On the Edge

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.

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.

Nothing interrupts Nothing, she thought, and she was still thinking it now.

‘Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bhodi Sva

Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bhodi Sva’

Surya accelerated the chant.

‘Let go of the brakes,’ he urged.

The mantra became a syllabic blur, slowed down again to individual sounds, and then died to a whisper. Surya sounded the meditation bell and silence resumed.

Crystal remained in the same state of subtle and effortless generosity. The mantra couldn’t take her there or take her away from there. Chanting had been happening; now silence, charged by the chanting, was happening instead.

Peter felt himself fall into that electrifying silence, like a child jumping into the sea from a high rock and suddenly plunging into a cooler, denser medium, in a thrill of bubbles and slow limbs. The silence was his held breath, was everyone’s held breath. Kapow! he couldn’t help thinking. That was as good a mantra as any other, as long as it kept him feeling this lightness, this vitality.

The next time the bell sounded, it was the end of the session and time for lunch. Peter unlocked his legs and staggered out of the meditation room. He waited for Crystal in the hall, and passed the time by reading various quotations pinned to the notice-board.

Follow your breath right out of your nose

Follow it out as far as it goes.

You can’t think straight

And you don’t know who to call

It’s never too late to do nothing at all.

— Allen Ginsberg

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

— Franz Kafka

Within that birthless wide open space, phenomena appear like rainbows, utterly transparent …

* * *

As Peter began to read this third quotation, the woman he had last seen buried under a pile of cushions in Martha’s workshop swayed towards him, as if to challenge the claims of transparency with her soft bulk.

‘Hi, how are you doing?’ she said.

‘Fine.’

‘You left our workshop, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s too bad. Martha and Carlos have completely changed my life. I feel like a great weight has been lifted off my mind.’

‘Oh good.’

‘But maybe you’ve found what you need. I hope so.’ She smiled and swished her way through the door.

A great weight has been lifted off her, thought Peter, remembering Carlos, Martha and Paul sitting stoutly on the cushions from which her stifled screams of protest could be heard. I wanna live. Let me outta here. And now she’s grateful. Why had he wasted his indignation on this useful therapy? How could he know what benefits it might not hold for someone whose life was already worse than being sat on in public?

He looked into the meditation room and saw Crystal stretching out. She sat on a cushion, her back arched forward and her head touching the floor.

‘That’s not necessary,’ smiled Surya.

‘Ah, Guruji,’ said Crystal, entering into the joke and bowing reverently.

Peter glanced back at the notice-board, and wondered vaguely whether you could get rainbow gridlock, with the phenomenal world arching iridescently in one direction or another. The rainbow marquetry of a place like Manhattan might represent a substantial insubstantiality. He decided not to carry on reading but to wait for Crystal outside. After retrieving his shoes, he went out onto the lawn and stood with his hands in his pockets looking at the flowers, and thinking he must look like lovers are supposed to.

When Crystal came out, they walked together to the lodge. Peter wanted to keep the silence they were meant to observe, but he was desperate to ask if she would join him that weekend. As they crossed the bridge over the waterfall, he pondered various hopeless ways of formulating the question.

‘Yes,’ said Crystal, as they started the ascent beyond the bridge.

‘What?’ said Peter.

‘You wanted to know whether I’d spend the weekend with you. The answer is yes.’

‘How did you know I was going to ask that?’

‘I don’t know how,’ said Crystal. ‘I just knew it was troubling you.’

‘I don’t know why I asked you how you knew,’ said Peter, after a pause. ‘I suppose,’ he went on, unused to talking after two days of relative silence, ‘I suppose it sounded like the next question, if you know what I mean. It’s not that it might not be interesting to look into, but I asked it then because it was the obvious thing to say.

‘It’s like earlier,’ he went on, ‘when I was waiting for you, I leant over and sniffed a flower, and it smelt of nothing, and I thought of the word “odourless”, and then I thought of the phrase “odourless, colourless liquid”. It was completely meaningless, except that the phrase was lying there like invisible ink, waiting for the heat of an experience to tell me what to think. I can’t bear it, it’s completely unfree, during that moment my mind was just a chain of words.’ Peter was surprised by the thoughts that were tumbling out of him. He felt himself becoming more real as he spoke.

‘Even when I was beating myself up about being distracted during meditation, I thought “I’m living in the past” — another chain of words — but I wasn’t living in the past, I was thinking about the past. Thinking about the past was my present experience. What stopped me from having it was that chain of words, that misguided self-reproach. Do you see what I mean? I’m rather new to all this, I’ve probably got it all wrong.’

She smiled at him and he knew that she understood. Her silence invited him to be silent. Did he need words at all? And when he did, why arrange them in a chain? They were not his enemies. He understood, and smiled back.

At lunch, Crystal and Peter found themselves next to a man from their group. With aquiline nostrils and an emphatic vertical crease between his eyebrows, he sat on the redwood bench, both hands planted on his thighs, looking at his salad bowl with the implacable concentration of a duelling samurai. He breathed heavily through his nose, a pearl diver about to plunge, and then with a sudden burst of speed impaled a lettuce leaf on his fork, thrust it in his mouth, replaced the fork, planted his hands back on his thighs and resumed his wakeful snoring. Chomping the leaf with reptilian equanimity, his half-closed eyes remained focused on the same spot. A minute later he repeated his raid on the salad bowl, bringing a piece of celery back to his ruthless mouth.

Peter looked on, lost between amazement and laughter. Glancing at Crystal to see if she was leaning in either of these directions, he saw a complex but relaxed expression on her face. She seemed to sympathize with his desire to laugh, without losing sympathy for the person who had caused it. She held his gaze and he felt himself slipping into the atmosphere she was inhabiting, where the mind’s dragging plumage could slowly spread to reveal the full glamour of its design.