Island (18 page)

“And the whole caboodle is inside your skull,” said Will. “Strictly private. No reference to any external fact except a toadstool.”

“Not real,” Murugan chimed in. “That’s exactly what I was trying to say.”

“You’re assuming,” said Dr. Robert, “that the brain
produces
consciousness. I’m assuming that it transmits consciousness. And my explanation is no more farfetched than yours. How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order? Nobody has the faintest idea. All one can do is to accept the facts and concoct hypotheses. And one hypothesis is just about as good, philosophically speaking, as another. You say that the
moksha
-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which causes them to produce a set of subjective events to which people have given the name ‘mystical experience.’
I
say that the
moksha
-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which opens some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of Mind with a large ‘M’ to flow into your mind with a small ‘m.’ You can’t demonstrate the truth of your hypothesis, and I can’t demonstrate the truth of mine. And even if you could prove that I’m wrong, would it make any practical difference?”

“I’d have thought it would make all the difference,” said Will.

“Do you like music?” Dr. Robert asked.

“More than most things.”

“And what, may I ask, does Mozart’s G-Minor Quintet refer to? Does it refer to Allah? Or Tao? Or the second person of the Trinity? Or the Atman-Brahman?”

Will laughed. “Let’s hope not.”

“But that doesn’t make the experience of the G-Minor Quintet any less rewarding. Well, it’s the same with the kind of experience that you get with the
moksha
-medicine, or through prayer and fasting and spiritual exercises. Even if it doesn’t refer to anything outside itself, it’s still the most important thing that ever happened to you. Like music, only incomparably more so. And if you give the experience a chance, if you’re prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably more therapeutic and transforming. So maybe the whole thing does happen inside one’s skull. Maybe it
is
private and there’s no unitive knowledge of anything but one’s own physiology. Who cares? The fact remains that the experience can open one’s eyes and make one blessed and transform one’s whole life.” There was a long silence. “Let me tell you something,” he resumed, turning to Murugan. “Something I hadn’t intended to talk about to anybody. But now I feel that perhaps I have a duty, a duty to the throne, a duty to Pala and all its people—an obligation to tell you about this very private experience. Perhaps the telling may help you to be a little more understanding about your country and its ways.” He was silent for a moment; then in a quietly matter-of-fact tone, “I suppose you know about my wife,” he went on.

His face still averted, Murugan nodded. “I was sorry,” he mumbled, “to hear she was so ill.”

“It’s a matter of a few days now,” said Dr. Robert. “Four or five at the most. But she’s still perfectly lucid, perfectly conscious of what’s happening to her. Yesterday she asked me if we could take the
moksha
-medicine together. We’d taken it together,” he added parenthetically, “once or twice each year for the last thirty-seven years—ever since we decided to get married. And now once more—for the last time, the last, last time. There was a risk involved, because of the damage to the liver. But we decided it was a risk worth taking. And as it turned out, we were right. The
moksha
-medicine—the dope, as you prefer to call it—
hardly upset her at all. All that happened to her was the mental transformation.”

He was silent, and Will suddenly became aware of the squeak and scrabble of caged rats and, through the open window, the babel of tropical life and the call of a distant mynah bird. “Here and now, boys. Here and now…”

“You’re like that mynah,” said Dr. Robert at last. “Trained to repeat words you don’t understand or know the reason for, ‘
It isn’t real. It isn’t real
.’ But if you’d experienced what Lakshmi and I went through yesterday you’d know better. You’d know it was much more real than what you call reality. More real than what you’re thinking and feeling at this moment. More real than the world before your eyes. But
not real
is what you’ve been taught to say.
Not real, not real
.” Dr. Robert laid a hand affectionately on the boy’s shoulder. “You’ve been told that we’re just a set of self-indulgent dope takers, wallowing in illusions and false
samadhis
. Listen, Murugan—forget all the bad language that’s been pumped into you. Forget it at least to the point of making a single experiment. Take four hundred milligrams of
moksha
-medicine and find out for yourself what it does, what it can tell you about your own nature, about this strange world you’ve got to live in, learn in, suffer in, and finally die in. Yes, even you will have to die one day—maybe fifty years from now, maybe tomorrow. Who knows? But it’s going to happen, and one’s a fool if one doesn’t prepare for it.” He turned to Will. “Would you like to come along while we take our shower and get into some clothes?”

Without waiting for an answer, he walked out through the door that led into that central corridor of the long building. Will picked up his bamboo staff and, accompanied by Vijaya, followed him out of the room.

“Do you suppose that made any impression on Murugan?” he asked Vijaya when the door had closed behind them.

Vijaya shrugged his shoulders. “I doubt it.”

“What with his mother,” said Will, “and his passion for internal-combustion engines, he’s probably impervious to anything you people can say. You should have heard him on the subject of motor scooters!”

“We have heard him,” said Dr. Robert, who had halted in front of a blue door and was waiting for them to come up with him. “Frequently. When he comes of age, scooters are going to become a major political issue.”

Vijaya laughed. “To scoot or not to scoot, that is the question.”

“And it isn’t only in Pala that it’s the question,” Dr. Robert added. “It’s the question that every underdeveloped country has to answer one way or the other.”

“And the answer,” said Will, “is always the same. Wherever I’ve been—and I’ve been almost everywhere—they’ve opted wholeheartedly for scooting. All of them.”

“Without exception,” Vijaya agreed. “Scooting for scooting’s sake, and to hell with all considerations of fulfillment, self-knowledge, liberation. Not to mention common or garden health or happiness.”

“Whereas
we
,” said Dr. Robert, “have always chosen to adapt our economy and technology to human beings—not our human beings to somebody else’s economy and technology. We import what we can’t make; but we make an import only what we can afford. And what we can afford is limited not merely by our supply of pounds and marks and dollars, but also primarily—
primarily
,” he insisted—“by our wish to be happy, our ambition to become fully human. Scooters, we’ve decided after carefully looking into the matter, are among the things—the very numerous things—we simply can’t afford. Which is something poor little Murugan will have to learn the hard way—seeing that he hasn’t learned, and doesn’t want to learn, the easy way.”

“Which is the easy way?” Will asked.

“Education and reality-revealers. Murugan has had neither.
Or rather he’s had the opposite of both. He’s had miseducation in Europe—Swiss governesses, English tutors, American movies, everybody’s advertisements—and he’s had reality eclipsed for him by his mother’s brand of spirituality. So it’s no wonder he pines for scooters.”

“But his subjects, I gather, do not.”

“Why should they? They’ve been taught from infancy to be fully aware of the world, and to enjoy their awareness. And, on top of that, they have been shown the world and themselves and other people as these are illumined and transfigured by reality-revealers. Which helps them, of course, to have an intenser awareness and a more understanding enjoyment, so that the most ordinary things, the most trivial events, are seen as jewels and miracles. Jewels and miracles,” he repeated emphatically. “So why should we resort to scooters or whisky or television or Billy Graham or any other of your distractions and compensations?”

“‘Nothing short of everything will really do,’” Will quoted. “I see now what the Old Raja was talking about. You can’t be a good economist unless you’re also a good psychologist. Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician.”

“And don’t forget all the other sciences,” said Dr. Robert. “Pharmacology, sociology, physiology, not to mention pure and applied autology, neurotheology, metachemistry, mycomysticism, and the ultimate science,” he added, looking away so as to be more alone with his thoughts of Lakshmi in the hospital, “the science that sooner or later we shall all have to be examined in—thanatology.” He was silent for a moment; then, in another tone, “Well, let’s go and get washed up,” he said and, opening the blue door, led the way into a long changing room with a row of showers and wash basins at one end and on the opposite wall, tiers of lockers and a large hanging cupboard.

Will took a seat and while his companions lathered themselves at the basins, went on with their conversations.

“Would it be permissible,” he asked, “for a miseducated alien to try a truth-and-beauty pill?”

The answer was another question. “Is your liver in good order?” Dr. Robert enquired.

“Excellent.”

“And you don’t seem to be more than mildly schizophrenic. So I can’t see any counterindication.”

“Then I can make the experiment?”

“Whenever you like.”

He stepped into the nearest shower stall and turned on the water. Vijaya followed suit.

“Aren’t you supposed to be intellectuals?” Will asked when the two men had emerged again and were drying themselves.

“We do intellectual work,” Vijaya answered.

“Then why all this horrible honest toil?”

“For a very simple reason: this morning I had some spare time.”

“So did I,” said Dr. Robert.

“So you went out into the fields and did a Tolstoy act.”

Vijaya laughed. “You seem to imagine we do it for ethical reasons.”

“Don’t you?”

“Certainly not. I do muscular work, because I have muscles; and if I don’t use my muscles I shall become a bad-tempered sitting-addict.”

“With nothing between the cortex and the buttocks,” said Dr. Robert. “Or rather with everything—but in a condition of complete unconsciousness and toxic stagnation. Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts. That’s why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome. In the past even a duke had to do a lot of walking, even a moneylender, even a metaphysician. And when they weren’t using their legs, they were jogging about on horses. Whereas now, from the tycoon to his typist, from the
logical positivist to the positive thinker, you spend nine tenths of your time on foam rubber. Spongy seats for spongy bottoms—at home, in the office, in cars and bars, in planes and trains and buses. No moving of legs, no struggles with distance and gravity—just lifts and planes and cars, just foam rubber and an eternity of sitting. The life force that used to find an outlet through striped muscle gets turned back on the viscera and the nervous system, and slowly destroys them.”

“So you take to digging and delving as a form of therapy?”

“As prevention—to make therapy unnecessary. In Pala even a professor, even a government official, generally puts in two hours of digging and delving each day.”

“As part of his duties?”

“And as part of his pleasure.”

Will made a grimace. “It wouldn’t be part of
my
pleasure.”

“That’s because you weren’t taught to use your mind-body in the right way,” Vijaya explained. “If you’d been shown how to do things with the minimum of strain and the maximum of awareness, you’d enjoy even honest toil.”

“I take it that your children all get this kind of training.”

“From the first moment they start doing for themselves. For example, what’s the proper way of handling yourself while you’re buttoning your clothes?” And suiting action to words, Vijaya started to button the shirt he had just slipped into. “We answer the question by actually putting their heads and bodies into the physiologically best position. And we encourage them at the same time to notice how it feels to be in the physiologically best position, to be aware of what the process of doing up buttons consists of in terms of touches and pressures and muscular sensations. By the time they’re fourteen they’ve learned how to get the most and the best—objectively and subjectively—out of any activity they may undertake. And that’s when we start them working. Ninety minutes a day at some kind of manual job.”

“Back to good old child labor!”

“Or rather,” said Dr. Robert, “forward from bad new child idleness. You don’t allow your teen-agers to work; so they have to blow off steam in delinquency or else throttle down steam till they’re ready to become domesticated sitting-addicts. And now,” he added, “it’s time to be going. I’ll lead the way.”

In the laboratory, when they entered, Murugan was in the act of locking his briefcase against all prying eyes. “I’m ready,” he said and, tucking the thirteen hundred and fifty-eight pages of the Newest Testament under his arm, he followed them out into the sunshine. A few minutes later, crammed into an ancient jeep, the four of them were rolling along the road that led, past the paddock of the white bull, past the lotus pool and the huge stone Buddha, out through the gate of the Station Compound to the highway. “I’m sorry we can’t provide more comfortable transportation,” said Vijaya as they bumped and rattled along.

Will patted Murugan’s knee. “This is the man you should be apologizing to,” he said. “The one whose soul yearns for Jaguars and Thunderbirds.”

“It’s a yearning, I’m afraid,” said Dr. Robert from the back seat, “that will have to remain unsatisfied.”