The Sensual Mirror Read Online Free PDF

was at the very edge of condensing into drops.
    “My wife and I split up two months ago,” he went on. He had no conscious intention of saying more, but found the words sliding out from between his lips. “There wasn’t even a cause, I mean, nothing that you could bring up in a divorce trial, although she refused to have a baby for four or five more years and that became an arguing point. I guess it began to go sour when I let myself be swayed by her restlessness and quit my job. I was happy as a teacher. But there was the excitement of Europe and, when we got back, the appeal of the city. I’d always lived a kind of sheltered small town life and for a while I got drunk on New York. Julia began making a fabulous salary working for a man we’d met in Yugoslavia who told her she had all the makings of a high-powered executive. I got this job and began making more than three times what I earned as a high school instructor. So we lived high off the hog. And . . . I don’t know, I guess in the busyness and glitter we just lost sight of . . . “ His voice trailed off. “Well, maybe we didn’t really have a common vision to begin with. And it just took five years for us to realize it. We reached that point of not communicating. We found excuses to stay away from the apartment. I began to suspect that she was having an affair. And I began to think of having one myself. And then one evening we got into another argument over having a child. I said I wanted one. She said she didn’t I don’t imagine that was anything more than a symbol. But the anger provided us with the energy to do what we needed to. I packed my bags, and moved into a hotel.”
    Martin sat silently for a few minutes, his perspiration now coming as much from his outburst as from the steam. Then he wiped his forehead and laughed, a harsh brief expulsion of air. “It’s peculiar,” he said, “summing up five years of my life in a paragraph.”
    “Babba says that when we die we see that our whole life has been nothing but a brief thought.”
    “That’s an odd form of consolation,” Martin said.
    “It’s just his way of reminding us that this drama we live out from day to day is not very important.”
    “What else is there?”
    “God,” Robert said.
    “Another odd form of consolation.”
    “Sometimes it’s reassuring, sometimes it’s not. The point is that it’s a reality. In fact, it’s the only reality. There is only God. And within that, there’s just a grab-bag of details, none intrinsically more interesting than any other.”
    “You really believe that?” Martin asked. “Again, it’s not a matter of belief. You either see it or you don’t.”
    “And do you see it? Do you see God like that? What is it, a kind of screen on which we’re the movie?”
    “That’s one metaphor. Every religion, every person, has their own image of God. But the great teachers remind us over and over again that any image we make of God is not God. God isn’t a thing, or a person, or even an experience. God is . . . “ Now it was Roberts turn to fall silent. He turned and walked to the other end of the steam room, becoming completely invisible.
    “God is . . . ?” Martin repeated.
    “God is,” Robert concluded. “That’s about as far as language can go. After that, there is only realization, actually knowing yourself as God. And for that, you can stand on your head for a thousand years and not necessarily come any closer to that truth.”
    “Then why bother?”
    “Because it’s possible,” Robert replied, his disembodied voice wafting through the steam. For an instant Martin sensed a peculiar parallel to the experience of Moses talking to a burning bush. “There are people who have realized themselves as God, who live as God.”
    “Jesus,” Martin offered.
    “He was one. Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Ramana Maharshi. There have been quite a number.”
    “Who’s around today?” Martin asked, openly cynical.
    “Babba is one,” Robert said