Ill the other day, my bones in flu or grip of ache, sleeping from 5 p.m. to 9 a.m. with supper break & a few cigarettes & dreams and barefoot it down twice to pee—I didn’t fear death or think of it. Maybe that is an improvement.
Self-conscious, I have nowhere to go. Maybe might as well leave it at that, continue to travel and die as I am when I die.
Avalokitesvara, Kuan Yin, Jaweh, Saints, Sadhus, Rishis, benevolent ones, Compassionate Superconscious ones, etc., what can you do for me now? What’s to be done with my life which has lost its idea?
If it is a matter of each being has to create its own divinity, far be it from me to know what to do or be. I don’t even have a good theory of vegetarianism. As for love & sex, I don’t know what to say, Peter sleeping on his side in the next bed, still faithful tho[ugh] I must be poor company to old beauty. And lying on my own back in the dark, the world just keeps revolving as before.
At least I am down in possessions to Peter & a knapsack. I still am loaded with Karma of many letters & unfinished correspondence. I wanted to be a saint. But suffer for what? Illusions? The rain, were it to rustle the leaves, would seem more friendly than before & more reminiscent of an old dream. But all the connections are vague, machines make noise & lights across the road I’ve never investigated. Next the rest of India & Japan, and I suppose later a trip: England, Denmark, Sweden & Norway, Germany, Poland, Russia, China & then back home again. And that’ll be the end of that world, I’ll be about fifty, the relatives’ll all be dead by then, old ties with the boys of yore be loosed or burnt, unfaithful, in so many decades it is best to let it all go—is Jack drunk? Is Neal still aware of me? Gregory yakking? Bill mad at me? Am I even here to myself? I daren’t write it all down, it is too shameful & boring now & I haven’t the energy to make a great passional autobiography of it all—for who’s all that autobiography for if it doesn’t deliver heaven or reasonable equivalent? Anyway, who is that autobiography for? Young kids after the movies? I guess I have nothing to contribute to general edification by this vague haphazard slow motion death. ‘Red Cats’ a fine title anyway.
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This extract is from Indian Journals (March 1962—May 1963): Notebooks, Diary, Blank Pages, Writings.
39.
The Mandala in the Clouds
Deborah Baker
Poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger were already in India when Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky, decided to make their spiritual sojourn in 1961. This account of the Beats in India offers a vivid glimpse of their confused, restless, sometimes amusing, search for the sacred.—Ed.
The morning of their audience with the Dalai Lama, Gary Snyder rose alone and climbed to the timberline above the Triund Forest Lodge, where they were staying, eighteen kilometres from Dharamsala. It was his last full day in the Himalayas. The next day they would take a bus to Pathankot, where they would board the morning express train for Bombay, with a side trip to Aurangabad to take in the cave temples and monasteries. From Bombay, he and Joanne would begin the long boat journey back to Japan. Just beyond the timberline about five kilometres from the forest lodge, Gary came to the wide white expanse of the snowfield that led directly to the summit of Dhaulagiri. He wanted to see how close he could get. In anticipation, he’d bought a steel-tipped cane in the village, the nearest things to an ice axe he could find.
Gary Snyder had grown up just north of Seattle, surrounded by mountains and rivers. His father’s farm was in the shadow of Mount Rainier and the Cascades, and on days when the fog lifted, he could see the Olympia range across Puget Sound. In the forests of his boyhood, he would come across Indians with spears standing motionless on slender planks above the Columbia River, patiently awaiting salmon. When he was twelve, he discovered a Chinese landscape painting in the Seattle Art Museum in which he recognized the tall misted pines, waterfalls and mountainscapes of the Pacific Northwest. His curiosity about the tightly braided tradition behind the painting led him to Chinese poetry, Ch’an Buddhism and the Zen Institute in Kyoto. In Zen he understood a spiritual practice that made no promise of liberation but insisted upon the discipline of daily meditation. In Kyoto he learned: You had to try. And for years he had stood there, spear in hand, staring into the water. Now again he stood, peering at the snowfield and the summit beyond, steel-tipped cane in his grip.
Later in the day, they would be greeted at the fenced compound of His Holiness by Sonam Kazi, a compact man dressed neatly in Western clothing. The king of Sikkim had made an unannounced visit, Kazi explained, to ask the twenty-seven-year-old Dalai Lama for a blessing on his forthcoming marriage to a Sarah Lawrence girl. They would have to wait. Allen, Peter, Gary and Joanne passed the time with Sonam Kazi, who, it developed, was also from Sikkim, where his father was a powerful feudal landholder. After leaving St Stephen’s College in Delhi, Kazi had travelled to Lhasa to study with masters of Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism, the most ancient of Tibetan Buddhist orders. Until the Chinese invaded a year after his arrival, Sonam Kazi found Tibet a haven on earth. He stayed for five years, then left to work as a Tibetan translator for Pandit Nehru.
Among his teachers in Lhasa was a lama named Dudjom Rinpoche, the most revered living repository of the Nyingma tradition. Dudjom had anticipated the arrival of the Chinese, he said, and managed to smuggle his library of sacred texts out of Tibet to the hill station of Kalimpong. Dudjom Rinpoche’s own root teacher had prepared him with his prophecy that he would spread Nyingma to every continent. Later, after the Chinese destroyed six of the main Nyingma monasteries, Dudjom Rinpoche’s library became the sole relic of Padmasambhava’s original translations. By the time the king of Sikkim and his affianced had taken leave of His Holiness, Sonam Kazi had convinced Allen to make a trip to Kalimpong to receive oral transmission from Dudjom Rinpoche himself.
‘If you take LSD, can you see what’s in that briefcase?’ Lounging on his velvet couch like an overgrown schoolboy, His Holiness the Dalai Lama smiled mischievously. Though he listened closely to Peter’s and Allen’s accounts of experiments with drugs, he didn’t really believe that drugs were very useful. In fact, though the psychic states drugs achieved were real enough, drugs themselves were a distraction, doing little to address the central problem of the ego, the source of all spiritual anguish and ignorance. But Allen persisted. He wanted to know how drug states corresponded to the spiritual states achieved by meditation. He offered to have Timothy Leary send him some psilocybin. His Holiness seemed agreeable, if only because it seemed to mean so much to him and he was sincerely interested in scientific experiments. Then Allen proposed to recite ‘Howl’. Though Sonam Kazi’s gifts as an interpreter were unquestioned, he was somehow dissuaded.
Allen could be something of a village explainer, and Gary was eventually obliged to interrupt him midmonologue. ‘The inside of your mind,’ he noted in a peremptory manner, ‘is just as boring as everyone else’s,’ so was it really necessary to go on so? The awkward moment was quickly followed by a mano-a-mano exchange between Gary and the Dalai Lama. The two compared Tibetan posture and breathing techniques with those of Zen. Gary did a demonstration.
‘Couldn’t there be another posture of meditation for Westerners?’ Joanne piped up. The Dalai Lama looked puzzled and turned to Sonam Kazi. He said something in Tibetan.
‘It is not a matter of national custom,’ the Dalai Lama pronounced. Gary was impressed. An excellent reply, he thought. Allen interrupted.
‘How many hours of meditation do you do a day?’
‘Me? I never meditate, I don’t have to.’
If His Holiness was teasing him, Allen missed it. He was thrilled with this answer, Joanne reported. ‘[Allen] wants to get instantly enlightened and can’t stand sitting down,’ she wrote a friend back home. ‘He came to India to find a spiritual teacher. But I think he actually believes he knows it all, but just wishes that he Felt better about it.’
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This extract is
from A Blue Hand: The Beats in India.
40.
The Godmen’s Flock
Peter Brent
Peter Brent’s Godmen of India offers a fascinating glimpse of India’s charismatic spiritual figures and the dynamics of the guru–shishya relationship—one that is still viewed by many as feudal and paternalistic. This extract describes a connection between master and disciple that is almost chemical. And yet, even this is a metaphor—evocative, perhaps, but still inadequate—to sum up what is clearly a complex, indescribable bond.—Ed.
David is at ease with himself. He is not trying to become Indian, he is trying to become himself. He takes up no exaggerated attitudes of piety to what he is doing (one night I lent him a Simenon: later, when he came out of a long period of meditation, he gave me a big smile and said, ‘Now I know who did it!’). He is not dedicated to becoming a sadhu, nor, like other Westerners I met, determined to unravel the secrets of the spiritual universe. He is relaxed, happy with the task he has set himself, one that is difficult enough without metaphysical embellishment. Perhaps this is because he approaches his new life from a position of strength—he was successful enough in his American existence not to feel apologetic. What could be done in that way, he did; in the end, he discovered it was not enough. Then he came to India.
‘It is kind of hard to be brief about how I got here. It started when I was born. I am not trying to be smart-ass or anything. But the most memorable, outstanding mind-whammy was my acid trip. You see, I was very deeply involved in manipulating my environment. I was working eighteen hours a day practising law, politics, part of the moderate Left trying to take over the party from within. Very good at it in our community. We did control the situation in our community. We had control of the city, getting the first Federal grants for the Negroes, we were doing all those things, getting jobs and recreation facilities, trying to improve the environment, fighting the big industries on pollution, doing all the things you do to try and make the whole living situation harmonious and worthwhile. I knew where I was going, I thought I had an objective. I thought I was a talented young man and I should use my talents to help other people, improve the society and the environment. I thought I could tell exactly what was right and what was wrong. And the whole of the problem was that the whole of society was run by a bunch of idiots; ignorance was rife, and greed. I really thought I knew exactly where it was at. And of course—I never did think about this aspect of it—but I obviously really enjoyed the exercise of power and playing that role; I always thought of myself as the little boy fighting against the big giants, too, which is very interesting. I always thought of myself as David facing Goliath.
‘Well, everybody I’d known had taken acid for years, people I knew who were living around me, people I was running to. At college I went to a funny spade psychiatrist who was taking people on trips in ’56, ’57, ’58, always talking to me about it. And I had read all the literature about it and I knew lots of people who had done it and I was very, very careful to read everything I could read about it and get a shrink to take me on a trip and do the whole thing in what I thought was a very objective way; because I was curious to know about myself.
‘When I took acid it was like some large hand had reached over and ripped my exterior off. That is the only way to describe it. You don’t think of having an interior and exterior, but it was as if there was no shell. I had total perception in every direction as far as I wanted to let it move. I started out in the beginning of the trip playing mind games. Everything was in extreme, vivid colours, extreme beautiful colours, and I could make any shape in as far a direction as I wanted to in every direction. I had no sense of up or down or sideways. And I could make any sound go with any of that shape. I could create symphonies, concerts, all variety of sounds and shapes and colours, all flowing in every direction as far as I wanted to make them go. I could see forever. I’d had some fun with my mind, smoked grass for twenty years since I was twelve, but I’d never even conceived of a mind having that kind of capacity. Never conceived of it. That was the first couple of hours. I’ve got to tell you about this trip because it really did it.
‘Then I opened up my eyes and looked around and it became extremely obvious that everything I had ever believed in about reality was false. And there’s something about acid, people say, “Well, it is a drug and how do you know that it isn’t the drug and not you?” There’s something about it that you know and there’s no way you can convince someone that hasn’t taken it, because you realize that you are seeing something, that something’s been removed, an obstacle has been removed from your vision and you are seeing something and you simply know it is the truth. I don’t feel the need of convincing anybody of it, I don’t think; but I know it is the truth. You see everything as one great light show. You see everything as forms of light, everything you thought of as solid walls and hamburgers you can squeeze, things are soft and hard—it is just different forms of light and you see it quivering and moving and you see it rising and falling, you can see, literally see, mountains or flowers or trees wake up when the sun rises in the morning. You can smell and feel and hear them waking up. You can feel the vibrations from animals. Have you ever been around, like, a mouse or a little animal and ever notice how onepointed they are on you? Like they will be totally concentrated on everything you are doing, like you’d be if you were in a room with somebody that much bigger than you? Well, that is how you become about everything.
‘And I looked out over San Francisco; I was in an apartment up high where I could see the port and the sea and the water and the people, and you could see everything that was happening, you could see the people scurrying around, you could feel them scurrying around and around and around: this big hum of people running around. You could see the pollution coming off them into the air. When a bird flew by you could just feel yourself flying by; you were the bird, you know. And you could see the absolute total futility of man doing things. It was just absolutely pointless. It became clear to me very fast that the only point was knowing what was happening, being aware; until one was aware of what was happening, all that scurrying around was a tremendous waste of effort and most of it was extremely negative and harmful. I mean people were doing so much more harm than good. Which is obvious even to someone who isn’t very aware.
‘I took a series of acid trips, spaced them out three to six months apart so I wouldn’t burn myself because I could feel the mental exhaustion that it caused and I’d observed what it had done to people that had taken it too close together, and I never had any problems arise as a result.
‘What happened then, I tried to get myself out of all the things I was in; I had a lot of financial commitments, I had just built an enormous house, you know, I had just socked myself in for a career, being the leader, great white hope, and I had to unravel myself out of a lot of financial things, political things. I had a big law practice with all kinds of dates for trials that we schedule a long time ahead. I stopped taking major cases, just slowly got out of it. I left two years ago. Left the office exactly two years ago now. Went and spent the summer in Europe and drove here, got here last November. I wasn’t in a big hurry, I knew what I was going to do, but I wanted to kind of visit a lot of Sufis coming across because I was very interested in Sufism. I wasn’t sure which road I was going to go on. Went and spent some time in Benares, here and there, and found out from a Sufi lady in Delhi that the highest yogi she knew going was Muktananda. So I came here.
‘I came here looking for a guru who was going to tell me how to get rid of greed and hatred and all that. I don’t have any delusions about becoming realized, because that happens to one out of every million people who take up meditation. I put my goals probably more practically; I’d just like to get rid of greed and hatred and be able to feel that kind of love that I felt and I don’t want to have to take drugs to do it. I don’t want to destroy myself. I enjoy life. I knew absolutely nothing about shaktipat or kundalini; I’d read something about it but I didn�
��t know much about it. So I came here and decided to do what they do here and see what happens.
‘And what they do here is you do your chores every day and you go sit in front of Swami Muktananda for a certain period of time a day. And I did that. And after a while I started feeling some very strange sensations in my head and body. A very thick, honey, warm feeling, a feeling that I’d call ecstasy. And say that I’d never felt ecstasy before; I thought that sex was ecstasy, but this is another level of ecstasy, a level terribly more gripping, amazingly enough. You just feel … I have read other people’s descriptions; someone who described his feelings in front of Ramana Maharshi and it is exactly the way he described it. He said it feels like your mind is immersed in a thick sea of honey. You know, it stops all mind chatter, it just stops; just “slurp”, like jumping into a bathtub full of vaseline. It just stops, but in the nicest way. And you have this warm, warm, warm, thick, thick feeling all through you, especially in your head, also in your body, in the trunk of your body. And it gets stronger and stronger and stronger.
‘Then I went with him for a couple of weeks to Bombay and a couple of weeks in Baroda. And when I am in front of him a lot of hours a day, then I’ll even have it when I am meditating when I am not around him. And if you really get it strong, you can keep it and be a long way away from him. You know what this is supposed to do? Of course, the idea of meditation is to stop the mind chatter so you can see into yourself, see yourself past all the ego talk of past and future. In a very crude way—this is putting it in an extremely crude way—whilst your guru helps what you are doing by giving you his grace, his one-pointedness is so powerful and so intense that, on a level that is not something that I know enough of to describe, he communicates that to you. But so many people that come here, people who didn’t know that that was going to happen to them, people who just dropped in with other people, sat down and felt this sensation that I know it is not a product of my imagination; I know it is real, I know it is damned real because I have staggered and reeled around like I was high on dope or booze. It is not like booze and it is not like dope, it is like something else, but the closest thing in our experience would be like a drug. You know, you feel good, you feel warm, you feel thick, you feel loving: you feel good. It is obviously something in you, something’s happening. You feel like some external thing has come into you. Now all I have to do is to be near him and I feel it. If I walk by where he is, I feel it. He gives off these vibrations and from everything I’ve read every saint gives off these vibrations.
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