‘Is that right?’ said Stan, prepared to bow to a greater authority. ‘My wife’s a great reader,’ he added proudly.
‘With my schedule I haven’t got the time,’ complained Gary.
‘They’re mostly audio books,’ admitted Karen.
Karen’s literary tendencies were plainly displayed for anybody who cared to use the bathroom.
On the wall was a list called ‘A hundred things I’ll try to remember every day’. It ranged from the practical, ‘Drink peppermint tea to cleanse my auric field’, through the ethical, ‘Try to achieve psychic calmness in my sendings and remember that every being, whoever he or she may appear to be, has his or her unique part to play in the great mystery we call life’, and upwards to the metaphysical, ‘Aside from the rarest exceptions, humanity came to our planet from the Moon.’
Beside the lavatory itself was something simply entitled ‘Poem’.
I walk with Great Spirit through the dew
He makes me feel so shiny and new
I am happy as a child
In his embrace so firm yet mild.
Everyone agreed that, as usual, Stan and Karen’s barbecue was a unique success. Karen asked Walking Eagle if he would help them close with a blessing. Walking Eagle, who felt constrained by Robert’s presence, made the closing ceremony almost indecently abrupt.
‘Mother Earth, Father Sky,’ he called out, raising his palms to the stubborn blue patch above the patio. ‘We ask your blessing as Stan and Karen go on their Tantric workshop. May spring return to the mountain.’
‘I appreciate that,’ said Stan, raising his glass and giving Karen a squeeze.
A murmur of approval rose from the guests and dissipated in the dazzling light of the afternoon.
7
During Saturday lunch Brooke had again urged Crystal to get in touch with Adam Frazer when she arrived at Esalen. Kenneth allowed his forbidding composure to be punctuated by sarcasm when Adam came up in conversation.
‘Like all very brilliant people he can be difficult sometimes,’ Brooke admitted to Crystal.
‘Like all very difficult people he’s difficult the whole time,’ Kenneth corrected her.
‘I’ve noticed dumb people being difficult too,’ Crystal pointed out, in the hope that they could all find some common ground.
Now that she was driving down Route One, only a couple of hours from Esalen, Crystal started to wonder what she should do about Brooke’s suggestion.
There was no doubt that Adam was clever and charismatic, with rows of mystical medals shining on his chest, but he had publicly turned his back on Mother Meera, one of the gurus he had earlier publicized with unbridled eagerness. Once trapped in the supreme truth of his latest enthusiasm, he was forced to tear up yesterday’s manifesto with a screech of renunciation, or face the unpleasant prospect of keeping his mouth shut. Apart from uncomfortably recalling her mother’s pendulum of devotion and disappointment, Crystal was uneasy because of her own more hesitant but respectful relationship with the avatar of Thalheim.
The most consistent thread in all Adam’s work was the conviction that whatever happened to him was of global significance. Had he operated in the 1930s, he might well have written a book called ‘Why I’m a Communist’, followed, hotfoot, by a book called ‘Why I’m not a Communist’. Now, in the portentous shadow of the millennium, he pursued the same tango on the mystical plane. He experienced the Divine as a series of compliments paid to his sensitivity, and if he ever lapsed into humility it was the most extraordinary humility the world had ever seen and was immediately turned into a book or a film. Crystal had seen a film about his conversion to Mother Meera in which he often seemed to be on the verge of tears at the thought of what he’d been through in order to become so special. Even his laughter was lachrymose, like the giggling of a child who has been tickled for too long.
Whoever he was announcing or denouncing, taking up or dropping, Oedipus and Narcissus were two figures who commanded his unquestioning loyalty. Exiled from his magical Indian childhood by the treachery of his adored mother, he was installed in frigid England where he developed that prancing, bucking intellect with which he hoped one day to kick down the stable door.
At heart he remained unconsoled, even by his own brilliance, and when he met an Indian woman calling herself Mother Meera he was powerless to resist the rumour of her omnipotence and resumed his magical communion with the subcontinent. She was bound, by the same somnambulant logic, to betray him, as his own mother had done. This she did, or so Crystal had heard, by failing to share Adam’s excitement about his forthcoming marriage to Yves.
Again he retreated from devotion to scholarship, but Rumi, despite his intoxicating emphasis on the wine and fire of Divine love, could not last for ever. A friend of his had told Crystal that Adam’s attention was being drawn towards the Virgin Mary, the mother of all mothers, who had the advantage of already being elaborately mythologized and, thanks to being dead, was less likely than her predecessors to let him down or tell him how to run his life.
Or was she?
The race was on. Would Adam at last find in the Mother of God a parent adequate to his special needs, or would he end up staring into the glamorous pool of his own personality with an ever more candid admiration?
Crystal liked people to be fascinating, but she didn’t want them to be charismatic — charismatic meant that they expected other people to find them fascinating. Adam, having led the charge towards Mother Meera, was no less charismatic in retreat. Some of his plodding followers might be forgiven their sprained ankles and their spinning heads.
As usual his personal experience contained a message it would be mad for the world to ignore. He’d squabbled with Mother Meera, and so the age of the guru was over. With Yves’s approval and support, he was prepared to strike a posture of total independence from any mediated experience of the Divine. Gurus were fallible human beings like the rest of us, and it was dangerous to attribute magical powers to them. Of course it was, thought Crystal, but they still might know something worth finding out.
Adam had become the anti-guru guru, teaching his listeners to turn their backs on all their teachers (except himself) and strut about in garrulous self-sufficiency. This desire to abandon the people who’d helped him, driven by the deep conviction that in the Dodge City of maternal betrayal you have to shoot first, was not to everyone’s taste. It was all very well to kick away the ladder once he was on the roof, but what about those who had not yet run through most of the star rinpoches and avatars currently crowding the planet?
No doubt the transition from external authority to inner conviction was an important passage in spiritual life, but of all revolutions it must be the most bloodless; nothing could falsify it more conspicuously than the need to stab. Any real awakening embraced a past which appeared to have led with newly unveiled precision to a higher perspective. Whereas ordinary well-being always dragged along its gloomy companions, ‘How long can this possibly last?’ and ‘If only I’d known this earlier’, awakening divulged the secret of ripeness, redeeming time as well as understanding, promising that every drop of suffering had been purposeful and that things would never be the same again.
If only it happened more often.
The past contained implacable enemies of liberation, from the most general unnegotiable conditions, like the structure of the human brain, or the karmic chain of cause and effect which seemed to enslave every incident to a deep and eventually unknowable set of causes, down through the genetic codes inherited by each individual, and finally in the distracting drama of personal history. It was only by appreciating the asphyxiatingly conditioned nature of each thought and action that Crystal had developed that passion for freedom which might enable her to punch her way through the icecap of conditioning. She was well aware that this passion and the moments of spaciousness which it sometimes gave her might also be determined. Until these tricky questions were settled more precisely by science and philosophy, every choice might be contained in the invisible prison of another category of determinism.