Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Opened at another place and found the description and image of a Whisper-Pink Bra in Dacron and Pima Cotton. Turned the page and here, memento mori, was what the Bra-buyer would be wearing twenty years later — A Strap-Controlled Front, Cupped to Support Pendulous Abdomen.
“It doesn’t get really interesting,” said Murugan, “until near the end of the book. It has thirteen hundred and fifty-eight pages,” he added parenthetically. “Imagine! Thirteen hundred and fifty-eight!”
Will skipped the next seven hundred and fifty pages.
“Ah, this is more like it,” he said. “‘Our Famous 22 Revolvers and Automatics.’” And here, a little further on, were the Fibre Glass Boats, here were the High Thrust Inboard Engines, here was a 12 h.p. Outboard for only $234.95 — and the Fuel Tank was included. “That’s extraordinarily generous!”
But Murugan, it was evident, was no sailor. Taking the book, he leafed impatiently through a score of additional pages.
“Look at this Italian Style Motor Scooter!” And while Will looked, Murugan read aloud. “‘This sleek Speedster gives up to 110 Miles per Gallon of Fuel.’ Just imagine!” His normally sulky face was glowing with enthusiasm. “And you can get up to sixty miles per gallon even on this 14.5 h.p. Motor Cycle. And it’s guaranteed to do seventy-five miles an hour — guaranteed!”
“Remarkable!” said Will. Then, curiously, “Did somebody in America send you this glorious book?” he asked.
Murugan shook his head. “Colonel Dipa gave it to me.”
“Colonel Dipa?” What an odd kind of present from Hadrian to Antinous! He looked again at the picture of the motor bike, then back at Murugan’s glowing face. Light dawned; the Colonels purpose revealed itself. The serpent tempted me and I did eat. The tree in the midst of the garden was called the Tree of Consumer Goods, and to the inhabitants of every underdeveloped Eden, the tiniest taste of its fruit, and even the sight of its thirteen hundred and fifty-eight leaves, had power to bring the shameful knowledge that, industrially speaking, they were stark naked. The future Raja of Pala was being made to realize that he was no more than the untrousered ruler of a tribe of savages.
“You ought,” Will said aloud, “to import a million of these catalogues and distribute them — gratis, of course, like contraceptives — to all your subjects.”
“What for?”
“To whet their appetite for possessions. Then they’ll start clamouring for Progress — oil wells, armaments, Joe Aldehyde, Soviet technicians.”
Murugan frowned and shook his head. “It wouldn’t work.”
“You mean, they wouldn’t be tempted? Not even by Sleek Speedsters and Whisper-Pink Bras? But that’s incredible!”
“It may be incredible,” said Murugan bitterly; “but it’s a fact. They’re just not interested.”
“Not even the young ones?”
“I’d say especially the young ones.”
Will Farnaby pricked up his ears. This lack of interest was profoundly interesting. “Can you guess why?” he asked.
“I don’t guess,” the boy answered. “I know.” And as though he had suddenly decided to stage a parody of his mother, he began to speak in a tone of righteous indignation that was absurdly out of keeping with his age and appearance. “To begin with, they’re much too busy with …” He hesitated, then the abhorred word was hissed out with a disgustful emphasis. “With sex.”
“But everybody’s busy with sex. Which doesn’t keep them from whoring after sleek speedsters.”
“Sex is different here,” Murugan insisted.
“Because of the yoga of love?” Will asked, remembering the little nurse’s rapturous face.
The boy nodded. “They’ve got something that makes them think they’re perfectly happy, and they don’t want anything else.”
“What a blessed state!”
“There’s nothing blessed about it,” Murugan snapped. “It’s just stupid and disgusting. No progress, only sex, sex, sex. And of course that beastly dope they’re all given.”
“Dope?” Will repeated in some astonishment. Dope in a place where Susila had said there were no addicts? “What kind of dope?”
“It’s made out of toadstools. Toadstools!” He spoke in a comical caricature of the Rani’s most vibrant tone of outraged spirituality.
“Those lovely red toadstools that gnomes used to sit on?”
“No, these are yellow. People used to go out and collect them in the mountains. Nowadays the things are grown in special fungus beds at the High Altitude Experimental Station. Scientifically cultivated dope. Pretty, isn’t it?”
A door slammed and there was a sound of voices, of footsteps approaching along a corridor. Abruptly, the indignant spirit of the Rani took flight, and Murugan was once again the conscience-stricken schoolboy furtively trying to cover up his delinquencies. In a trice ‘Elementary Ecology’ had taken the place of Sears Roebuck, and the suspiciously bulging briefcase was under the table. A moment later, stripped to the waist and shining like oiled bronze with the sweat of labour in the noonday sun, Vijaya came striding into the room. Behind him came Dr Robert. With the air of a model student, interrupted in the midst of his reading by trespassers from the frivolous outside world, Murugan looked up from his book. Amused, Will threw himself at once wholeheartedly into the part that had been assigned to him.
“It was I who got here too early,” he said in response to Vijaya’s apologies for their being so late. “With the result that our young friend here hasn’t been able to get on with his lessons. We’ve been talking our heads off.”
“What about?” Dr Robert asked.
“Everything, Cabbages, kings, motor scooters, pendulous abdomens. And when you came in, we’d just embarked on toadstools. Murugan was telling me about the fungi that are used here as a source of dope.”
“What’s in a name?” said Dr Robert with a laugh. “Answer, practically everything. Having had the misfortune to be brought up in Europe, Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex, the dirty word evokes. We, on the contrary, give the stuff good names — the moksha-medicine, the reality-revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved. Whereas our young friend here has no first-hand knowledge of the stuff and can’t be persuaded even to give it a try. For him, it’s dope and dope is something that, by definition, no decent person ever indulges in.”
“What does His Highness say to that?” Will asked.
Murugan shook his head. “All it gives you is a lot of illusions,” he muttered. “Why should I go out of my way to be made a fool of?”
“Why indeed?” said Vijaya with good-humoured irony. “Seeing that, in your normal condition, you alone of the human race are never made a fool of and never have illusions about anything!”
“I never said that,” Murugan protested. “All I mean is that I don’t want any of your false samadhi.”
“How do you know it’s false?” Dr Robert enquired.
“Because the real thing only comes to people after years and years of meditation and tapas and … well, you know — not going with women.”
“Murugan,” Vijaya explained to Will, “is one of the Puritans. He’s outraged by the fact that, with four hundred milligrammes of moksha-medicine in their bloodstreams, even beginners — yes, and even boys and girls who make love together — can catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego.”
“But it isn’t real,” Murugan insisted.
“Not real!” Dr Robert repeated. “You might as well say that the experience of feeling well isn’t real.”
“You’re begging the question,” Will objected. “An experience can be real in relation to something going on inside your skull, but completely irrelevant to anything outside.”
“Of course,” Dr Robert agreed.
“Do you know what goes on inside your skull, when you’ve taken a dose of the mushroom?”
“We know a little.”
“And we’re trying all the time to find out more,” Vijaya added.
“For example,” said Dr Robert, “We’ve found that the people whose EEG doesn’t show any alpha-wave activity when they’re relaxed, aren’t likely to respond significantly to the moksha-medicine. That means that, for about fifteen per cent of the population, we have to find other approaches to liberation.”
“Another thing we’re just beginning to understand,” said Vijaya, “is the neurological correlate of these experiences. What’s happening in the brain when you’re having a vision? And what’s happening when you pass from a pre-mystical to a genuinely mystical state of mind?”
“Do you know?” Will asked.
“‘Know’ is a big word. Let’s say we’re in a position to make some plausible guesses. Angels and New Jerusalems and Madonnas and Future Buddhas — they’re all related to some kind of unusual stimulation of the brain areas of primary projection — the visual cortex, for example. Just how the moksha-medicine produces those unusual stimuli we haven’t yet found out. The important fact is that, somehow or other, it does produce them. And somehow or other, it also does something unusual to the silent areas of the brain, the areas not specifically concerned with perceiving, or moving, or feeling.”
“And how do the silent areas respond?” Will enquired.
“Let’s start with what they don’t respond with. They don’t respond with visions or auditions, they don’t respond with telepathy or clairvoyance or any other kind of parapsychological performance. None of that amusing pre-mystical stuff. Their response is the full-blown mystical experience. You know — One in all and All in one. The basic experience with its corollaries — boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and meaning.”
“Not to mention joy,” said Dr Robert, “inexpressible joy.”
“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 far-fetched 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 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 milligrammes 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 the 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 fulfilment, 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 and 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 and 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 in tenser 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.”