This troubles me not intellectually but spiritually. Spirituality ought not to be ethereal or insubstantial but pragmatic and active.
The reason I feel optimistic in such a superficially gloomy and apocalyptic climate is I know that there are wonderful possibilities for our species that we are only just beginning to reconsider.
When the physicist speaks of the expanding universe with atheistic wonder, he is feeling the same transcendent pull that Rumi describes:
Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you.
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that.
Rumi was a Sufi mystic, though I imagine if you don’t know who Rumi was, the addition of the definition “Sufi mystic” isn’t tremendously helpful.
“Who is Alan Devonshire?”
“He had a great left peg but dodgy knees.”
“Oh. Thank you for clarifying.”
The manifest world is telling us what to do, with increasingly obvious signals; we need only look at our codes. Symptoms are signals. We are becoming through technology increasingly adept at reading and responding to signals; alas, due to the perverse prevailing ideology, we are ignoring the most important messages.
The people that currently have power are tuned in on the wrong side of Solzhenitsyn’s line, temporarily forgetting that they are divinely connected. Hence ecological meltdown. The obvious signals that we need to switch to different energy systems are being ignored because they’re watching another channel, where the moot, outdated signal of individualistic self-advancement is being bombastically broadcast. Now is the time to change channels.
Where now can we feel this connection in our pre-packed and prescriptive lives? When are we supposed to have time amidst the deadening thud of our futile duties?
“You’ll find God among the poor,” they say. Is that true anymore?
Is the connection between poverty and divinity simply a panacea for the world’s destitute, an assurance that they’ll be rewarded in the hereafter? Or does a material deficit provide space for God?
My love of God elevates the intention of this book beyond the dry and admirable establishment of collectivized communities.
I am enraptured by the magnetic pull of evolution: What is this energy that heals the body and escalates one cell to two, that repairs and creates and calculates in harmony with environment, outside of time? Where is evolution trying to go? Evolutionary psychologists would likely say the imposition of an anthropocentric concept like “trying” or “intending” is naïve, but I’m not going to ask one, they get enough airtime, the killjoys.
I remain uncharmed by the incessant rationalization that requires the spirit’s capitulation.
The infusion of the scientific with the philosophical is materialism. The manifesto for our salvation is not in this sparse itinerary.
This all encompassing realm, this consciousness beyond mind, cannot be captured with language any more than you can appreciate Caravaggio by licking the canvas or Mozart by sniffing the notes on a staff.
The Transcendental Meditation Foundation, which taught me to meditate, conducted an experiment in Washington to evaluate the effects of concentrated meditation on that city’s crime figures. They got a group of people, ranging from a few hundred to a thousand, to meditate in a hotel, to see if this would impact the behavior of the wider community. From a cynical perspective, it was a bold experiment to embark upon. Why would a bunch of … I’m going to assume hippies, sitting still in a room thinking a word change the way a criminal outside in Washington would behave? In fact who funded this madness? It makes no material sense. “We are living in a material world and I am a material girl,” sang Madonna. And she’s right, it is and she is.
Quantum physicist John Hagelin was one of the scientists behind this experiment. I’ve chatted to him about meditation and asked for neurological data that advances meditation beyond an esoteric practice for bearded wizards in the Himalayas. Transcendental Meditation, though, was actually brought to the West by a bearded wizard from the Himalayas. Known as the Maharishi, you might recognize him from “the sixties,” when he was at the epicenter of a countercultural explosion, perched cross-legged on a flower-strewn stage with the Beatles.
The technique of TM that the Maharishi taught them is the type of meditation that I use. Hagelin describes it as a tool to get “beyond thought to the source of thought.” When scanned in a meditative state, the brain behaves in a tangibly distinct electrophysiological way. It’s a fourth state of consciousness. Awake, asleep, dreaming, and the meditative state.
There is some distance to traverse, according to conventional thinking, between meditation producing unusual brainwaves and crime falling in a major metropolis as a result of a group of people practicing it.
Over the course of the two-month experiment, crime fell by 23 percent. What’s more, the figure increased in tandem with the number of people practicing. John Hagelin said through meditation we can access “the unity beyond diversity.” That beyond the atomic, subatomic, nuclear, subnuclear, there is a unified field. The results of this experiment suggest that if a significant proportion of a population regularly meditated it will affect consciousness—beyond the people involved.
Burglaries, street crime, and violence all fell as a result of the state of consciousness achieved by a group of people inwardly thinking a word until a state beyond thought was reached. That’s weird.
It is irrefutable proof that beyond the world that we can currently measure with tools as yet inept for such an advanced task, there is a connection between the apparently separate consciousness of individuals.
Consciousness exists beyond your head, between our heads, and it can manifest harmony.
That is perilously close to affirmation of a Higher Power. My experiences of meditation began before bearded pajama time, which a friend of mine is encouraging me to describe as a mental breakdown. I don’t think it was, as I would say that despair is a necessary ingredient of a breakdown. What did happen at the time of my divorce was that a lot of my beliefs and their outward manifestations fell away.
My marriage ended as a result of the kind of incompatibility recognizable to anyone who’s been through a break-up. Where mine may have differed is that my wedding and accompanying move to Los Angeles represented to me the crescendo of a particular type of thinking.
I, like a lot of people who come from somewhere glum, was trying to be something spectacular, always though with the subtly unabating knowledge, like an unaddressed itch, that change comes from within.
The myth of the genie and his wishes or the stories of Midas or Faust are all, I suppose, telling the same story: that you cannot outwardly acquire solutions.
Anyone as indoctrinated by capitalism as me will miss the point in those tales.
The Midas touch is still thought of as a positive thing as opposed to the “gift” of turning your wife into an inanimate lump of metal. The three genie wishes always lead to the hapless recipient slumped, head in hands, lamenting, “I wish I’d appreciated things the way they were.” Sorry! No more wishes. Usually in these stories people wish for fame and fortune and sex and power, the things kids today want (maybe not the sex), fed on Closer Weekly or Us Weekly or whatever. It’s what I wanted.
These primary-colored, neon-lit goals are what a lot of people want, and they serve as a kind of psychological signpost that bluntly indicates “Away From Here.” The present isn’t good enough; the people in these magazines seem happy or at least heightened, their faces a papped mandala for the contemplation of the secular flock.
The Transcendental Meditation practitioners have established a community in Fairfield, Iowa, where they can live in accordance with the Vedic principles behind TM. It is most recognizable for its two iconic meditation domes, which loom like tranquil
boobs plopped on to the pastoral view. I just turned myself on then; that can’t’ve been their intention.
The members of this community are attempting to inhabit a kind of utopia, to live now, in accordance with spiritual ideals, not to regard the ideal society as a tantalizing pipe dream forever out of reach but as a daily reality.
I shall tell you now and for no extra charge that “living in the present” seems to be the key component across every scripture, self-help book, and religious group I’ve encountered. To harmonize with life in each moment, not to make happiness contingent on any prospective condition.
Not to be tormented by the past but to live in the reality of “now,” all else being a mental construct.
Osho, Eckhart Tolle, Jesus, Buddha, Oprah—anyone who’s anyone who’s ever grown a beard or shaved their head or dropped out and looked back at the material world with a sage shake of the head, a knowing wag of the finger, and a beatific smile—are all saying “Snap out of it”; liberate yourself from the tyranny of egoic introspection.
This is the seam of the self that consumerism can continually mine, the unrelenting inner voice that wants and fears, that attaches and rejects. The people in robes and beards want us to learn to live beyond it, to calmly watch the chattering ego like clouds moving across a perfect sky, to identify with the stillness that is aware of the voice, that hears the voice, not the voice itself.
Well, that’s easy for them to say, all relaxed in their flowing robes, like giant, hairy babies, it’s extremely difficult, especially when that voice has such omnipresent external allies to rely on, whilst the very idea of a spiritual life has been marginalized and maligned.
Perhaps this state needn’t be the product of strenuous esotericism; it’s possible that calm presence of mind is our natural state and our jittery materialism the result of constant indoctrination. Much as I love spirituality to be served up properly branded in a turban, dressed in curtains, the accoutrements are surely an aesthetic, not a prerequisite.
Once on holiday on the Pacific coast of Mexico, I met a man who possessed a stubborn spirituality that was more earth than air, more leather than muslin. I was on the kind of luxurious holiday that will be coldly ground out like a mink cigar when sanity is restored, set to stay in a resort called Cuixmala, which I will never be confident writing or pronouncing due to that “x” in the middle of it.
I flew into Puerto Vallarta airport from Los Angeles, then had to get a prop plane from there to the resort. Me and my mate Nicola traveled there together, she in the role of an adult nanny to facilitate the extended infancy that fame affords. Fame is like a sequin-covered suit of armor that provides a holographic cover for actual me; most people, whether their opinion is positive or negative, are content to deal with the avatar, leaving me as tender as crabmeat within. Really, it’s an amplification of what happens if you’re not famous. I don’t imagine that we are often interacting on the pure frequency of essential nature; we usually have a preexisting set of conditions and coordinates that we project on to people we meet or circumstances we encounter.
This is not just a psychological notion. Robert Lanza, in his concept-smashing book Biocentrism explains that our perception of all physical external phenomena is in fact an internal reconstruction, elaborating on the results of experiments in quantum physics, that particles behave differently when under observation—itself a universe-shattering piece of information—so that, and forgive my inelegant comprehension of the quantum world, electrons fired out of a tiny little cannon, when unobserved, make a pattern that reveals they have behaved as “a wave,” but when observed, the kinky little bastards behave as “particles.”
That’s a bit fucking mad if you ask me. That’s like finding out that when you go out your dog stands up on its hind legs, lights a fag, and starts making phone calls. Or turns into a cloud.
Lanza describes how our conception of a candle as a yellow flame burning on a wick is a kind of mentally constructed illusion. He says an unobserved candle would have no intrinsic “brightness” or “yellowness,” that these qualities require an interaction with consciousness. The bastard. A flame, he explains, is a hot gas. Like any light source, it emits photons, which are tiny packets of electromagnetic energy. Which means electrical and magnetic impulses.
Lanza points out that we know from our simple, sexy everyday lives that electricity and magnetic energy have no visual properties. There is nothing inherently visual about a flame until the electromagnetic impulses—if measuring, between 400 and 700 nanometers in length from crest to crest—hit the cells in our retinas, at the back of the eye. This makes a complex matrix of neurons fire in our brains, and we subjectively perceive this as “yellow brightness” occurring in the external world. Other creatures would see gray. At most we can conclude, says Lanza, that there is a stream of electromagnetic energy that, if denied correlation with human consciousness, is impossible to conceptualize. So when Elton John said Marilyn Monroe lived her life “like a candle in the wind,” he was probably bloody right, and if he wasn’t we’ll never know.
We apply reality from within. The world is our perception of the world. So what other people think of you, famous or not, is an independent construct taking place in their brain, and we shouldn’t worry too much about it.
On my trip to Mexico I encountered Ernesto, who clearly didn’t give a toss about fame. Me and Nic were due to be met at Puerto Vallarta, we knew not by whom. As soon as I saw Ernesto there, halfheartedly holding a sign with a pseudonym on it and a fag a lot more committedly, I became curious. He wore a cloth baseball cap, like a mechanic in a movie, a red polo shirt, and shorts. Everything he wore looked like it had at some point been used to polish an engine. He looked weathered; I suppose that means like he’d been alive a while and spent a lot of time outside. As I approached I noticed that I couldn’t easily imagine this man observing the usual custom in this circumstance and carrying my luggage. He didn’t. I noticed I was disgruntled but left that unexpressed.
Brown he was, Ernesto, nicotine-stained fingers, good like wood compared to plastic, I observed, as he greeted us with a fraction of a smile, a few words in Spanish, and smoked his way from the main terminal to the smaller, adjacent terminal where the prop plane awaited.
It was a red and yellow plane so comically small and vivid it might as well’ve been a cartoon. It in fact looked like “Jimbo,” an anthropomorphic airplane from children’s BBC in the eighties. It was such a diminutive aviation device that boarding it was more akin to putting on a jacket than to getting on a plane. It became clear, but was never explained, that Ernesto was the pilot when he got in the driving seat and started pressing buttons. Nicola is a nervous flyer, which is annoying because we all die in plane crashes, not just nervous people, but we, the fearless, are expected to console and coo and tell them it’s okay and list statistics about air travel’s relative safety: “You’re more likely to die in a road accident,” etc. Well, I’m sick of it.
They’re getting short shrift from me now, these blubbering sky-nancies. Phobias are like fetishes, if you ask me, nurtured little perversions that the sufferers secretly enjoy. The last time a nervous flyer tried it on with me, I barked at her like she was talking in an exam and threatened to sit on her.
Nicola sat in the back, which was like she was perched in a knapsack on my back, and nervously eyed Ernesto as he, with the slapdash dexterity of a bare-knuckle croupier, prodded and jabbed dials and switches. He indicated that we should put the seat belts on. They were those ones that have no spring-loaded recall, like in an old car; it was like draping a dressing-gown cord over your shoulder. We took off with the sense of excitement that accompanies the thrill of a fairground ride, with none of the guaranteed safety.
When I meet a new person, I like to take them in, give them a damn good staring at, and check my files for references. I suppose that is the beginning of prejudice. Ernesto seemed to be softening, perhaps as a result of our excitement at taking off. He began to take on the role o
f guide, pointing out interesting bays and coves as we flew along the coastline. “Here we will see sharks,” he said, lowering the altitude, and sure enough we could make out a dappled gray slither of wickedness shimmering in the azure.
I began to quiz Ernesto to see if he matched up to my prejudices. I assumed him to be a man who’d lived in close harmony with the land and with machines. A pragmatic man. He may never have left Mexico, I thought.
He continued to beguile with cavalier nods to jungle gaps where marijuana crops grew and, encouraged by our interest, as the resort drew near incorporated some aeronautical stunt work into his repertoire, swooping down till we were yards above the beach. Swimming village kids waved like in the opening credits of a travel program. He dive-bombed at a jeep on a dirt track, his former grease-monkey persona replaced by the debonair grace of a World War I flying ace. I felt great joy and safety and decided that I loved this man. Between stunts, I’d looked at his eyes, and they were blue like the sea and, like the sea, they had sharks in them. Wild, untamable nature and certainty. Connection and power, warmth. I immediately and unthinkingly made him a father figure. When Nicola, who was leaving the next day to fly to London, was taxied back by Ernesto, I went along for the ride.
This time a seasoned copilot with forty minutes’ experience, I felt able to switch off a little and not be so self-consciously dazzled by the view. I took to my phone to make a few texts and whatnot. I must’ve stared mute and listless for longer than Ernesto deemed suitable, as he jerked the plane violently up, then down, taking my breath away and making me audibly yelp. He looked at me and smiled. “In the moment,” he said.
I’m not often chided as an adult. I usually just do what I want, and drifting into a wet-lipped torpor, agog at the screen of my self-administered iTag, is one of the ways I voluntarily squander the gift of life. Well, Ernesto wasn’t having it. He’d given himself the role of “elder” and was belatedly initiating me into the present.
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