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Confirmation 101
S: Did you think you’d please me with this reaction?
A: Well, I thought about that. That was one of the things I thought about this week.
S: Afterward.
A: Yes. But not beforehand.
S: Did you conjure it up?
A: I don’t think that I did. I mean it’s possible, I suppose, but
that didn’t feel like a real alternative.
S: You were stunned—were you also intrigued by it all?
A: I was very intrigued by it and went through the rest of the
day with some kind of calm settling over me. It seemed a very beautiful day, and I wasn’t worried about getting finished with the workand . . .
S: Well, how could you have both reactions, the fear—like going over the waterfall—and yet calm?
A: The only thing I could think was what we’ve talked about before—what I’ve always said I have no experience with—which is surrender. Once I had sort of understood that I hadn’t created this thing for myself, that I hadn’t done it for any purpose, I just surrendered to it. It just was, and it had picked me up and taken me. There was nothing I could do but just, in a way, surrender to it. The phrase that kept coming all day long and all week long is something the Quakers say: “What is it that you require of me?”
But it was more like, “What is it that is required of me?” I felt that I didn’t have the answer to that question. And all of the thinking about it in the world wasn’t going to give me the answer. Was it required of me that I go to your house for a Sai Baba meeting that evening? I couldn’t bring myself to do it, partly because I would have had to cancel a date with my husband. I didn’t feel up to explaining to him. I would have owed him an explanation and it would have been very uncomfortable—partly that kind of scared me.
I wasn’t sure that seeing any more of it would have any impression on me, and I wanted to kind of leave myself with what had happened and not force it in one direction or another. I felt that what was required of me was to surrender, to have had this experience, to try to look at it, to try not to force it into any direction and to try and remain open to it. That’s pretty hard for me because I’m not used to that kind of thing. But that was where the sense of calm came from: “This has happened to me; I’ve got it, I can’t fight it,