The incense burned, my legs, twisted into a half-assed half lotus, ached, and the beatifically smiling yogi in my black-light, Peter Max-like “LOVE” poster gazed down upon me in serene compassion. I curled my thumbs and forefingers in the sacred mudra 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 the 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 susceptible psyche of the lonely and 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 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 the Dalai Lama's retreat house 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 radiant messiah the world had waited for so long.
After many additional weeks of painful half-lotuses and endless Jethro Tull, with the memory of timeless, limitless bliss only receding further from my prayerful grasp, 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 guy in my black-light Love poster--talk about dharma and destiny!) Which finally sets the table for our discussion of enlightenment and death.
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“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 the high 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 Tweety-bird out the open birdcage door. The euphemism may be wanting in grace, but there's nothing wrong with the metaphor.)
Maharishi answered, “The seed roasted in the fire of knowledge does not sprout again.”
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 an escape from myself—say, oblivion—would certainly do. However, the rest of the audience clearly felt otherwise, as evidenced by the sudden buzz of dismay. “But Maharishi,” the questioner whined. The Guru giggled sympathetically—he loved his worshipful bliss ninnies—but the answer remained, in its essence, Sorry, Bub, 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 acolytes. Of course, it was easy for him: white robes, full lotus, effulgent halo—he and Krishna-Jesus-Buddha were like peas in a 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, largely due to the Beatles, 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 and endorsed by John "Rocky Mountain High" Denver), Ram Dass (more accessibly Western; rich history of LSD use), Bhagwan Rajneesh (real nice cars, group sex! distinctive orange robes), and the Kali-Durga-Mama woman whom Joe Namath dated for a while (earth goddess ambiance, Tantric sex! celebrity watching). But all that was in the future, and caused a subsequent diversification in the Maharishi business into nutritional supplements, instructional cassettes 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. Because if you got right down to it, this 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, mystic powers? Yes, they’re definitely full-price 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—but five contemptible minutes of CC 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 Ignorance 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 and frantically denied misery, followed by an eternity of nonexistence, the whole point is…to get a brand new set of wheels! 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 drugs, alcohol, hamburgers and sex, to end up a toasted seed tossed into the deepest, darkest 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?
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. They chuckled: their beloved Guru could be such a koan-jokester, 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 Enlightenment despite decades of meditation (and my few intermittent years of yogic levitation-hopping in the eighties)--but the Organization would undoubtedly maintain that my failure to follow the program (i.e., meat, sex, drugs, failure to pay dues) voided any implied guaranty. Still, I've never quite lost that small, bright heart-noodle of hope that my long-sought Freedom Land lies just around the next corner, like an open manhole awaiting only my heedless, toodling footsteps, and the appointed moment of Delivery. In the meantime, I did discover that meditation cures even the stubbornest case of hiccups--and that's a nice benny. Om Shanthi Om.
February 2008: I've just learned that the Master has dropped the body himself. Adios, dear yogi, vaya con Dios.
By Henry E. Panky
Teetering on the manhole of nothingness...for you
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