by Karan Bajaj
Max walked out of his cave when such meditations ended, tired, dizzy yet elated. The universe was revealing its most fundamental truths to him. The truth about suffering was clear. The way out of it was even clearer. He was walking on the path of the sages now, feeling lighter, bathed in bliss and certitude. One energy vibrated everywhere, within and around him. The trees sprouting leaves with the arrival of spring, the blooming flowers, the melting snow, the clear, blue stream, the mountains in front of him, the pristine Ganges below him, the warmth of spring, the cold of winter, the bear that tried to maul him, the spiders and scorpions that slept in his cave, and he, Max, beneath the surface distinctions of name and form, they were all made of the same substratum—the one eternal consciousness.
At times during his meditation, he would feel the consciousness rise up inside him with an overwhelming physical force and cry for a release. Without thought, he would pick up a stone and carve images on the walls of the cave, stopping only when his palms bled. Later, he’d look at the pictures by the light of the fire. Trees enveloped in a calm, cooling wind, stick figures locked in an embrace, fantastical figures flying toward the sun, huge stormy waves in a sea, men and women in the throes of pain or in sexual ecstasy, he was drawing man and nature in all its glory and wretchedness. He had never been any kind of an artist before yet an entire universe seemed to be alive and craving expression within him.
With spring came more animals—first, the wolves, then the snow leopards. Max fetched water from the stream when the ice melted, sometimes careful to avoid dusk when the animals congregated there, sometimes too ecstatic after his meditation to care. The leopards would stare at him, ears cocked, eyes ablaze, their thick, coarse fur standing erect on their backs. Max no longer practiced samyama on the single energy connecting them. Perhaps they sensed it in him though, because they never approached him. Whenever he appeared, they would appraise him quickly, then return to drinking their water. Sometimes a young cub would nuzzle up to him but the mother never objected when Max petted or played with him. He gave them names from his past. The leopard who drank alone was Ramakrishna; the serious, thoughtful cub was Andre; the melancholic leopardess older than her years was Sophia. But eventually his deepening meditation put an end to that practice as well. For the instinctual desire to separate and hold on to individual identities was the root of suffering.
Leopards gave way to occasional tourists in summers, coughing and sputtering as they hiked up from Gomukh, the source glacier of the Ganges. They stopped dead in their tracks when they saw him, their mouths falling open in surprise.
“Who are you?” they would ask. “A saint? Some god?”
Max obliged for photographs but never spoke. The world wanted identification, separation, and categorization, everything he was trying to eliminate. Despite having spent nine months in complete seclusion, he was still far from losing his sense of self, from slipping into blissful union with consciousness. During his meditation, he wasn’t Max. He was the sum of all existence and knowledge, the singular energy he sought to become. However, this association ended when his meditation ended. When he arose, he was the same Max, lighter, more at peace, but his mind was still active, still pursuing the goal rather than having become the goal. Surely this couldn’t be the final state. The union with consciousness couldn’t be conditional on closing the eyes and concentrating. It should exist in himself naturally. He should feel its awareness in every moment, not a trancelike, self-induced state brought on by meditation.
Something was holding him back. Worse, this failure felt familiar. His bones were heavy with the knowledge of similar tantalizing glimpses in innumerable past lives but he had never been able to tear the veil apart. Of what use were trivial accomplishments like walking on water and levitating? With the right discipline, anyone could concentrate on the udana, the upward-flowing prana, making the body so light that walking on air became easier than planting a firm foot in the snow. And the hundred-year-old yogis who looked twenty-five did nothing more than trap their prana with bandhas to make the body a closed system that never decayed or aged. All this was easy. Simple perambulations of the body. This wasn’t his goal. Something had shifted inside him after the drought in the village. He didn’t crave peace for himself anymore. He wanted to reach the other side so he could bring back answers for everyone. This time, he wouldn’t let his body, his life slip away until he reached his goal. Max cut down on food and pranayama, and meditated with more concentration than ever before.
30
Summer gave way to a cold, dry fall. Max had long run out of his meager rations. Now the shoots and roots he had been living on began to wither away as well. He ate less and less but one day he knew he couldn’t hold his body together without more food. Max forced himself to stop meditating and reluctantly make the hike down to Gangotri village, disappointed that the body’s petty needs once again were interfering with his quest for transcendence.
A few hours of scrambling down the sharp ice and he reached the established trail. He sensed human presence some miles away. Images of an Indian couple, a tall guide wearing a hat, and two young porters swinging ice axes flashed through his mind in quick succession.
The idea of meeting tourists, with their questions and conversations, overwhelmed him. He walked swiftly for the next hour in silence, encountering nobody. When the images started flashing quicker and became more sharply defined in his mind, Max went off the narrow trail, down the steep precipice, forcing the prana into the bottom of his feet so the heat would make them stick to the ice. He squatted and crouched, along the slanting mountain, moving slowly toward the frozen river one hundred vertical feet below.
“Look, a baba.”
Above him, the group stood on the path. A couple, a tall guide, and two porters—exactly the images he had seen in his mind. They were more than fifty feet away but their words rang in his ears as if they were standing next to him.
“Oh God, how can anyone go down like that?”
“He is like Spiderman.”
They laughed, the harsh sounds assaulting Max’s ears. Just like the laughter of the people who had gathered around the food cart in New York had jarred him years ago. Max recoiled at the sharpness of the memory. Was he any closer to answering the questions that had bothered him then? Max quickened his pace.
“He looks a little mad.”
“Isn’t he a foreigner? Why do they come here? Craziness, man.”
“Must have fallen into some guru’s racket.”
“These Americans, Europeans are lonely, man. Loneliness drives you mad. That’s why I don’t want to leave India.”
“But just look at how fast he is going down.”
“Spiderman, Spiderman, Spiderman.”
Max reached the river. He could still hear their conversation from a hundred feet above over the noise of the river. He sprinted away, treading lightly on the thin ice. When the water appeared again, he walked over it without thinking. Suddenly aware that the travelers could take pictures, he glided onto the rocky river bank, and ran over the sharp stones. Their voices finally stopped ringing in his ears more than a mile into his run. He slowed to a steady pace again, mentally preparing himself for the sights and sounds in the village by invoking the chatter of his previous life.
When he arrived in Gangotri village, Max walked to a small shop selling food and supplies. The shopkeeper shooed him away. When it happened again at the next shop, Max stole a glance at the mirror outside an open-air restaurant. It had been almost a year since he’d seen a clear reflection of how he appeared to others. He had dropped another twenty or thirty pounds and looked thin and wasted in his torn clothes. His dark hair was long, unruly and matted, his arms and legs caked in mud, and his fingernails black from foraging. All across his hands and wrists, there were cuts and bruises, likely from the pine tree and the sharp edges of the rocks in the cave. They thought he was a beggar.
Max took damp money out of his pocket and walked back into the first shop. He opened
his palm to show the shopkeeper the money.
“I want to buy food,” said Max in Hindi, his voice sounding heavy and strange after months of silence.
The tall, lean shopkeeper, sitting on a chair in front of burlap sacks filled with grains, beans, and lentils, stared at him. He said something in the local mountain language.
Max concentrated on the man’s heart and heard the thought originate before it became sound in the man’s throat and words on his lips.
“You are young. Don’t waste your time like this. Work hard. Work is God,” the man was saying. “How much do you need?”
Max bought small bags of rice, kidney beans, and chickpeas, enough to last him several months. One day, the shopkeeper would understand. They would all understand. Max wouldn’t rest until he crossed over the boundary to the infinite.
Max walked past the small hotels, restaurants, and sundry shops, pulled despite himself to the sounds of conversation and laughter. He entered the Gangotri temple and sat cross-legged on the concrete floor in the open courtyard. A bald, orange-robed priest shaved the head of a small boy while his parents looked on indulgently. Men and women in colorful clothes prostrated themselves before a deity’s statue. A smiling couple came up to Max and offered him an apple. Max refused with folded hands. He took out the paper bags with rice and kidney beans from his backpack and put them next to him on the floor so people would know he had food. But they wouldn’t stop. Every few minutes, someone would stop by and offer him fruit or sweets or leftovers of a cooked meal. They were brimming with joy and wanted to share it with everyone, especially the lonely and destitute.
What happened 2 u Ace?
Max pushed away the images of Andre and Sophia that were creeping into his mind on seeing the living, breathing people around him. He couldn’t be distracted now. He had to work harder than ever before. He stood, gathered his supplies, and began his trip back up the mountain.
31
Max plunged himself into samyama with even more fervor after his visit to Gangotri. But the harder he tried, the more the faint glimmer of consciousness dancing in the corners of his mind began to fade. Instead, phantoms from his past arose from the blackness within him.
In the darkness of the cave, he saw once again Andre’s scared, confused eyes when he’d realized that his wheelchair wouldn’t fit into the narrow bathroom door of their apartment in the projects. Deep, painful abscesses had formed in Andre’s leg when he began crawling to the bathroom every day. Soon, they became infected, and his left leg had to be amputated. Max’s eyes welled up with tears at the memory of Andre sitting on his cracked wheelchair, one leg cut to its stump, another hanging useless. The images came in quick succession. His mother’s shrunken, jaundiced face as the cancer ate into her liver. Pitbull’s blood splashed over their building’s metal door after a rival gang member slit open his throat. The memorial dolls with missing arms and legs on the tree in St Ann’s Park, swaying in the wind.
I’m merely seeing the painting of the moon, Max; you have a chance at seeing the moon.
Often, he would stand on the cave entrance and stare at the half-moon above him, thinking of Anand’s words from years ago. Why was the truth still eluding Max? He was no closer to experiencing the peace and stillness of pure consciousness than he’d been when he had first started his journey. He thought of karma and the laws of cause and effect. Were these memories of pain that never left his side just the effect of the pain he had caused himself?
I hear this after giving my life to you both.
His mother’s shaking voice rang in his ears. Max had blamed her for their poverty, for getting pregnant with him at nineteen, for not planning her life better—all because he was angry at her after he abandoned Keisha. But it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t even known Keisha was pregnant. Max had been afraid to tell her because she had always wanted him to leave the projects and never look back. The baby’s cries resounded in the cave. Max put his hands over his ears. He had denied a life the chance to work out its karma. Could there be a worse crime? His mother had devoted her life to Sophia and him. Keisha had loved him. Sophia and Andre had cared for him. Yet he had abandoned everyone. All he had given them in return was pain.
For so many lives, Max had hurt, damaged, destroyed. A Scottish minister who left his young wife to live alone in the mountains. The Israeli woman who could never really love her children and resented them for caging her. Max shuddered as the images from his innumerable past lives arose in his mind. Was there an end to this endless cycle of causing and begetting suffering? He’d read of ascetics who inflicted pain upon themselves to speed up the universe’s retribution for their misdeeds rather than allow nature to take its course. Could penance be his salvation?
Late one winter afternoon when the snow pounded the cave and the temperature dropped several degrees below zero, Max raised his left arm and decided not to lower it again until he achieved his goal. He relished the searing pain in his muscles and resisted the urge to tighten and loosen his fist. He wouldn’t allow himself even the slightest relief. This time, he wouldn’t run away from his past the way he had at Ramakrishna’s ashram. The effects of his past bad karma had to be burnt away to dust. Only then would he be free from the bondage of cause and effect, destroy the individual and become the universal.
He kept his arm raised when he ate and performed his evening samyama. The stabbing pain went from his arm to his shoulder socket to his neck and skull when he lay down at night. Blood rushed to his forehead. His head pounded. Max looked up at the black stone roof of the cave and thanked the universe for his discomfort. He didn’t put his arm down that night. Finally, some choice he had made was working.
The next morning, Max went out of the cave to relieve himself. He struggled with unfastening and fastening his pants. When he came back in, he stripped off his clothes. He didn’t need them here anyway. The discomfort of the cold was also good.
The sharp burning sensation in his muscles turned into a blazing fire the next morning. Tears streamed down his eyes. Max vomited and felt a little better. By afternoon, it felt as if someone was sawing off his arm with a sharp knife. Electric shock waves ripped through his body. The images from his past receded into the growing red blur in his forehead. Yes, his penance was working.
By the next morning, the pain was steady and constant. Max struggled to light a fire with one hand, eventually succeeding in finding a jagged edge of a rock to rub the magnesium stick against. He lit a small fire and slept again after eating a bit of chickpeas and rice.
When he awoke in the evening, he could feel the old farmer-driver from the village driving a large, red tractor over his arm again and again, wanting to cut off every nerve, every vein in it. Shakti’s peeling laughter resounded in the cave. You won’t rest until you see him face-to-face, Max.
He looked at his arm with detachment. This pain wasn’t him. This body wasn’t him. The mind that classified this numbing, grating sensation as agony wasn’t him. He could overcome this. It was simple.
32
Max didn’t put his arm down through that month. His muscles withered. The pain refused to relent but he didn’t think much of it anymore. Melting snow and foraging for roots became more difficult with one hand so Max just ate less. Hunger was good, necessary. He couldn’t have left the cave, anyway. One storm crashed after another that winter. Max lit small fires to keep the snow from depositing on the entrance. The temperature dropped. One day, he caught a cold. He was more surprised than discomfited by it. This wasn’t supposed to happen. His body was immune to petty illnesses. Max did pranayama to expunge it but he couldn’t churn his abdomen at the same speed as before. His belly kept colliding against his spine, making him cry out in pain. The cold stayed. Another sign of purification. He lay down at the back of the cave waiting for it to pass.
A hazy fog filled the space between his eyes. He was slipping, falling into blackness, into infinity, progressing closer to his goal.
Max woke up after a day, may
be two. His throat was parched. He had eaten most of the snow on the cave floor so he forced himself to get up. Dizzy and spinning, he crawled to the cave’s mouth. Just a light snowfall. Max stumbled outside. He picked himself up, carefully keeping his left arm raised, and walked a little in the fresh snow. When he felt faint again, he knelt on the ice. The afternoon sun cast a reddish-orange shadow on the sea of white around him. Max cupped his palm and collected a few snowflakes. His tongue stung. He forced himself to eat more.
Clouds covered the sun. The white mountains turned a glittery silver in the fading light. The stream shimmered in the still air. He looked around. No sign of Baba Ramdas, no sign of anyone, just silence, pure stillness. This world, it was so soft, so beautiful. Max began to cry.
Through his tears, he crawled back inside the cave. The feathery whiteness below him was colored with specks of red. He turned around. A trail of blood followed him inside. Max inspected his body dispassionately. Something had scraped his thigh. A steady stream of blood trickled from it. He should get the herb that grew right behind the cave, the one that healed wounds. Maybe in the evening. All he wanted now was to lie down and fill his heart with the shining stream and silver cliffs. They were so symmetrical, so beautiful. Fresh tears came to his eyes.
A scorpion scuttled up his torso. Max didn’t want to brush it off and hurt it. He let it inch up his ribs to his neck and dry lips. Everything was one consciousness. Beautiful. Max closed his eyes. The scorpion made its way further up, opening its pincers wide. Max slept peacefully.
When he woke up, the cave was black. The scorpion had gone. He was alone, all alone. Just him and the infinite blackness. He should get the herb. He pushed himself up. His open wound stared at him. Deep, red, rich, alive, stunning. Max lay down again.