At the centre of the Garden was God: I mean there was this guru who was known as God: I mean some of the inmates of the Garden referred to him, at least part-jokingly, as God: I am going to go on calling him God because one of the points of the Garden, as I have said, was to do with jokes – how to make jokes come alive like a finger or a bird. God had once been a professor of philosophy at somewhere like Madras: he had seen people around him setting themselves up as makeshift gods – telling people what to do, deciding the world was this or that or the other, shutting their eyes or blaming others when the world went its own way. So what do you do about this absurdity (yet terrible necessity?) of human beings setting themselves up as gods: for do you not, after all, if you think you know, have to tell others what to do? You can make a joke of it, perhaps: you can let yourself be called God: but then laugh at yourself and tell others to laugh when the world, as it does, goes its own way.
God had set himself up five or six years earlier by this hot sea and when I arrived a thousand people lived in the Garden constructing, maintaining, expanding, making it work: another two thousand or so came in from outside each day to listen to God, to laugh, to try to learn about themselves and perhaps by this – by seeing themselves as something of a joke – by this part of them, at least, to become like gods. The Garden was set in about ten acres of grounds within which, as well as the enormous hall, were dormitories, eating places, meeting places, workshops – mostly prefabricated buildings set among paths and shrubs. People from outside came in each day on foot, by ferry, by bicycle, by rickshaw: they came from the town and from the village which was on the road to the bridge inland over the estuary. There was also an encampment of thatched huts where people stayed between the Garden and the sea. Each morning it was the custom for God to appear in person to talk to his acolytes: there were also sessions each afternoon (it was during one of these that I had arrived) when his recorded voice came down from loudspeakers in the ceiling like seeds or birdshit from trees.
In some respects I suppose the Garden was not so different from other ashrams that have sprung up by this hot sea: I mean there have always been teaching communes in India, but recently there have been kinds flocked to by the people from the West – where gurus talk about what they say cannot be talked about; where people treat them like gods the more they say they are not gods. What was different about the Garden, I think, was just that the people there saw so much of all this in terms of a joke: how could it not be? in what other style, indeed, could one talk about the godliness that one said could not be talked about – a joke being that which brings together, illuminates, things which rationally remain separate; which releases energy like a spark between poles. You would be walking along a path in the Garden and you would see people with their somewhat mad archaic faces suddenly double up with laughter; as if they had been struck by some sort of lightning within; the lightning being the flash that lit up both their own absurdity and their wonder, I suppose, at their seeing this. Words are ridiculous: you have got to use words: so use them for what they are. Then, with luck, you are happy. And perhaps there are wing-beats swirling up the dust: the finger pointing from somewhere just outside the frame of trees.
So when I arrived that hot afternoon and there was the voice coming down from the ceiling of the enormous hall – the bodies spread out on the concrete floor like things fallen haphazardly but also precisely arranged: like pieces of sculpture (for what else is art except that which gives the impression of something fallen from heaven and yet exact: is it not this that happens when you are painting a picture? what you discover is what is already there, and yet you have been free, it is your creation) – when I arrived that hot afternoon I sat with my back against a pillar of the enormous hall and the woman who had brought me there left me; but I felt as if she were around some corner; and the voice was like bits of light coming down.
‘Humans have reached a moment in their history when for the first time they can destroy themselves: destroy themselves not just as individuals or as groups but as a species utterly. Humans, of course, have always had the ability to destroy: they have had to, to stay alive. Enemies have had to be fought; forces that would have destroyed humans have had to be destroyed. But now, the forces that would destroy humans are humans themselves.
‘Two thousand five hundred years ago humans began to glimpse something of this: it has been said – There is a moment when the world stopped smiling. You can see it in their works of art, their sculpture. Before this, humans had represented themselves as walking forwards like proud animals: what does it matter if they destroy? they have to, to live: this is their nature. Then some darkness, some realisation, comes down on them quite suddenly. There has evolved some inward eye: some knowledge that if you destroy others you are in the process of destroying yourselves: you are connected. But still, is not destruction in your nature? Is it not true you have to destroy in order to stay alive?
‘Two thousand five hundred years ago you see the pain coming down; there is an impossibility here, humans sense they are trapped by the very same mind, the rationality, that sees that they are trapped. There have been these patterns instilled into them from childhood – to defend yourself you have to attack; to protect yourself you have to blame others and not yourself. Yet you also see, suddenly, that it is yourself that you attack: you look around – it is by yourself that you are trapped. Things both are your fault, and are not: you are free, but you cannot order things.
‘People in the West saw this most tragically – that they were helpless, yet they had the impression of being free. They were driven by the forces of animals, and yet there was part of them that could see this and did not want it: this part of them was like gods. But what could they do? – cut out eyes, liver, heartbeat? They could make up rituals, blinkers, dogmas, to comfort the terror and pain. There were many in the West at this time who said it would have been better never to have been born.
‘But two thousand five hundred years ago, just at this time when humans at large seemed to become aware of the trap they were in in their minds, there were also one or two, in the East mainly – mutations, perhaps, who had managed to remain alive in an environment that must have seemed hostile to them – who saw from their very consciousness of the predicament what might be done to make it bearable; even to transcend it. For is not this also an observable pattern of humans, of the world, that each catastrophe, or awareness of it, seems to have within it seeds that might fall on to new ground and grow? There were these few people scattered throughout the world – Buddha, Lao-tzu, Mahavira, Zoroaster – who saw that, of course, you destroy yourself by destroying others; you do not get wholeness by antagonism; you do not use the mind to get out of the traps of the mind. You need to give up, give over, to drop or rise to another level. You have to become detached in the way that you now know one part of you is able to be detached – that part which can see how you are trapped. You can float free, as it were, with the whole of you like this: you can become an observer, a listener, a witness: you can become a watcher of yourself in the way that you can be a watcher of others. Then you find a whole new landscape has opened up; it is not, after all, that you are detached; you are part of a whole network of that which is detached; and so you are both detached and not detached. It is difficult to talk of this because words have evolved to deal with the past life that you will have forsaken: but what were old impossibilities, predicaments, can now be held in paradoxes.
‘This knowledge has been there, available for those who choose, for two thousand five hundred years. Always there have been teachers. But people have been free to choose for themselves, or not.
‘Now, if humans are to survive, this is no longer a matter of individual choice.
‘What is happening now is something of the kind that happened two thousand five hundred years ago: either humans will make a leap, a quantum leap, in their consciousness of the world and of themselves – or they will not. But this time if they do not, they will be destroyed.
‘Have you noticed how in paintings it is sometimes the animals – the horses, the dogs, the tigers – who look out from the frames as if they know much more, and are wiser, than the humans – as if it were not they, but the confusions of humans, that cause the trap? There is a Christian myth that by humans accepting the redemption of themselves the animal kingdom will be redeemed: but it is also the other way round: we need not fear our animal nature; it is by our recognition of it that we will not be trapped and may become whole; part of the whole.
‘There is a story by Heinrich von Kleist about humans not being viable in the way that animals and gods are viable: in order to stay alive, humans have to go right round the world and into their garden again by the back way.’
I was sitting with my back against one of the pillars at the edge of the enormous hall. There were the bodies precisely and at random scattered and ordered on the floor.
I thought – We have been tipped over on to this strange level like those sticks, or dice, which you throw and then observe: through what has been by chance, you think you have a glimpse into the ordering of the future.
Bodies fall this way or that; they fly, or land on pavements out of windows.
I wondered whether the woman with the fair round face had waited for me. The voice had stopped. People in ones and twos began to leave the enormous hall.
I did not know what to do. That white light had come down. Where do you go when you see there is nowhere to go that is not a theatre?
The hook that had been for so long tugging at my throat had got me, it seemed, to the foot of this voice from the ceiling: I now lifted my head: gritted my teeth: it was as if, yes, the hook was being taken out: I seemed to be having a small fit. There was cold air coming in through the holes of my wounds: I opened my mouth: there was some sort of scream: I thought – or is this like music? Or I was one of those pieces of sculpture being discovered in the stone but it was being hit and hit by the chisel and was making its protest to the sky; do not sculptors love figures making their protest to the sky! I did not want to move: I did not want to do whatever it was to grow and become human: there seemed some obscenity even (was this what the voice had suggested?) in the business of survival. There had been a time in my childhood when I had been left alone in the house after my parents had tricked me into not taking me somewhere with them: I had heard my father say – She’ll get over it. But I had said to myself – I will not. I will stay in the dust for ever.
I did not know what I was doing in this enormous hall. I was the child on the edge of a bed; the cold air was like fire: there were figures in white coats advancing with sticks to push into your throat; your eyes.
Why should I not be one of the bodies spread on the pavement; to be picked up and put in a barrow?
The woman with hair that was like an aura of light came and sat cross-legged beside me on the concrete floor. She arranged her golden robe across her knees. It was as if she were preparing some space for me. She put her arm round me and pulled me towards her; but this time she went on pulling me, as if there were some task to be done, something almost mechanical on the workshop floor of the enormous hall. She seemed to be trying to get me on to her lap: this did not seem possible; I was too large. I was an old body, dangling, being pulled and bumped up a rock-face. After a time I found myself half on and half off her lap. I lay there quite easily. I had my knees up by my chin; my head against her legs. I thought – You mean, this is no obscenity? There was that hard rather violent taste and smell. It was in my mouth, like a finger. I held my mouth open. She still did not speak.
Just in front of my face, where it lay on her lap, was one of her feet, where she sat cross-legged. I thought – Her toe is like one of those toes of a Pope or a Buddha which people crawl to lick or to suck –
– Of course, a toe is like a breast.
She said ‘Go on. You do what you like.’
People who came to the Garden had usually suffered some catastrophe in their lives; how else would they have been tipped out of the particular niches of their minds?
I was taken to one of the thatched huts in the scrubland between the Garden and the sea. The hut was round, with mud-brick walls, like a hut in any tropical country. Inside there were three double bunks; stools and a low table and a charcoal brazier by the door.
Living in the hut into which I moved there were four other girls and one man; we did not come to know each other well; one of the points of the Garden was that it was ourselves we should try to come to know. We were told – Many of the catastrophes in our lives had been caused by our taking to be people what were shadows of our own projection: we could not get to know other people until we knew ourselves.
The four girls in the hut into which I moved were called Ingrid, Samantha, Gopi and Belle. Ingrid was a German who had been on the fringe of some terrorist group; she had spent time in jail. Samantha was an Australian who had had cosmetic surgery which had gone wrong and one of her breasts was rock-hard and larger than the other. Gopi was a small American girl who wore headbands like a Red Indian. Belle was Irish and pregnant, and had one or two children being looked after by her mother at home.
The man, or boy, was called Sylvester: he was Scandinavian: he had long fair hair and looked like the figurehead of a ship. It was usually he who did the cooking. He would sit by the brazier half in and half out of the door and would sing sad songs in his gutteral language. (Well, why is it women who are the figureheads of ships?)
When I was first taken to the hut there was no one there and it was, yes, like the mock-up of some nest: there were clothes and blankets over the floor: there was that smell which seems to be a mixture of fish and stale bread. One of the bottom bunks seemed to be free; it was used as a shelf for tins and plates. I thought – I shall lie on the tins like a fakir to demonstrate my goodwill: or would this be seen as self-destructive?
How shall I describe life in the Garden, and in the hut: one of the purposes of the Garden was that not much should seem to be going on. Growth occurs, doesn’t it, when nothing seems to be happening: drama is to do with violence and death. You can describe easiest what is to do with destruction: language is not for what goes on quietly, behind one’s back, in the dark.
How much do you know about this sort of thing – this Zen thing, Buddha thing, Tantra thing, Tao thing? (I mean you or you: I know about you!)
You have to become emptied, hollowed out, like a flute: then God can play you.
People have been saying this, yes, for centuries: they’ve also been saying it can’t be said.
God is there, inside you, outside you: you get rid of the barriers of the ego, and you become part of the whole.
Put it into words and it is not quite there: do not try to put it into words and how can it be known?
So you make shots at it, don’t you, and let them go. Every now and then you look round; and one or two are on the target.
In our hut, in the evenings, we would go about our business as if we were denizens of some shrine – oil-lamps like fireflies flickered; there was the smoke perhaps of incense; what we were honouring, I suppose, was just a nothingness so that something that might be ourselves might grow in the dark. There is always a nothingness, is there not, within a holy of holies. Ingrid w
as a long lean German girl who would take her clothes off and lie on her stomach on her top bunk; she was like a leopard up a tree: she would let a paw hang down. Gopi would climb up like a monkey on to Ingrid’s back; she would sit astride her to massage her; she would press on ribs and shoulders, getting flowers out of stone, her own small breasts like arrows pointing down. Samantha would do exercises on the floor, wrapping an ankle, or a knee, round the back of her neck so that she became like one of those puzzles which make globes or cubes out of bits of slotted wood. When Belle came in she was like blown leaves; lamps were apt to go out; there was the impression of cats being swept along by broomsticks. Sylvester, in the doorway, would hang on to the legs of his brazier until Belle had passed by: then he would continue with his stirring, or poking about with forks, like someone trying to demonstrate a more practical form of witchcraft.
There was a plastic washbasin on a stand in the hut; a communal tap in the space between four or five huts. There was a building with latrines that people tried to avoid. We wandered off, with bundles of clothes to wash, down to the estuary.
There was one evening when Belle swept in with more violence than usual and one of the chains, or belts, that she wore round her skirts like grappling irons caught on the string of beads that Sylvester wore round his neck: Sylvester fell back, was dragged, like some victim behind a cart. The pan that he had been holding, containing hot oil, shot into the air: Gopi and Ingrid, on the top bunk, thrashed about like people attacked by bats. Samantha, enrapt in the lotus position on the floor, her eyes closed, did not see that a drop of hot oil had landed on her one large breast. Smoke arose from it: a black hole slowly appeared; we watched transfixed. I thought – For the seventh level of consciousness, it is best to have a plastic breast?
Judith Page 12