The Sensual Mirror (18 page)

But Robert was wide-eyed before Martin even spoke, and even as he spoke Martin knew that the other man was innocent of the charge. There was no way he could have reached Babba with information he’d only received that evening. The only alternative was that the guru had taken a wild shot, and scored a lucky hit. But the look in Babba’s eyes discounted that theory also. Somehow, Martin realized, Babba knew everything that was going on inside him.

Babba turned his head and looked out over the audience of devotees and the curious. And when he spoke, it was to everyone in the room. “Marriage is the most difficult yoga for a man and a woman in this age. Once, when it was clear what it is to be human, then marriage was very simple. Now we no longer know what it is to be human, so we cannot understand why we marry. Marriage does not seem necessary. Even to have children, we don’t need marriage. And we can have more fun if we are single.” The last sentence was delivered with that delicate intimation of a pause which the professional comedian uses to trip his listeners into laughter. It was successful. People laughed.

“Marriage now is like a prison. Husband and wife keep each other in their seats. They watch each other like thieves. Sometimes marriage is like a party. Husband and wife have sex with other husbands and wives. The best marriage now is like a school. It is a place to learn. It is a yoga. But this is still not the way it was.”

He paused and gazed out into space. His face began to glow, and his eyes shone, like a child watching a Disney film. Babba gazed into the Golden Age, the first period after the creation, and his heart was full with the joy of what he saw. The vision almost shimmered above the heads of those sitting in front of him. Martin saw it too. It wasn’t anything specific, not a picture. What he saw was more of a feeling, a time when he and Julia had lain in each other’s arms and faced the inevitability of each other’s death. Martin remembered the impact of the realization that one day he would exist in the world without her, or she without him. And it was as impossible to grasp as the fact of his own extinction. They had talked about it, and too overwhelmed with the brute reality of the truth that thundered in their souls, they had begun to joke about how they would end, and made a pact that if either of them were about to die, the two of them would jump off a cliff together, like lovers in the old Japanese romances.

“But they actually did that,” Julia had said. “I mean, it’s a historical fact. Lovers who weren’t allowed to marry sometimes committed suicide together to make their love eternal.”

“Would you really do that with me?” Martin had asked.

“Would you? With me?” she replied.

And for a while they had not spoken, staring into space, trying to imagine what it would be like to grasp one another in a final embrace and then leap from a cliff . . . the dizzying rapturous fall through space, the last kiss, the ultimate look into one another’s eyes, and then the plunge into the arms of death, the consummate union of their love.

Each person in the room looked into the space where Babba’s eyes were drawing a vision out of the ether, and each saw a different image, a different feeling, a different memory. And yet, all were united through him.

Babba suddenly withdrew his gaze from the air and whirled back to Martin who was caught totally unprepared for the lances of insight that shot into his mind. He was still tasting that moment with Julia when Babba leapt into his soul with both feet.

“Julia,” Babba said.

Martin gasped.

“It is dark,” Babba said. “You cannot see her. She cannot see you.”

Martin’s senses jammed. The floor tilted under him.

“There is sorrow,” Babba said, repeating his earlier judgment. “There is much sorrow. You cannot see her. She cannot see you.”

Martin heard the sound of sobbing. He felt tears on cheeks and hands. He was in touch with a deep ache going from throat to chest. And it took several minutes before he realized that all that was happening to him, and that it was all part of a single action.

I’m crying, he thought.

He had slid to the floor and was now curled up on his side, his face buried in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably. He wept from his belly to his brain. The tears of a lifetime were waiting to be shed, the sadness of a world waiting to be recognized. All the transiencies of his life swept before him, the lovely things doomed to perish. His parents, his friends, himself at all the stages of his growth. And finally, Julia. Julia, who had become a burr of anger, a wall of resistance, a symbol of continual discomfort. He understood how long it had been since he had even seen her, known the texture, the grain and smell and cut of her. She had become some grim thing on the periphery of his sensations, an annoyance whose name he knew. And through that sudden realization, there gushed the tenderness of the early days, the pure union of the first years. Memories like galaxies exploded in his mind. Words, fragments of glances, touches, silent subtle agreements, a shared destiny.

And it was lost, lost as fully as though she were dead. She had died to him, and he had not been there to leap off the cliff with her. Rather, he had helped push her from the precipice, as she had tried to push him. Babba’s words burned in his heart, and each time it seemed he would stop weeping, a new layer of sorrow was uncovered, and he started to sob again.

Martin cried for almost a quarter of an hour. After the first few minutes Babba looked away, as did all the others in the room. He began to chant, a low, liquid sound, and it was taken up by the crowd. Within seconds, Martin’s sounds were drowned in a great waterfall of voices, a mighty AUM which swelled and grew and lifted every thought and feeling and identity of all those under its sway, lifted them all to a space in which the eternal and infinite and ever-present source and beginning of all manifest creation flexed its unfathomable power to cause the countless universes to dance.

That single sound, the distillation of all sound, held by ancient sages to be the primal sound of creation, existing before light, before energy, before matter, before life, moved with the force of elemental consciousness to lift the people in the loft beyond all concerns of daily details, of earthly bother, of solar influence, and even of galactic programs. Sitting erect, eyes closed, Babba and his followers soared through the empyrean with all the ease and sweet grace of gulls skimming over water. The A began as a murmur in the belly and progressed to a rumble in the chest; the U opened the throat, the M vibrated through the skull, combing the tangled neuron patterns of the brain.

Martin knew none of this. All he could feel was the dam bursting in his heart. For the first time in his adult life he could wail and sob and cry his anguish to the skies, bury his tears in the earth. The wall of sound which towered over him allowed him to lose all self-consciousness, and absorbed even his most powerful cries.

Gradually, he wound down. His moans were interspersed with seconds of silence during which he coughed and tried to catch his breath. After a while, even the constriction in his diaphragm let go, and he gulped air down into his belly, that flat, muscled plane which had been tucked in and plastered over with exercise since he was fifteen years old and formed a military concept of posture. Finally, he was at rest, curled up on his side in the fetal position, both hands over his face, fingers in his mouth, his nose running, his eyes red, sighing.

Who am I? was the first formed thought in his mind.

As the swelling and sediment subside in a river which has been engorged by melting snow, returning to its prior contours and rates of flow, so Martin’s ego, shattered and blown out of all recognizable proportion, started to crystallize once more. Yet some other force was awake in him, that edge of panic, perhaps of greed or insecurity, that thing called evil or devil or ignorance, which cannot allow things to take their course; that curse of human beings who are aware of their own death and build civilizations as monuments to fear. It would not let him lie there, simply, like a child. Had that been possible, he would have emerged refreshed, reborn as it were, cleansed of tensions and alive to areas that had long been anesthetized. But the jagged rim of anxiety cut at him as a can improperly opened will snag the unwary finger, opening flesh and bringing blood.

What am I doing here? was Martin’s second coherent thought.

He opened his eyes.

Oh, my God. What will they think of me? completed the catalogue of his conditioned attitudes.

Babba was looking down at him. The guru had undergone yet another transformation, it seemed. Now he was like Martin’s grandmother as he remembered her. An old woman with a wrinkled face, lips that trembled slightly just before she began to speak, and fingers that knew how to grab him in just those spots which were ticklish or tender. His central memories of her were fat lemon gumdrops she gave him when she was pleased, and the brutally intimate pinches and squeezes she administered when she wasn’t.

Martin shifted his gaze. Every other person in the room that he could see was also looking at him. Robert was gazing at him too, his expression like that of a parent whose child has said its first word. Martin slowly pulled himself erect. He reached into his pocket and took out his handkerchief. Sheepishly, he blew his nose. The action produced a loud, wet honk, like a goose with a head cold nagging its mate. The sound made a number of people laugh, and Martin glanced out over the white pyramid formed by his fingers inside the cloth grasping his nose. At once he realized how silly he looked, and the apprehension in his chest loosened, and he found himself smiling inside the tiny tent.

He wiped his eyes, folded his legs under him, put his handkerchief away, and waited to see what would happen next. He was already piecing together the event as rapidly as his reforming sense of identity would allow. The pure experience, already and instantly a memory, began to fade in intensity and focus, and the machinery of analysis started to grind out interpretations. These proceeded along the lines of a reverse ontology, beginning with Martin’s highest level of comprehension and sliding down the scale from there. Having no education or inclination to allow a notion of the Absolute, or even the cosmic, Martin’s first awareness was psychological. He understood that he had suppressed a good deal of feeling in relation to his breakup with Julia, and that the guru’s extraordinary and unexpected line about divorce and death had unplugged a dam of emotion. He was even able to link that with the lifelong repression he had been suffering as a result of his childhood experience, given the culture he was raised in. But he did not, at that moment, grasp the wider implications, the notion that this was a lesson in the history of a people, or a process in group dynamics. He had no way of seeing just then that his tears had been everyone’s tears, that he had cried for all the people in the room. It would be a long long time before Martin would be able to disentangle himself from the notion that his limited self, his idiosyncratic viewpoint, was utterly transparent, transient and unimportant; that it was merely a reflection of the true Self from which all manifestations arise and to which all manifestations return.

Babba knew this about Martin. So did Robert. And yet, a man had to start somewhere. And Martin had at least felt something other than his habitual gesture, his unconscious awareness of the world as a vast theatre built for no other reason than to hold his personal drama. Paradoxically, however, as he returned from that liberating experience, his first reaction was to re-affirm his basic attitude, hyping it with the energy derived from his momentary and fragmentary liberation.

From Babba’s eyes, the incident was unremarkable, as were all phenomena in the created universe. Babba had attained a permanent state of consciousness, a state generally called “enlightenment” in America, but for which each culture has a name. God realization, being at-one with the Tao, bhava samadhi, satori, maturity, and so forth. He had been raised in a sanctimonious household, his father a minor priest in a local temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey god, his mother aggressively self-effacing in her effort to project a more abject humility than all the other wives of all the other minor priests in the area. At age eight, he suddenly saw through the stultifying hypocrisy of his parents, a feat shared by most children who are not absolute cretins. But with his insight he had felt a rare compassion. That is, he not only saw the stupidity of his parents, but he felt the sorrow against which their rigidity was a defense. He began to weep, and cried continuously for seventeen days. He lost thirty pounds and came close to dying. But in a land so riddled with religiosity, the event was not brought to the attention of a doctor, but to that of a holy man who had retired to a cave fifteen miles outside the village. The holy man, not stirring from his seat, had simply said, “Throw him into the river and then bring him here.”

When Babba, then known by his given name of Rammurti, was flung into the water of the river, he began to splutter, thrash about, and drown, and he had to be pulled out by two men who dove in from the shore. The act, however, did accomplish one thing: the boy was no longer crying. The hermit told the parents that the child was obviously marked for special spiritual development, and told them to leave him in the cave. They would not have dreamed of protesting.

Babba then underwent a fairly standard training, although bizarre by the standards of human convention. He once went five years without seeing another human being besides the hermit. For two years he had to pluck all the hair out of his beard one strand at a time to teach him disregard for pain. At one point he lived on nothing but water and sunlight for three months. The hermit eventually sent him on to another teacher, and this continued until he was thirty, at which point, sitting with his current master, the entire complex of tensions and attitudes and habits which define the human being dissolved all at once, and he became himself truly. There was no longer a platform or vantage point from which he observed himself or the world. He had lost all sense of identification with specific manifestations of pure, unformed consciousness, and so was able to watch the manifest universes rise and fall with as much concern as he watched the rising and falling of his own breath. He was no longer in the world, nor was he out of the world. He was the world itself.