This resonated for me. Hadn’t I experienced moments when I intuited this? As an adolescent, I had often heard some other voice in my head, offering a dispassionate commentary on my actions. Even in the depths of my angst, that voice would arise, cool and appraising.
‘I think the psychologists call that dissociation,’ Martin said wryly. ‘They have no model of the transcendent, or of the god within. It’s too radical, too confronting an idea for the Western mind. And, it has to be said, too open to abuse if the individual is not on a disciplined path and under the guidance of a teacher. Without a teacher it can become what psychology calls inflation, an ungrounded sense that “I am God”.
‘The teacher begins by taking us into a protective cocoon where we can begin to feel our way. He, or in your case she, can relieve feelings of emptiness or isolation, can be a refuge that gives us relief from pain. But if we persist under her guidance we will be forced to confront our vanity and self-righteousness. What Freud didn’t see was the later stages of the practice, which go beyond that infantile shelter. That’s just the beginning, just as childhood is a beginning, not a phase you stay in all your life. The meditative path is one where the psychic residues of the infantile state must at various times be gratified, then confronted, and ultimately abandoned. At first the teacher gratifies them for you, then she pushes you to confront them. That’s when the going gets heavy. That’s when more is asked of you. And that’s when some people give up.’
‘So you move from a position of early dependence to some other state?’
‘That’s the idea. Meditation can begin as a narcissistic exercise, a way of propping up the wounded ego. It can give rise to egotistical thoughts. “I am special, other people are ignorant.” New Age self-righteousness.’
I could see that this might have been the case at first, in the early days, when I started to feel smug, and even superior, but not now. Since the temporary euphoria of my baffling initiation I had had too many experiences of my own limitations, too many of what I now thought of as my mad Oliver moments.
‘And then it becomes about the exploration of that something else?’
‘Uh-huh. But how do you know if you’re not deceiving yourself? Are not delusional?’
‘Only you can figure that out. Do you trust your experience, or don’t you?’
‘How do I know if I can trust my experience?’
‘Just keep meditating, Rick. Do that and everything else will sort itself out. You don’t have to believe in anything. Just do the practice.’
‘To do the practice you need to believe in it.’
‘No, you don’t. You need faith, and that’s a different thing. Belief is clinging to a set of doctrines, usually based on what someone else has said. Faith is opening the mind, without preconceptions, to whatever comes along. Faith is a plunge into the unknown. Faith is what underpins any science that’s not dogmatic. Faith accepts that we cannot know everything and can control only a little. We surrender our need for certainty.’
‘But you believe in certain things.’
‘I do. Or, rather, I know them from my practice. But that doesn’t mean you have to. Whatever I tell you won’t stick. You have to find out for yourself.’
‘Then why are we talking?’
Martin laughed. ‘Who knows? You’ve turned up, so we’ve talked. Things just happen.’
For the next twenty-one weeks I walked with Martin almost every Saturday, and in that time he instructed me in the rudiments of Eastern mysticism. It was not my habit at the office to stop for lunch, but on the Monday after that first meeting I walked to an office supplies shop on High Street and spent a good twenty minutes looking at notebooks. I was drawn almost immediately to a medium-sized ring-bound journal with a bright red plastic cover; I liked the look and the weight and feel of it. I hadn’t owned a notebook since I was a boy, and the very idea of handwriting was enough to give me a rush. I had forgotten the promise of the blank page, and I felt youthful again, ready to be initiated into an as yet unwritten scripture: not a diary, nothing so banal, but a playful scroll, a white space of possibility. I bought a dozen of the notebooks and took them home that night. When I stacked them on my desk they seemed to emit their own aura.
Every Saturday, in the evening when I arrived home, or sometimes the following morning, I would make notes of my conversations with Martin, never wholly confident of their accuracy. Whatever Martin said sounded simple and convincing but the next day I couldn’t recall it precisely, or only a flattened-out version of it. In the translation into my own phrasing something always escaped, some spark of energy and conviction, some gleam of intensity that was Martin. This bothered me, but when I complained of it to Martin he was offhand. ‘You don’t need to remember anything,’ he said.
For Martin it was all about the practice, but when I pressed him he did agree to recommend some reading, beginning with Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. It seemed at first an odd choice but I soon discovered the logic of it. In the nineteen-fifties Huxley had taken mescalin and it changed him, induced in him something that he described as a sacramental view of reality. It was, said Martin, not unlike what I had experienced in the bottleshop, only more prolonged, more intense, more lurid in its detail.
From this, Huxley developed a model of the brain as a kind of filter, a reducing valve for a reality that is overwhelmingly complex and multilayered. When we look at a table we see a table but it’s really a pattern of vibrating atoms; if we saw everything in this way all the time, saw the whole world as a cosmic dance of energy, we would not be able to function. The brain had evolved as a mechanism to filter information so that we can process it in a manageable way. What comes out the end of the valve is, in Huxley’s words, a mere trickle of consciousness. But every so often we get a glimpse of the ‘more’, as when drugs open the cortex and we get to see what lies beyond our limited perception. We perceive the wondrousness of things, what the mystics cognise as the vibratory hum of a divine consciousness, an energetic maelstrom that Huxley calls the Mind at Large. Something that is transcendent, yet at the same time present to us as ‘a felt immanence, an experienced participation’.
These last words came closest to describing my experiences with Sri Mata. Since my first meeting with her, and on my good days, I had begun to feel that I participated in the world in a new way, as if she had drawn a magnet over my field to realign my internal compass. She lived in my head now as a presiding presence, but it was as if she had always been there, as if I had known her before and it was only now that I had become able to ‘see’ her. And in enabling this re-cognition, she had altered the way I saw everything else, had opened the valve a little wider.
As time passed, my walks with Martin became the fulcrum of my week. I looked forward to them. I looked forward to other things as well – I was far from being a recluse – but not in the same way. She had given me a field of meaning and for two hours on a Saturday afternoon I was able to inhabit it fully, without distraction. And while there were hours of earnest debate with Martin, there were also times when we strolled in companionable silence. Sunlight filtered through the leaves of the feathery wattles and the boys shouted into the dusk. They seemed always to be there, lofting their ball high into the hazy air and swearing with careless vehemence if they misjudged its flight. Sometimes they would aim the ball straight at Martin and each time I would feel my temper rise. There was a needling quality to these gambits but Martin was unfazed and would enter momentarily into the game. One evening, as we left the park, we came upon the boys beside the western entrance. They were sitting on top of the old brick ovens, smoking. One of them called out. ‘Hey, Martin!’
Martin waved.
‘You know them?’ I asked.
‘In a fashion. The first time I ran into them they tried to mug me but we’ve progressed from there.’
I wondered what this ‘progress’ had involved. ‘Perhaps you should invite them to a yoga class,’ I said.
‘I’ve tried that.
I think the idea of it scared them. I’d have more luck with martial arts.’ And he told me of how a year earlier he had approached a state juvenile detention centre and offered to teach weekly classes of yoga and meditation. But the authorities had passed. Martin shrugged. ‘Too soon.’
And yet, I could see, these boys wanted to get to know Martin. They prodded at him; they sensed there was something there for them, even if they didn’t know what it was. Perhaps it was the tattoo on his bicep, a badge of credibility. And, had they known it, they might even have liked the translation from the Sanskrit: Salutations to the destroyer and re-creator of worlds.
This was the intriguing thing about Martin: he could be so ordinary, ordinary in a good way, in a way that I could never manage. When I watched him kick a ball I reflected on the fact that in no way was he exotic. She was not a normal human being, that much I was sure of, but Martin was not so removed that I couldn’t measure myself against him. Only four years separated us in age, and before anything else we were men together, and men from a common background. What lay between us was the depth of Martin’s experience. Above all, I envied his naturalness, for it seemed that if ‘spiritual’ progress meant anything, it meant a natural and spontaneous embrace of the moment, an embrace that was generous in its response to others, unfettered by any painful self-consciousness. Wherever he was, Martin seemed at home. One afternoon when we were discussing meditation, he stopped suddenly and said, ‘Sit here and meditate with me now.’
‘Here?’ We were out in the open, not even under a tree. I glanced across at the boys who were nearby.
‘They’re alright. They’re used to me. I often sit here.’
But I baulked. I would feel like a fool, and even though I knew that this was what I most desired – to be a happy fool and not to care – I was an ocean away from that particular landing.
‘Well,’ remarked Zoe, one Saturday evening in autumn as I lit the barbecue on the deck, ‘these talks with Martin always put you in a good mood. If I were a suspicious woman I’d think maybe you had a mistress.’ Indeed, my walks with Martin did enhance my mood. I felt at last that I was coming to grips with the core of the riddle; that slowly, strand by strand, I was unravelling a knot that had sat between my shoulder blades for a very long time.
One school holiday, when I mentioned that Zoe and Luke were away, Martin invited me to his house for dinner. In no time at all he prepared a simple meal of kichari – ‘I lived on this at the ashram’ – with a delicious side dish of coconut chutney, strong on the chilli he had grown on his balcony and dried above the sink. And he had no objection to me opening a bottle of wine, though he declined to share it.
While Martin was stirring the rice and lentil mixture, an enormous black cockroach flew at him, and he swatted it so that it dropped to the floor in a sudden dive. Then he ground it with the heel of his bare foot. You could hear the crunch.
I couldn’t resist. ‘And the sanctity of all life?’ I asked.
‘I’ve given this a lot of thought.’
‘And?’
‘And I make an exception for cockroaches.’ With this he ladled the kichari into two deep bowls and set them down on the table.
That night over dinner, relaxed by the intimacy of the occasion, not to mention the wine, I asked Martin about his past. What had brought him to a fate so unlikely? Where had he grown up?
‘All over the place,’ he replied. His father had been a major in the army and the family had moved around from base to base. He was a normal kid, he said, only interested in girls and surfing, and he didn’t get on with the Major, who ran the home like a barracks. ‘He had rules about everything,’ said Martin. ‘He was afraid, afraid that without his rules he wouldn’t know who he was.’
I nodded. I knew the type.
At the age of twenty, he continued, he dropped out of a science degree and began to drift up and down the coast with friends, doing seasonal work, living out of a van and hitting the surf as often as possible. ‘I think I knew then I wasn’t cut out for normal life.’
‘Who is?’
‘Well, some adapt better than others.’
The turning point had been an experience on acid. He was staying with his girlfriend in a caravan park in Kiama while his van was being repaired. Often he and his friends would drop a tab on the beach, lie on the sand and stare up at the clouds, comparing notes. Always for him these experiences were benign. But one evening when the weather was wet and steamy and it was just him and the girl in their cramped and gloomy caravan, they lay on the bed naked, dropped a tab of acid, and within what seemed only minutes he had plunged into a vortex of horror.
The caravan had a long wall mirror at the foot of the bed and when he looked into it he saw that he was melting, his whole body liquefying. First his head dissolved into a puddle of viscous red and yellow fluid that pooled on the sheet. Then it began, slowly, to trickle over the edge of the bed, and drip onto the floor. Next the right arm, then the left, the two legs together, until only his molten torso remained on the bed, and he could see his own heart beating on the sheet, a lump of pulsating meat. Before long, this too began to melt, and the horror of it was paralysing; he tried to shut his eyes but was unable even to blink. Any minute now there would be nothing left of him, he would be just a tiny speck in a gaping void that grew bigger and darker by the second.
Then, in the midst of his terror, a thought came to him: who is observing this disintegration? Something or someone remained. Some other self was present, something larger than the scared little Martin figure melting on an unmade bed. Then he knew: at his core there was a part of him that was indestructible, some other self, and here it was, quietly observing this lurid fantasy of the brain.
In the months that followed, a single question possessed him. Who was that observer? Where did he come from?
‘I’d never been a reader, but after that I began to read whatever I could get my hands on, all the acid literature I could find, and then some. What was the brain chemistry on this?’
‘And what is the brain chemistry?’
Ah, he said, this was a big question, and if I wanted to pursue it he would give me some books. But in the end those books had failed to satisfy him. The brain was just a transmitter, like a television set, infinitely more complex but a transmitter nonetheless. The question was: where were the programs coming from? From that moment a new restlessness took hold of him. He returned to the city, resumed his studies and worked part-time as a security guard, and occasionally as a bouncer at a club in George Street. One evening he wandered into a yoga class in Chinatown run by Tadeusz, an eccentric Pole and former martial arts instructor. They hit it off. Within three years he had become one of Tad’s assistants. At the age of twenty-seven, he set off with a backpack for India.
I couldn’t imagine Martin as a bouncer and said so.
He smiled. ‘The Major taught me to box,’ he said. ‘Insisted on it. Not that that’s much help when you’re wrangling a crowd of drunks. It just gives you a false sense of security.’
I was distracted, and thinking of my youth. ‘I never got into drugs,’ I said.
‘Never?’
‘Just dope in my twenties, nothing more. I was too much of a control freak. I didn’t trust the suppliers.’
‘Well, I suspect they were more reliable then than now.’ And in any case, Martin added, the problem with drugs was that they were not practical, just a temporary holiday from normality. Once the effect wore off you were back where you started, back to your old neuroses. What you needed was a practice that could weaken old behaviour patterns and destructive ways of thinking, weaken them permanently. You needed to recondition the neocortex. ‘You have to change the game, Rick, change it for good.’
‘The game?’
‘The Rick game, the Martin game, all that accumulated shit that builds up from childhood. The crazy wiring of the ego. The ego is a necessary organising principle that gets us through our day, but as we age we begin to tire of it, we tire of our
own constructed persona. We start to experience it as baggage. This is the paradox of human maturation. Once the ego is established, in maturity it becomes stale, a burden. It tires of the game. After a while it begins to struggle for its own extinction.’
This was one of the things, he said, that in later life made us restless, and could lead to erratic or bizarre behaviour, a desire for radical change.
Later that night, writing up my notes, I found myself lingering over a phrase, the burden of personality. I recalled a book I had read not long after I met Zoe, a book I had found on Joe’s shelves. It was a reflection on the nature of melancholy. In it the author had described his claustrophobia, his sense of being smothered by the barnacle weight of his own personality. He had used that same word, had compared his state of mind to that of a man trapped beneath the hull of a capsized boat, unable to dive deeper and swim free. Maybe this was a male thing. Did women feel it? At a certain age you felt the encumbrance of the identity you had constructed for yourself, or had thrust upon you: all those leathery accretions of habit, those barnacles on the psyche that are both you and not you. And you felt the need to be rid of them, to have it all – this construct, ‘Richard Kline’ – dissolved in whatever merciful solvent you could find.
One morning, early, when it was still dark and after I had settled on the floor, cross-legged and with my back straight against the wall so that I did not sag and doze off, almost the moment I closed my eyes I felt that I was sitting beside a lake. And although the glazed surface of the lake was uncannily still, as if painted, beneath its waters lay a fathomless abyss, a ceaseless hum of meaning, a fertile chaos in which some force was endlessly giving birth.
Morning after morning this lake appeared. I didn’t seek it, I made no mental effort to summon it to mind; it was simply the case that as soon as I sat on the floor and closed my eyes I was there, beside its dark water. The lake was rimmed by a forest of trees that fruited a kind of nut, like a chestnut, and all around me lay a glossy carpet of these small brown nuts so that I knew, if I grew hungry, I needed only crack open their shells. The lake was so vivid, and yet so soothing, that I was reluctant to open my eyes, to get up, leave the room and begin the rest of my day. But then one morning I was taken by the fear that I might no longer be able to go on leading the life I now led. I saw an image of my son, alone on the lake in a small canoe, and I shivered and grew cold. I opened my eyes, suddenly and with relief, and got up and left the room, and was especially attentive to Luke over breakfast.
A Short History of Richard Kline Page 19