Volume III: Love & Awareness

Snippets from the story to come.

The third volume of Surrender Now, ‘Love and Awareness,’ will be launching on March 27th right here in your inbox.

Volume III is the last of this series of stories I have to share about the ordinary miracles I have lived through, and how they have made me who I am. It is about what happened when I finally loved myself enough to discover the person whom I love most, and describes the beginning of our journey together.

For those of you who don’t know me, this relationship has outlasted every conceivable mischance, tragedy, and unexpected upheaval that could possibly be thrown at two lovers on the path of self-realisation. From the moment I met him, the whole world changed: he reflected a truth I had been yearning to find, and I devoted myself to the life we have shared ever since, a life of love and awareness.

My sense of purpose, before I found him, was unclear: I knew I was seeking a way out of suffering, and I knew that meditation had a lot to do with it, but I was not disciplined at meditation. I was an excessively disciplined writer and an accomplished hermit, but being creative for its own sake wasn’t getting me anywhere; my work sucked. I wanted to be conscious.

I did not know how tightly wound up I had been in my dreams of glory until he started to unravel me. He was, in every sense, my undoing; there was no way I could pretend to be the person I had been before when it was clear that he saw through me. How painful it was to expose all the twisted games I had been playing my whole life: how wretched it felt to truly experience, for the first time, that I knew nothing.

Loving him, at first, was a lot like death: there was an intensity to our love, charged by the spiritual community in which he lived, that invited me to a depth of surrender from which I never have recovered. Once you have loved, and loved truly, no recovery is possible: you are stuck for life with loving, and very often it hurts.

The story describes a threshold that I passed irremediably when I met my beloved; there was no turning back to any ordinary way of life once his world had opened up to me. I dreamed, one night, that I was in a tipi wearing a rainbow coloured dress; he had come to me in that dream, offering me a gown of white, and then led me outside into the sunshine.

My intention in writing is to provide a unique lens through which to view the miracle of love: as an instrument of transformation, as a blessing from heaven, and a mirror through which to view the self reflected. Conscious love — that is, a shared willingness to remain unconditional — is both difficult and rare; a great commitment is required, not only to loving the other but to living in awareness, to knowing oneself.

The story that you are to read is true to life, though I have taken liberties in the telling of it; my own thoughts and impressions frame everything that took place, and my perceptions as a narrator are not always reliable. But in sharing what happened when love awakened in me, I hope to bring this miracle into your lives as well.

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📚 Catch up on the story so far by downloading the free ebook editions of Surrender Now. 📚

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Rosebank

Around me the stream of Rainbow Temple transients swirled on: always someone was striking up a guitar or a djembe drum, always someone was twirling a hula hoop around or juggling, always there was some paranoid hippie banter taking place or rampant idealistic visioning going on.

If there was a trip going to Byron Bay or to the markets over the weekend, I would make a batch of bliss balls from ingredients I pinched from the supermarket and sell them for $2 a pop. On a good day I could make enough for my weekly rent. On an excellent day, I might find a group of cashed-up stoned backpackers on the foreshore — an easy score. On a bad day, I would get balled out by municipal authorities who would whinge at me for selling food without a license.

All the trails through the Nightcap National Park were by now familiar to me, and I knew where to find streams that led down to secret pools on the cliffsides and secluded waterfalls that ran with fresh clean water you could drink and swim in.

Sometimes I explored abandoned houses and cabins nestled up in the far reaches of the forest, and once I even found a disused caravan filled with curious artefacts of people who were long gone: crystals, drawings, headdresses and such things. It was totally creepy, like entering into a time capsule, and I never went back (though I pocketed some crystals).

Grandma’s triumph

That very day, my eighty-eight year-old grandmother left her apartment with a sense of dignity and purpose. Brandishing her cane, she descended in the elevator to her basement carpark and fired up her demure grey BMW.

With her car stereo blaring talkback radio, she drove like an old lady does to the local shopping plaza. There she parked at a slightly off angle in the disabled carpark (which is okay, that’s what it is for) and slowly hobbled towards the supermarket to buy milk for her tea, bread and marmalade, and a package of microwave oats for her breakfast.

Her moment of triumph had come at last: bearing her shopping bag to the bank, she leaned her small, exhausted frame against the teller and asked to make a transfer into my bank account, the details of which were inscribed in loose cursive script on a crumpled piece of paper she fished out of her purse. The transaction complete, she walked like a warrior back to her vehicle: she had done it. She had bailed me out. The sense of satisfaction brimmed inside her, rich like wine.

I appreciated her gesture for many reasons as I mused upon it in the richly contemplative atmosphere of my cabin on a rainy afternoon. Here I was, living in total contradiction to her expectations of me, and nonetheless she was willing to support my basic expenses with a sum that was negligible to her and enormous for me. She had not demanded that I come back to Melbourne; she had simply suggested that I get a job, and flagged her willingness to tide me over in the meantime.

Encounter

A moment of silent wonder and curiosity transpired between us. And then the next remarkable thing happened. I was facing you, and the westerly sky behind you was facing directly at me. The afternoon sun had been concealed by a cloud until that moment.

As you were looking at me, a dazzling ray of sun emerged from the sky and poured golden light upon my face. Suddenly, I was glowing, even as you — less than a metre to my left — were still cast in shade by the rotunda. Observing your expression transforming once again into a look of wonder, I realised that I actually appeared to be emanating radiance, which was an unusual thing for me. I just smiled.

“You’re a goddess!” you gasped.

“You say that to everyone,” I laughed, and then you laughed too.

And as we chuckled together, the whole universe seemed so beautifully aligned and all of existence felt like part of the joke we were sharing. We seemed to know each other intimately even though we had never met. It was a laugh about nothing and everything, and in the midst of that laughter it felt like I was coming home.

“Where are you from?” you asked.

“Rosebank,” I uttered, with reverence.

“I live in Rosebank,” you replied, and now it was my turn to be astonished again. “I live on Emerson Road,” you continued. “Whereabouts are you?”

“Fox Road,” I told you. “At the Rainbow Temple. In a cabin on the hill.”

We exchanged another look of amazement and thrill.

Ashram

Negotiating the steep driveway, I began to get a strangely ominous feeling in my heart: something like dread, a premonition that this was not a place to mess around in. Part of me wanted to turn away and go back to the humble familiarity of the Rainbow Temple, where it was easy to chill out and do as one pleased.

The vibes of this place were noticeably intense; perhaps for a purpose, it occurred to me. This was a place, as you had said, where people were working on themselves. The energy of inner work, of conscious development, had a markedly different signature to that which I was accustomed to. It was intense — almost painfully so; I felt trepidation and disquiet, once again flung out of the comfort zone of my prior expectations.

I didn’t see anybody as I walked up the drive, though I noticed some well-built cabins, almost like resort bungalows, constructed out of cement on the hillside. I saw gardens of beautiful flowers, kept with meticulous care and attentiveness to detail, growing along the driveway and up towards some of the buildings. And finally, a large white homestead appeared on the crest of the hill, framed by neat lawns and flowerbeds.

The absence of people was quite eerie. I couldn’t shake the sense that I was somehow inadvertently getting myself into some kind of gothic horror story. There was a carpark at the top of the hill where I saw Vinayka’s van and a few small cars parked near it, but with nobody around to orient me I didn’t quite know where to go next. I just pivoted about the carpark, looking around and waiting for something to happen.

Then I caught sight of a girl approaching me, a sensuous-looking girl about my age, with long brown hair and full lips. She had an angelic cleanliness about her even as she appeared voluptuous, like you would imagine Mary Magdalene. She wore a floaty blue dress and sandals and was clearly perplexed to see me standing there in the carpark.

“Are you looking for someone?” the girl asked me in a soft voice, her accent noticeably Slavic.

“Y. invited me,” I answered, suddenly feeling disheveled and out of place and utterly cowed by the situation I had arrived in.

“I’ll go and get him,” she nodded, and gestured for me to follow her to the big white house on the lawn.

There was a covered veranda there in front of the house, tiled with pale grey stones, and she showed me to a table and chair beside a gargantuan hibiscus shrub where I could sit down whilst she went to go and fetch you. I lowered myself into the chair, feeling clumsy and ungainly as one of its legs made a squeak against the tiles.

As the brunette moved to cross the lawn, the front door of the house opened and a pale woman with long red hair, dressed in a smooth yellow sundress, came out and followed her. The pair walked silently, as if in liquid motion, towards a small cabin on the opposite side of the lawn. I was captivated by the lightness of presence of the two women, the understated elegance of them both and the palpable calmness that seemed to move through them; suddenly, I could not help but feel hopelessly out of my depth. Why had I even come here?

I looked down at my beaten sandals and my bandaged staph wounds and my silly little dress and daggy jumper and worn-out handbag and felt as awkward as could be, totally unworthy to be seated on the spotless tiles of this veranda with all the manicured roses growing around it.

My hair felt frizzled and frazzled and tangled; my very posture seemed counter to the refinement and elegance of that clean, calm place. All I felt was shame and discomfort, even as I sighted your cool countenance as you crossed the tidy lawn, confident as if you owned the place.

“You’ve come,” you said plainly, as I stood to shake your hand. This did not seem like the sort of place to share hugs in.

I know nothing

Everything you had to say came back to the subject of consciousness. The need for living in awareness and the practice of meditation were the themes you kept returning to constantly in our dialogues.

Whilst I found myself in agreement, conceptually speaking, I nonetheless wanted to challenge your viewpoint on these matters; there was something deep within me that just wanted to resist, resist and challenge this sense of arrogance and entitlement that seemed to pour out of you when you were speaking on these topics. I wanted to prove that I was more astute than you had taken me for.

“To know oneself,” I started grandly, “in Gurdjieff means to know that we operate like machines, and to figure out what is moving each different part. The intellect, the emotions, the body are all working independently of each other without any coherent will or intention behind them, and they’re all servicing different agendas. So it’s less about knowing and more about observing the sequence in motion.”

“Self-observation is only one element,” you countered, “and it doesn’t take you very far if you only leave it at that. Consciousness observes the machine, but who is observing the observer? There is a point where observation ceases,” you stopped, turning on the trail to face me. “And what will is there to summon this cessation? Is it your will? No,” said you, drawing closer to me. “You don’t have a will to end the process of observation. You’re identified with it. You want to keep the game of witnessing going, because it serves you somehow. The witness is more powerful than the machine, it’s true, but whose power? From where?”

“Consciousness…” I offered, falteringly. I was still trying to wrap my head around what you were saying as I searched your clear, stern eyes for the perfect answer.

“There is a consciousness beyond your concept of consciousness. Drop the concept, drop the observation. It is impersonal. It has nothing to do either with yourself or your mechanical functions or whoever is witnessing. Of this,” you uttered, turning away from me and back onto the path, “you know precisely nothing.”

“…”

I was trying to think of some perfect, witty retort to counter your claim that I knew nothing about such things, but at that point I became aware of the futility of my position.

I was observing, with great aptitude, all of my thoughts and feelings; I was working to master my will and intuition through the practice of meditation, but where was it getting me, really? It was just the concept of consciousness that was keeping me going with it all, the idea of a greater power than my own mechanical nature.

In this you were right: I knew nothing of consciousness.

Seduction

With the patience and diligence of one who spent years practicing martial arts, Raoul eventually discovered the key to my heart: fancy breakfasts.

Once he started sharing his stash of health food provisions with me, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed to his charms. He would turn up at my cabin in the morning with fixings for sourdough pancakes with honey and tahini sauce, or just the right superfood powder to add to our green smoothies, or some specially branded berry to add to a chia pudding.

Now that we were eating so well and starting to have such good times together, I was finding it more and more difficult to stay platonic about things, to the point that I really started to enjoy the very long goodnight hugs and meeting his gaze surreptitiously across the Temple kitchen and the occasional holding of hands on a long car ride. It started to feel awfully like I was leading him on, which unconsciously I probably was.

And then it was the full moon again, this time in the sign of Sagittarius, and I always felt sensual and reckless and would do impetuous things at the full moon. So just when everybody at the Temple had given up on teasing me and Raoul about our not-quite love affair, then we made out passionately under the moonlight on the hill. Afterwards I scurried away back to my cabin alone, feeling my resistance start to cave in against a surge of desire.

Well, Raoul probably realized that the battle was half-won and continued to visit my cabin with the fixings for next level breakfasts. We made the fanciest of fancy scrambled eggs and ate them on the fanciest of fancy slices of sprouted Essene bread. It was quite clear to me by now that this young fellow was a pro in the art of seduction.

Auntie Flow

“Listen, Zora, I just wanted to know if you’d be interested in having my car… Basically I want it to stay at the Temple when I’m gone, but I want to make sure that somebody takes good care of it. If you want it, it’s yours. I’m not going to sell it for money…”

I was getting all giddy thinking of karma cars and good deeds, but managed to respond:

“Alex! Yes, of course, that would be amazing. Please, I would love that.”

To my eyes, there was no more beautiful vehicle than Auntie Flow, as I came to name her. She was a maroon-burgundy Ford Falcon, a ’91 model, back when they made sedans all nice and cruisy and square and proper.

She was an auto transmission (which was good news for me, as nobody had ever dared to teach me how to drive manual) with a banged-out right headlight, no stereo, and faulty lights on the dashboard. From the first moment I fired up the ignition, I knew we were made for each other.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they drive. Leigh would putter along at a snail’s pace and keep his eyes more on the passenger than the road. Guy would elegantly shift gears while spinning yards as he expertly navigated the familiar country roads. Vinayka sat up ramrod-straight at the driver’s seat and put his indicator on for the turnoff even if there was nobody else on the road. And you, beloved, at the helm of the Pajero, were so centred in your presence that the vehicle and the world around it seemed to turn around you.

As for me, when I came into the possession of Auntie Flow, the first thing I did was to strew a selection of crystals and feathers across the dashboard under the windshield, just to make sure she looked nice and unregistered. I would lean back in the driver’s seat with my left foot tucked beneath me, my right foot working the pedals, taking the pace nice and slow to gaze at the pretty country landscape and always stopping by the roadside produce stalls. I had my own car!

I spent a few weeks going through the motions of trying to get Auntie registered, but when I finally got a grasp of exactly how much paperwork, bureaucracy, mechanical work and expense that the whole process required I just decided it wasn’t worth it when I only drove to the shops once a week anyway. There were plenty of unregistered cars driving about in this neck of the woods, and other drivers basically just affirmed what Alex had told me: just keep to the backgrounds, don’t head into town.

“Besides,” Robby pointed out to me once, “the fine for getting booked is just the same as a year’s rego. Only the fine is less paperwork!”

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