“Your theories are just words,” I retorted. “You brag about this power, but it’s impossible for you to demonstrate it to me!”
“It is possible, and I will demonstrate it! Psychological barbarians such as yourself find it entirely natural to spend hours training their body in sport, yet it never occurs to them to train their mind. My blessed father rarely had the time to come see me himself, but he appointed one of his major disciples, Alfred Orage, to take charge of my education until I was thirteen. This remarkable man taught me psychological exercises that permitted me to realize what you shall now hear and see.”
Then, like a monkey entranced by a cobra, I watched a fascinating spectacle. Standing on her left leg, Reyna D’Assia traced a figure eight in the air continuously with her right leg. Meanwhile, her left hand continuously traced a square and her right hand a triangle. All the while, she recited a seemingly chaotic succession of numbers. In continuous movement, Reyna paused only briefly in her reciting, explaining the different exercises. They were so complicated that I could not remember all of them, though I do remember a few. I heard her recite, very fast and seemingly nonsensically, the multiplication tables from 2 to 22. For example, 8 × 1 = 8; 8 × 2 = 7; 8 × 3 = 6; 8 × 4 = 5. . 8 × 12 = 6; and thus onto 8 × 100 = 8. It sounded to me like a computer gone haywire.
“Listen carefully: 2 × 8 = 16. If I add the 1 and the 6, I get 7, you understand? No? Another example: 8 × 12 = 96 and 9 + 6 = 15 and 1 + 5 = 6. Therefore, 8 × 12 = 6. How much is 7 × 7?” Without giving me time to think, she replied, “7 × 7 = 4.”
I was feeling dizzy. Relentlessly, Reyna continued the exercise and then complicated it even more. While continuing to recite the table in ascending order, she interspersed it with an alternating descending order:
“8 × 1 = 8; 8 × 100 = 8; 8 × 2 = 7; 8 × 99 = 9; 8 × 3 = 6; 8 × 98 = 1. .”
As she continued her reciting and movements, I did manage to verify one part with a laborious mental calculation. Multiplying 8 by 98, I obtained 784. 7 + 8 + 4 = 19; 1 + 9 = 10; 1 + 0 = 1. Indeed, 8 × 98 = 1. .
For an interminable hour, Reyna held me spellbound with further mental juggling. Some of it was absurd, such as mixing two tables together: 7 × 1 = 12; 12 × 1 = 7. . 7 × 2 = 24; 12 × 2 = 14; 7 × 3 =36; 12 × 3 =21; 7 × 80 = 960; 12 × 80 = 560. . And she went on like this to 7 × 100 = 1,200 and 12 × 100 = 700. As if this was not enough, she once more interspersed it with alternating ascending and descending tables: 7 × 2 = 1,188; 12 × 99 = 14. . 7 × 3 = 1,176; 12 × 98 = 21. . 7 × 4 = 1,164; 12 × 97 = 28. .
A feeling of terror began to grow in me as this woman began to dance as a sinister machine — with very complex and sinuous movements that had not the slightest hint of seduction — to a music that did not exist for me. The more complicated the dance became, the more insanely complicated her numerical exercises became.
In her trance, she shouted, “Number 1 is Tom, number 2 is Dick, number 3 is Harry!” And then she counted: “Tom, Dick, Harry, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, Tom-0, Tom-Tom, Tom-Dick, Tom-Harry, Tom-4. .” and so on, substituting, for example, 5-Harry-Tom for the number 531. . Then, to complicate things further, she yelled, “Now I’m changing! Tom = 2, Dick = 5, Harry = 7!” This meant: 1, Tom, 3, 4, Dick, 6, Harry, 8, 9, 10, 11, 1-Tom, 13, 14, 1-Dick, 16, 1-Harry. . and on and on.
I felt as if my brain and my entire body would explode from all these complications. When I could stand it no more, I leaped up, grabbed her, and halted her gyrations.
“Get hold of yourself, you lunatic! Your problem is that you’ve never been trained to develop your soul; you’ve been taught to be only a kind of circus performer. It is like the story of the juggler who presented himself to the king. After twenty years of training, he had achieved the feat of juggling a hundred chickpeas at once without letting a single one fall. As a reward, the king gave him a barrel full of chickpeas.”
“So! I see that you do not understand the importance of these exercises. You are an artist established in the habit of pulling from your navel all sorts of garbage — which then are qualified as works of art. Yet they are only the expressions of a pack of contradictory egos that you call I. Your mind creates one thing, your emotional center wants something else, your sexual center demands still another thing, your body is going its own way, and meanwhile, that which should be your soul is an egg that no one is hatching. You are a chariot pulled by four horses straining in different directions, and the coachman has fallen asleep at the reins. Of course, the inner jewel is still there, but veiled by a cloud of contradictory thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions. There is no real will, no unitary goal — only a chaos of changing objects under which is buried an unchanging subject. You cannot hear the beating of your heart in a city roaring with traffic. .”
“What arrogant presumption!” I retorted. “How do you know I have not attained inner unity? Every morning, I meditate for two hours with a Zen master.”
“What are you seeking?”
“Awakening!”
“Then you’re a dreamer. You seem to think you’re climbing a ladder with only one rung, but it has many more. You sit motionless on your butt in this zendo, hoping to attain a mysterious state that they’ve taught you to name ‘awakening.’ You’re like a parrot that salivates when it sees clouds, because it’s been taught that they’re also called ‘banana.’ You imagine that awakening is like obtaining a piece of gold or a precious object that you can then keep, like a halo around your head. It’s ridiculous. Only when your stagnant ideas become fluid will you experience your first explosion of consciousness. And of course you think that will last forever, but you are mistaken — in this dimension of reality, the only permanence is impermanence. That which does not change stagnates. Acquiring fluidity can be likened to a large stone falling into the middle of a lake. The shock creates a circular pattern of waves that covers the entire surface of the water. The expansion of consciousness is infinite, but the lake of the mind is finite. Once the process begins, you will go from awakening to awakening, from smaller to greater surprises, never ceasing to be astonished before the newness of the world. Do you understand? You have been searching for a static awakening, whereas there is only continual change. .”
She grabbed me by the shoulders, pressed her face to mine, and cried: “Stagnation is not only mental! It is also emotional, sexual, and physical! Break down your dams!”
A dense anger made my heart pound. “I agree to be your lover, not your pupil!”
“Then why are you so angry? I only want to give. .”
“Giving has nothing to do with obliging someone to receive! Give me only what I ask for!”
“Very well.”
“Then shut up and let’s fuck again!”
With an astounding agility, she shoved me so that I fell onto my back on the bed, and she immediately began caressing my penis. Her hands were like butterflies fluttering from testicles to glans without ceasing. Her fingers moved so fast that they seemed to become transparent and multiply. Soon, she interrupted this delight to administer a series of small, authoritarian taps that went from high to low and back again. Then came the deep caresses, spiraling, stretching my organ out toward infinity and then making it soft and burying it in my pubis as if to change it into a vagina, squeezing it like a fruit, moving it from one hand to another, cradling it tenderly like a mother cradles a baby. Finally, after a multitude of different kinds of caresses, she seized it firmly and began masturbating it with a superhuman rapidity for a very long time and with increasing vigor and no sign of fatigue until I could resist no longer and the white fountain shot out.