7

During Saturday lunch Brooke had again urged Crystal to get in touch with Adam Frazer when she arrived at Esalen. Kenneth allowed his forbidding composure to be punctuated by sarcasm when Adam came up in conversation.

‘Like all very brilliant people he can be difficult sometimes,’ Brooke admitted to Crystal.

‘Like all very difficult people he’s difficult the whole time,’ Kenneth corrected her.

‘I’ve noticed dumb people being difficult too,’ Crystal pointed out, in the hope that they could all find some common ground.

Now that she was driving down Route One, only a couple of hours from Esalen, Crystal started to wonder what she should do about Brooke’s suggestion.

There was no doubt that Adam was clever and charismatic, with rows of mystical medals shining on his chest, but he had publicly turned his back on Mother Meera, one of the gurus he had earlier publicized with unbridled eagerness. Once trapped in the supreme truth of his latest enthusiasm, he was forced to tear up yesterday’s manifesto with a screech of renunciation, or face the unpleasant prospect of keeping his mouth shut. Apart from uncomfortably recalling her mother’s pendulum of devotion and disappointment, Crystal was uneasy because of her own more hesitant but respectful relationship with the avatar of Thalheim.

The most consistent thread in all Adam’s work was the conviction that whatever happened to him was of global significance. Had he operated in the 1930s, he might well have written a book called ‘Why I’m a Communist’, followed, hotfoot, by a book called ‘Why I’m not a Communist’. Now, in the portentous shadow of the millennium, he pursued the same tango on the mystical plane. He experienced the Divine as a series of compliments paid to his sensitivity, and if he ever lapsed into humility it was the most extraordinary humility the world had ever seen and was immediately turned into a book or a film. Crystal had seen a film about his conversion to Mother Meera in which he often seemed to be on the verge of tears at the thought of what he’d been through in order to become so special. Even his laughter was lachrymose, like the giggling of a child who has been tickled for too long.

Whoever he was announcing or denouncing, taking up or dropping, Oedipus and Narcissus were two figures who commanded his unquestioning loyalty. Exiled from his magical Indian childhood by the treachery of his adored mother, he was installed in frigid England where he developed that prancing, bucking intellect with which he hoped one day to kick down the stable door.

At heart he remained unconsoled, even by his own brilliance, and when he met an Indian woman calling herself Mother Meera he was powerless to resist the rumour of her omnipotence and resumed his magical communion with the subcontinent. She was bound, by the same somnambulant logic, to betray him, as his own mother had done. This she did, or so Crystal had heard, by failing to share Adam’s excitement about his forthcoming marriage to Yves.

Again he retreated from devotion to scholarship, but Rumi, despite his intoxicating emphasis on the wine and fire of Divine love, could not last for ever. A friend of his had told Crystal that Adam’s attention was being drawn towards the Virgin Mary, the mother of all mothers, who had the advantage of already being elaborately mythologized and, thanks to being dead, was less likely than her predecessors to let him down or tell him how to run his life.

Or was she?

The race was on. Would Adam at last find in the Mother of God a parent adequate to his special needs, or would he end up staring into the glamorous pool of his own personality with an ever more candid admiration?

Crystal liked people to be fascinating, but she didn’t want them to be charismatic – charismatic meant that they expected other people to find them fascinating. Adam, having led the charge towards Mother Meera, was no less charismatic in retreat. Some of his plodding followers might be forgiven their sprained ankles and their spinning heads.

As usual his personal experience contained a message it would be mad for the world to ignore. He’d squabbled with Mother Meera, and so the age of the guru was over. With Yves’s approval and support, he was prepared to strike a posture of total independence from any mediated experience of the Divine. Gurus were fallible human beings like the rest of us, and it was dangerous to attribute magical powers to them. Of course it was, thought Crystal, but they still might know something worth finding out.

Adam had become the anti-guru guru, teaching his listeners to turn their backs on all their teachers (except himself) and strut about in garrulous self-sufficiency. This desire to abandon the people who’d helped him, driven by the deep conviction that in the Dodge City of maternal betrayal you have to shoot first, was not to everyone’s taste. It was all very well to kick away the ladder once he was on the roof, but what about those who had not yet run through most of the star rinpoches and avatars currently crowding the planet?

No doubt the transition from external authority to inner conviction was an important passage in spiritual life, but of all revolutions it must be the most bloodless; nothing could falsify it more conspicuously than the need to stab. Any real awakening embraced a past which appeared to have led with newly unveiled precision to a higher perspective. Whereas ordinary well-being always dragged along its gloomy companions, ‘How long can this possibly last?’ and ‘If only I’d known this earlier’, awakening divulged the secret of ripeness, redeeming time as well as understanding, promising that every drop of suffering had been purposeful and that things would never be the same again.

If only it happened more often.

The past contained implacable enemies of liberation, from the most general unnegotiable conditions, like the structure of the human brain, or the karmic chain of cause and effect which seemed to enslave every incident to a deep and eventually unknowable set of causes, down through the genetic codes inherited by each individual, and finally in the distracting drama of personal history. It was only by appreciating the asphyxiatingly conditioned nature of each thought and action that Crystal had developed that passion for freedom which might enable her to punch her way through the icecap of conditioning. She was well aware that this passion and the moments of spaciousness which it sometimes gave her might also be determined. Until these tricky questions were settled more precisely by science and philosophy, every choice might be contained in the invisible prison of another category of determinism.

However irrational it might seem, she felt instead that there was collaborative impulse at work, as if her passionate refusal to inhabit this frozen domain was being answered by a pitying Nature, which stooped down and lifted her from the ice with the same impersonal tenderness with which she sometimes lifted a struggling insect from a swimming pool. And then an idea like ripeness would descend on her with utter conviction and, like the insect opening its wings again in the sun, everything was perfect just as it was.

Crystal’s relationship with gurus and spiritual authority was far from simple, and she recognized in her reading of Adam’s predicament the shadow of some of her own doubts and difficulties. Adam was a kind of authority himself, not only in his own eyes, but also in the part of her that was still impressed by his cleverness and notoriety. Why else would she be wondering whether to approach a man whose behaviour she found silly and corrupt? Was she expecting to acquire mystical prowess by association? And if she was, how different was that from his ruptured faith that, bathed in Mother Meera’s omnipotence, he could realize an omnipotence of his own?

Crystal, too, had longed for paraplegics to rise from their beds as she passed, longed for emotional knots to unravel in the clear light of her presence, and longed to crown these powers with the touching modesty of disclaiming them. Perhaps the only difference between her and Adam was that when she had these longings she realized that, under present conditions, she was wasting her time.

In order to see Mother Meera, Crystal had been forced to overcome reservations about going to Germany at all. Most of her father’s family had died in the Holocaust, and her sense of her father’s absence from her childhood was exacerbated by the ancestral void that lay behind him. Germany was the Fatherland of her fatherlessness, a personal wound that took the preposterous form of a nation state, it had bequeathed her not only a family which she didn’t know but one she could not know. Her loathing of its Nazi past cut across all her ideals of forgiveness and compassion. She went there to challenge her hatred and indignation, and found her desire to give them up challenged instead.

Thalheim lay in what might have been called the heart of Germany until, arriving there, it seemed wiser just to call it the middle. The ugliness of the surrounding villages would have been dazzling enough without the hostility of the population to reinforce it, but the stony-faced family who ran Crystal’s boarding house in Dornburg chose to underline the atmosphere of dutiful depression with a particular grimness of their own. Frau Varden treated her clients as an insufferable imposition, as if they had been billeted on her by an invading army, while her two lumpish sons had perfectly decanted their sibling rivalry into a competition for the role of village idiot, knowing that the loser would always be welcome in some humble capacity at the local abattoir.

Walking around Dornburg, Crystal’s thoughts grew wilder and wilder. She longed to haemorrhage against the walls to add a little colour to the scene. All the buildings were white, the gardens trim, the designs utilitarian. Post-war Germany seemed to be punishing itself for the extravagances of its past. If its internally shuttered houses and tight-lipped inhabitants were also trying to renounce world domination, the discipline carried with it a hygienic ferocity reminiscent of the drives it was designed to extinguish. No wonder the Germans had spent their history invading other countries. Who could blame them for wanting a holiday from their own Kultur? When she reached the edge of the village on her first walk, shivering in the December snow, she found a cute sign, decorated with a cow and a few buttercups, saying, AUF WIEDERSEHEN DORNBURG! It reminded her that on the flip side of every bully was a sentimentalist, like those smiling pigs painted on a butcher’s window, wearing a lop-sided trilby and a willing expression.

The devotees in her boarding house added to her isolation by drowning all the fine distinctions which had crowded her mind since she had first heard rumours of Mother Meera’s divinity. For them the focus of controversy was not her status, but their own status, as measured by where they sat during darshan, the silent encounter with Mother Meera which was the climax of their pilgrimage.

Crystal discovered this preoccupation at her first breakfast, and learned the nicknames of some of the Meera entourage, jokingly called the ‘darshan Police’.

‘I didn’t want to be in Kansas in the fucking kitchen,’ complained one American woman.

‘I was in the bookshop,’ her friend groaned, ‘and every time anyone wanted to get past me, they tapped me on the shoulder. Moustache Boy gave me a really nasty shove. You know, that was abusive. The only way I can figure it is that I had to learn something about my body.’

Boris, a ponderous Russian living in North Carolina, controlled the little group through the power of his mind.

‘Please!’ he said, as if he were asking someone to remove their car from his driveway and couldn’t be expected to keep his temper for much longer. ‘Read Jung!’

Everyone, it turned out, had read some Jung already and so Boris badgered them from another angle.

‘Jung only wrote one book for the public, that is Man and His Symbols, the other books are too esoteric for the public.’

‘Oh, I kinda liked Memories, Dreams, Reflections,’ said Robin, the woman who had been abused by Moustache Boy.

Boris gave her a furiously soulful and patronizing glance with which he conveyed that she had not understood its inner meaning. When he heard that Crystal was living in California, he became bitter.

‘Ha! California,’ he said, ‘the capital of spiritual materialism.’

It was too cold for Crystal to refuse a lift that evening, but she paid the price of overhearing Boris’s dream interpretation.

That afternoon Robin had dreamt that she was driving a six-wheeled truck. Before she could say anything more, Boris explained that ‘Six is the number of the higher intelligence.’

‘Why?’ asked Robin.

‘Because it is the sixth chakra, the brow chakra, which is the chakra of the higher intelligence.’

‘Well, there are so many systems…’ Robin began, but she was soon silenced by the Rasputin-like power of Boris’s self-belief.

‘It is very clear: you are being driven by a higher intelligence,’ said Boris, turning into the municipal car park.

Crystal, who was going to darshan for the first time, was able to break away and go to the head of the crowd, a privilege reserved for newcomers.

A lecture on darshan manners, delivered on the edge of the dark and foggy car park by a skeletal and lamp-eyed man with a monkish haircut who looked as if he’d been interrupted illuminating a twelfth-century manuscript, advised Crystal not to look at the other devotees but to turn her attention inwards and meditate during the three hours she would sit in Mother Meera’s presence.

While she stood there waiting to leave, Crystal overheard a snatch of conversation between two American men.

‘What did you say this guy’s name was?’

‘Poonjaji. He can really shift your perspective,’ said a man in a blue bonnet.

Crystal felt a burst of affection for Poonjaji. She remembered her private interviews with him and the way he always went straight to the point.

‘Are you and I the same?’ he would ask in the warbling Indian accent she loved to imitate. ‘Is there any difference between you and my guru?’

Nothing about the content of these questions could in itself explain why she had felt all the walls come down at once, and the undulation of a universal rhythm flow through her unresisted, not with the loud bliss of psychedelics but with perfect naturalness. The trouble with Poonjaji’s teaching was that there was no supporting practice, and it only took a long plane flight, a bout of flu and an unreliable man to turn this openness into a sense of agoraphobic naivety, quickly followed by closure. Having thought she was beyond meditation, she resumed with grim discipline. She couldn’t fly to Lucknow every morning for half an hour but she could sit on a cushion.

What would be the Mother Meera effect? What would it show her, if anything?

When the group of newcomers finally set off, the man who had spoken about Poonjaji was at the front of the pack.

Someone came abreast of him. ‘First night, huh?’ he asked sarcastically.

‘Oh, yeah, well, like I figured I deserved a place in the big room,’ said the man in the blue bonnet.

He’s lying, thought Crystal. He’s on his way to see someone who he thinks is either God or a fully realized human being and he’s lying in order to get a better seat. What’s the deal here? Hasn’t it occurred to him he might be blowing it?

And here she was on her way to see the same person and getting annoyed by the behaviour of a stranger.

The group advanced swiftly and quietly through the streets, approaching a house with a large room on the ground floor and a dimly lit window upstairs. Ah, thought Crystal, uplifting her thoughts, that’s her home, that’s where we gather downstairs, and from her bedroom Mother Meera engages in her lonely work, sending the Paramatman light into the world.

It was not the house. They moved on to a stubbornly ordinary village house and stood in line, having their names checked by a man with a clipboard and a mustard-coloured tie.

Inside, Crystal sat down in a room crowded with rows of white plastic chairs; its wallpaper was silky and white, the floor tiles white marble, and against the wall stood a large armchair draped in pale floral silk. On the ceiling the light bulbs were contained by opaque glass lotuses, not with a thousand petals but with six, each petal patterned with sinuous tendrils of clear glass.

Crystal sat down and closed her eyes.

She was astonished by the speed and directness with which she was javelined into concentration. It was a ferocious state of mind, piercing her with a sense of urgency. Why was she holding back from the final generosity, the final embrace of life? How could she bear to run along the gleaming tracks of a determined and yet fugitive experience?

All the touching deathbed scenes she had ever imagined flashed over her at once. Smiling serenely at her inconsolable friends, she would be wise and kind, a reconciliation in one hand and a legacy in the other, courageous in the face of pain, witty at the end.

Why wait? Why wait until she had a hospice for an address? Why wait until she was twiddling the dial on a morphine drip?

Why not do it now? If not now, when?

She opened her eyes and looked around her, ostensibly to check whether she was participating in a mass psychosis, but also wanting to steady herself with the reassuring metallic flavour of irritation with which Germany and Boris had provided her so conscientiously over the last twenty-four hours. Who were these devotees she had fallen among? What context did they provide for her prickling sense of urgency?

Not surprisingly, visiting someone called ‘The Mother’, there were various connoisseurs of the maternal: earth mothers, lost boys with pursed lips, thin unsuckled daughters. She looked around, relieved by the triumphant return of her critical mind.

The honey-blond crew who discussed the enneagram over coffee in their lovely homes. Gold jewellery. Very long fingernails. They hold the saucer under their chins as they sip from the cup. They brush the crumbs from the corner of their mouths with pinched napkins. No minds to speak of, but a kind of gooey generalized lurv. Easter bunnies melting next to a fake log fire.

And the hippies who’d done India and done acid and done communal living. Hair still long, but grey now. Experts on altered states who thought that Mother Meera might give them a hit that would take them back beyond the detoxifying diets, beyond the ashrams, back to the early trips.

And old people who would hardly be able to get on their knees to rest their heads in Mother Meera’s consoling hands. They wanted to be less scared of death, of all the things they’d done and hadn’t done. Who could blame them? Who could blame any of them?

‘The Mother’ came into the room and they all rose, eagerly, coolly, arthritically. She’s a small Indian woman with a moustache and a fancy sari, thought Crystal, but she felt a visceral recognition during the avatar’s swishing passage through the room, and sensed a masterpiece of concentration housed in that fragile body.

Crystal closed her eyes again and shifted instantly into an intense reverie. She saw an image of pale-yellow roses beaded with rain, and felt that this vivid picture was somehow accompanied by an elaborate anecdotal atmosphere.

She was seeing these roses in the early morning, after talking all night in a curtained room with someone who was not yet her lover but would be soon. And then she’d gone outside. Wet grass, almost as laborious as sand to walk through, and the melancholy excitement of a new day without sleep, the smell of rained-on earth and, round the corner of the house, the roses, against a stone wall, their heads stooped with water, but also stooped from having to mean so much, like a newborn child who inherits a famous name, not just wet flowers but old roses.

Behind her closed eyes she closed her eyes again, and the smell hit her in the middle of the brow like a picture nail. The inner sensation of beauty disarmed her predatory mind which, a few moments earlier, had been watching for something to condemn, like a cat beside a mousehole. Now, she had merged with an imaginary rose and was nodding carelessly on the edge of a symbolic realm, pregnant with the atmosphere of amorous adventure.

Far out.

If only I could sustain this awareness for ever, thought Crystal, immediately losing it, recognizing the inevitability of the loss, and finding a new centre. The operation was over in a second. Some things were lost, some remained. The thing was to see what was there, instead of moping about what was lost and hoping it might return. The enigma of how things became available to consciousness was some consolation for their apparent loss, as well as a promise of further loss. She had spent so much of her life chasing after half-concealed thoughts, like a diver hurrying towards a glint in the seaweed, only to find when she got there at last the lid of a tin rocking limply in the current.

The roses were gone but she had cut through their loss with a bracing sense of present reality.

This Mother Meera was quite something; or the collective expectation that she was quite something was quite something. What did it matter? In her presence Crystal was able to hover on the thermals of impermanence without needing to beat a wing. And if those warm currents, caused by appreciating the insubstantiality of her own thoughts, were removed, and she hovered in pure emptiness, beyond even acknowledging the emptiness, would she have to flap a wing?

She experimented, relaxing completely into the knowledge of her own death, taking groundlessness as her ground, and free fall as her playing field. Instead of spiralling downwards, she found a still more essential poise. Her eyelids parted slowly, her lips parted slowly, and her slowly exhaling breath seemed to last from the beginning of time to the present moment, so solid was her sense of connection between those two non-events, passing like a rod through the centre of her body.

Quite something, the little Indian woman was quite something.

Curious to watch the process of darshan more closely, Crystal beamed in on the devotee who was kneeling in front of Mother Meera, his head in her hands. After a few moments he gazed up into Mother Meera’s eyes. Crystal was trying to discern the exact quality of the transmission when she was distracted by the sound of muffled crying.

Only a few seats away from the avatar’s armchair sat the source of the noise. Her face was crumpled, halfway between the tear pump of a devouring Picasso hysteric and the glycerine leakage of the sickliest devotional postcard. Tears streamed down her cheeks with such hydraulic prowess, it was hard to believe that she was not connected to the mains water supply. As one fluid ounce followed another into a chain of soggy handkerchiefs, Crystal started to imagine the slates of a mountain lodge glittering in the spring thaw; Venetian floods submerging the chequered piazzas, and eventually, in pure awe, Noah’s ark bobbing under a dehydrated sky.

The reason she couldn’t find her way to compassion was the repulsiveness of the display. It seemed to be divorced from direct suffering and to spring on the one hand from a simple rage that Mother Meera was getting so much attention, and on the other from a veil of piety suggesting that only she, Wasserworks, understood the exact nature of the sacrifice the Divine Mother had made by descending into the charnel house of human incarnation.

Crystal tried to persuade herself that this was the core of suffering, the suffering of self-centredness, and that it too required compassion, but she only grew more exasperated. Wasserworks’s strategy of draining attention towards herself was bad enough, but the dissonance of her calamitous expression as she looked at darshan was like going to a concert with someone who stoutly whistles another tune during the performance. Crystal tried all the usual self-accusations to discover why she was so annoyed by this woman, but finally had to give up and be annoyed by somebody else.

Immediately behind Wasserworks, and in comic contrast, was Mrs Ecstasy, who had her hands folded over her heart and her head cocked to one side and a grin from ear to ear. She looked like a clown on a circus poster.

Crystal tried to stop but she simply had to accept that she was doomed to shuttle between passages of exquisite insight and blasts of annoyance and disrespect.

Ah, there was the liar, without his blue bonnet, looking shifty as hell. The Macbeth of darshan, whose victorious proximity to Mother Meera was utterly compromised by his means of winning it, was sweating on his throne. Whatever self-righteous pleasure Crystal might have taken in his punishment collapsed at the thought that she must soon present herself to Mother Meera. Who was she to condemn Blue Bonnet, or anyone else? What was so pure, after all, about her own state of mind?

She realized she was asking these questions in order to be able to look without malice into the eyes of what might be God, whoever she was, or an agent of the Paramatman light, whatever that was. The calculated nature of this correction made her feel even more phoney. She realized that any pretence would give way like so much sodden paper, and that this too was an effect of the context she was in. She exhaled and let it happen, finally coming to rest in the knowledge that she had come to Thalheim, however misguidedly, because somehow she wanted to be a force for good in the world. That was true. She could rest there.

She started wishing that they had been given numbers so that the timing of her own darshan could have been taken out of her hands. Instead, she found herself waiting apprehensively, half relieved and half frustrated by the constantly renewed line of kneeling devotees waiting in the aisle. Eventually deciding to treat the queue as a reassuring interval in which she could reverse her decision, she knelt in the aisle herself.

What could she bring to Mother Meera? The outcry of a lost child? The humble devotion of a pilgrim? The highest notes of her own consciousness? What were those anyway? In a blur of panic and indecision she staggered up to the waiting chair and watched the last darshan before her own.

Kneeling in front of Mother Meera, almost fainting with nervousness, she bowed her head until it was parallel with the avatar’s knees. Mother Meera pressed her thumbs gently on either side of the central line of her skull and Crystal felt, or imagined she felt, two rods of light being slotted into her head. They would dissolve over time, she decided, keeping her bathed in a state of illumination.

These thoughts gave way to a sense of flotation in infinite space, without images, and without speculation about the state itself. Mother Meera removed her thumbs and Crystal looked up, no longer wondering which gaze to use. Her awareness had briefly flipped from a point in space to being space, the pure category without the limitation of a viewer. She offered this transformation, not without scholarly enthusiasm, to Mother Meera, who instantaneously met her at that level, but met her with eyes that hinted, without reproach, that she could take it further.

Crystal left darshan with an unprecedented sense of devotional simplicity. It did not last.

Boris had picked up a pink-cheeked Englishman whom he was also driving back to Dornburg.

‘God,’ said Robin, ‘did you see that man who went up twice? He snuck up at the end and had a second bite … Can you believe that?’

‘The sari she wore tonight was really special,’ said Robin’s friend.

‘So,’ asked Boris witheringly, ‘did anyone achieve full realization?’

‘The way I see it,’ said the Englishman with an engaging smile, ‘is that we’re all realized already, we just don’t realize we’re realized.’

‘But isn’t realizing we’re realized realization?’ asked Crystal.

‘That’s what Mother Meera does.’

‘But she can only make you realize how much you realize at any particular moment.’

‘I think she can make it all happen at once.’

‘Maybe,’ said Crystal, ‘but you still can’t project it backwards…’ Why was she arguing? She could see that the leaves and twigs of logic were not going to dam up the flash flood of his conviction.

‘Apparently Adam Frazer used to have his own special slippers during darshan,’ said Robin. ‘And when someone asked him to take them off, he said, “They’re not shoes, they’re slippers, and anyway, I’m allowed.”’

The memory of this exotic detail recalled Crystal to the present and her doubts about associating with Adam. She had left Thalheim dismissing fraud, but uncertain whether Mother Meera was wise to call herself ‘a divine personality’, a phrase which never entirely escaped the atmosphere of a Long Island cocktail party. Perhaps she was someone who had never forgotten the unity of the realm from which she had descended into incarnation, or a yogic master, or a good person with exceptional powers of transmission who had fallen in with the mythologies of her culture and the longings of her entourage. ‘Avatar’ was just a word from the treasury of hyperbolic spiritual claims. She chose not to get too hung up about whether to believe it or not, and to concentrate on the way Mother Meera had amplified her highest meditative state. There seemed to Crystal to be no enslavement inherent to the process, it was just what Mother Meera did. If that’s what you wanted, you could get it there, like gas at a gas station.