“So, I'm on the first tee with him...He hauls off and whacks one…long—he’s a long-ball hitter the lama—into a ten-thousand foot crevasse. …Do you know what the Lama says?
‘Gunga galunga... gunga, gunga-galunga.’
So we finish the eighteenth and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, how about a little something, you know, for the effort.
And he says, ‘No, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’
So I got that goin' for me…which is nice.”
Carl Spackler on caddying for the Dalai Lama
The incense burned, my legs -- twisted into a painful, half-assed half-lotus -- ached, and the beatifically smiling yogi in my black-light, Peter-Max-rip-off “LOVE” poster gazed down upon me in serene and amused compassion. I curled my thumbs and forefingers in the sacred hand mudra -- the many into the One -- and counted my inhales and exhales, and then—I know you’re not going to want to believe this—in a bestowal of purest and wholly undeserved grace (though one might argue that grace is by its very nature undeserved), the soiled and claustrophobic cage of my peevish ego blew out in an immeasurable Big Bang of Self and my astonished soul soared like a seagull...through the sun...into that bright Freedom Land. Verily, infinitude unfolded like a mushroom cloud of light and bliss inside my heretofore pinched and discontented heart, and I found myself surfing the oceanic waves of that exalted peace-which-surpasseth-understanding. I was the universe and the universe was me--I am That, Thou art That, all this is That--and we laughed and laughed at such an excellent punchline to the absurd, oft tedious and longwinded joke of my life.
Since it was 1973 and I was sixteen at the time, this ecstatic moment of illumination arrived to the trilling flute of Jethro Tull’s “Thick As A Brick,” which had been stacked on the spindle along with other period masterpieces:
"And your wise men don’t know how it fee-ee-ee-ee-eels to be THICK...as a BRICK...doo doo da diddly dee..."
[One wonders if Godhead could have blossomed inside my adolescent heart if, say, “Horse With No Name” or “Benny & the Jets” had been spinning on the turntable. It doesn’t seem likely, but the holy books are silent on the issue.]
Skeptics may wish to ascribe this experience to an undiagnosed bipolar disorder; a brain tumor; a flashback from my mescaline trip of the previous Columbus Day; too many Herman Hesse, Alan Watts and "Tibetan Book of the Dead" books; or simply the wounded, susceptible psyche of the lonely, morose, escape-hungry teenager—and later developments indeed lend some credence to these niggardly, small-minded suspicions. But here’s the thing: I don’t really care if I was touched by the divine or just touched—delusion being a slippery fish in any consideration of theology and the human condition. What was important was the ecstasy, the peace, the sense of finally understanding it all (and it actually making sense), and over the subsequent decades, I’ve tried every means I could think of—-thousands of hours of meditation, drug-fueled vision-quests, dervish dancing, a monastic cell in Dharamsala—to effect a Return. Though ultimately unsuccessful, in between bouts of suicidal depression, I came surprisingly close a few times along the way. In any case, in 1973, I didn’t think it was unreasonable to suppose that I now teetered on the very cusp of enlightenment: a budding Buddha, an inchoate Krishnamurti, the new Kwisatz Haderach of the Planet Dune, the radiant messiah the world had waited for so long.
After many additional weeks of half-lotuses and endless hours of Jethro Tull and Moody Blues, with the memory of timeless peace and limitless bliss only receding further from my desperate, prayerful finger tips, I realized I needed professional help—and that, at length, brought me to the lotus feet of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (Who turned out to be the benign wise man in my black-light Love poster--talk about dharma and destiny!) Which finally sets the table for our discussion of enlightenment and death.
**************
“Maharishi, but what happens if I drop the body five minutes after reaching Cosmic Consciousness?”
Nine months later, after being initiated into the mysteries of Transcendental Meditation and making the necessary arrangements to escape my senior year of high school, I found myself in a small valley in the Alps, listening to Maharishi lecture on the different stages of Self-realization: Cosmic Consciousness, God Consciousness, Unity and Brahman Consciousnesses (known in everyday parlance as CC, GC, UC and BC). And the question came up as to what happened if one “dropped the body” in CC, this being the lowliest of the realized states. (Personally, I find “body dropping” as a euphemism for dying somewhat lacking in the delicate finesse that make euphemisms appealing in the first place—but the idea is that as the body drops, presumably to the floor or sidewalk, the soul flies free, like a bird of paradise through the birdcage door. The euphemism may be wanting in grace, but there's nothing wrong with the metaphor.)
Maharishi waved around his long-stemmed rose and answered, “The seed roasted in the fire of knowledge does not sprout again.” Say what, oh perfect master?
Now, I’ve always been an escapist, something I credit to being a weary, wizened, yet highly evolved old soul eager to get off the Wheel (but which psychiatrists have attributed to a more prosaic dopamine deficiency), so while eternal enlightenment sounded best, anything that provided a get-out-of-jail-card from myself—say, oblivion—would certainly do. However, the rest of the audience of attentive acolytes clearly felt otherwise -- as evidenced by the sudden buzz of dismay. “But Maharishi,” the questioner whined. The Guru banged his rose against the microphone and giggled sympathetically—he loved his worshipful bliss ninnies, even mired in benighted ignorance as they were—but the answer remained, in its essence, "Sorry, Bubu, you’re a toasted seed (emphasis on the syllable "toast") and the bright, dewy daffodil of your being shall not, come spring-time, sprout again." You had to hand it to His Holiness: he wasn’t going to soft-soap his restive devotees. Of course, it was easy for him: white robes, full lotus, effulgent halo—he and Krishna-Jesus-Buddha were like supernatural peas in a golden pod; he didn’t have to worry about dropping the body in CC.
Frankly, I would have been more accommodating, offered a new Sanskit mantra or sutra at a special insiders' price, something that pulled an elegant end-around the body-dropping dilemma: the disciples would have climbed over each other like gerbils waving Papa’s checks. I say, give ‘em what they want ... or someone else will. But Maharishi—at the time, the most popular guru in the world—disagreed. And he could be a real hard-ass about The Truth as he saw it. [He consequently ended up losing a lot of followers to other masters such as Baba Muktananda (more enigmatically Eastern, endorsed by John Denver), Ram Dass (more accessibly Western; rich history of LSD use), Bhagwan Rajneesh (distinctive orange robes, real nice cars, group sex!), and the Kali-Durga-Mama woman whom Joe Namath dated for a while (earth-goddess ambiance, Tantric sex! celebrity watching). Not to mention the Hare Krishnas and Moonies (for the irreparably lost & damaged), and Werner "Wet Willy" Erhard's EST (for New Age yuppies). But all that was mostly in the future, and caused a subsequent diversification in the Maharishi business into nutritional supplements, levitation and real estate.]
In any case, for my fellow seekers, well, to die in CC, Jesus! Might as well brand a giant “L" on their foreheads -- everyone would regard them as total schlimazels. Because if you got right down to it, this non-sprouting, dissolving-into-the-Light business didn’t sound all that empirically different from the dark, grinning abyss waiting on the other side of the morgue chute (Welcome podner!). It sounded a lot like, well … death. And that wasn’t what these young, western, middle-class pilgrims had signed up for. Immortality, godhood, divine ecstasy, magic mystic powers, being part of the ultimate "in" group? Yes, they’re definitely enthusiastic buyers. But ego extinction? No more Art “Arjuna” Greenblatt? Come on, that sucked! Enlightenment had sounded better than Christian-Judaic heaven—for one thing, you didn’t have to go through the nasty business of dying and, besides which, in the seventies western religion sounded so un-hip—but five contemptible minutes of cosmic consciousness followed by an eternity of well-lit nothingness sounded distinctly less appealing. And, say what you will about divine compassion, we all know...shit happens.
What we had here was a fundamental disagreement about the point of life. In the East, where Hindus and Buddhists believe that the soul must typically endure a million reincarnations of idiot darkness and misery in various human, animal and amphibian forms before finally achieving freedom, the whole point is to get off the Wheel of Suffering. Compared to living in Bhopal sweeping bullock turds off the highway for seven rupees a day, the Void sounds like a nice upgrade. But in the West, where people generally believe in a single lifetime of Ignorance, consumerism and frantically denied misery, followed by an eternity of nonexistence, the whole point is…to get a brand new set of wheels! Don't worry, be happy! Seize the day! Make hay! Be all that you can be! Just do it! One certainly doesn’t spend years cross-legged; breathing through alternate nostrils; eating curried mung beans; avoiding garlic, drugs, alcohol, meat and sex outside of marriage; to end up a burnt peanut tossed into the deepest, blackest butt crack of them all. Nuh unh.
Jeez, Maharishi, this is a real bummer. Can we please get back to talking about eternal, unbounded bliss-consciousness arriving approximately seven years after initiation? Or how about your recently-announced "Dawn of the Age of Enlightenment" and the special roles reserved for paid-up, organization members? (There's been a lot of subsequent grumbling about Maharishi's dating the aforementioned dawn to 1973, but, remember, he lived in Hindu time -- and Hindu ages, so-called yugas, are damned long -- so I say, give the age of enlightenment a little time to kick in. Maybe the Bush administration and the Palin/McCain campaign were the last noisome farts of the dark ages and it will soon start raining flower petals and myrrh. As the saying goes, "From our lips to Mahavishnu's ears.")
As people dug into their millet-nutloaf casserole at lunch, you could hear at every table, “What I think Maharishi really meant…” They speculated that once over the initial hurdle into higher consciousness, “suggested guidelines” regarding existence could be bent or renegotiated, one celestial hand washed the other, and death postponed indefinitely. Wrapped in robes of purest light in the highest heaven, simpering benignly and blessing the ignorant bug-humans scuttling below in their darkness. Yep, that rang true. It simply made good sense. They chuckled: their beloved Guru could be such a jokester, loved to giggle, always enjoyed poking the hive of his disciples' credulous unenlightenedness--for their own good, of course.
Okeydokey then. “Pass the nutloaf, Ham Dass.” Better have seconds because this stuff went right through you and there were six long hours of mantra-work and yoga asanas before the rice and lentils of dinner.
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Afterword: As far as I can tell (and my girlfriend, Jeannine, vociferously agrees), I never did attain that perfect state of Enlightenment despite decades of meditation--but the Organization would undoubtedly maintain that my failure to follow the program (hamburgers, dope, sex, cocktails, pornography, failure to pay dues, reading the wrong books, blasphemy & general bad karma) voided any implied guaranty. Or perhaps they'd pitch the Zen Master/Good Witch of the West defense -- i.e. I've always been enlightened; I just needed to click together my ruby slippers and realize it -- which I always thought was a pathetic theological flim flam, like giving trophies to every Peewee League participant regardless of win-loss record. (And anyway, where's the fucking peace and bliss, grasshopper?) Still, I've never quite lost that small, bright heart-noodle of hope that my long-sought Promised Land lies just around the next corner of the sandy Sinai, like an open manhole in Holy Yerushalayim awaiting only my heedless, toodling footsteps -- and the appointed moment of Deliverance. On the other hand, my overt non-Realization suggests my peanut has not been roasted in the fire of knowledge, and leaving aside atheistical forecasts of the simple, utter obliteration of my unique consciousness, much less the fundamentalist position that my nuts are going to roasted in hell, that leaves open the possibility of sprouting once again in yet another life of suffering and ignorance, perhaps as a bug or amphibian.
So I've got that goin' for me...which is nice.
"On the field of Truth, on the battle-field of Dharma,
what came to pass, O' Sanjaya, on that plain of Kurukshetra?"
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