My Guru & His Disciple (2 page)

A believer in what? That remained for me to discover, and the discovery was a gradual process. Gerald was a master of the oblique. If I asked him a direct question, I got an answer which rambled like a river over a vast area of knowledge, carrying me past the shores of prehistory, anthropology, astronomy, physics, parapsychology, mythology, and much much more. The glimpses he allowed me of these shores were tantalizing and I would beg him to extend them, forgetting or not caring what my original question had been.

Gerald simply wasn't the sort of person one could come to and say, “Please summarize your views, so I can decide if I agree with them.” Nor could I carry out my intention of accepting Gerald's pacifism while rejecting his religious beliefs. I'd begun to realize that the two were completely interdependent.

And, anyhow, Gerald subtly but absolutely refused to be rejected. If I disagreed with a statement of his—or with his use of certain words—he dismissed my disagreement by implying that it was merely semantic. He was so sure of himself that he could afford to apologize to me. He was sorry, he said; he had expressed himself clumsily. He should have stated his case in apter words—to me, especially, whose skill with them so far exceeded his own. He hadn't forgotten how to flatter.

Despite his vast learning, he treated me as an equal. He had an air of conferring with me, never of teaching me. “You remember, of course, that odd book of Smith's on the customs of the Micronesians?” would be a typical opening of one of his expositions. During our first weeks together, I would keep telling him that I'd never read Smith, or Jones, or Robinson, or Brown, as the case might be. Later I learned to let such rhetorical questions go by without comment. They were rhetorical because Gerald always told you, anyway, what Smith had said that was relevant to the subject being discussed. In the same manner, he would declare that “I should like your opinion on Smith's theory” and then proceed to inform me what
his
opinion was, and hence mine—since disagreement between us wasn't possible, according to his rules of intercourse.

I was anxious to hear more about the pacifist groups which he had written of in his letters. What kind of preparation did he think would be necessary for the members? Paramedical training? A study of Gandhi's tactics of non-violence? No, Gerald didn't show any interest when I mentioned either of these. All he would discuss was a form of self-preparation at what he called “the deep level.” To become a true pacifist, you had to find peace within yourself; only then, he said, could you function pacifistically in the outside world.

Gerald had already started his own drastic program of self-preparation; every day he sat for three two-hour periods of meditation—in the early morning, around noon, and in the early evening. During these six hours he was engaged, as far as I could gather, in somehow fixing his thoughts upon what he called “this thing”—“this thing” being the source of inner peace which he was trying to contact. I think it was Gerald's natural fastidiousness which prevented him from calling it “God”—to say that he was looking for God would have sounded pretentious, ungentlemanly. Perhaps, also, he guessed that I would have a prejudice against the word. If he did, he was right. I loathed it.

My interpretation of the word “God” had been taken quite simplemindedly from left-wing anti-religious propaganda. God has no existence except as a symbol of the capitalist superboss. He has been deified by the capitalists so that he can rule from on high in the sky over the working-class masses, doping them with the opium of the people, which is religion, and thus making them content with their long working hours and starvation wages.

I soon had to admit, however, that Gerald's “this thing”—leaving aside the question of its existence or non-existence—was the very opposite of my “God.” True, it was by definition everywhere, and therefore also up in the sky, but it was to be looked for first inside yourself. It wasn't to be thought of as a Boss to be obeyed but as a Nature to be known—an extension of your own nature, with which you could become consciously united. The Sanskrit word
yoga,
ancestor of the English word “yoke,” means union, and hence the process of achieving union with this eternal omnipresent Nature, of which everybody and everything is a part.

During the past few years, I had kept declaring that I knew religion was a lie, because I knew that I hadn't got an eternal soul. Now, after talking to Gerald, it became obvious to me that I had been misusing the word “soul” to mean my ego-personality. I had merely been saying (quite correctly) that my ego-personality, Christopher, was subject to change, like my body, and therefore couldn't be eternal. If I did have a soul, it could only be “this thing,” seen in relation to Christopher. I might call it “mine” for convenience when thinking about it, but I must remind myself that Christopher could never possess it. If the two were ever to become united, Christopher would cease to exist as an individual. He would be merged in “this thing”; not vice versa.

The question remained: Why should I believe in “this thing” at all?

Among the various areas of knowledge that Gerald was opening up to me was the history of mysticism. For the first time, I was learning that there had been thousands of men and women, in many different countries and cultures throughout recorded history, who had claimed to have experienced union with what is eternal within oneself. That their accounts of this experience were essentially similar was certainly impressive, but it didn't prove anything, as far as I was concerned. Even when these people belonged to the modern world, they seemed utterly remote from me. Mightn't they all have been self-deluded, however sincere?

Gerald countered my objections with a compliment. My attitude showed, he said, that I was approaching the problem in exactly the right spirit. Credulity was the greatest obstacle to spiritual progress; blind faith was just blindness. He quoted Tennyson's line about “honest doubt” and told me that Ramakrishna (whoever that was) had urged his disciples to keep testing him, as a moneychanger rings coins to hear if they are false. It was no use just passively accepting the dogmas of the Church or the words of the Scriptures: I knew, of course, what Vivekananda (whoever that was) had said: “Every man in Christian countries has a huge cathedral on his head and on top of that a book.” No—the only way to begin the search for “this thing” was to say to oneself: “I'll keep an open mind and I'll try to follow the instructions in meditation which my teacher gives me. If, after six months of honest effort, I've had absolutely no results, then I'll drop it and tell everybody that it's a sham.”

This sounded fair enough. And I was impressed by Gerald's restraint. He didn't urge me to start meditating then and there. He didn't tempt me by describing the benefits he got from his own meditation—quite the opposite; he spoke of it in the same tone I would have used when complaining of my struggles to get a book written: it was a lot of hard work and most of the time it was frustrating. “When one comes to this late in life, one's mind's already so wretchedly out of condition.”

Oh yes, Gerald impressed me enormously. Already I believed that
he,
at least, believed he was making some progress in contacting “this thing” inside himself. He couldn't be lying to me; he hadn't any motive for doing so. He couldn't be shutting himself up for six hours a day in his room and pretending to meditate merely in order to impress Chris Wood. I didn't deny that Gerald was a playactor, with an Irish delight in melodrama and arresting phrases. Indeed, I believed in him
because
he was theatrical, because he costumed himself as a ragged hobo, because his beard was Christlike but trimmed, because some of his lamentations over the human lot had a hint of glee in them and some of his scientific analogies a touch of poetic exaggeration. I should have been much more suspicious of him if he had presented himself as a grave infallible oracle. My own nature responded to his theatricality and found it reassuring, for I was a playactor, too.

What made his company so stimulating was that he seemed to be so intensely aware. Awareness was his watchword. According to him, you had to maintain continual awareness of the real situation, which is that “this thing” exists and that we are therefore all essentially united. Whenever your awareness weakened, you slipped back into acceptance of the unreal situation, which is experienced as space-time and which imposes disbelief in “this thing” and belief in individual separateness. Gerald would quote Jesus admonishing the apostle Simon Peter: “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat.” Gerald uttered the word “desired” with a kind of snarl, baring the teeth on one side of his mouth. Then, quite uncannily, he would mime Satan himself, separating the mortal ego-husk from the immortal wheat grain and blowing it to perdition with a gleeful puff of his breath. “Satan,” in Gerald's interpretation, was the distracting, disintegrating, alienating power of space-time, operating through its agencies—the radio, the movies, the press. “It's the very
devil!
” Gerald would exclaim in a whisper, his pale blue eyes wild, like those of a man in a haunted house, beset by terrors. (He had developed the theme in a book published that year,
Pain, Sex and Time.
)

*   *   *

Lao-tze's
Tao Te Ching
was Gerald's favorite gospel of pacifism. He often repeated a sentence from its sixty-seventh chapter: “Heaven arms with pity those whom it would not see destroyed”—meaning that to feel concern for others is the only realistic attitude, because it is a recognition of the real situation, our oneness with each other. Feelings of love and compassion are not merely “good” and “right,” they are ultimately self-protective; feelings of hatred are ultimately self-destructive.

Lao-tze says that we should be like the water, because fluidity always overcomes rigidity; rocks and prejudices get washed away in the end. To illustrate this, Gerald used to say that Man, who has survived the dinosaurs and managed to evolve without growing wings or gills or poison glands, is descended from a small, weak, but adaptable tree shrew. (A famous biologist later assured me that Gerald's sense of poetic truth had carried him too far; Man is more probably descended from a large and aggressive ape.)

Gerald agreed with Lao-tze that one should never put the other party in the wrong if that can possibly be avoided. Martyrdom may be heroic if it is unavoidable, but you must be very sure that you have done everything permissible to save your persecutors from the spiritually self-destructive act of killing you. Otherwise, your death will be an act of passive aggression for which you will be partly to blame. Gerald would say with a sigh: “I'm afraid that that exceedingly odd individual, Jesus of Nazareth,
deliberately
got himself lynched.”

But Gerald disapproved of Jesus far less than of his Church. Gerald said that he could never become a Christian as long as the Church claimed for itself a monopoly of divine inspiration—which Hindus and Buddhists do not—and as long as it represented the crucifixion as the supreme and crowning triumph of Christ's career. Here, Gerald was joining Bernard Shaw in his condemnation of “crosstianity.” Which I found amusing, because Gerald's meditative bearded beauty, high temples, and long red nose seemed to present the composite image of a Shavian Christ.

*   *   *

Gerald referred to the life he was trying to lead as “intentional living.” Its purpose was, as he put it, to “reduce” the “strangulated” ego; he was fond of using words in their medical sense. The intentional life required not only long meditation periods—he insisted that his own six hours were an absolute minimum—but also an attempted moment-to-moment vigilance over one's every thought and action, since every thought and every action helps either to create or to remove the obstacles to union with “this thing.” No thought or action, however seemingly unimportant, can be regarded as neutral.

What were these obstacles? Gerald, who had a tidy mind and an inclination to think in trinities, would tick them off on his long, expressive fingers—addictions, possessions, and pretensions. Addictions included their opposites, aversions. They therefore ranged from, say, a lust for blonds, heroin, or toffee to a disgust-fear of cripples, gangrene, or lizards. Gerald regarded addictions as the least harmful of the three categories. Pretensions were the worst, he said, because there is one of them which can outlast all other obstacles. You may conquer your addictions and unlearn your aversions; you may unload yourself of your possessions; you may resign from your positions of honor and retire into humble obscurity. But then, and only then, the most deadly of all the pretensions may raise its head; you may begin to believe that you are a spiritually superior person and therefore entitled to condemn your weaker fellow creatures. (Was Gerald himself in danger of yielding to this final temptation? Yes—if only because he did seem capable of overcoming all the other obstacles along the course which led to it. I could imagine that Gerald might one day begin to take himself too seriously as a religious teacher. But, surely, not for long. He was too much of a comedian not to become quickly aware of the funny side of his holiness.)

As a concept, “intentional living” fascinated me. I saw how immensely it would heighten the significance of even the most ordinary day, how it would abolish boredom by turning your life into an art form. Indeed, it was related to the attitude which a novelist should have, ideally, toward his work on a novel. With one huge difference, however. The novelist is involved only with his novel and only during work hours; the intentional liver is involved with his whole life experience, and throughout every waking moment of every day until he dies. The finality of such an involvement scared and daunted me. To Gerald's austere temperament, it strongly appealed. The negative side of his involvement was his hatred of space-time, and he gloried in his hatred. “It's only when the sheer
beastliness
of this world begins to hurt you—like crushing your finger in a door” (here he winced, miming the physical pain) “that you're ready to take this step.”