A Short History of Richard Kline (18 page)

On the walk home I felt it again, that secret pleasure; felt drunk with it, an intoxicated fool. And I asked myself: is this what they meant by a state of grace? It was easy enough to have an epiphany on a mountain top, or beside a lake, but in a bottleshop? What tricks she played on me, how mischievous her humour. Was this how
she
saw the world? And had she now granted me a glimpse of it? Something that before was hypothetical, a mere concept, was now intimate,
known
to me.

For weeks after, I felt emotionally labile, was ready at any moment to melt, as if there were no boundaries and I might embrace anyone. Looking at my wife and son over the dinner table, I would feel the familiar pressure behind my eyes and have to distract myself in some way. One evening on the train, I sat next to an overweight youth in shabby jeans and a grey hoodie who was reading a book. I glanced at the running title at the top of the page:
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Oh, no, I thought. Such pathos in this, and I wanted to put my arm around him and grasp him in a bear hug and say, ‘Look, you're fine as you are, at the core of your self is a divine flame. You are the ecstatic pulse of the universe, you are without blame.' I had a mad impulse to give this kid some money, or take him for a meal and explain to him the truth of his being. Instead, I pressed my fingers against my eyes to absorb the watery film that was forming there, at which moment he shifted in his seat and in so doing bumped against my own raised elbow. ‘Sorry, mate,' he said.

I couldn't speak of these epiphanies because on one level they were, if anything, too ordinary. But looked at from another angle, I knew they would sound mad, and could easily be interpreted as an uprush of mania. I had worked once with a man who suffered from fierce oscillations between mania and depression, and I knew what the symptoms were, knew they could last for weeks, even months. But I knew I was not manic: my pulse did not race; I was not impulsive; I did not go on buying sprees.

I imagined telling Zoe about this, tried to rehearse the telling in my head, but the words weren't there. I loved her, now more than ever. Why, then, was I unable to share this with my wife, to draw her into the charmed aura of my experience? But I knew that if I attempted to articulate what I felt, the very words I used would undercut me, slice right through me like a guillotine of the trite. I would sound an eager fool. And yet my old scepticism hadn't deserted me. I was, I told myself, the same empiricist I had always been. I still believed in the reality of my senses, it was just that my senses were now attuned.

Meanwhile, to Zoe's bemusement, I had placed the tiny photo of Sri Mata on the table in my study. At first I wondered if having her image in the house would affect me in odd and unpredictable ways, but it was nothing, a mere object. And in any case the plastic image was inessential since she was always with me, a constant presence, and I meditated on her form: the delicacy of her feet, the blue-black of her hair, the hem of her white sari. She would flit momentarily into my mind in meetings, on the train, while I kicked a ball in the park with Luke; I imagined I caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, and her peculiar radiance enlarged for a moment every object, every figure in my field of vision. But I knew I would continue to lead a normal life, whatever that meant. Before I met her, I had thought I knew, but now I wasn't so sure. I had given up my old mantra, a simple sound and an old friend that had tided me over a bad period, and now I meditated on the one she had given me, a mantra that was long and complex, and I could scarcely get my tongue around the cascade of Sanskrit syllables.

And then there was the vexed question of God. I had given up on God a long time ago, without a pang, and had felt not the slightest desire to reclaim him since. But now, in her short talks, always in Hindi and translated by a devotee, she spoke of the divine; taught that there was an ultimate knowledge and source, and that a part of this, its very essence, lay within my own heart. She referred to it as the Self, an all-pervading consciousness of which we were a part, a union that we were blind to, though occasionally we caught glimpses of it. It was a teaching that sat uneasily with the old version of my empiricism, yet I could not deny that since my first meeting with her I had been granted insights into another dimension of the real.

When I tried to explain it to Zoe, I compared it to the experience of becoming a parent. When you have a child it's like you have been living in a small room and all the time you thought it was the world, and then the child comes and you discover that you are in fact living in a house with many rooms. But you are still inside the house. When you meet the guru you realise that there is a world beyond the house, and you step out of the house and into the unknown.

But there was another way to try and make sense of it, and that was to read. I discovered that there was a Vedanta bookshop in Croydon, and one Saturday afternoon I relieved myself of two hundred dollars and came home with a box of books. I read the
Bhagavad Gita
, I read the lives of the sages, I discovered that many Western philosophers and poets had been strongly influenced by Vedic mysticism. I baulked at the doctrine of reincarnation, since my senses gave me no evidence of this. But I liked the way the sages of Vedanta didn't dwell on sin, on the harsh and the punitive. There was no ‘don't do this, don't do that': just ‘remember your goal'. You got on the path and moved forward in your own way and your own time, doing the best you could.

I learned of the tradition of the guru and the disciple; that one did not ‘seek' and ‘find' the guru but that the guru found you; activated a predestined connection when the disciple was ‘ripe', which often meant desperate enough and unhappy enough to open to the unfamiliar and the unknown.

I learned that the connection I felt with her was of a special kind, called
bhakti
, and that I was a
bhakta
, one who may read and think and study and intellectualise as much as he likes, but the ground of his being is this loving connection he feels to the guru.

I re-read
Siddhartha
, the text of my youth, and knew for the first time the meaning of the phrase ‘wounded deeply by a divine arrow that gave him pleasure'.

I couldn't wait for her to return to the city in November, to emerge once again from her seclusion. By then I would have it all down. I would progress to the next level. I was ready.

But for now I had to contend with Joe Mazengarb.

Zoe, who was one to keep things discreetly to herself, had finally confessed to her father that she feared for her husband's sanity, that he seemed to be regressing into an infantile dependence on an idealised mother figure and might well be at risk of drifting into a cult.

When, after one of our regular squash games, Joe suggested stopping off at a bar for a drink, I knew what was coming.

‘What is this thing, Rick?'

‘What thing?'

‘This … this guru thing.' Joe was choking on
that
word.

‘It's nothing to worry about, Joe. I haven't lost my marbles.'

‘I must say, I'm concerned.'

‘It's okay, I'm still the same person. I still vote the same way, still barrack for the same team.'

‘Don't humour me, Rick.'

‘It's impossible to talk about,' I said, staring into my glass. There were two paths I could go down here: I could attempt to explain everything to my cynical father-in-law and listen to a lecture on the liver syndrome, or I could brush the subject away. I shrugged and opted for the latter. ‘It isn't necessary. Really.'

But Joe was a professional interrogator and, having brought us both to this precipice of discomfort, was not about to give up.

I don't remember the rest of that conversation, though I do recall another one, on a Sunday evening at my in-laws' house. After a relaxed dinner, Joe produced a new book he had bought, in which there was a yellow sticky note. The heading of the marked chapter read: ‘Is There a God Module in the Brain?'

I knew what was coming: a treatise on the biochemistry of mysticism and the work of the Indian neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran.

‘You know, Rick, those guys in San Diego found evidence of neural circuits in the human brain that affect how strongly an individual responds to certain experiences. If I have more connections between the emotion centres of the brain, like the amygdala, more connections than you, say, then I'm more likely to have' – he hesitated – ‘certain experiences.'

For once, Joe was tongue-tied. ‘Certain experiences' was all he could manage, so distasteful, indeed embarrassing, was the subject of my delusion.

‘I've read the research, Joe.'

He raised his eyebrows, then both hands, in an interrogatory shrug, as if to say, ‘And?'

‘As I read the work done to date' – I tried to sound considered – ‘far from invalidating religious experience, it merely indicates what the underlying neural substrate might be.'

‘But it does suggest that what you experience depends on your brain, not on any external reality.'

‘There may be differences between individual propensities, it's true. But we have to be careful when we talk about the relationship of the brain to what we call reality. We don't understand enough about either to be able to make a whole lot of categorical assertions about their relationship.'

Joe decided on another tack. He had been reading a book on conversion experiences, he said, by a man called Shermer, ‘and this guy believes that the revelations of St Paul, Augustine, Luther and Calvin were most likely the result of temporal lobe seizures'.

At that point I might have laughed out loud. I was impressed by Joe's homework, and if I had thought about it I might have felt touched by his concern. Instead, I bristled. ‘I know this stuff,' I said, ‘and I've never had a seizure, so I guess that rules me out of the category of the spiritually programmed animal.'

‘You're fencing with me.'

‘No,
you're
fencing with
me
.' I felt the anger rising, and the scorn. ‘Do you know how ridiculous all that sounds, all that neural puppetry?'

‘Do you know how ridiculous it is for a man like you to succumb to some hippie guru?'

I held my breath. I told myself I owed it to my father-in-law not to lose my temper. ‘Look, I'm not interested in philosophy here. I'm not debating how many angels can dance on the end of a pin. This is about my experience. You can speak with authority about
your
experience, I can speak about mine. I'm the same person I always was. I don't know about this thing called God. I can't see it or hear it or feel it but I do see and feel and hear
her
. You offer me argument, logic, words; I offer you my experience. And what if all these theories you cite are true? It doesn't matter whether they're true or not. It works for me. And why should this bother you? I'm not proselytising here, I'm not trying to convert you. Only if I were would this argument be in order. This is my objection to Christianity. It argues that it, and it alone, is right and everyone else is wrong. It wants to convert the world. It wants to gainsay the deeply felt mystical experience of others.'

‘Now you're preaching.'

‘You started this, Joe.'

We were quarrelling like schoolboys.

That night I went home and re-read Radhakrishnan's introductory essay to the
Bhagavad Gita
and marked the following: ‘The
Gita
does not give any arguments in support of its metaphysical position … Dialectic in itself and without reference to personal experience cannot give us conviction. Only spiritual experience can provide us with proofs of the existence of Spirit.'

Indeed.

I began to arm myself further with the word. Goaded by my father-in-law, I read Freud on infantilism in the adult and the effects of maternal deprivation. My mother and I, it is true, had had our ups and downs, and I was not her favourite. But that was beside the point. There were thousands of devotees of hundreds of gurus. Some got on with their mothers and some didn't. How to explain the difference? There was no reductionism that could explain away this phenomenon. If I had been close to my mother, they would say I was seeking to replicate the relationship, like a man who seeks a wife resembling his mother. If I hadn't got on with my mother, they would say I was looking for a compensatory maternal figure. Psychology was a maze of mirrors that reflected back the ghosts of its own assumptions. Nothing in psychology, as I understood it, explained my connection to this small, middle-aged Indian woman, this connection that had come out of the blue and, in a vital sense, reclaimed me.

It was in this labile and expansive mood that I decided to take Luke camping at the Bay of Fires, where I had swum as a boy.

We flew down to Melbourne and took the boat over Bass Strait so that Luke, who had never been to sea, could experience its depths for the first time. We slept in a spartan two-berth cabin, one of many that opened off a maze of narrow corridors. ‘We're like bees in a hive,' I remarked as we found our way to the cabin, and Luke nodded earnestly and said, ‘Except there's no queen.' Such a literal-minded boy, with a sweet intensity that I feared he would lose in adolescence. Too excited to sleep, he perched at the end of his bunk and stared out the window until the lights of Port Melbourne were no longer visible, the sky dark but with a full moon that shone its trail of light over the surging waters of the strait.