A Short History of Richard Kline

by Amanda Lohrey

  And then there was the vexed question of God. I had given up on God a long time ago, without a pang, and had felt not the slightest desire to reclaim him since. But now, in her short talks, always in Hindi and translated by a devotee, she spoke of the divine; taught that there was an ultimate knowledge and source, and that a part of this, its very essence, lay within my own heart. She referred to it as the Self, an all-pervading consciousness of which we were a part, a union that we were blind to, though occasionally we caught glimpses of it. It was a teaching that sat uneasily with the old version of my empiricism, yet I could not deny that since my first meeting with her I had been granted insights into another dimension of the real.

  When I tried to explain it to Zoe, I compared it to the experience of becoming a parent. When you have a child it’s like you have been living in a small room and all the time you thought it was the world, and then the child comes and you discover that you are in fact living in a house with many rooms. But you are still inside the house. When you meet the guru you realise that there is a world beyond the house, and you step out of the house and into the unknown.

  But there was another way to try and make sense of it, and that was to read. I discovered that there was a Vedanta bookshop in Croydon, and one Saturday afternoon I relieved myself of two hundred dollars and came home with a box of books. I read the Bhagavad Gita, I read the lives of the sages, I discovered that many Western philosophers and poets had been strongly influenced by Vedic mysticism. I baulked at the doctrine of reincarnation, since my senses gave me no evidence of this. But I liked the way the sages of Vedanta didn’t dwell on sin, on the harsh and the punitive. There was no ‘don’t do this, don’t do that’: just ‘remember your goal’. You got on the path and moved forward in your own way and your own time, doing the best you could.

  I learned of the tradition of the guru and the disciple; that one did not ‘seek’ and ‘find’ the guru but that the guru found you; activated a predestined connection when the disciple was ‘ripe’, which often meant desperate enough and unhappy enough to open to the unfamiliar and the unknown.

  I learned that the connection I felt with her was of a special kind, called bhakti, and that I was a bhakta, one who may read and think and study and intellectualise as much as he likes, but the ground of his being is this loving connection he feels to the guru.

  I re-read Siddhartha, the text of my youth, and knew for the first time the meaning of the phrase ‘wounded deeply by a divine arrow that gave him pleasure’.

  I couldn’t wait for her to return to the city in November, to emerge once again from her seclusion. By then I would have it all down. I would progress to the next level. I was ready.

  But for now I had to contend with Joe Mazengarb.

  Zoe, who was one to keep things discreetly to herself, had finally confessed to her father that she feared for her husband’s sanity, that he seemed to be regressing into an infantile dependence on an idealised mother figure and might well be at risk of drifting into a cult.

  When, after one of our regular squash games, Joe suggested stopping off at a bar for a drink, I knew what was coming.

  ‘What is this thing, Rick?’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘This … this guru thing.’ Joe was choking on that word.

  ‘It’s nothing to worry about, Joe. I haven’t lost my marbles.’

  ‘I must say, I’m concerned.’

  ‘It’s okay, I’m still the same person. I still vote the same way, still barrack for the same team.’

  ‘Don’t humour me, Rick.’

  ‘It’s impossible to talk about,’ I said, staring into my glass. There were two paths I could go down here: I could attempt to explain everything to my cynical father-in-law and listen to a lecture on the liver syndrome, or I could brush the subject away. I shrugged and opted for the latter. ‘It isn’t necessary. Really.’

  But Joe was a professional interrogator and, having brought us both to this precipice of discomfort, was not about to give up.

  I don’t remember the rest of that conversation, though I do recall another one, on a Sunday evening at my in-laws’ house. After a relaxed dinner, Joe produced a new book he had bought, in which there was a yellow sticky note. The heading of the marked chapter read: ‘Is There a God Module in the Brain?’

  I knew what was coming: a treatise on the biochemistry of mysticism and the work of the Indian neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran.

  ‘You know, Rick, those guys in San Diego found evidence of neural circuits in the human brain that affect how strongly an individual responds to certain experiences. If I have more connections between the emotion centres of the brain, like the amygdala, more connections than you, say, then I’m more likely to have’ – he hesitated – ‘certain experiences.’

  For once, Joe was tongue-tied. ‘Certain experiences’ was all he could manage, so distasteful, indeed embarrassing, was the subject of my delusion.

  ‘I’ve read the research, Joe.’

  He raised his eyebrows, then both hands, in an interrogatory shrug, as if to say, ‘And?’

  ‘As I read the work done to date’ – I tried to sound considered – ‘far from invalidating religious experience, it merely indicates what the underlying neural substrate might be.’

  ‘But it does suggest that what you experience depends on your brain, not on any external reality.’

  ‘There may be differences between individual propensities, it’s true. But we have to be careful when we talk about the relationship of the brain to what we call reality. We don’t understand enough about either to be able to make a whole lot of categorical assertions about their relationship.’

  Joe decided on another tack. He had been reading a book on conversion experiences, he said, by a man called Shermer, ‘and this guy believes that the revelations of St Paul, Augustine, Luther and Calvin were most likely the result of temporal lobe seizures’.

  At that point I might have laughed out loud. I was impressed by Joe’s homework, and if I had thought about it I might have felt touched by his concern. Instead, I bristled. ‘I know this stuff,’ I said, ‘and I’ve never had a seizure, so I guess that rules me out of the category of the spiritually programmed animal.’

  ‘You’re fencing with me.’

  ‘No, you’re fencing with me.’ I felt the anger rising, and the scorn. ‘Do you know how ridiculous all that sounds, all that neural puppetry?’

  ‘Do you know how ridiculous it is for a man like you to succumb to some hippie guru?’

  I held my breath. I told myself I owed it to my father-in-law not to lose my temper. ‘Look, I’m not interested in philosophy here. I’m not debating how many angels can dance on the end of a pin. This is about my experience. You can speak with authority about your experience, I can speak about mine. I’m the same person I always was. I don’t know about this thing called God. I can’t see it or hear it or feel it but I do see and feel and hear her. You offer me argument, logic, words; I offer you my experience. And what if all these theories you cite are true? It doesn’t matter whether they’re true or not. It works for me. And why should this bother you? I’m not proselytising here, I’m not trying to convert you. Only if I were would this argument be in order. This is my objection to Christianity. It argues that it, and it alone, is right and everyone else is wrong. It wants to convert the world. It wants to gainsay the deeply felt mystical experience of others.’

  ‘Now you’re preaching.’

  ‘You started this, Joe.’

  We were quarrelling like schoolboys.

  That night I went home and re-read Radhakrishnan’s introductory essay to the Bhagavad Gita and marked the following: ‘The Gita does not give any arguments in support of its metaphysical position … Dialectic in itself and without reference to personal experience cannot give us conviction. Only spiritual experience can provide us with proofs of the existence of Spirit.’

  Indeed.

  I began to arm myself further with the word. Goa
ded by my father-in-law, I read Freud on infantilism in the adult and the effects of maternal deprivation. My mother and I, it is true, had had our ups and downs, and I was not her favourite. But that was beside the point. There were thousands of devotees of hundreds of gurus. Some got on with their mothers and some didn’t. How to explain the difference? There was no reductionism that could explain away this phenomenon. If I had been close to my mother, they would say I was seeking to replicate the relationship, like a man who seeks a wife resembling his mother. If I hadn’t got on with my mother, they would say I was looking for a compensatory maternal figure. Psychology was a maze of mirrors that reflected back the ghosts of its own assumptions. Nothing in psychology, as I understood it, explained my connection to this small, middle-aged Indian woman, this connection that had come out of the blue and, in a vital sense, reclaimed me.

  It was in this labile and expansive mood that I decided to take Luke camping at the Bay of Fires, where I had swum as a boy.

  We flew down to Melbourne and took the boat over Bass Strait so that Luke, who had never been to sea, could experience its depths for the first time. We slept in a spartan two-berth cabin, one of many that opened off a maze of narrow corridors. ‘We’re like bees in a hive,’ I remarked as we found our way to the cabin, and Luke nodded earnestly and said, ‘Except there’s no queen.’ Such a literal-minded boy, with a sweet intensity that I feared he would lose in adolescence. Too excited to sleep, he perched at the end of his bunk and stared out the window until the lights of Port Melbourne were no longer visible, the sky dark but with a full moon that shone its trail of light over the surging waters of the strait.

  In the morning we woke to an abrasive loudspeaker. Sitting on the edge of his bunk and pulling on his socks, Luke stared at me with a solemn gaze. ‘You can feel it,’ he said. I thought he meant the vibration of the massive engine beneath us, which had kept me awake for much of the night. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the ocean. You can feel it under you. It’s awesome.’

  At the Devonport terminal we hired a car and bundled our packs into the boot. Then we set off for the coast, heading southeast along the highway, past the Great Western Tiers and pastures white with frost. When we turned off into the Fingal Valley we met with a cold so intense that the bare limbs of the deciduous trees were still coated in ice crystals and the valley shone like a landscape in a folk tale. We drove on, through the old mining towns with their wide streets and abandoned collieries, until at last we arrived at the top of a steep mountain pass, the edge of which fell away into canyons of dry eucalypt forest. As we made our descent, down and around the many narrow bends, we began at last to catch a glimpse of the glittering sea below, the long arc of a bay that curved towards the horizon.

  At the small seaside town of Scamander I pulled in at a dusty secondhand bookshop that had a food counter with scallop pies, which we ate for our breakfast. Then we set off for the fishing town of St Helens, where we bought camp food at a supermarket and hired boogie boards and wetsuits from a surf shop. By mid-afternoon we had arrived at an area known as The Gardens, and here we took the turn-off to a narrow unsealed road that led to the Bay of Fires.

  Because it was winter the campsite was empty, and we parked the car in a clearing fringed by she-oaks. I was impatient to see those magical waters of the bay again and wanted Luke to get oriented before it grew dark, so we set off down a steep track to the shore, where first we had to climb up and over a rocky promontory before we could descend to the long, white sands of the bay.

  The water was still at low tide, and all along the sand lay beached puffer fish with ugly bulbous heads, squashed angry-looking faces and bloated bodies covered in grey spikes. Luke was fascinated by their sinister ugliness and began to count them, until I directed his attention to Sloop Rock, a formation of rocks just off the coast, where a single steeple of rock reared up from a cluster of smooth boulders around its base, the whole appearing to float on the water.

  Luke stared out to sea. ‘The rocks here are different,’ he said, and I knew what he meant. In the softness of their contours they had a pneumatic quality, as if inflated with air; beneath the warmth of their pink lichen they seemed to breathe.

  At the far end of the bay we encountered a group of middle-aged walkers accompanied by young guides with bulging back-packs, and I guessed they were trekking towards the expensive eco-resort that lay some kilometres north. With their bodies knee-deep in grass and their heads silhouetted against the sky, they looked like pilgrims, even if it were only the local pinot and oysters that lured them on.

  I showed Luke where I had camped as a boy – behind the grasslands, near the mouth of a creek that ran out into a small lagoon – but it was too cold to camp there in winter as it lacked shelter from the wind. I told him of how, one morning, Gareth and I had woken to find a brown snake basking in a languorous coil beside our tent, and of the day a gang of bikies roared in to drink at the other end of the beach. My father had stiffened to red alert while my mother snapped at us to stay close, but Gareth had disappeared to climb a path that ran along the rear of the promontory. When he returned he boasted to me that the bikies had offered him a beer.

  Luke was keen to help with the set-up of the campsite. We pegged the tent beside a cluster of drooping she-oaks, and I warned him that if the wind came up at night they would make an eerie sound and he was not to be spooked. After we unrolled our sleeping bags I unpacked the primus stove, but Luke wanted to light a fire. Then he insisted on cooking the sausages and hamburgers, which he handled with the deft practicality of his mother, squatting on thin haunches and shaking the pan with one hand, while with the other he brushed the sparks away from his eyes. We ate beside the fire and I explained how the Bay of Fires was a favourite campsite for the northeastern tribe of the Tasmanian Aborigines, how in winter they came to live off the shellfish. When the English navigator Tobias Furneaux sailed along the coast he observed their long line of campfires glowing in the dusk and gave the bay its name.

  Then the darkness began to enclose us, and the cold, but we stoked the fire and warmed ourselves by its coals.

  In the morning it was freezing but Luke was determined to enter the water so we put on our wetsuits and took up our boards. When Luke emerged from the surf he was trembling from the chill. After we had changed, he was still shivering, so I suggested we cheat and drive to a local restaurant for lunch where it would be warm.

  At Binalong Bay we ate out on the deck under gas burners and looked down to a wedding that was being celebrated on the beach below. The members of the bridal party were in bare feet, the men in black trousers and white shirts, the bridesmaids in tight pink dresses that barely reached the top of their thighs. We watched as the elderly male celebrant took off his shoes and rolled up his trousers so that his white, bony shins looked like the legs of a rare species of seabird.

  At the culmination of the ceremony the groom lifted his bride and carried her to the edge of the water, where he whirled her around and around in the shallows. Up on the deck we, the diners, clapped and cheered.

  Luke seemed bemused by this. ‘Why did everyone cheer?’ he asked. ‘We don’t know them.’

  ‘To wish them well.’ It was a lame way of saying what I really meant. We cheer because we are in the presence of a great fertility rite. Uplifted by the promise that life will go on, for a moment we love one another and are irrational in our hope.

  In the late afternoon we returned to the campsite to build a fire and make supper from bread and packet soup. There was no wind and no cloud, one of those night skies where you don’t so much see as feel the curve of the earth fall away under you, with the stars spun out in a swathe. Luke yawned and I suggested we put out the fire and climb into our tent early.

  When I was sure he was asleep I unzipped the flap of the tent and went outside. There was a boulder nearby with a smooth, rounded surface and I sat cross-legged on the sand and leaned my back into it. For a while I meditated, absorbing the muted roar of the ocean, until I beca
me aware that my body had dissolved into the rock, and the rock into the sand. I felt the edges of whoever and whatever I was expand out into the darkness. The night sky entered into me, and when I looked down to where my body had been sitting, upright on the sand, there were no organs, no viscera, only the white stars blinking in space.

  the riddle

  And so he continued to meditate, in an interregnum of calm, until the inevitable happened. He began to feel smug. He had discovered the secret; he was one of the elect. He had knowledge at his fingertips. He had read the books, he had it all figured. He couldn’t wait for the next time she came out of her seclusion so that he could advance to a higher level.

  And then he received an email to say that, for the first time, she would be running a long weekend retreat in a small seaside hamlet an hour outside Melbourne. No talks, no teaching, only some chanting in the evenings and silent meditation throughout the day. For three days he would live the life of a monk and go deeper into the mystery.

  He flew down to Melbourne late on the Friday afternoon. On the plane they offered him food but he was too nervous to eat. Instead, he stared out at a sea of grey-white cloud that floated beneath him. For a while he closed his eyes, hoping for sleep, but, unable even to doze, he opened them. When he looked out the window, he saw that a huge cloud had risen up in a curling arc, like a frozen wave about to break. In the distance the sunset was a rim of crimson fire along a black horizon; the wing of the plane looked uncannily still, as if they were not moving at all but were suspended in space. Every now and then a gap would open in the cloud and the yellow lights of houses would blink up at him from the dry, brown earth below.

  At the airport he hired a car and drove to a small town on the Mornington Peninsula. All the way down he felt an intense excitement; this was going to be it, the time of revelation when he broke through into another dimension, when he ceased to be an apprentice, when finally he got ‘it’.