Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Will did not answer immediately. He was thinking of what had happened between himself and Babs on the evening of Molly’s funeral. The yoga of anti-love, the yoga of resented addiction, of lust and the self-loathing that reinforces the self and makes it yet more loathsome.
“I’m sorry I tried to be unpleasant,” he said at last.
“It’s your father’s ghost. We’ll have to see if we can exorcise it.”
They had crossed the market place and now, at the end of the short street that led out of the village, they had come to the open space where the jeep was parked. As Susila turned on to the highway, the beam of their headlamps swept across a small green car that was turning downhill into the by-pass.
“Don’t I recognize the royal Baby Austin?”
“You do,” said Susila, and wondered where the Rani and Murugan could be going at this time of night.
“They’re up to no good,” Will guessed. And on a sudden impulse he told Susila of his roving commission from Joe Aldehyde, his dealings with the Queen Mother and Mr Bahu.
“You’d be justified in deporting me tomorrow,” he concluded.
“Not now that you’ve changed your mind,” she assured him. “And anyhow nothing you did could have affected the real issue. Our enemy is oil in general. Whether we’re exploited by South-East Asia Petroleum or Standard of California makes no difference.”
“Did you know that Murugan and the Rani were conspiring against you?”
“They make no secret of it.”
“Then why don’t you get rid of them?”
“Because they would be brought back immediately by Colonel Dipa. The Rani is a princess of Rendang. If we expelled her, it would be a casus belli.”
“So what can you do?”
“Try to keep them in order, try to change their minds, hope for a happy outcome and be prepared for the worst.” Then, after a silence, “Did Dr Robert say you could have the moksha-medicine?” she asked, and when Will nodded, “Would you like to try it.”
“Now?”
“Now. That is, if you don’t mind being up all night with it.”
“I’d like nothing better.”
“You may find that you never liked anything worse,” Susila warned him. “The moksha-medicine can take you to heaven; but it can also take you to hell. Or else to both, together or alternately. Or else (if you’re lucky, or if you’ve made yourself ready) beyond either of them. And then beyond the beyond, back to where you started from — back to here, back to New Rothamsted, back to business as usual. Only now, of course, business as usual is completely different.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ONE, TWO, THREE, four … The clock in the kitchen struck twelve. How irrelevantly, seeing that time had ceased to exist! The absurd, importunate bell had sounded at the heart of a timelessly present Event, of a Now that changed incessantly in a dimension, not of seconds and minutes, but of beauty, of significance, of intensity, of deepening mystery.
“Luminous bliss.” From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids. “Luminous bliss.” That was as near as one could come to it. But it — this timeless and yet ever changing Event — was something that words could only caricature and diminish, never convey. It was not only bliss, it was also understanding. Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of known and knowable things. But here, behind his closed lids, there was neither spectacle nor spectator. There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with oneness.
In a succession of revelations, the light grew brighter, the understanding deepened, the bliss became more impossibly, more unbearably intense. “Dear God!” he said to himself. “Oh, my dear God.” Then, out of another world, he heard the sound of Susila’s voice.
“Do you feel like telling me what’s happening?”
It was a long time before Will answered her. Speaking was difficult. Not because there was any physical impediment. It was just that speech seemed so fatuous, so totally pointless. “Light,” he whispered at last.
“And you’re there, looking at the light?”
“Not looking at it,” he answered after a long reflective pause. “Being it. Being it,” he repeated emphatically.
Its presence was his absence. William Asquith Farnaby — ultimately and essentially there was no such person. Ultimately and essentially there was only a luminous bliss, only a knowledgeless understanding, only union with unity in a limitless, undifferentiated awareness. This, self-evidently, was the mind’s natural state. But no less certainly there had also been that professional execution watcher, that self-loathing Babs-addict; there were also three thousand millions of insulated consciousnesses, each at the centre of a nightmare world, in which it was impossible for anyone with eyes in his head or a grain of honesty to take yes for an answer. By what sinister miracle had the mind’s natural state been transformed into all these Devil’s Islands of wretchedness and delinquency?
In the firmament of bliss and understanding, like bats against the sunset, there was a wild criss-crossing of remembered notions and the hangovers of past feelings. Bat-thoughts of Plotinus and the Gnostics, of the One and its emanations, down, down into thickening horror. And then bat-feelings of anger and disgust as the thickening horrors became specific memories of what the essentially non-existent William Asquith Farnaby had seen and done, inflicted and suffered.
But behind and around and somehow even within those flickering memories was the firmament of bliss and peace and understanding. There might be a few bats in the sunset sky; but the fact remained that the dreadful miracle of creation had been reversed. From a praeternaturally wretched and delinquent self he had been unmade into pure mind, mind in its natural state, limitless, undifferentiated, luminously blissful, knowledgelessly understanding.
Light here, light now. And because it was infinitely here and timelessly now, there was nobody outside the light to look at the light. The fact was the awareness, the awareness the fact.
From that other world, somewhere out there to the right, came the sound once more of Susila’s voice.
“Are you feeling happy?” she asked.
A surge of brighter radiance swept away all those flickering thoughts and memories. There was nothing now except a crystalline transparency of bliss.
Without speaking, without opening his eyes, he smiled and nodded.
“Eckhart called it God,” she went on. “‘Felicity so ravishing, so inconceivably intense that no one can describe it. And in the midst of it God glows and flames without ceasing.’”
God glows and flames … It was so startlingly, so comically right that Will found himself laughing aloud. “God like a house on fire,” he gasped. “God-the-fourteenth-of-July.” And he exploded once more into cosmic laughter.
Behind his closed eyelids an ocean of luminous bliss poured upwards like an inverted cataract. Poured upwards from union into completer union, from impersonality into a yet more absolute transcendence of selfhood.
“God-the-fourteenth-of-July,” he repeated and, from the heart of the cataract, gave vent to a final chuckle of recognition and understanding.
“What about the fifteenth of July?” Susila questioned. “What about the morning after?”
“There isn’t any morning after.”
She shook her head. “It sounds suspiciously like Nirvana.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof — that’s a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.”
“This is better,” Will insisted.
“You mean, it’s more delicious. That’s why it’s such an enormous temptation. The only temptation that God could succumb to. The fruit of the ignorance of good and evil. What heavenly lusciousness, what a
super-mango! God had been stuffing himself with it for billions of years. Then all of a sudden, up comes Homo sapiens, out pops the knowledge of good and evil. God had to switch to a much less palatable brand of fruit. You’ve just eaten a slice of the original super-mango, so you can sympathize with Him.”
A chair creaked, there was a rustle of skirts, then a series of small busy sounds that he was unable to interpret. What was she doing? He could have answered that question by simply opening his eyes. But who cared, after all, what she might be doing? Nothing was of any importance except this blazing uprush of bliss and understanding.
“Super-mango to fruit of knowledge — I’m going to wean you,” she said, “by easy stages.”
There was a whirring sound. From the shallows, a bubble of recognition reached the surface of consciousness. Susila had been putting a record on the turn-table of a gramophone and now the machine was in motion.
“Johann Sebastian Bach,” he heard her saying. “The music that’s closest to silence, closest, in spite of its being so highly organized, to pure, one-hundred-degree proof Spirit.”
The whirring gave place to musical sounds. Another bubble of recognition came shooting up; he was listening to the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto.
It was the same, of course, as the Fourth Brandenburg he had listened to so often in the past — the same and yet completely different. This Allegro — he knew it by heart. Which meant that he was in the best possible position to realize that he had never really heard it before. To begin with, it was no longer he, William Asquith Farnaby, who was hearing it. The Allegro was revealing itself as an element in the great present Event, a manifestation at one remove of the luminous bliss. Or perhaps that was putting it too mildly. In another modality this Allegro was the luminous bliss; it was the knowledgeless understanding of everything apprehended through a particular piece of knowledge; it was undifferentiated awareness broken up into notes and phrases and yet still all-comprehendingly itself. And of course all this belonged to nobody. It was at once in here, out there and nowhere. The music which, as William Asquith Farnaby, he had heard a hundred times before, had been re-born as an unowned awareness. Which was why he was now hearing it for the first time. Unowned, the Fourth Brandenburg had an intensity of beauty, a depth of intrinsic meaning, incomparably greater than anything he had ever found in the same music when it was his private property.
“Poor idiot” came up in a bubble of ironic comment. The poor idiot hadn’t wanted to take yes for an answer in any field but the aesthetic. And all the time he had been denying, by the mere fact of being himself, all the beauty and meaning he so passionately longed to say yes to. William Asquith Farnaby was nothing but a muddy filter, on the hither side of which human beings, nature and even his beloved art had emerged bedimmed and bemired, less, other and uglier than themselves. Tonight, for the first time his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed. Between mind and sound, mind and pattern, mind and significance, there was no longer any babel of biographical irrelevances to drown the music or make a senseless discord. Tonight’s Fourth Brandenburg was a pure datum — no, a blessed donum — uncorrupted by the personal history, the second-hand notions, the ingrained stupidities with which, like every self, the poor idiot, who wouldn’t (and in art plainly couldn’t) take yes for an answer, had overlaid the gifts of immediate experience.
And tonight’s Fourth Brandenburg was not merely an unowned Thing in Itself; it was also, in some impossible way, a Present Event with an infinite duration. Or rather (and still more impossibly, seeing that it had three movements and was being played at its usual speed) it was without duration. The metronome presided over each of its phrases; but the sum of its phrases was not a span of seconds and minutes. There was a tempo, but no time. So what was there?
“Eternity,” Will was forced to answer. It was one of those metaphysical dirty words which no decent-minded man would dream of pronouncing even to himself, much less in public. “Eternity, my brethren,” he said aloud. “Eternity, blah blah.” The sarcasm, as he might have known it would, fell completely flat. Tonight those four syllables were no less concretely significant than the four letters of the other class of tabooed words. He began to laugh again.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Eternity,” he answered. “Believe it or not, it’s as real as shit.”
“Excellent!” she said approvingly.
He sat there motionlessly attentive, following with ear and inward eye the interwoven streams of sound, the interwoven streams of congruous and equivalent lights, that flowed on timelessly from one sequence to another. And every phrase of this well-worn familiar music was an unprecedented revelation of beauty that went pouring upwards, like a multitudinous fountain, into another revelation as novel and amazing as itself. Stream within stream — the stream of the solo violin, the streams of the two recorders, the manifold streams of the harpsichord and the little orchestra of assorted strings. Separate, distinct, individual — and yet each of the streams was a function of all the rest, each was itself in virtue of its relationship to the whole of which it was a component.
“Dear God!” he heard himself whispering.
In the timeless sequence of change the recorders were holding a single long-drawn note. A note without upper partials, clear, pellucid, divinely empty. A note (the word came bubbling up) of pure contemplation. And here was another inspirational obscenity that had now acquired a concrete meaning and might be uttered without a sense of shame. Pure contemplation, unconcerned, beyond contingency, outside the context of moral judgments. Through the uprushing lights he caught a glimpse, in memory, of Radha’s shining face as she talked of love as contemplation, of Radha once again, sitting cross-legged, in a focused intensity of stillness, at the foot of the bed where Lakshmi lay dying. This long pure note was the meaning of her words, the audible expression of her silence. But always, flowing through and along with the heavenly emptiness of that contemplative fluting was the rich sound, vibration within passionate vibration, of the violin. And surrounding them both — the notes of contemplative detachment and the notes of passionate involvement — was this network of sharp dry tones plucked from the wires of the harpsichord. Spirit and instinct, action and vision — and around them the web of intellect. They were comprehended by discursive thought, but comprehended, it was obvious, only from the outside, in terms of an order of experience radically different from that which discursive thinking professes to explain.
“It’s like a Logical Positivist,” he said.
“What is?”
“That harpsichord.”
Like a Logical Positivist, he was thinking in the shallows of his mind, while in the depths the great Event of light and sound timelessly unfolded. Like a Logical Positivist talking about Plotinus and Julie de Lespinasse.
The music changed again, and now it was the violin that sustained (how passionately!) the long-drawn note of contemplation, while the two recorders took up the theme of active involvement and repeated it — the identical form imposed upon another substance — in the mode of detachment. And here, dancing in and out between them, was the Logical Positivist, absurd but indispensable, trying to explain, in a language incommensurable with the facts, what it was all about.
In the Eternity that was as real as shit, he went on listening to these interwoven streams of sound, went on looking at these interwoven streams of light, went on actually being (out there, in here and nowhere) all that he saw and heard. And now, abruptly, the character of the light underwent a change. These interwoven streams, which were the first fluid differentiations of an understanding on the further side of all particular knowledge, had ceased to be a continuum. Instead, there was, all of a sudden, this endless succession of separate forms — forms still manifestly charged with the luminous bliss of undifferentiated being, but limited now, isolated, individualized. Silver and rose, yellow and pale green and gentian-blue, an endless succession of luminous spheres came swimming up from some hidden source o
f forms and, in time with the music, purposefully constellated themselves into arrays of unbelievable complexity and beauty. An inexhaustible fountain that sprayed out into conscious patternings, into lattices of living stars. And as he looked at them, as he lived their life and the life of this music that was their equivalent, they went on growing into other lattices that filled the three dimensions of an inner space and changed incessantly in another, timeless dimension of quality and significance.
“What are you hearing?” Susila asked.
“Hearing what I see,” he answered. “And seeing what I hear.”
“And how would you describe it?”
“What it looks like,” Will answered after a long silence, “what it sounds like, is the creation. Only it’s not a one-shot affair. It’s non-stop, perpetual creation.”
“Perpetual creation out of no-what nowhere into something somewhere — is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“You’re making progress.”
If words had come more easily and, when spoken, had been a little less pointless, Will would have explained to her that knowledgeless understanding and luminous bliss were a damn sight better than even Johann Sebastian Bach.
“Making progress,” Susila repeated. “But you’ve still got a long way to go. What about opening your eyes?”
Will shook his head emphatically.
“It’s time you gave yourself a chance of discovering what’s what.”
“What’s what is this,” he muttered.
“It isn’t,” she assured him. “All you’ve been seeing and hearing and being is only the first what. Now you must look at the second one. Look, and then bring the two together into a single inclusive what’s-what. So open your eyes, Will. Open them wide.”
“All right,” he said at last and reluctantly, with an apprehensive sense of impending misfortune, he opened his eyes. The inner illumination was swallowed up in another kind of light. The fountain of forms, the coloured orbs in their conscious arrays and purposefully changing lattices gave place to a static composition of uprights and diagonals, of flat planes and curving cylinders, all carved out of some material that looked like living agate, and all emerging from a matrix of living and pulsating mother-of-pearl. Like a blind man newly healed and confronted for the first time by the mystery of light and colour, he stared in uncomprehending astonishment. And then, at the end of another twenty timeless bars of the Fourth Brandenburg, a bubble of explanation rose into consciousness. He was looking, Will suddenly perceived, at a small square table, and beyond the table at a rocking chair, and beyond the rocking chair at a blank wall of whitewashed plaster. The explanation was reassuring; for in the eternity that he had experienced between the opening of his eyes and the emergent knowledge of what he was looking at, the mystery confronting him had deepened from inexplicable beauty to a consummation of shining alienness that filled him, as he looked, with a kind of metaphysical terror. Well, this terrifying mystery consisted of nothing but two pieces of furniture and an expanse of wall. The fear was allayed, but the wonder only increased. How was it possible that things so familiar and commonplace could be this? Obviously it wasn’t possible; and yet there it was, there it was.