A Short History of Richard Kline (22 page)

Sydney Park. I had never liked it, never cared for its attempts at renewal, which had about them a whiff of morbidity. At that time the trees were young and immature; from a distance they looked flimsy. The remnants of the old brick factory remained, its sombre industrial chimneys, its rows of abandoned brick ovens like small prison cells, the stolid Victorian masonry of the arches where homeless men slept at night, rags and cardboard flaps left in abject piles during the day.

I met Martin outside the western entrance to the park at the bottom of King Street. It was a fine, cool afternoon with a glint in the air, and we began our walk beside a stand of eucalypts where bark and leaf debris crunched beneath our feet.

I felt a kind of sap rising in me, an expansion of energy in my chest, and thought maybe it was too long since I had gone for a walk, and should do it more often, and take Luke along with me. By then we had come on some young men who were kicking a ball. One of them held the ball in his right hand, having just retrieved it from the bottom of a low rise, and he turned and kicked it directly at Martin. I found this provocative, but when it came spinning towards us, just above head height, Martin raised his right arm and caught it effortlessly, one-handed, before dropping it onto his foot in a practised stab kick. The youth who had kicked it fumbled the ball and the others jeered.

‘Not bad.' I said. ‘Signs of a misspent youth.'

Martin grinned. ‘I'm out of practice, but they,' indicating the boys, ‘like to keep me on my toes.'

In the days leading up to this meeting I had thought a lot about Martin. Until my encounter with Sri Mata, my own life had been conventional, but where had Martin Coleby come from?

Zoe was curious. How did you get to become a middle-aged suburban monk? she asked. Disappointments in love? Trauma at an early age? Psychically poleaxed and left with no other option but to retreat from the world? Or maybe an obsessive will to self-mastery? Women always wanted to know these things, always wanted someone's history, but I was not about to ask; it felt too personal.

Instead, I asked about the guru–disciple relationship. Had Martin ever been to see Sri Mata?

‘No.' He shook his head. ‘I have my own teacher. I used to live in his ashram outside Chennai. For twelve years.'

He said this slowly, almost haltingly, as if it had been a long time ago.

‘Why didn't you stay there?'

‘He told me to leave, go home, teach others. He said I'd become too comfortable in the ashram, too pleased with myself.'

‘Were you?'

‘Probably. I didn't want to come back here, that's for sure. I was unhappy with the idea, very unhappy, but here I am.'

I felt an urge to ask him more about this ‘unhappiness', but sensed it was off-limits. But it did embolden me to pose a question that had troubled me since Joe Mazengarb had raised it. Was the guru a substitute parent?

By then I was familiar with Freud's argument, not only from my reading but also from my irascible debates with Joe; any kind of god or guru was an idealised parent, a desire to regress to the infant state and to seek safety and psychic security in submission to the wise man (or, in my case, woman). It had been Joe's abrasive dialectics that had led me to read Freud in the first place and to discover the troubling notion of transference, that in my attachment to a guru figure I was unconsciously transferring unresolved feelings and desires from my parents to another adult. In other words, I was just a big baby and needed to get over it.

To my surprise, Martin was not dismissive of the idea.

‘I think there's an element of truth in that,' he said. ‘None of us has perfect parents. Some of us do need to be re-parented, for a while at least, and the teacher does that. At the same time,' he added, ‘this feeling of something missing, which you experienced as a child, is not just because you've been expelled from the womb, or because your parents weren't perfect. It's hardwired into us, a divine discontent. The fact that we experience this nameless discontent is a sign that we are attuned to an unconscious knowledge of something else, something larger than ourselves. God, the Mind at Large, cosmic consciousness, call it what you like. It's a part of us and we are a part of it. In the
Bhagavad Gita
Krishna calls it the Knower of the Field. And this is what meditation leads to, getting in touch with the Knower, who, by the way, is always there within us. Has always been there, both without and within.'

This resonated for me. Hadn't I experienced moments when I intuited this? As an adolescent, I had often heard some other voice in my head, offering a dispassionate commentary on my actions. Even in the depths of my angst, that voice would arise, cool and appraising.

‘I think the psychologists call that dissociation,' Martin said wryly. ‘They have no model of the transcendent, or of the god within. It's too radical, too confronting an idea for the Western mind. And, it has to be said, too open to abuse if the individual is not on a disciplined path and under the guidance of a teacher. Without a teacher it can become what psychology calls inflation, an ungrounded sense that “I am God”.

‘The teacher begins by taking us into a protective cocoon where we can begin to feel our way. He, or in your case she, can relieve feelings of emptiness or isolation, can be a refuge that gives us relief from pain. But if we persist under her guidance we will be forced to confront our vanity and self-righteousness. What Freud didn't see was the later stages of the practice, which go beyond that infantile shelter. That's just the beginning, just as childhood is a beginning, not a phase you stay in all your life. The meditative path is one where the psychic residues of the infantile state must at various times be gratified, then confronted, and ultimately abandoned. At first the teacher gratifies them for you, then she pushes you to confront them. That's when the going gets heavy. That's when more is asked of you. And that's when some people give up.'

‘So you move from a position of early dependence to some other state?'

‘That's the idea. Meditation can begin as a narcissistic exercise, a way of propping up the wounded ego. It can give rise to egotistical thoughts. “I am special, other people are ignorant.” New Age self-righteousness.'

I could see that this might have been the case at first, in the early days, when I started to feel smug, and even superior, but not now. Since the temporary euphoria of my baffling initiation I had had too many experiences of my own limitations, too many of what I now thought of as my mad Oliver moments.

‘And then it becomes about the exploration of that something else?'

‘Uh-huh. But how do you know if you're not deceiving yourself? Are not delusional?'

‘Only you can figure that out. Do you trust your experience, or don't you?'

‘How do I know if I
can
trust my experience?'

‘Just keep meditating, Rick. Do that and everything else will sort itself out. You don't have to believe in anything. Just do the practice.'

‘To do the practice you need to believe in it.'

‘No, you don't. You need faith, and that's a different thing. Belief is clinging to a set of doctrines, usually based on what someone else has said. Faith is opening the mind, without preconceptions, to whatever comes along. Faith is a plunge into the unknown. Faith is what underpins any science that's not dogmatic. Faith accepts that we cannot know everything and can control only a little. We surrender our need for certainty.'

‘But
you
believe in certain things.'

‘I do. Or, rather, I know them from my practice. But that doesn't mean you have to. Whatever I tell you won't stick. You have to find out for yourself.'

‘Then why are we talking?'

Martin laughed. ‘Who knows? You've turned up, so we've talked. Things just happen.'

For the next twenty-one weeks I walked with Martin almost every Saturday, and in that time he instructed me in the rudiments of Eastern mysticism. It was not my habit at the office to stop for lunch, but on the Monday after that first meeting I walked to an office supplies shop on High Street and spent a good twenty minutes looking at notebooks. I was drawn almost immediately to a medium-sized ring-bound journal with a bright red plastic cover; I liked the look and the weight and feel of it. I hadn't owned a notebook since I was a boy, and the very idea of handwriting was enough to give me a rush. I had forgotten the promise of the blank page, and I felt youthful again, ready to be initiated into an as yet unwritten scripture: not a diary, nothing so banal, but a playful scroll, a white space of possibility. I bought a dozen of the notebooks and took them home that night. When I stacked them on my desk they seemed to emit their own aura.

Every Saturday, in the evening when I arrived home, or sometimes the following morning, I would make notes of my conversations with Martin, never wholly confident of their accuracy. Whatever Martin said sounded simple and convincing but the next day I couldn't recall it precisely, or only a flattened-out version of it. In the translation into my own phrasing something always escaped, some spark of energy and conviction, some gleam of intensity that was Martin. This bothered me, but when I complained of it to Martin he was offhand. ‘You don't need to remember anything,' he said.

For Martin it was all about the practice, but when I pressed him he did agree to recommend some reading, beginning with Aldous Huxley's
The Doors of Perception
. It seemed at first an odd choice but I soon discovered the logic of it. In the nineteen-fifties Huxley had taken mescalin and it changed him, induced in him something that he described as a sacramental view of reality. It was, said Martin, not unlike what I had experienced in the bottleshop, only more prolonged, more intense, more lurid in its detail.

From this, Huxley developed a model of the brain as a kind of filter, a reducing valve for a reality that is overwhelmingly complex and multilayered. When we look at a table we see a table but it's really a pattern of vibrating atoms; if we saw everything in this way all the time, saw the whole world as a cosmic dance of energy, we would not be able to function. The brain had evolved as a mechanism to filter information so that we can process it in a manageable way. What comes out the end of the valve is, in Huxley's words, a mere trickle of consciousness. But every so often we get a glimpse of the ‘more', as when drugs open the cortex and we get to see what lies beyond our limited perception. We perceive the wondrousness of things, what the mystics cognise as the vibratory hum of a divine consciousness, an energetic maelstrom that Huxley calls the Mind at Large. Something that is transcendent, yet at the same time present to us as ‘a felt immanence, an experienced participation'.

These last words came closest to describing my experiences with Sri Mata. Since my first meeting with her, and on my good days, I had begun to feel that I participated in the world in a new way, as if she had drawn a magnet over my field to realign my internal compass. She lived in my head now as a presiding presence, but it was as if she had always been there, as if I had known her before and it was only now that I had become able to ‘see' her. And in enabling this re-cognition, she had altered the way I saw everything else, had opened the valve a little wider.

As time passed, my walks with Martin became the fulcrum of my week. I looked forward to them. I looked forward to other things as well – I was far from being a recluse – but not in the same way.
She
had given me a field of meaning and for two hours on a Saturday afternoon I was able to inhabit it fully, without distraction. And while there were hours of earnest debate with Martin, there were also times when we strolled in companionable silence. Sunlight filtered through the leaves of the feathery wattles and the boys shouted into the dusk. They seemed always to be there, lofting their ball high into the hazy air and swearing with careless vehemence if they misjudged its flight. Sometimes they would aim the ball straight at Martin and each time I would feel my temper rise. There was a needling quality to these gambits but Martin was unfazed and would enter momentarily into the game. One evening, as we left the park, we came upon the boys beside the western entrance. They were sitting on top of the old brick ovens, smoking. One of them called out. ‘Hey, Martin!'