The Yoga of Max's Discontent

by Karan Bajaj

  • • •

  LATE ONE NIGHT in May, Max opened his eyes after his meditation to find the cave plunged in darkness. No moonlight danced on the entrance, no cliff shimmered in the distance. It must be later than he thought, way past midnight. His heart lifted. He had meditated through the night. Max hadn’t experienced this complete suspension of time in a while. Elated, he had lain down to sleep when he smelled a strange odor—a mix of damp cloth and burning rubber. Max went to the front of the cave to investigate. His feet touched something soft, bristly, and wet. He tried to pick it up in his hands. A grunt broke the silence.

  A bear.

  Max froze.

  The six-foot-tall bear hulked away from the front of the cave. Moonlight flooded in. It hadn’t been as late as he thought. Max stepped back, his eyes fixed on the silhouette of the bear in the soft white light.

  The bear looked around with its beady black eyes, shaking its head.

  Max stood still.

  The bear grunted again. Its eyes met Max’s. It came closer, thrusting its black nose, its confused face forward. Foul breath washed over him.

  Max inched back, maintaining eye contact. He slid his back against the cave wall, grasping for the magnesium stick. He couldn’t find it.

  The bear didn’t seem interested in Max. Crouching down, it was moving back slowly when its back hit the small cave entrance. Yelping, it charged forward.

  “Stop,” yelled Max, standing up and raising his hand.

  The bear paused three inches away from Max. It shook its fur, spraying ice flakes on Max.

  Max’s heart thudded. He breathed slowly.

  The bear moved back a little, lifting its front legs.

  Max lowered himself slowly and thrashed around for the stick.

  The bear raised itself higher.

  Max’s hands shook. He upturned the stones frantically.

  The bear’s head collided against the top of the cave. A roar shattered the night. It dropped to all four paws and charged at Max.

  Max stopped looking for the stick. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the bear, the air between them, the consciousness connecting them both.

  Tat Tvam Asi.

  I am That. One consciousness. One universal energy.

  A wisp of cool air enveloped him.

  Shuffling steps. A shower of ice.

  Max increased the intensity of his samyama, drowning out all sounds and sensations, just concentrating on an image of the furry face, wide eyes, and black nose in his mind.

  I am He.

  We are one.

  An eternity passed. Or a minute. When he opened his eyes, the bear was at the mouth of the cave.

  Max stood up, drowned in a wave of compassion for the scared, confused life in front of him. He picked up the magnesium stick lying below him and the knife beside it. He struck a flare and walked calmly to the front of the cave.

  The bear turned around.

  Max stepped outside with him.

  The bear ran toward the stream.

  The chiseled cliff face shimmered like a ring in the moonlight. The boulder sparkled, dripping with snow.

  The bear disappeared into the night.

  Max’s eyes swept over the moonlike landscape, the ancient rocks eroded by centuries of glaciers, tall, still, yet breathing and alive. Not a whisper for miles. Max turned around and walked inside the cave. He didn’t know if it was good karma or samyama that had made the bear leave. But he knew now why he had struggled with his meditation thus far. He had lost the life-and-death urgency that had brought him to the Himalayas. His hiking trip was over now. It was time to get back to work.

  29.

  From then on, Max focused less and less on the mundane business of living. When he couldn’t collect pine needles and build a fire, he fasted. If he ran out of water, he ate snow directly without worrying if he was getting enough to be fully hydrated. Spiders and scorpions stopped bothering him when he left them in peace. If rainwater seeped into his cave and wet his bedsheet, he accepted it for what it was and didn’t build a fire to dry it. He did pranayama only on alternate days and stopped his routine of washing clothes every three days. Instead, he spent more and more of his time immersed in meditation. Early in the morning, he sat outside the cave and performed samyama on the sun, flowing his entire living, breathing energy into it. His skin blazed and he became one with it and the stars, planets, and galaxies that surrounded it.

  In the beginning, there was no space, no time—just a shimmering, vibrating energy, the sum of everything good and evil, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, active and dormant, containing millions of possible universes within it. The energy fluctuated, helpless with its desire to experience itself, and out of the hundreds of possible outcomes, the universe we live in came to be. The energy now lived both within and without the universe. The elements in the manifested universe burst, exploded, contracted, evolved, forming combinations, then rejecting them, forming them again powered by the intelligence of this consciousness and governed by the singular law of cause and effect, action and reaction. Hot lava gushed within him, and the sun, the moon, the entire visible universe emerged from tiny, radiating elements. Billions of years later, life sprang out of molecular mass. From single cell to multicell organisms to animals and man himself, all were made of the same substratum, each linked by the same vibrating, intelligent energy, separated by their sense of I, governed by the same law. Every effect had a cause, every cause an effect.

  Max studied man’s cause and understood it was the same as that of all animate and inanimate cells—the original desire of consciousness to manifest itself. He saw the desire, a shimmering, vibrating burst of light, manufacturing a body to find an expression. The body with its five senses interacted with the world, creating more desire, and the desire individuated itself in another body when the old body was worn out. And so the cycle went. The human paradox was now clear to him. The nature of life was desire, and the nature of desire was its infiniteness and its inability to be satisfied. Earlier, it had been necessary to further evolution, to allow consciousness to express its full potential. Now when man had reached the peak of self-awareness, it was just an infinite circling loop. As long as it lasted, man would never be satisfied and would always be subject to the cycle of suffering. Again and again Max would be born; again and again he would live, want, suffer, and die.

  Max arose from such samyamas shaking, his body ablaze with energy, too exhausted to even walk up to the stream to collect fresh snow. He would recover after a few days of rest and practice samyama on the people who had found their way out of the cycle: Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad. And when he merged with them in meditation, the answers emerged—simple, logical, and decisive.

  The way out of the cycle was to sublimate the I principle, relinquish all individual desire, to restrain the naturally outgoing mind fueled by the senses and turn it inward. Once it focused within, the mind saw its real nature of pure consciousness and rejected the individual desires and thoughts surrounding it. Jesus had sublimated his desire with helpless compassion for his fellow beings; the Buddha had silenced his craving with intense meditation and the practice of yoga; Muhammad had done it by forgetting himself in his complete devotion to his God. They had all become vessels of pure consciousness without any thought of their own individuality. Different paths, but they converged. All fingers pointing to the same moon.

  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. With the arrival of spring, the trees sprouted leaves, the flowers bloomed, the snow melted. All this—the clear blue stream, the mountains in front of him, the pristine Ganges belo
w 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 himself—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 in 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. 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.

  “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, though lighter, more at peace; yet 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 one’s eyes and concentrating. It should exist in him 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 pull the veil aside. 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 get back answers for all. 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 ago 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.

  After a few hours of scrambling down the sharp ice, 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 slid off the narrow trail and 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 a 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 Spider-Man.”

  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 moved down faster.

  “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.”

  “Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Spider-Man.”

  Max reached the river. He still heard 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 the travelers could take pictures, he glided onto the rocky riverbank 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, 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 himself in the mirror outside an open-air restaurant. It had been almost a year since he’d seen 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 were caked in mud, and his fingernails were black from foraging. All across his hands and wrists, there were cuts and bruises, likely from the pine trees 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 becam
e 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 got up, packed up 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.