Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“And now it’s time for the descent, time for a second bout of the yoga of danger, time for a renewal of tension and the awareness of life in its glowing plenitude as you hang precariously on the brink of destruction. Then at the foot of the precipice you unrope, you go striding down the rocky path towards the first trees. And suddenly you’re in the forest, and another kind of yoga is called for — the yoga of the jungle, the yoga that consists of being totally aware of life at the near-point, jungle life in all its exuberance and its rotting, crawling squalor, all its melodramatic ambivalence of orchids and centipedes, of leeches and sunbirds, of the drinkers of nectar and the drinkers of blood. Life bringing order out of chaos and ugliness, life performing its miracles of birth and growth, but performing them, it seems, for no other purpose than to destroy itself. Beauty and horror, beauty,” he repeated, “and horror. And then suddenly, as you come down from one of your expeditions in the mountains, suddenly you know that there’s a reconciliation. And not merely a reconciliation. A fusion, and identity. Beauty made one with horror in the yoga of the jungle. Life reconciled with the perpetual imminence of death in the yoga of danger. Emptiness identified with selfhood in the Sabbath yoga of the summit.”
There was silence. Murugan yawned ostentatiously. The old priest lighted another stick of incense and, muttering, waved it before the dancer, waved it again around the cosmic love-making of Shiva and the Goddess.
“Breathe deeply,” said Vijaya, “and as you breathe, pay attention to this smell of incense. Pay your whole attention to it; know it for what it is — an ineffable fact beyond words, beyond reason and explanation. Know it in the raw. Know it as a mystery. Perfume, women and prayer — those were the three things that Mohammed loved above all others. The inexplicable data of breathed incense, touched skin, felt love and beyond them, the mystery of mysteries, the One in plurality, the Emptiness that is all, the Suchness totally present in every appearance, at every point and instant. So breathe,” he repeated, “breathe,” and in a final whisper, as he sat down, “breathe.”
“Shivanayama,” murmured the old priest ecstatically.
Dr Robert rose and started towards the altar, then halted, turned back and beckoned to Will Farnaby.
“Come and sit with me,” he whispered, when Will had caught up with him. “I’d like you to see their faces.”
“Shan’t I be in the way?”
Dr Robert shook his head, and together they moved forward, climbed and, three-quarters of the way up the altar stair, sat down side by side in the penumbra between darkness and the light of the lamps. Very quietly Dr Robert began to talk about Shiva-Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance.
“Look at his image,” he said. “Look at it with these new eyes that the moksha-medicine has given you. See how it breathes and pulses, how it grows out of brightness into brightnesses ever more intense. Dancing through time and out of time, dancing everlastingly and in the eternal now. Dancing and dancing in all the worlds at once. Look at him.”
Scanning those upturned faces, Will noted, now in one, now in another, the dawning illuminations of delight, recognition, understanding, the signs of worshipping wonder that quivered on the brinks of ecstasy or terror.
“Look closely,” Dr Robert insisted. “Look still more closely.” Then, after a long minute of silence, “Dancing in all the worlds at once,” he repeated. “In all the worlds. And first of all in the world of matter. Look at the great round halo, fringed with the symbols of fire, within which the god is dancing. It stands for Nature, for the world of mass and energy. Within it Shiva-Nataraja dances the dance of endless becoming and passing away. It’s his lila, his cosmic play. Playing for the sake of playing, like a child. But this child is the Order of Things. His toys are galaxies, his playground is infinite space and between finger and finger every interval is a thousand million light years. Look at him there on the altar. The image is man-made, a little contraption of copper only four feet high. But Shiva-Nataraja fills the universe, is the universe. Shut your eyes and see him towering into the night, follow the boundless stretch of those arms and the wild hair infinitely flying. Nataraja at play among the stars and in the atoms. But also,” he added, “also at play within every living thing, every sentient creature, every child and man and woman. Play for play’s sake. But now the playground is conscious, the dance-floor is capable of suffering. To us, this play without purpose seems a kind of insult. What we would really like is a God who never destroys what he has created. Or if there must be pain and death, let them be meted out by a God of righteousness, who will punish the wicked and reward the good with everlasting happiness. But in fact the good get hurt, the innocent suffer. Then let there be a God who sympathizes and brings comfort. But Nataraja only dances. His play is a play impartially of death and of life, of all evils as well as of all goods. In the uppermost of his right hands he holds the drum that summons being out of not-being. Rub-a-dub-dub — the creation tattoo, the cosmic reveille. But now look at the uppermost of his left hands. It brandishes the fire by which all that has been created is forthwith destroyed. He dances this way — what happiness! Dances that way — and oh, the pain, the hideous fear, the desolation! Then hop, skip and jump. Hop into perfect health. Skip into cancer and senility. Jump out of the fulness of life into nothingness, out of nothingness again into life. For Nataraja it’s all play, and the play is an end in itself, everlastingly purposeless. He dances because he dances, and the dancing is his maha-sukha, his infinite and eternal bliss. Eternal Bliss,” Dr Robert repeated and again, but questioningly, “Eternal Bliss?” He shook his head. “For us there’s no bliss, only the oscillation between happiness and terror and a sense of outrage at the thought that our pains are as integral a part of Nataraja’s dance as our pleasures, our dying as our living. Let’s quietly think about that for a little while.”
The seconds passed, the silence deepened. Suddenly, startlingly one of the girls began to sob. Vijaya left his place and, kneeling down beside her, laid a hand on her shoulder. The sobbing died down.
“Suffering and sickness,” Dr Robert resumed at last, “old age, decrepitude, death. I show you sorrow. But that wasn’t the only thing the Buddha showed us. He also showed us the ending of sorrow.”
“Shivanayama,” the old priest cried triumphantly.
“Open your eyes again and look at Nataraja up there on the altar. Look closely. In his upper right hand, as you’ve already seen, he holds the drum that calls the world into existence, and in his upper left hand he carries the destroying fire. Life and death, order and disintegration, impartially. But now look at Shiva’s other pair of hands. The lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. What does that gesture signify? It signifies, ‘Don’t be afraid; it’s All Right.’ But how can anyone in his senses fail to be afraid? How can anyone pretend that evil and suffering are all right, when it’s so obvious that they’re all wrong? Nataraja has the answer. Look now at his lower left hand. He’s using it to point down at his feet. And what are his feet doing? Look closely and you’ll see that the right foot is planted squarely on a horrible little subhuman creature — the demon, Muyalaka. A dwarf, but immensely powerful in his malignity, Muyalaka is the embodiment of ignorance, the manifestation of greedy, possessive selfhood. Stamp on him, break his back! And that’s precisely what Nataraja is doing. Trampling the little monster down under his right foot. But notice that it isn’t at this trampling right foot that he points his finger; it’s at the left foot, the foot that, as he dances, he’s in the act of raising from the ground. And why does he point at it? Why? That lifted foot, that dancing defiance of the force of gravity — it’s the symbol of release, of moksha, of liberation. Nataraja dances in all the worlds at once — in the world of physics and chemistry, in the world of ordinary, all-too-human experience, in the world finally of Suchness, of Mind, of the Clear Light. And now,” Dr Robert went on after a moment of silence, “I want you to look at the other statue, the image of Shiva and the Goddess. Look at them there in their
little cave of light. And now shut your eyes and see them again — shining, alive, glorified. How beautiful! And in their tenderness what depths of meaning! What wisdom beyond all spoken wisdoms in that sensual experience of spiritual fusion and atonement! Eternity in love with time. The One joined in marriage to the many, the relative made absolute by its union with the One. Nirvana identified with samsara, the manifestation in time and flesh and feeling of the Buddha Nature.”
“Shivanayama.” The old priest lighted another stick of incense and softly, in a succession of long-drawn melismata, began to chant something in Sanskrit. On the young faces before him Will could read the marks of a listening serenity, the hardly perceptible, ecstatic smile that welcomes a sudden insight, a revelation of truth or of beauty. In the background, meanwhile, Murugan sat wearily slumped against a pillar, picking his exquisitely Grecian nose.
“Liberation,” Dr Robert began again, “the ending of sorrow, ceasing to be what you ignorantly think you are and becoming what you are in fact. For a little while, thanks to the moksha-medicine, you will know what it’s like to be what in fact you are, what in fact you always have been. What a timeless bliss! But, like everything else, this timelessness is transient. Like everything else, it will pass. And when it has passed, what will you do with this experience? What will you do with all the other similar experiences that the moksha-medicine will bring you in the years to come? Will you merely enjoy them as you would enjoy an evening at the puppet show, and then go back to business as usual, back to behaving like the silly delinquents you imagine yourselves to be? Or, having glimpsed, will you devote your lives to the business, not at all as usual, of being what you are in fact? All that we older people can do with our teachings, all that Pala can do for you with its social arrangements, is to provide you with techniques and opportunities. And all that the moksha-medicine can do is to give you a succession of beatific glimpses, an hour or two, every now and then, of enlightening and liberating grace. It remains for you to decide whether you’ll co-operate with the grace and take those opportunities. But that’s for the future. Here and now, all you have to do is to follow the mynah bird’s advice: Attention! Pay attention and you’ll find yourselves, gradually or suddenly, becoming aware of the great primordial facts behind these symbols on the altar.”
“Shivanayama!” The old priest waved his stick of incense. At the foot of the altar steps the boys and girls sat motionless as statues. A door creaked, there was a sound of footsteps. Will turned his head and saw a short, thick-set man picking his way between the young contemplatives. He mounted the steps and, bending down, murmured something in Dr Robert’s ear, then turned and walked back towards the door.
Dr Robert laid a hand on Will’s knee. “It’s a royal command,” he whispered, with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders. “That was the man in charge of the Alpine hut. The Rani has just telephoned to say that she has to see Murugan as soon as possible. It’s urgent.” Laughing noiselessly, he rose and helped Will to his feet.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WILL FARNABY HAD made his own breakfast and, when Dr Robert returned from his early morning visit to the hospital, was drinking his second cup of Palanese tea and eating toasted breadfruit with pumelo marmalade.
“Not too much pain in the night,” was Dr Robert’s response to his enquiries. “Lakshmi had four or five hours of good sleep, and this morning she was able to take some broth.”
They could look forward, he continued, to another day of respite. And so, since it tired the patient to have him there all the time, and since life, after all, had to go on and be made the best of, he had decided to drive up to the High Altitude Station and put in a few hours work on the research team in the pharmaceutical laboratory.
“Work on the moksha-medicine?”
Dr Robert shook his head. “That’s just a matter of repeating a standard operation — something for technicians, not for the researchers. They’re busy with something new.”
And he began to talk about the indoles recently isolated from the ololiuqui seeds that had been brought in from Mexico last year and were now being grown in the Station’s botanic garden. At least three different indoles, of which one seemed to be extremely potent. Animal experiments indicated that it affected the reticular system. …
Left to himself, Will sat down under the overhead fan and went on with his reading of the Notes on What’s What.
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
In Pala, after three generations of Reform, there are no sheep-like flocks and no ecclesiastical Good Shepherds to shear and castrate; there are no bovine or swinish herds and no licensed drovers, royal or military, capitalistic or revolutionary, to brand, confine and butcher. There are only voluntary associations of men and women on the road to full humanity.
Tunes or pebbles, processes or substantial things? ‘Tunes’, answer Buddhism and modern science. ‘Pebbles’, say the classical philosophers of the West. Buddhism and modern science think of the world in terms of music. The image that comes to mind when one reads the philosophers of the West, is a figure in a Byzantine mosaic, rigid, symmetrical, made up of millions of little squares of some stony material and firmly cemented to the walls of a windowless basilica.
The dancer’s grace and, forty years on, her arthritis — both are functions of the skeleton. It is thanks to an inflexible framework of bones that the girl is able to do her pirouettes, thanks to the same bones, grown a little rusty, that the grandmother is condemned to a wheel chair. Analogously, the firm support of a culture is the prime condition of all individual originality and creativeness; it is also their principal enemy. The thing in whose absence we cannot possibly grow into complete human beings is, all too often, the thing that prevents us from growing.
A century of research on the moksha-medicine has clearly shown that quite ordinary people are perfectly capable of having visionary or even fully liberating experiences. In this respect the men and women who make and enjoy high culture are no better off than the low-brows. High experience is perfectly compatible with low symbolic expression. The expressive symbols created by Palanese artists are no better than the expressive symbols created by artists elsewhere. Being the products of happiness and a sense of fulfilment, they are probably less moving, perhaps less satisfying aesthetically, than the tragic or compensatory symbols created by victims of frustration and ignorance, of tyranny, war and guilt-fostering crime-inciting superstitions. Palanese superiority does not lie in symbolic expression but in an art which, though higher and far more valuable than all the rest, can yet be practised by everyone — the art of adequately experiencing, the art of becoming more intimately acquainted with all the worlds that, as human beings, we find ourselves inhabiting. Palanese culture is not to be judged as (for lack of any better criterion) we judge other cultures. It is not to be judged by the accomplishments of a few gifted manipulators of artistic or philosophical symbols. No, it is to be judged by what all the members of the community, the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, can and do experience in every contingency and at each successive intersection of time with eternity.
The telephone bell had started to ring. Should he let it ring, or would it be better to answer and let the caller know that Dr Robert was out for the day? Deciding on the second course, Will lifted the receiver.
“Dr MacPhail’s bungalow,” he said, in a parody of secretarial efficiency. “But the doctor is out for the day.”
“Tant mieux,” said the rich royal voice at the other end of the wire. “How are you, mon cher Farnaby?”
Taken aback, Will stammered out his thanks for Her Highness’s gracious enquiry.
“So they took you,” said the Rani, “to see one of their so-called initiations yesterday afternoon.”
Will had recovered sufficiently from his surprise to respond with a neutral word and in the most non-committal of tones. “It was most remarkable,” he said.
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nbsp; “Remarkable,” said the Rani, dwelling emphatically on the spoken equivalents of pejorative and laudatory capital letters, “but only as the Blasphemous Caricature of TRUE Initiation. They’ve never learned to make the elementary distinction between the Natural Order and the Supernatural.”
“Quite,” Will murmured, “Quite …”
“What did you say?” the voice at the other end of the line demanded.
“Quite,” Will repeated more loudly.
“I’m glad you agree. But I didn’t call you,” the Rani went on, “to discuss the difference between the Natural and the Supernatural — Supremely Important as that difference is. No, I called you about a more urgent matter.”