Who or what was experiencing right now? Perhaps he was a ‘what’ after all. Perhaps under the sociological ‘what’ was a psychological ‘who’, and under that another impersonal ‘what’. Poor old ‘who’ was sandwiched between a ‘what’ hardly worth knowing, and another ‘what’, hardly knowable. ‘Buddha nature’ made it sound like a big who, that was the lure, but actually it was a big what. It never belonged to you, you belonged to it.
There he was pondering again. Pondering wasn’t meditating, or was it?
Just pop the question and let go. Rushing sound in the ears, pure presence, free fall. Wasn’t this fabrication, wasn’t this fantasy? God, meditation was a nightmare, one got in such a muddle. Still, he’d better look as if he knew what he was doing, or Crystal might never kiss him again.
Begin again. Shed his armour, and shed the bandages under the armour, throw away his masks and the sincere countenance under his masks. Say goodbye to his body, his cherished body. Watch it fall away, like the discarded section of a rocket. And his mind, his cherished mind, watch it fall away. Who watches it fall away? Sense that directly.
For a moment, sharp as a paper cut, Peter sensed it directly.
What was that?
It disappeared.
Shit.
‘Let’s chant the Prajna Paramita mantra,’ said Surya Das, ‘number three on your sheet. It’s said that wherever this sutra is chanted the dharma will flourish. Beings will be awakened and benefited and blessed. The land and the denizens of the forest will have the seed of enlightenment sown in their fertile heart-minds. So I think it’s a good thing to do,’ he added casually.
People laughed.
‘It can’t hurt, right?’ He chuckled. ‘I should say, “thus have I heard” to show that I didn’t make it up,’ said Surya. ‘Somebody else made it up.’
Crystal smiled. She enjoyed watching Surya walking the line between mischief and respect, between being an American man and being a Tibetan monk. After playing with these conditions, he would cut through to the ‘heart of the matter’, the fact that Dzogchen teachings claimed to deal with ‘things as they are’.
The subtlety of his positions was not always shared by his audience. Yesterday a woman had said that when she was growing up, ‘It was real important to be American. I have a problem with all this foreign chanting,’ she complained. ‘Do I have to accept this stuff to be enlightened?’
‘You have to accept everything to be enlightened, that’s the trouble,’ said Surya.
Crystal heard Surya chant the end of the Heart sutra and prepared herself.
‘… and therefore set forth this mantra and say, “Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Sva.”’
The chant swelled through the room:
‘Gate Gate Paragate…’
‘Break up your mind,’ urged Surya.
Peter imagined a clay pigeon shattering in the air.
Crystal imagined a machete slicing into a watermelon, its two halves rolling quietly apart.
Peter played the image again and again, wondering if he was doing the right thing or just having a fantasy.
Crystal watched the image dissolve as she had watched it arise, by itself arising and dissolving by itself. ‘We don’t need to get rid of our thoughts, they’re empty enough already,’ as Surya liked to say. The mind had a capacity to be enchanted by its own display, but that enchantment was also part of its display. By not interrupting this flow of appearance and disappearance, and not wanting anything from it, Crystal made room for everything, let everything be just as it was. She did not call this allowance stillness or spaciousness, because stillness could be ruined by agitation and spaciousness by confinement. If there was room for everything, there was room for agitation and confinement as well.
This accommodating state of mind had started two days before, when she took the afternoon off and went for a walk. The clouds were strangely symmetrical that day. Each tower of white vapour rose from a dark, cleanly cut base. Widely spaced enough not to obscure the sky, they receded all the way to the horizon, like the intersecting points on a grid that described the curve of space.
Crystal started to notice that her thoughts and perceptions gained admittance without the obstruction of a reaction. The noise of the cars that passed her on the highway was no more intrusive than the beauty of the clouds. Everything was being itself, there was no need to interfere. She tested the Dzogchen soft-focused gaze, looking, without looking at anything in particular. Flies and birds passed through her field of vision as effortlessly as her field of vision passed through her. A jogger drifted by in a melting passage.
She stopped trying to meditate because she was living immersed in the unobstructed sympathy that meditation tried to procure. She knew that there was an absolute continuity between herself and the other forms which shimmered on the surface of emptiness. There was no need to be less fundamental than that. She knew that the grammar of consciousness was reversible. Instead of saying, ‘I had the experience,’ it was no less true to say, ‘The experience had me,’ but then again it was no more true either, and the flashy pleasure of playing with the transitives did not tempt her. It was not a question of boundaries dissolving, as they did so ostentatiously in the psychedelic realm, but of the boundaries not being there. Dissolving, transcending and cutting through gave substance to the illusions over which they claimed to triumph. If there was no wall, there was no need for a pole vault. When there was a wall, it was pretentious to call it an illusion.
Further down the highway she came across a dead fox. Flattened by a car, it was alive with flies. The stench of its putrid entrails was overlaid by a much sharper smell, like the stab of ammonia. She drew the air unemphatically into her lungs and walked on. There was room for that too.
She saw the beckoning finger of a ‘symbolic’ interpretation, and saw how the provocation of a corpse could form a whirlpool in the stream of her perception. Opposite this whirlpool, another one was formed by the vanity of thinking, as so many seekers seemed to do, that the world had organized itself into a lesson for her benefit. The excitement of those times when everything seemed symbolic (‘Tout devient metaphor,’ as Jean-Paul had moaned all night in their tent in Utah, quoting some French author) now seemed a lower-order vision compared with this unimpeded clarity. There was no need to reject the fact that the fox was a memento mori, or that its death tested the resolve of her inclusiveness, nor was there any reason to become fascinated by it. The meanings of the fox’s death could not be exhausted: the appearance of the corpse, its chemical composition, its absent inhabitant, its affinity with all other corpses, its difference from all other corpses, the velocity of the impact, the mood of the driver, the hunger of the flies.
Back at Esalen, there was a party. To see if she would be distracted, she took on the music and the crowd and the darts of distrust and the grappling irons of desire. There was no essential change, just more perceptions to work with. She was seeing the Buddha nature in each person while at the same time seeing the personality that enclosed it. She was filled with extraordinary tenderness. She saw that every unhappiness was caused by the desire for happiness, and it prised open her heart. She had no trouble in operating on two levels at once, as she had always wanted to do. It was completely natural, but quite inexplicable, like being able to circle above an airport and meet someone in the lobby at the same time.
She danced in the crowd and when Peter came up to her she danced with him. When they kissed, they kissed. Nothing else could have happpened at that moment. She knew that Peter would become her lover, she knew that he would ask her to the Tantric workshop that weekend. She could see over the horizon of ordinary knowledge, rising on the natural thermals of her awareness. She saw no reason to imagine any limits to its widening perspective.