On the Edge A Novel (22 page)

‘Do we have to have a nervous breakdown too?’ asked the woman in the grey tracksuit.

‘No, no, no. Bless you. You may be lucky enough to have a harmonious relationship, and that may be a karmic gift.’

‘Add children to this dynamic, Adam, and it’s totally different. You can’t afford to do this stuff if you have children. These two guys didn’t have to deal with children.’

‘Of course they didn’t, but they had to deal with homophobia. Try homophobia, darling.’

‘Why do you think the disciples were so vicious?’ asked the Frenchwoman.

‘I think they were freaked out that Rumi, who they were projecting on as a Master, suddenly appears as a person shattered by love, crying and unable to organize his experience. And then he was with Shams, this utter nutcase who is obviously going through something immense. They don’t want a Divine experience, they want security, and so they do absolutely everything to stop it, out of a mixture of fear, panic, anxiety, rage at other people’s happiness, incredible self-accusation at not feeling as much as other people, and hatred of beauty – don’t underestimate that: I think we all have it. And so on, and so on, we’re all in this game of comparison.’

Kenneth tiptoed back into the room, looking studiously solemn.

‘But let’s not dwell on all of that,’ sighed Adam. ‘After all, is there anything more sublime in the world than sitting with a group of friends thinking about these things, in a place as incredibly sacred and radiant as this place has been for centuries and centuries. Being here with you I feel gratitude for the Earth, immense gratitude for the Sun. I feel affection for everyone that I’m looking at, because I know that everyone is sincere and searching and Rumi is the great wine-pourer, and something wonderful is going to happen whether we like it or not. We’re in the hands of powers greater than ourselves.’

There was a murmur of appreciation from the room.

‘Let’s end with a poem. I might try to sing it for you…’

‘Uhmm,’ said several people encouragingly.

‘“Those tender words we spoke to one another,

They will be stored in the secret heart of Love,

And one day,

And one day,”’

Adam repeated the line, belting it out at top volume.

‘“They will fall like rain,

And the whole earth will be made green

With our love.”’

Cheers and applause rose from the audience.

‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ purred Adam. ‘The springtime is coming, the real springtime, and this is the agony of childbirth.

‘I love you all,’ said Adam, hurrying towards the door like a man expecting to be mobbed. ‘And I’ll see you at four o’clock.’

Brooke dashed after him. She had arranged a special lunch for herself and Adam, Kenneth and Yves.

‘Let’s not dawdle,’ said Adam, ‘or they’ll all come and ask me to read their poems. How was I?’

‘Brilliant,’ panted Brooke, trying to keep up.

13

The windows surrounded Peter with faint reflections of meditating figures, upright on their cushions. Slumped on his own zafu, he discreetly lifted his ankle from a pressed artery. His lower leg had been tingling its way to death on the carpet and he couldn’t bear it any longer. He was resigned to the ache in his knees which had taken up residence immediately, but he was surprised by the skewer of pain running from his neck to his right shoulder. He discreetly – discreetly again, although in this room full of statues every blink felt like an Olympic event – arched his back in the hope of bringing some relief. What was he supposed to do, meditatively speaking? Pretend it wasn’t happening? How was all this sitting around related to the strange experience he’d had in the hot tubs?

In one respect he didn’t really care. He was in love with Crystal and he was in love with the possibility of a renewed ecstasy. Physical ruin was a small price to pay for these promises of self-transcendence which seemed to merge in the mysterious light of next weekend’s Tantric workshop. Although it was for ‘committed couples’, he still had twenty-four hours to persuade Crystal to come along with him. If she agreed, he would be completely broke and miss his last chance to go back to the bank on Monday morning. Peter felt the thrill of finally detonating the edifice of his old self.

Everybody knew that being ‘in love’ was a state of temporary insanity, that’s why it was so important to make it last as long as possible. It was the bubbling up of the absurd conviction that he had just met a human being unlike any other: not wounded or demanding or confused; not deceitful or egotistical or cruel; not lost or weak or stupid; someone generous, splendid, inexhaustibly intriguing, and reciprocally deluded.

Love was such a small word, how could its single syllable attend to so many catastrophes at once? Like a doctor in an emergency ward, it was always on call, covering for a fondness compounded of pity and duty, rushing to the scene of a violent sexual obsession, falling to its knees in a mountain monastery, throwing stale bread to clockwork pigeons, meeting somebody else’s wife in a hotel room, changing a nappy at four in the morning. What time could it possibly spare to certify his romances?

Perhaps this time it was true love: not the insomniac registrar but the brain surgeon with steady hands. And yet, how had Crystal so convincingly replaced Sabine, and how had Sabine so convincingly replaced Fiona, all in a few months? Fiona, it was true, cried out for replacement. Her opinions were doomed expeditions, her voice a futile gesture, her kisses kamikaze pilots. Now, she seemed not to have been born into the complexity of the world at all, but to have slipped thinly and diffidently to the ground, like a page from a fax machine, the announcement of some fading appetites and sociological facts that stuttered, almost noiselessly, from the roller of her genetic fabric.

He hated Fiona for the use she had made of Gavin’s death in the Cult Busters meeting she had been to with his mother. Hatred was famously close to love, people wrote books about that sort of thing, but it also had a justified reputation for not being close to it at all. As this thought passed through him, Peter could feel his hatred break up into guilt, and see pity rushing in to soothe the guilt. These Buddhists were certainly on to something. The exhausting business of turning his colliding and scattered emotions into a story about who he was was matched by the exhausting business of editing it into a story he liked. The first thing he asked about a situation was whether he liked it or not, and the next question was how it would ‘turn out’, which meant whether he would like it or not later on.

During the last forty-eight hours he had been forced to see the extent of this tyranny. Even ‘meditating’ he kept asking, ‘Do I like this?’ ‘Is this for me?’ ‘Will I get enlightened?’ ‘Will I like that?’ ‘Are the others bored too?’ And that was when he was concentrating. The rest of the time he just drifted through the ghostly landscapes of the future and the past, arranging and rearranging them until he liked them more, or decided that he didn’t like them at all. It was pathetic. There he was again, having an aversion to his own mental life. It went on and on.

Once or twice he had stopped asking, ‘Do I like this?’ and had felt the encroachment of a subtle and alien calm. Needless to say, in the face of this opportunity for a new experience, he had painstakingly reconstructed the story which had just dematerialized. ‘Am I the sort of person who kisses a woman he hardly knows as he leans on a wooden fence above the foaming Pacific?’ Yes! ‘Am I the sort of person who then invites her to a Tantric workshop which will cost him his job?’ As soon as possible!

He was in a radical frame of mind, partly thanks to Lama Surya Das, who was leading the meditation. Peter had expected a wizened ethnic type in a saffron toga, smiling tirelessly and bowing to the insects. The Lama in fact turned out to be a burly American who walked to his zafu as if it were the striking plate on a baseball field. Peter dimly sensed that somewhere in the depths of his meditating mind the Lama was perpetually hitting a home run, but instead of dashing around the field he stood there, watching the ball arc into the open space which was the true object of his attention.

‘Now that the mind is extremely spacious,’ said Surya Das, as if to confirm Peter’s speculation, ‘turn it back abruptly on itself with the laser-like question, “Who or what is experiencing right now?” Sense that directly, no need to analyse it too much, just pop the question and let go. Who or what is experiencing, controlling, thinking? See through the seer and remain free. Plumb that gap, that bottomless abyss, that luminous openness, pure presence. It’s too close, so we overlook it. It seems too good to be true, so it’s hard to believe. It’s too simple, we can’t get our minds round it. It’s too transparent, we can’t even see it. It’s not outside us, so we can’t reach it. That’s the innate great perfection. Don’t overlook it.’

He fell silent again.

Yeah, thought Peter, just pop the question and let go. He pictured himself falling through space, like a Magritte businessman. He let go of his umbrella, and fell faster. He heard the wind rushing in his ears. That rushing sound, that was pure presence.

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.