried out in your apparent separate form.”
“Blissy Be, I have always loved you and acknowledged you as the source of understanding.”
“Sudra, it is hard for those who are not married to understanding to understand the play of our marriage. My whole life has been involved in a great love and marriage with you.”
“Yes, Blissy Be, they interpret the separation as a separation from heart and understanding and even as masculine supremacy over the feminine.”
“They see the separation as unworthiness on my part, of not having recognized male force as ultimate power.”
“Yes, those ideas belong to the ego and the games of its immunity. You know the truth now, the full truth and you can never be anything but the truth.”
“Blissy Be, will our loved ones and the world ever see that we are the same and see us how we are here today, simply together in this perfect marriage of heart and light?”
“Yes, my dear Sudra, in these words put to paper, our appearance is being made and felt and those who want to love without separation will understand our play, our marriage. For in our marriage everyone is wedded . . . all hearts are realized in the light and the open heart will love its existence.”
“We are at the dawn of this understanding, aren’t we Blissy Be?”
“Yes, my love, existence will know itself as consciousness and all of existence will be wedded to the heart and know its heart as happiness, as its very source . . . as consciousness itself.”
Sudra stood up and faced the sun of her beloved. “It has been given.”
“And it is done, my dearest Sudra. We are forever on our honeymoon now.”
Sudra kissed her beloved very self. His bright heart shined also as a very bright open face. She thought, this is the only moment there is and ever will be. This is the meaningless meaning of the story of our marriage.
“And!!!!!” added Blissy Be . . . just because! Just because he liked to have the last crazy word in. Sudra loved that!!!! About him!!!
