The continuing spiritual fermentation going on inside me didn’t make me any less small-minded. When my life seemed to be in a rut, I would try to change my responses to stimuli but found myself reacting exactly as before. The set patterns of mind and action inherited from past lives (those pesky vasanas) must be dismantled before any progress can be made, and I was grappling with them unsystematically in my own feeble way.
Peter and I had enjoyed, or endured, another meal with Granny at the Compleat Angler soon after the car arrived. In fact we triumphed over her, entirely by accident. Naturally she found a way of getting her own back.
It was well known in our household that there was one foodstuff which Granny abominated. I remember her saying, ‘I hope your mother isn’t serving you boys any of that dreadful slop from the tins? If I find she has, my revenge will be terrible.’ Possibly she was joking, but it was never safe to make that assumption.
I wonder what she would have said, if she had known that the kitchen convenience to which she was referring with such disgust had been introduced to Britain by Fortnum and Mason, the shop for top people par excellence, as a prestige item. For some time they were the only stockists of … tinned baked beans. Considered by Granny to be the active opposite of a vegetable, a food item so vulgar and American it was practically obscene.
She was explaining, not for the first time, that one of the reasons she selected this particular Otel for her stays was the excellence of the vegetable preparation. Now that Peter had found employment in the world of catering she offered relevant instruction free of charge. In a country where greens were routinely boiled to mush, the kitchen staff at the Compleat Angler knew how to retain both vitamins and flavour. It was Granny’s opinion that people shouldn’t be allowed to have children unless they had proved they could cook vegetables correctly. It was hard to see how this scheme could be enforced, but that wasn’t Granny’s responsibility. She just had the ideas.
Of course beans-on-toast was one of our favourite meals at Trees. Mum sometimes bought cleaning products because she might win a cash prize if she produced them when the manufacturers’ representative came to call, though she knew in her heart of hearts that they wouldn’t displace her favourites. Those items lived at the back of a cupboard, awaiting a knock on the door. They shared the space with her Heinz baked beans, those tins glowing with an indefinable blue-green, the colour of an Amazonian parrot that never was.
The beans needed to be near enough for convenience but well out of sight in case her mother pounced for a spot inspection. It was quite normal for our treats to have a lining of shame to them in this way. We never missed Bruce Forsyth on a Saturday night, when he appeared on the Light Programme, as she perversely called ITV (once she’d stopped pretending we couldn’t receive the signal at all, on account of our being so near the river). We watched ‘just to see how awful it is’, to be amazed at what lower people found entertaining. Our pleasures lay some distance from our principles, and often the things we said we liked did nothing for us.
Now at the Compleat Angler Granny was plumping for her main course, the lamb. There only remained the selection of a vegetable. She asked what was available. Normally the staff were chatty and personable, but our waiter must have sensed he was on dangerous ground. ‘Beans, Madame,’ he said.
‘What sort of beans, exactly? French beans? Runner beans? Broad?’
This wasn’t her Spanish pet (the one who didn’t want me for a pet), who would certainly have had a shot at sweet-talking her, however hopeless the odds. This one was reduced to cowed silence and dumb show. He took the lid off the chafing dish to display the contents. It might just as well have been a kidney dish of hospital waste. Granny’s face went dark – this was the scalding look occasionally visited on husband or dog – and Peter suppressed a snort. He and I were throughly enjoying the fix she was in. She who loved to put people on the spot was in a bit of a spot herself. How was she going to get out of it?
I thought I’d help the drama along. ‘What sort of beans are we being served with, Granny?’ I sang out. ‘I can’t see from here! They look all orangey.’
The big game of the ego
We watched her lips, Peter, the waiter and I, waiting to hear what words would emerge. Granny played for time, taking a good ten seconds to clear her throat. ‘The item …’ she said at last. ‘The item on the menu seems to be … haricot beans … gently simmered in a piquant sauce. A la mode de Boston.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I know what that is! My French isn’t so bad after all. That’s baked beans, that is.’ I saw Granny quiver, as if from pain or shock. ‘Bung some on here, mate!’ I said cheerily to the waiter. ‘There you are, Peter! I knew Granny would never mind if we ate these. Mum must have been teasing us – or else she got the wrong end of the stick. She does that sometimes.’ It was lovely to have the whip hand for once. ‘You’re right, Granny, they really know how to cook vegetables here. First class, tip-top!’ They tasted even better than the ones we ate at home in conditions of secrecy. For once we were tasting victory, served up on fine china in tomato sauce.
Of course we pushed our luck. We tried to consolidate our advantage, and naturally we came a cropper. Granny had a natural genius for One-Upmanship, and Peter and I wouldn’t remain One-Up for long. Later when I read Stephen Potter’s book on One-Upmanship it held no surprises. The manœuvres all seemed rather tame. One of these days I’ll track down a biography of the man, to see how he came up with the idea. For all I know there is a legendary figure in Stephen Potter studies, a mysterious woman he met at a party in the 1930s who showed him how to hunt the big game of the ego, someone who taught him all he knew.
Now, in the elation of the triumph we had shared, Peter was urging Granny to come with us to a film that was showing locally. An X film, a Hammer Horror. Vampires. ‘Come on, Granny,’ said Peter, ‘let your hair down.’
‘No one has yet been able to explain to me, Peter, why letting one’s hair down would be a good thing. Your own hair has been let down rather far already.’ He blushed but didn’t give up.
‘Really, Granny, you’ll be quite safe. We’ll look after you if you get scared. I’ve seen it already and I’ll warn you when it’s going to make you jump. John hasn’t seen it, but nothing scares him.’ Not entirely true (anything set in a hospital gave me a sick feeling in my stomach) but a good thing to hear your brother say.
‘I very much doubt that the film you propose would make me jump. I warn you, though, that I might flinch.’ Peter seemed delighted. If it wasn’t for the formal surroundings he would have been whooping like mad. Granny was scared – she’d admitted it!
Then Granny went off at a tangent. ‘When I was a child, there was no television and no films. We used to tell each other stories instead. One friend of my father’s who used to visit was called Mr Stoker. In winter we would sit close to the fire while he told us tales that held us spellbound …’
Peter looked at me uncertainly. Granny was rambling, Granny seemed to be going gaga. Perhaps he thought that the shock of those beans in the chafing dish had broken her spirit. I wasn’t so sure. I remembered the last time I had underestimated her, in this very room. I decided I would wait to hear the full six clicks before I was sure that Granny was out of ammunition.
Granny was scanning our faces for reaction to what she had said. Then her face hardened rather, as she added, ‘Bram Stoker was the one who wrote that story, you know, the one you both seem to enjoy so much. If television had existed in his day I dare say it would never have been written …’
She paused to let her words sink in. We were still at sea. ‘There is one point on which I must correct you, much as I hate to do so.’ True enough, Granny hated to correct people almost as much as she hated to breathe. ‘You have been saying Drác-ula’ – she spat the word out as though it was a slug lurking in a bowl of consommé – ‘and I have held my tongue. Now I feel it only fair to tell you that the word is properly pronounced Dra-coóla. That is, if Mr Stoker is all
owed to know something about a personage he made up. When I told you I would wince if I went to the cinema to see your film, I was not referring to the story, with which I am thoroughly familiar, but to the pain of having to hear that ghastly and ignorant mispronunciation.’
One-Up? She was a thousand up, now. We would never catch up, not even if the Compleat Angler betrayed her all over again by serving Milky Bars on the dessert trolley. Still, it had been fun while it had lasted, our little ascendancy over the Dowager Empress of One-Upmanship. For the rest of the evening she was in full control.
I tried to find spiritual instruction in my encounters with Granny. I even thought of telling her of my Hinduism – she was surely too much a woman of the world to be alarmed. On the other hand I’d rather she was alarmed than moved to deflate me conversationally, perhaps by remembering a hunt ball in her youth at which she had taught a dark young chap all he needed to know about what she called ‘passive resistance’, by the way she discouraged a persistent suitor. Mohandas Gandhi, she rather thought that was the dark young chap’s name.
One of the things I loved about Ramana Maharshi from the start was the way he could use anything as a text or an example. There was no gospel as such, just the warm imperative to realise yourself, refracted through the whole range of analogies waiting to be used. His teaching might take a simple gesture or a staple food as its starting point.
The unboggled mind a great hindrance
Once a presumptuous seeker after truth made the journey to Tiruvannamalai and insisted on seeing Ramana Maharshi, who refused, saying ‘Go back the way you came.’ The seeker after truth was very much put out by such uncoöperative behaviour from the guru, until his acolytes pointed out that far from being dismissed without what he had come for, he had received teaching of the richest, pithiest sort. ‘Go back the way you came’ – what could be more enlightening, properly understood? Retrace your footsteps, seek always the source, ask yourself not what is sought but who it is that seeks. The visitor went away greatly enlightened. Though the possibility remains that Ramana Maharshi really was saying Get lost, I can’t be doing with you. It’s a full-time job discouraging your own personality cult – and then the devotees did what they could to put a tactful gloss on what he said.
What instruction could I extract from this evening with Granny, on which she had got up to all her old tricks, and a few new ones? Perhaps I should be concentrating on the moment when she pounced, which always took me by surprise. At those moments I had the sensation that my thoughts had run into the buffers. When the mind boggles, enlightenment is just round the corner. If I could recreate that sensation at will, I would have made a real start. The unboggled mind is a great hindrance to self-realisation.
Simpler than stopping the mind in its tracks is unstringing it, by meditation. I was determined to open my mental apparatus to the things that underlay it, but I had no technique. I was making the usual beginner’s mistake of simply instructing the mind to suspend itself. Chop chop. I don’t have all day.
Meditating, at least in the noisy West, is like trying not to buy anything when you actually live in a supermarket. The trick is not to let yourself be distracted by the displays of bargains but to concentrate on your shopping list, which has THERE’S NOTHING I NEED written on it (even if the words are actually OM MANE PADME OM). With practice even these words disappear from the paper, and it becomes second nature to wander along the gleaming contemplative aisles, their shelves perfectly empty, the piped music replaced by a distillation of breathing.
My own yoga breathing was more or less instinctive, thanks to all the inadvertent practice I had put in during the bed-rest years, but I didn’t know what a mantra was, or how it would help me unfocus. Or perhaps I had found my own way to the idea. It seemed to me that I had come close to meditating, as a child, when I had repeated the words from the lid of a biscuit tin, draining them of meaning, or else filling them with the radiance of not meaning anything. Peek Frean Peek Frean. I tried it for some time, with fair results.
There’s nothing in modern life which remotely resembles meditation, except possibly making mayonnaise by hand. If you have the patient alertness to add the olive oil drop by drop in the early stages, you’ll probably get the knack of meditation quite quickly. Admittedly making mayonnaise was a two-person job as far as Mum and I were concerned – she did the beating and I concentrated on precisely that aspect of the process, regulating the thin dribble of oil. I really wanted to make mayonnaise out of fascination with the scientific aspect (behaviour of emulsions). Mum asked what was wrong with Heinz salad cream, and I had to say, nothing much. On the basis of his tomato ketchup, his baked beans and his salad cream, Mr Heinz didn’t miss a trick.
Heart-mortar, mind-pestle
With a little effort you could see meditation as an exercise in spiritual emulsification, suspending the ego in tiny dispersed globules. There’s licence for such flights of fancy in the Hinduism I follow, and plenty of precedent in my guru’s poems and conversation. In 1914 or so he wrote ‘Song of the Poppadum’. What could be more down to earth? It goes like this:
Make a batch of poppadums
Eat them and satisfy your appetite.
Don’t roam the world disconsolate.
Hear the word, unique, unspoken
Taught by the true teacher who teaches
The truth of Being-Awareness-Bliss.
1. Take the black-gram ego-self
Growing in the five-fold body-field
And grind it in the quern,
The wisdom-quest of ‘Who am I?’
Reducing it to finest flour.
Make a batch of poppadums … &c.
2. Mix it with pirandai-juice,
Which is holy company,
Add mind-control, the cumin-seed,
The pepper of self-restraint,
Salt of non-attachment,
And asafœtida, the aroma
Of virtuous inclination.
Make a batch of poppadums … &c.
3. In the heart-mortar place the dough
And with mind-pestle inward turned,
Pound it hard with strokes of ‘I’, ‘I’,
Then flatten it with the rolling pin
Of stillness on the level slab of Being.
Work away, untiring, steady, cheerful.
Make a batch of poppadums … &c.
4. Place the poppadum in the ghee of Brahman,
Held in the pan of infinite silence,
And fry it over the fire of knowledge.
Now I is transmuted into That.
Eat and taste the Self as Self,
Abiding in the Self alone.
Make a batch of poppadums … &c.
How am I supposed to resist a guru who effortlessly combines such contrary literary forms – prayer and recipe? The answer is that I’m not. I had already enjoyed the idea in The Satipatthana Sutta and Its Application to Modern Life that there was no special time and place that needed to be set aside for the contemplation of the non-illusory. Now I was mad for the idea that everyday life actually supplied the material for its own dismantling, so that you could be plunged into self-enquiry even while you were cooking up a batch of snacks. Everything around me was a potential trigger of enlightenment. It meant that I could lower my little bucket into the ocean of contiguous moments at any point, and be sure of bringing up a sample that would yield the whole.
Admittedly I did much better on the meditation front once I had a regular mantra, even if it was that old shop-bought standby (yes) Om Mane Padme Om, the Mother’s-Pride-sliced-white-bread of mantras. You never lose your fondness for your first mantra, in the same way that you’re always tender towards the car that let you learn to drive.
If I needed formal proof of the unreality of time, I would only need to think of the year I spent at High Wycombe Technical College after Burnham, a period which seemed purgatorial and endless but left remarkably little trace. For times that came before and after my mind is well armoured with the
illusion of recall, but for that year the memory gun fires blanks. I nosed my way forward, studious mole, along the blind tunnel of language acquisition. I didn’t explore High Wycombe or make friends, in or out of college. It’s possible that I wasn’t interested in social life, that I was saving myself, socially, for Cambridge, but I can’t imagine I would have put up much of a fight against overtures. I certainly wasn’t actively saving my virginity (assuming I had left Vulcan with that strange virtue intact), but still it lingered like a fog. There were no takers.
The ‘Tech’ had a strong vocational aspect. Many of my fellow students were doing something called Business Studies, which meant less than nothing to me. I was only a part-time student, turning up for a couple of lessons a week. I spent a lot of my time reading, not just for my course, but various arcane treasures unearthed by Mrs Pavey. I read Arthur Osborne’s The Incredible Sai Baba with fascination, but also relief that I had established a rapport with Ramana Maharshi before I could be tempted by such a tremendous spiritual showman. Sai Baba’s miracles were full of slyness and misdirection – he slept, for instance, on a plank intricately suspended by ropes. No one ever saw him climb onto it, though plenty saw him lying there. It seems to have been levitation with a few teasing strings attached. Sai Baba’s principle was that he would give people what they wanted, in the hope that they would gradually develop a hunger for what he wanted to give. One day he went to fill a jar with oil for his lamps, but was given water instead by a mischievous tradesman who followed him home to see what happened. What happened was that Sai Baba filled his oil lamps with the water he had been given, and they burned very merrily indeed. Ramana Maharshi’s miracles, on the other hand, were so discreet that they hardly stood out against the natural order. They made no attempt to impress. I prefer the lighter touch, the low-key miracle.
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