“Travel in the old ruts,” quotes my friend Meredith; some ancient Chinese maxim. The way lain down by elders. Pathways through the world, pathways through the mind—it’s a shame that these days we so seldom have a guide. That our atomized worldview, mimicking scientific doctrine, sees us as separate, distinct, alone, orbiting in space, touching only an infinite void.
My cognitive sleuthing about ol’ Ernesto was quite wrong. He was well traveled and had resided in Paris and had lived all kinds of urbane adventures. He’d been flying since he was fifteen, though, and up there was so confident and connected it was hypnotic. It’s helpful for me to have differing visions of what spirituality might be, that it can be expressed with dog-ends, not dog collars, tattered caps, not turbans. Infinite potential up there in the moment, in the clouds.
* * *
* I’m not saying that Rupert Murdoch is as bad as Hitler. Hitler’s warmongering and genocide remain unchallenged as the greatest crimes of modern times. However, a man in the position of power that Murdoch is in choosing to neglect the possibility to make the world a fairer, more loving place and instead electing to spread fear, suspicion, and prejudice while obscuring facts about highly controversial but profitable practices like fracking could bring down all humanity. Legally though I’m obliged to say that Hitler and Murdoch are two distinct entities and that Hitler was a worse bloke.
12
Within You, And Without You
THE FAIRFIELD TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION COMMUNITY HAVE attempted to create external conditions that support a higher cause. Of course, the fear with such a community is that it might be a bit insipid and weird or seem like a cult. I spent a few weeks there to see what it was like to be in an environment that nourished serenity and if I could live comfortably with serenity’s immediate neighbors: earnestness and humorlessness.
Even if untroubled by these conceptual neighbors, the inhabitants of the meditation community in Fairfield have literal neighbors to contend with. They cohabit their town with the ordinary rural community of Fairfield present long before a glorious set of transcendent knockers jiggled on to the horizon, generating a dissonant hum in the small-town center. Adjacent to the predictable pinewood-and-paperbacks vegan restaurant, there’s a bar selling Coors and shots with a stag-hunting arcade game in the corner. The indigenous laborers I noted eyed the newcomers the way any immigrant community can be viewed, as threatening and unwelcome, tranquil invaders from another dimension.
The problem with communities built around sitting still and doing nothing is that, yes, you guessed it, they’re a bit fucking boring, particularly to people like me, brought up on shopping centers, porno mags, and crack. When I’m in a TM-themed café, about to bite into something made of parsley, I might think, “Fuck this, there’s an arcade game next door where I can shoot a bambi in the bonce.”
This attitude of churlish indifference seems like nerdish deference contrasted with the belligerent antipathy of the indigenous farm folk, who regard the hippie-dippie interlopers, the denizens of the shimmering tit temples, as one fey step away from transvestites. I shall tell you the one negative thing about the TM community I can think of, just to get it off my chest, then I can resume my primary purpose of encouraging you to incorporate spiritual practice of some kind into your life.
They do a thing called “yogic flying.” Now, if someone says to me, “Russell, would you like to partake in some yogic flying?” the image I have is of myself and a few hippies levitating like Aladdin, blissed out and superior, looking down on the world in every conceivable way. If the reality of the situation is a bunch of people with their legs crossed hopping across crash mats, a hybrid of a sports-day sack race and the Paralympics, I shall feel short-changed.
I urge my brethren in the New Age realm, those of us who want to change the world, whether from a radical political perspective or a spiritual one, to be fastidious; Richard Dawkins is watching, like the librarian of all earth’s knowledge, shushing and prodding and demanding overdue diligence.
If we tell Dickie Dawkins we at last have proof of the supernatural, that we are finally manifesting a glorious new dawn for humankind, that we are ready to join the angels, then invite him into a giant tit in Iowa and show him what looks like some highly motivated amputees clamoring for a top-shelf magazine, he is unlikely to be impressed. Not that impressing Dickie Dawkins is the aim of the game; he’s made his mind up to be dour. I’d hate to go on holiday with him. “These pyramids are inaccurate; fetch my spirit level. Actually, just get me a normal level; I don’t believe in spirits. No, I don’t want to buy a fez!”
Whilst I stayed in Fairfield, Bobby Roth, a remarkable man, in essence a priest of the TM faith, taught me to meditate. Bob would eschew the priestly title, as the TM movement is understandably keen to avoid any mantles that prevent its powerful technology being unappealing to secular people, because it sounds “out there,” or to religious people, if it seems to conflict with their ideology. To me, though, Bob, who has become a dear friend, is a type of priest or swami. A devoted man.
I have recently begun to look for people’s “vicar” nature. It is a technique I happened upon quite by chance, but I think it has a precedent in eastern mysticism. In Buddhism they talk of each of us having a “Buddha nature,” a divine self, the aspect of our total persona that is beyond our materialism and individualism. Well, that’s all well and good. What I’m into is people’s “vicar nature”—what a person would be like if they were a vicar. You can do it on anyone; it doesn’t have to be a vicar either if that isn’t your bag, it could be a rabbi or an imam or whatever. Simply think of someone you know, like, I dunno, Hulk Hogan, and imagine them as a devotional being. When I do, it helps me to see where their material persona intersects with a well-meaning spiritual aspect. Reverend Hogan would be, I suspect, a real fire-and-brimstone guy, spasming and retching in the pulpit but easily moved to tears, perhaps by the plight of a childless couple in his parish. Anyway, let’s not get carried away, it’s just a tool to help me see where a person’s essential self might dwell.
Oddly, it’s really easy to do with atheists. I can imagine Richard Dawkins as a vicar in an instant, Calvinist and insistent. Dogmatic and determined, having a stern hearthside chat with a seventeen-year-old boy on the cusp of coming out.
My point is that in spite of the lack of any theological title, Bobby Roth is like a priest. We learned TM, Nik and I, over four days in one-hour sessions that were mostly technical, with minimal ritualism and mysticism. The only standout bit of hocus-pocus was in the final session, when a rose and some rice were placed on an altar. The majority of the time was spent learning the technique.
The technique is this: You shut your eyes and inwardly, silently, think a mantra. A mantra is just a word or a series of words. In this case a word. You think the word the way you would think any thought, in a relaxed, unforced way. Not like an angry inner shout; that defeats the object. You calmly, silently repeat, “mantra.” Then again: “mantra.” You continually think, “mantra.” If you notice another thought come, and it will, you don’t get wound up like you’re a Texan border guard and your own thoughts are Mexican fence hoppers; you just calmly return to thinking “mantra.” “Mantra” is just an example by the way, your word is secret. It is given to you by your teacher, and you mustn’t tell anyone else.
That was one of the hardest aspects of the process. I nearly went mad not telling my mantra to anyone else. I was like the protagonist in an Edgar Allan Poe story, demented by my secret knowledge, a metal pellet of metronomic guilt pinging off the bars in my mind. Even writing about it now makes me want to type it in a gaudy font made of lime-green letters, but I won’t because I’m so fucking spiritual. Apparently this desire to grass on your own mantra is common. I told a kid in the community school about it; she said she’d had it too when she’d first learned, and I felt relieved by the kinship. Then she went, “Yeah, but I was only seven.”
After a while, sitting in silence, the repetition o
f the mantra becomes natural or hypnotic. Sometimes, even now, it takes ages, like my own brain is an over-entitled and caffeinated lodger, banging down cups and whistling TV jingles. It’s fucking annoying. Honestly, sometimes I’m sitting, I’m sure looking double-Christ-like, but inwardly I’m thinking with the forensic specificity of a master forger an absolute facsimile of the Kylie Minogue song “I Should Be So Lucky.” How does my brain do that? It is the exact song, perfectly re-created, every synthetic beat and squeak rendered as authentically as if Kylie was inside my skull.
Amazing as it is that the brain can conjure up these neurological illusions, which on some subtle level are a physical reality, like they must be made of an electrical impulse which has a charge or a weight, it’s a fucking drag when I can’t voluntarily stop it. There is no limit to what can be imagined either; we can now in this moment command the mind to play the Kylie track, then instead of her singing it, have the words emerge from the mouth of an elephant in dark glasses. Your mind is doing it now. It exists. Then you can put your school’s hardest kid in there, mine was Jamie Dawkins (no relation), put him on the elephant’s back dressed as bin Laden, singing the harmonies. We have created that now with conscious energy. It has a charge and a weight; it is real and distinct from nothingness; the absence of that thought object has a different weight and charge.
Given that we live in infinite space (I don’t—I live in Shoreditch), the difference between that thought object as imagined and as reality, in our shared consensual material realm, is negligible.
I mean, if space is limitless, LIMITLESS, then the difference in size between an electron, an atom, a golf ball, a football, the moon, the Earth, Jupiter, is all irrelevant, because the context has no limit.
If you put a golf ball and a football on a table in front of you the difference in size seems significant. If you go to the other side of the room, less so. If you go down the street the difference is even less significant. If you looked from the moon it would be hard to notice. That might seem like a big jump but it isn’t because we are talking about a realm beyond contextualization. This is what exists in consciousness—a potentially limitless realm in which we can engineer and then project new realities.
The astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell said of his experience of viewing Earth from the moon: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’ ”
I love this quote for many reasons. One, because it illustrates that all the well-meaning talk of oneness, such as you have found in this book, is built upon an empirical reality. We’re all one, the human family; when you pull back to outer space or dive within to inner space, that becomes clear. I like that traveling to the moon was such an emotional and spiritual experience for Edgar, as I have always thought that astronauts would be tough military types that wouldn’t be given to such profound pronouncements.
Mostly, though, I love his violent conclusion that he’d like to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and take him to the moon. Firstly because to grab anyone by the scruff of the neck is an animal and implausible thing to do. I just felt the back of my neck and there’s barely any scruff to grab. Unless this politician had a particularly fat neck, Edgar would have to be content with an inch of skin between his thumb and forefinger, like he was holding a teacup; he might as well have his pinkie finger extended.
Then he’d have to kidnap the bloke, presumably from Washington, drag him all the way to Cape Canaveral, Florida, into the NASA HQ, presumably give him some basic space training, put him in a suit, a rocket, strap him in, spend a few days getting to the moon, then finally march him out and admonish him for his lack of perspective.
I don’t think he could sustain his indignation for that long. I reckon he’d start to feel a connection to the terrified politician at some point during that journey, possibly in the training section, where they’d have to acclimatize to zero gravity in a swimming pool.
Also, surely once Edgar got back to the moon and he looked back to Earth, his love of all the members of the human family would kick back in and he might feel too guilty to lay into the sobbing and vertiginous, undisclosed politician.
Among the small number of people who have seen our planet from space this sense of enlightenment is seemingly common. There are loads of comparable quotes that illustrate this strong sense of connection and fraternity. I chose Edgar D. Mitchell’s one because he’s the only astronaut who saw his epiphany as an impetus to snatch a senator and beat him up on the moon like an intergalactic Vito Corleone.
In meditation, through the repetition of your mantra, or in other techniques, with the focus of your attention on your breath, a candle, or a riddle, eventually thought relents. What is consciousness when thought abates? What I have experienced when I’m able to get through the inner tics and mental tricks that the ego uses to prevent transcendence is a warm relief. I had it today. At first when I closed my eyes, I was uncomfortable and had to adjust myself; my back, or legs or nuts, can feel taut or trapped and I can’t relax. I notice sometimes that I’m holding tension in my jaw or my shoulders; I consciously let it go. How can you be at peace if you are subtly exerting pressure, holding energy, somewhere in your body? The first condition is quiet, the second is comfort; then I can start.
Today the Monty Python “Lumberjack Song” was in residence in my head. I’d just watched it online and when I shut my eyes it vividly replayed. I didn’t try to kick the jaunty ditty and grinning Michael Palin off the carousel of thoughts; I instead focused on letting go of the tension in my jaw and pulling a trapped bit of ballbag out from between my legs. It was my own ballbag.
This management of anatomical minutiae completed, I began thinking the mantra. The mantra vied with Palin and my jaw for mental supremacy. I stay relaxed and detached; I don’t get aggressive about asserting the mantra. The temptation is to feel aggrieved that your own mind won’t do your bidding. Like Dr. Strangelove’s hand saluting a disintegrated Reich of previous contemplation. The point is, though, the object of focus is not relevant. If I become attached to the idea of a perfect inward incantation, that is an egoic act. The aesthetics of thought activity are unimportant. In my experience, the mystical qualities of the mantra—by which I mean that which is not known—are secondary to the hypnotic effect of repetition. To me it seems that eventually the busy, chattering “monkey-mind” eventually accepts that all that is happening is the repetition of a word and just sort of fucks off to sleep.
The Maharishi, and perhaps his version warrants more credence, given it was he who brought this technique to the West, described it thusly: If the mantra is the word “rose,” every time the word “rose” is repeated, the conscious mind in anticipation of the coming repetition moves closer to the unconscious source of thought that generates all mental phenomena. With each repetition, deeper goes the awareness that hears it, in preemptive increments, until eventually that awareness is submerged within the source and thus unified.
The Maharishi’s description is probably more scientific and prettier; go with whatever you want. The great American comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who has practiced TM for over thirty years, puts it into typically succinct terms: “It’s like plugging your phone into a charger twice a day for twenty minutes.”
These two twenty-minute interludes, one in the morning, one in the evening, also serve to remind me that there is more to life than what I’m doing and thinking, what I fear and desire, what I think of other people and what they think of me. During those times I experience something beyond those concerns and it’s a great relief.
My friend Meredith, who is archetypically “a wise woman”—if we were in a fairy tale, we’d meet in a wood—said to me, “Enlightenment is already present, how could it be oth
erwise?” meaning that the state of enlightenment, union, Christ-consciousness, or whatever, must be present already in the mind, at least the capacity for it. It is not manufactured or engineered; it is by relinquishing other stimuli or factors that this state can emerge.
“The kingdom of heaven is within,” said Jesus, perhaps in reference to the euphoric relief from earthly burden achieved through alignment with a preexisting but unutilized frequency of consciousness that carries you to the bliss that exists beyond self.
I experience that bliss when I meditate. It feels simultaneously relaxing and empowering. Actually, though, the awareness that it has been pleasant comes subsequently, because during a “successful” meditative experience there really isn’t a self to apply the labels of “relaxing” or “empowering.”
I wish I had it every time, but even after five years’ practicing, sometimes my scuttling mind will not yield, the jittery busybody of my inner museum cataloging and caterwauling, applying adjectives and conditions to external phenomena that would be best left alone.
An unexpected benefit of this process is an increased compassion for others, a dawning recognition of the connection between us all. Since meditating I feel that the intuitive connection to others that I’ve always felt has been somehow enhanced.
I’m lucky in that I have a mother who is pathologically loving and gentle. Who unfussily loves animals and children and tries to see the good in everyone—thank God, because in my case it was pretty well hidden. This perhaps-inherited positive trait, though, was redundant and unexpressed for much of my life as I was entangled in the sparkles and the spangles, mangled in the crackling drudge, addicted to attention and drugs.
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