by Marco Vassi
Martin shifted his gaze. Every other person in the room that he could see was also looking at him. Robert was gazing at him too, his expression like that of a parent whose child has said its first word. Martin slowly pulled himself erect. He reached into his pocket and took out his handkerchief. Sheepishly, he blew his nose. The action produced a loud, wet honk, like a goose with a head cold nagging its mate. The sound made a number of people laugh, and Martin glanced out over the white pyramid formed by his fingers inside the cloth grasping his nose. At once he realized how silly he looked, and the apprehension in his chest loosened, and he found himself smiling inside the tiny tent.
He wiped his eyes, folded his legs under him, put his handkerchief away, and waited to see what would happen next. He was already piecing together the event as rapidly as his reforming sense of identity would allow. The pure experience, already and instantly a memory, began to fade in intensity and focus, and the machinery of analysis started to grind out interpretations. These proceeded along the lines of a reverse ontology, beginning with Martin’s highest level of comprehension and sliding down the scale from there. Having no education or inclination to allow a notion of the Absolute, or even the cosmic, Martin’s first awareness was psychological. He understood that he had suppressed a good deal of feeling in relation to his breakup with Julia, and that the guru’s extraordinary and unexpected line about divorce and death had unplugged a dam of emotion. He was even able to link that with the lifelong repression he had been suffering as a result of his childhood experience, given the culture he was raised in. But he did not, at that moment, grasp the wider implications, the notion that this was a lesson in the history of a people, or a process in group dynamics. He had no way of seeing just then that his tears had been everyone’s tears, that he had cried for all the people in the room. It would be a long long time before Martin would be able to disentangle himself from the notion that his limited self, his idiosyncratic viewpoint, was utterly transparent, transient and unimportant; that it was merely a reflection of the true Self from which all manifestations arise and to which all manifestations return.
Babba knew this about Martin. So did Robert. And yet, a man had to start somewhere. And Martin had at least felt something other than his habitual gesture, his unconscious awareness of the world as a vast theatre built for no other reason than to hold his personal drama. Paradoxically, however, as he returned from that liberating experience, his first reaction was to re-affirm his basic attitude, hyping it with the energy derived from his momentary and fragmentary liberation.
From Babba’s eyes, the incident was unremarkable, as were all phenomena in the created universe. Babba had attained a permanent state of consciousness, a state generally called “enlightenment” in America, but for which each culture has a name. God realization, being at-one with the Tao, bhava samadhi, satori, maturity, and so forth. He had been raised in a sanctimonious household, his father a minor priest in a local temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey god, his mother aggressively self-effacing in her effort to project a more abject humility than all the other wives of all the other minor priests in the area. At age eight, he suddenly saw through the stultifying hypocrisy of his parents, a feat shared by most children who are not absolute cretins. But with his insight he had felt a rare compassion. That is, he not only saw the stupidity of his parents, but he felt the sorrow against which their rigidity was a defense. He began to weep, and cried continuously for seventeen days. He lost thirty pounds and came close to dying. But in a land so riddled with religiosity, the event was not brought to the attention of a doctor, but to that of a holy man who had retired to a cave fifteen miles outside the village. The holy man, not stirring from his seat, had simply said, “Throw him into the river and then bring him here.”
When Babba, then known by his given name of Rammurti, was flung into the water of the river, he began to splutter, thrash about, and drown, and he had to be pulled out by two men who dove in from the shore. The act, however, did accomplish one thing: the boy was no longer crying. The hermit told the parents that the child was obviously marked for special spiritual development, and told them to leave him in the cave. They would not have dreamed of protesting.
Babba then underwent a fairly standard training, although bizarre by the standards of human convention. He once went five years without seeing another human being besides the hermit. For two years he had to pluck all the hair out of his beard one strand at a time to teach him disregard for pain. At one point he lived on nothing but water and sunlight for three months. The hermit eventually sent him on to another teacher, and this continued until he was thirty, at which point, sitting with his current master, the entire complex of tensions and attitudes and habits which define the human being dissolved all at once, and he became himself truly. There was no longer a platform or vantage point from which he observed himself or the world. He had lost all sense of identification with specific manifestations of pure, unformed consciousness, and so was able to watch the manifest universes rise and fall with as much concern as he watched the rising and falling of his own breath. He was no longer in the world, nor was he out of the world. He was the world itself.
He and his master exchanged a silent blink of understanding, and Rammurti walked out of the temple and into the forest. He wandered for five years, carrying nothing but the blanket on his back and an eating bowl. He walked more than thirty thousand miles barefoot, begging his way from village to village. When he arrived at the edge of a village, he would simply sit under a tree, and within hours his presence would be felt and by that night most of the people of the village would be sitting before him. He would speak, or sit silently; sometimes he healed or gave practical advice on the affairs of life. And then one night he would slip away, leaving a legend behind, and perhaps a small shrine that the villagers would build to mark the spot where he had been. Finally, he just drifted off into the woods and stayed there for more than twenty years, totally naked, simply one more animal on the face of the earth. He had attained ultimate simplicity.
One day he was found by a group of government engineers surveying that part of the jungle. He was sitting on a tree limb. Surrounding him were a group of monkeys. Some of the people in that party say that Babba was speaking in grunts and gestures to the monkeys and that they all seemed to be laughing and having a good time. The men were startled, but the power of four thousand years of tradition wiped out the thin veneer of westernized technological prejudice which had passed for education in the British universities they had attended, and they stopped to acknowledge that a rare being was sitting before them, naked, bearded to his belly, talking to monkeys.
As might be expected, word got out, and before long people were making pilgrimages to that spot in the forest, and shortly after that Rammurti was prevailed upon to return to the world of people to give suffering civilization the benefit of his wisdom. Only those so steeped in the darkness of their tunnel vision that they can’t see beyond the propaganda of progress will fail to understand what a sacrifice the man made in agreeing to leave the forest. Later on, when he had attained a following of tens of thousands in India, and twice as many in a dozen countries around the world, when he was accused of being on a large ego trip, only those who could see the man’s soul and knew his history realized what a petty prize this adulation was in relation to what he had to give up: that absolute liberty, that soaring solitude, that mute oneness with unstructured life, that approximation to God.
When he returned to the world of manufactured things, he was given the name Babba by his first devotees. For him, from the first, everything he saw once he left the forest was some kind of absurd drama. He was amused by airplanes and television sets. He became addicted to cigarettes. He read a newspaper once, then rubbed it against his buttocks, saying “Toilet paper.” He laughed a lot, and no one ever quite understood precisely why, although many rationalizations were given. The fact of the matter was that Babba had found vastly more intelligent
, humorous, gentle and wise creatures amidst the bands of monkeys he had lived with than he ever found among the monkeys of the cities who wore clothing and spoke words and lived lives of such tortured tension and inflated self-importance that he could not believe they were of the same branch of animal life.
So when Martin appeared, his defenses bristling with the obviousness of porcupine quills, and then collapsed into racking sobs. Babba was unimpressed. At the same time, he felt empathy with the condition, enough so that he moved the roomful of people into the rather theatrical chanting, something which had value merely as a soothing device, but which overemotional devotees tended to mistake for some form of occult teaching. Reality, plain and unadorned, was the heart of Babba’s truth, and as all the scriptures have pointed out, there is no way to communicate it. Babba’s techniques, tricks, talks all served but one purpose: to keep people around him long enough for them to catch on for themselves, to use him as a fixed point against which to view all the changes of state they passed through in their lives until they learn that enlightenment is little more than a posture, an attitude, a direction.
“You feel better?” Babba asked.
Martin nodded, and settled himself more comfortably. He had almost regained his former composure, that is to say, the subliminal guardedness which constituted his moment-to-moment presence in the world. With his psychological clothes back on, he was now ready to become discursive, to talk about what had happened, to discuss his thoughts. The massive attention of all the people in the room, at first a threat, was now delight. Martin was beginning to feel the first rushes of what it is like to be a star.
Unfortunately, he was only the moon; Babba was the source of light. And upon receiving Martin’s nod indicating that he was all right, Babba smiled, then turned his head, paused a fraction of a second, and then cast his gaze on someone else in the room, a pretty woman who looked to be in her early twenties, with very large breasts unhampered by a brassiere, the nipples of which poked with soft insolence through the thin cloth of her blouse. Babba made some kind of facial expression Martin couldn’t see, but most of the others laughed, and the woman blushed and closed her eyes in seductive withdrawal.
Martin blinked several times, rapidly, as though clearing his head from a blow on the chin. All at once, he was a nonentity, just another body in the crowd. The emotions that coursed through him were shifting too rapidly for him to identify. Anger at being ditched like a high school girl on a blind date; shame at being exposed; jealousy that the guru’s attention was going elsewhere. These feelings mixed, boiled, and gave rise to judgments. Babba was a fickle fraud, a cheap showman taking cheap shots; the meeting had all the spiritual value of a nightclub in the Catskills; Babba cared only for his own aggrandizement, he had no true concern for individuals. He might have dug himself more deeply into a fit of chagrin, except that Robert, sitting next to him, put a hand on his shoulder.
“I know what you’re thinking and feeling,” Robert said. “But try not to let any of it scar you. We can talk about it later.”
Martin glanced up and was about to look away except that Robert held his gaze. The tall yoga instructor wouldn’t let Martin look away until he had acknowledged with a slight lowering of his eyelids that the message had been received at the depth at which it was sent.
The rest of the evening was a small torture for Martin. There was some more of Babba’s horsing around with people, and then a long shaggy soul story about a fish looking for water, and a disconnected ramble among reminiscences, references to Vedic texts, and homely homilies. When Babba finished talking, a bony woman in her late fifties stood up clutching a piece of paper and read off a number of announcements having to do with various functions concerning Babba’s organization, The Twilight Stallion Confirmation. And when she sat down, someone struck a gong and the group launched into a half hour of chanting, during which Babba sneaked away.
Martin was aghast. His legs were on fire. His eyes burned and he had trouble staying awake. But he was determined to stick it through to the end. But when everyone was singing the monotonous tune with its repetitious words, their eyes closed and their attention elsewhere, and Babba just sort of backed away from the edge of the platform and seemed to fade into the darkness behind the screen, Martin became furious. Still, he gritted his teeth, clenched his hands into fists, and suffered it through.
Finally, the chanting wound down, the room fell into a quaking silence, there was a moment’s pause, and then people began to gather themselves to leave. Martin almost sobbed out loud with relief. He tried to stand up but his right leg was completely asleep, so much so that it did not even tingle. It was like a dead fish, a piece of soft rubber. He rose up on his left leg, which did tingle, to the point of almost debilitating pain.
“My oh my,” he said to himself, “that’s going to hurt when it starts to wake up.” And slapped the right leg once, experimentally. No sensation at all.
He felt a hand slip under his right arm and grab his armpit. He turned. It was Robert. He was smiling, goofy, loose. But his arm was like a steel bar.
“I thought you were in shape,” Robert said.
“I am,” Martin huffed.
They made their way through the thinning crowd to the section of the loft that was used as a kitchen. Martin reached a chair just as his right leg began to twitch with the first rushes of painful sensation. He sat down heavily and began kneading the thigh of the afflicted leg. Robert stood nearby, talking to the woman whose place it was. The two of them walked over.
“I hope you’re all right,” the woman said.
“Oh, no damage,” Martin replied. His professional pride was stung.
The woman put a hand on his shoulder. “I do hope you’ll come to see Babba again. It was very unusual for him to single you out on your first visit. And what you went through was very beautiful, perhaps painful, but something which will begin to work in you and change your life. That’s the way it is with Babba. When he touches us, no matter how well we think we understand what’s happening, the truth of the experiences keeps unfolding.”
Martin’s leg was now a bottle of angry buzzing mosquitoes, each biting with silent fury. He wanted to give it his entire attention, to nurse the limb back to normality, but male vanity was stronger than organic pain. He stood up and smiled.
“I certainly never had anything like that happen to me in my life before,” he said. He tried to strike a note somewhere between honesty and graciousness. The woman was a plump, pleasant person in her early forties, attractive enough to sleep with but not so much so that one would automatically consider it. “I really don’t know what to make of all this. Perhaps I’ll be back, but the whole thing is very strange to me.”
“I don’t think there’s a person here who didn’t feel that at first.” She began to detail her own experiences, but caught a cautionary glance from Robert, and understood that it would be best to leave the newcomer to him. She waved a hand in front of her and gushed, “Well, you must excuse me. The one thing I don’t want to do is sound like a used consciousness salesman.” She smiled again, an expression so warm and pervasive that Martin was taken in completely. “I do hope well see you again,” she repeated, and turned to make her way to the far end of the loft where Babba was sitting on a rug, some eight or ten people around him.
“Ready?” Robert said. ttWhat’s going on back there?” Martin whispered.
“A business meeting. Making plans for Babba’s stay in the country this summer. He’s going up to a place near Grossinger’s.”
Martin’s eyes opened wide. Robert laughed. “I know,” he said. “On one level it’s just like a new wave in the Catskills. The old Jewish stand-up comedians are being replaced by Hindu sit-down cosmologists.”
The two men went out of the loft, down the stairs and into the street. The culture shock was like getting off a plane that had just arrived from Tibet. Cars thudded past. People slid by, angular
, silent, guarded. The air was two-thirds exhaust and industrial waste. The bar across the street was even more crowded than it had been. Rock still crashed through the glass onto the sidewalks and shouted its raucous affirmation up to the rooftops of the converted factory buildings that were fast becoming a hive of busy artists.
“What’s your mood?” Robert asked.
“This may sound blasphemous, but I’d love a beer.”
“Nothing wrong with a beer. Want to try across the street?”
“Do you?”
“Sure. It’ll make an interesting contrast.”
They crossed the street and walked up to the double doors. Up close, the bar looked like a murky goldfish bowl, the cigarette smoke turning the air gray, the people, slightly drunk, moving with the spasmodic lassitude of underwater creatures.
They went inside. The bar stretched thirty feet down the left side of the narrow room. The opposite wall was bare except for a long counter, belly-button high. Not an inch of wood showed along either space. Men and women in about equal numbers occupied every available stool, stood in front of every available inch of counter and bar. Four bartenders moved incessantly, supplying customers directly, while a fifth filled orders for a stream of waitresses who serviced the back room, a barnlike space five times the size of the bar proper, with tables, booths, and a small space for dancing.
Robert and Martin walked several feet into the space and halted, letting it wash over them. A dozen women shifted their eyes and ranked the two men with erotically computerized glances, checking hair, clothing, mouth, crotch bulge, height, and general body attitude. Most of them, with uncanny instinct, dismissed Robert as a homosexual. For several of them, however, that offered more intriguing possibilities than were available with most of the men in the bar, swaggering types too inhibited to swagger, leering from their one-dimensional fantasy plots. A homosexual, at least, was more likely to produce amusing conversation, and those who were prone to fucking women usually did it very well indeed. Martin presented a more complex problem to those probing eyes. He was physically superb, a veritable bull, a classic stud. But the cut of his pants, the style of his hair, and the opacity of his stare indicated a certain lack of nuance or subtlety of understanding. He was the sort of man one would want to marry. He would work hard, sincerely do his best to please, and keep the old vagina properly pounded. The difficulty would be the absolute necessity for having an affair, almost certainly with some rotter, an artist with dirty dishes in his sink, brilliant canvases on his wall, crumbs in his sheets, women constantly ringing his phone, and a pound of grass in a cookie jar on his bookshelf. The women at the bar looked at Martin and by and large decided that they couldn’t stand the guilt.