Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

In her new job, Liz hosts a series of retreats for about a hundred devotees who come for a week to 10 days of meditation and devotional practice. She is the only problem solver for them in the ashram. They come from all over the world. The job of Key Hostess utilizes all the intuition and listening skills she has gleaned from the experience of a lifetime. She loves these people for their bravery to face whatever manifests when they go into the silence of meditation for seven days. She knows they are all afraid because when they go into silence, they go alone. She gets a letter from a filmmaker for National Geographic commenting on the bravery of the members of the Explorers’ Club honored at a recent dinner. He had never seen so many brave people gathered at the same time. Liz thinks to herself, “You ain’t seen nothin” (216).

The goal of the retreat is to reach the turiya state, the fourth level of consciousness, beyond waking, dreaming, or deep dreamless sleep. The intelligent awareness in the fourth state, pure consciousness, is the witness of all other states. If you move into “witness-consciousness,” then you can be present with God all the time, unaffected “by the swinging moods of the mind.” Gilbert thinks that most of us have at one time entered this state of bliss, if only for a couple of minutes. The devotees have come to the retreat to experience this infinite love, the divinity within.

The devotees take the vow of silence, and the whole ashram stops its chatter. Liz observes devotees in meditation from the back of the room. In her prayer, she asks that they be given any blessing reserved for her. Although she doesn’t intend to meditate with them, their practice lifts her. One Thursday afternoon, “on the waves of their collective devotional intention,” she says that she is transported through the “portal of the universe and taken to the center of God’s palm” (219).

Liz has been frustrated with the attempts of the mystics to describe the indescribable. She wants to feel it rather than read about it, to be part of God, so miraculously obvious, like when you look at an optical illusion and then clearly see, for instance, two vases that are two faces. It is there all along; and once you see it, you can never not see it. She feels compassion and unity with the universe, everybody, and everything, and at that moment wonders how anyone could ever feel anything else.

She wonders why she bothered to chase happiness when “the bliss was here the entire time” (221). Yet the moment she starts to think she doesn’t want to ever leave this union, she starts to “slide back to earth” with want. Her ego returns. She becomes aware that when she believes the state of bliss can be lost, she doesn’t quite understand it yet. This is God’s message: “You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here” (222).

The retreat ends, and the devotees come out of silence, hug her, and thank her. Some tell her she appeared to them in their meditations as “a silent gliding, ethereal presence” (222). This is the ashram’s ironic humor: The Key Hostess has become the Quiet Girl in the back of the temple.

She is now meditating four or five hours a day, in her final weeks, at ease with herself, sometimes experiencing shakti and sometimes quiet contentment. Thoughts come and go, so familiar they don’t bother her anymore. She doesn’t feel the change in her yet, but she anticipates it will impact her return to normal life. The former nun from South Africa predicts that only then “will you start to notice how your interior closets have all been rearranged” (223-24).

She has a sleepless night and goes out into the moonlight, feeling alive and healthy. She runs toward a clump of eucalyptus trees where a temple to Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, used to stand. She throws her arms around one of those trees, feeling pure love. As she looks around, all she can see is God, and she realizes this feeling is both what she has been praying for and praying to.

Liz has been wondering about her “word” ever since her conversation with Giulio about “sex” as the word for Rome. She finds it in an old text about Yoga, a Sanskrit description of ancient spiritual seekers: antevasin, “one who lives at the border” (225). The antevasin, no longer part of the conventional life of the village but not yet transcendent, enters the mysterious forest of the unknown. When the plumber/poet from New Zealand departs from the ashram, he gives Liz a farewell poem about her journey, “Elizabeth, betwixt and between.” She has spent years wondering what she is supposed to be. She now believes she does not need to wonder. She is an antevasin, a betwixt and between.

Liz thinks about how the world’s religions desire to find a metaphor for attaining communion with God. For her, as an antevasin, she wants to move from the village to the forest. Religious rituals often evolve when someone from the village seeks a new path, has a transcendent experience, and returns to show others the way. The villagers repeat the words or acts of the prophet, and when it succeeds, the repetition evolves into a devotional practice and then hardens into dogma.

Liz recounts the fable about a saint followed by loyal devotees who meditate for hours a day. The saint has a young cat that disrupts the meditation, so he ties it to a pole outside during meditation. Each day he ties the cat, and then they meditate. This becomes such a habit that no one can meditate until the cat is tied to the pole. When the cat dies, they have a religious crisis. Without the cat, they can’t meditate. The cat has become their means to reach God. This is an example of becoming obsessed with “repetition of religious ritual just for its own sake” (227). The yogic scriptures say God responds in any way mortals choose to worship so long as they are sincere. There is no “right” way.

Religions also attempt to make sense of the chaos of the world. Western tradition envisions a judgmental God who sorts it all out and determines after death whether one goes into heaven or hell. In Eastern tradition, in the Upanishads, the texts suggest that “so-called chaos may have an actual divine function even if you personally can’t recognize it right now” (228). The best we can do is practice equilibrium. Liz’s Irish dairy farmer imagines the universe as a great spinning engine, and the seeker wants to get to the core, to the hub in the center of the wheel, the “hub of calmness—that’s your heart” (229).

Lis has observed that some of her friends who have no spiritual path or belief have devastating experiences which make them long for spiritual support. An ex-Catholic friend whose mother died around the time his first child was born desired a ritual or sacred place to sort out his emotions. Unable to return to the Catholic faith, he also felt it inappropriate to go “cherry picking a religion” (229). Liz disagrees and thinks it is perfectly fine to search for the holiness that works for you.

The Hopi Indians believe each world religion contains a spiritual thread wishing to join other spiritual threads that will eventually weave together to pull us out of darkness into the light. The Dalai Lama, similarly, suggests that Western worshippers can adopt Eastern ideas and integrate them into their practices. God is infinite and bigger than limited religious doctrines. The individual longing for transcendence unites all seekers.

Liz spends her last night at the ashram in the meditation cave under the photograph of Swamiji and climbs into her “hub of stillness.” She sits there all night, not actively praying. She says that has “become a prayer” (231). She slides a piece of paper under the carpet right below Swamiji. The paper contains two poems, one written when she first arrived at the ashram and the other written that morning.

Her poems:

Her first poem says that her path to God is a struggle. She calls it a “cat set loose in a pigeon pen” and a “worker’s uprising.” She follows a brown hobo down the path, short for “homeward bound” (232-33).

The second poem says she can’t get “far enough” into the ashram. She wears pants from the grass, makes out with the Eucalyptus tree, and eats the soil “served on a bed of birds’ nests.” She has sweated and worked into her meal: “I’d finish only half my plate,/ Then sleep all night on the rest” (233).