Yet another life-or-death matter. Oh well.
As the group moved, others joined it, forming spontaneously into a mobile crowd, then a pack, a sturdy vessel of revenge. They were a kind of human tsunami, gathering speed and size. There was no dispersing them. It was a petrifying sight. Eerily, they seemed to be gearing up for a silent massacre. This was not a pack with a war cry, this was a tight-lipped group rolling wordlessly forward. As I ran, I thought how I hate any kind of mob- I hate mobs of sports fans, mobs of environmental demonstrators, I even hate mobs of supermodels, that’s how much I hate mobs. I tell you, mankind is bearable only when you get him on his own.
Interestingly, it was a democratic crowd. Anyone could join in to mutilate Eddie and my family. There were even a few children. That surprised me. And some elderly gentlemen too, who despite being timid and frail were not struggling to keep up. It was as if they had been absorbed by the mob and taken on the energy of it, as if their thin, weak bodies were now nimble fingers of a powerful hand. But weren’t these people supposed to be Buddhists? Well, what of it? Buddhists can be pushed over the edge like anyone else, can’t they? To be fair, Eddie had burst into their inner serenity with poison and murder and blackmail and rape. Inner serenity isn’t impervious to a ferocious assault like that. Incidentally, none of them were smiling like the Buddha. They were smiling like the serpent, like a forty-headed dragon.
Even the sun took on a menacing quality. It was dropping fast. Naturally, I thought, this was to be no brightly lit spectacle of raw carnage. It was to take place in the dark.
But what’s this? The mob was picking up the pace! I was already pooped, and now I’d have to run at breakneck speed. How annoying! The last marathon I had intended to run was when I beat 200 million spermatozoa for the egg. Now here I was again. In truth, it was kind of exciting. I was so aware of what a relentless thinker I was that action felt surprisingly good. Murderous mob on its way- what are you going to do about it?
The dusk infused the sky with a soft, syrupy red: a head-wound red. As I ran, I wished I had a machete- it was heavy going, tunneling through all that thick vegetation. I was taking furtive passages through shaggy ferns, where the last of the sunlight only made it in random splotches. The jungle with its usual threatening noises had the surround sound of an expensive home entertainment system.
A half hour later I was losing them. Dammit. What was I going to do? What could I do? I ran, I fell, I vomited, I got up again. Why had we come here? Fucking Thais. An Australian mob might kick the shit out of you, but you’d crawl home afterward. This was murder! No, slaughter! My dad! And Caroline! And Terry! All alone up there, isolated and unprepared. I ran on to the point of exhaustion. And the heat. And the mosquitos. And the fear. I’m not going to make it. How can I warn them?
I suppose I could…
No.
Unless…
I had an idea. But it was foolish, desperate, impossible. I must be out of my mind. Or just my imagination amusing itself. But what an idea! Here it was: Dad and I were connected in deeper ways than just father and son, and I’d long had the suspicion that we were unintentionally reading each other’s minds every so often, and so if I concentrated intensely enough, if I only put in a little psychic effort, maybe I could send him a message. Absurd! Brilliant?
The problem was, it was difficult to summon up that kind of concentration while running, and if I stopped and it didn’t work, I might lose not only the mob but with them my way home. And everyone would die!
Did I really think we could read each other’s minds? Should I risk it? Running through the foliage was getting more difficult; I’d push aside a branch only to have it whip me in the face. The jungle was getting aggressive. The mob was getting away from me. I was wilting in the heat. My family was going to die.
Should I risk it?
Fuck it.
I stopped. The murdering rabble disappeared over a hill. My heart was aching in my chest. I breathed deeply to placate her.
In order to make contact with Dad, I needed to get myself into a deep meditative state. I needed to hurry, of course, but you can’t hurry absolute inner quiet. You have to coax it over time. You can’t transform the essential qualities of your mind as if you’re running to catch a bus.
I got myself in the textbook position. I sat on the ground cross-legged, concentrated on my breathing, and repeated my mantra, “Wow.” This brought about a quiet enough mind, but to be honest, I felt a bit blunt in the head. I had some clarity, enough to drift to the edge of consciousness, but no further. I felt a twinge of bliss too- well, so what? I needed to go further than I ever had, and here I was, going through the motions. From everything I had read about insight meditation, I had learned that there was a system to be used- this is how you sit, this is how you breathe, this is how you concentrate on your breathing. But using this system was a routine that seemed the opposite of the true meditative state I needed. Now that I had practiced this meditation thing a number of times, always the same way, with the same breathing, the same concentration, I felt I might as well be working on a factory line screwing tops on Coca-Cola bottles. My mind was peaceful, hypnotized, numb. That was no good.
Trying to calm my excited mind meant that a conflict was going on in my head. That burned up essential energy I needed in order to communicate telepathically with Dad. So then maybe I had to stop concentrating, but how did I achieve a quiet mind without concentrating?
First of all, instead of sitting cross-legged, I stood up and leaned against a tree like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Then I listened not to my breathing, as Anouk advised, but to the noises around me. I didn’t close my eyes either. I opened them wide.
I was observing the wet, shaggy trees in the late-afternoon sunlight without concentrating. I made my mind astonishingly alert. I didn’t just observe my breath, either, but kept an eye on my thoughts. They fell down like a shower of sparks. I watched them for a long time. I pursued them, not where they went but where they came from, back into the past. I could see how they held me together. I could see how they put me together, these thoughts- the true ingredients of the Jasper broth.
I started walking and the silence of my mind went with me, though it was not the absence-of-sound kind of silence. It was a huge, deafening, visual silence. No one had ever told me about this kind of silence. It was really loud. And as I walked through the jungle, I managed without effort to maintain this clarity.
Then my mind became quiet. Really, really quiet. It happened instantaneously. I was suddenly free of inner friction. Free of fear. That freedom somehow helped all my spineless impediments to melt away. I thought: The world is swelling, it is here, it is bursting in my mouth, it is running down my throat, it is filling up my eyes. Strangely, this big thing had entered me, though I was not bigger for it. I was smaller. It felt good to be small. Look, I know how this sounds, but take it from me, this was not a mystical experience. And I’m not kidding myself, either. I’m not a saint. Not for all the breasts in California would I, like Francis of Assisi, purify the lesions of lepers with my tongue, certainly not, but- and this is where I’m heading- I felt something I’d never experienced in my life before: love. I know this sounds crazy, but I think I actually loved my enemies: Eddie, my family, the murdering mob en route to slaughter my family, even the virulence of the recent outburst of hate by the Australian people. Now, let’s not get carried away; I didn’t adore my enemies, and while I loved them, I was not in love with them. But still, my instinctive revulsion toward them had evaporated somehow. This excess of feeling frightened me a little- this frenzy of love that tore through the butter of my hate. So then it seemed Anouk was wrong; the real fruit of meditation wasn’t inner peace but love. In fact, when you see life in its totality for the first time and you feel genuine love for that totality, inner peace seems like a kind of small, petty goal.