“Be my guest,” said Bruce, pushing the gray binder across the dividing line onto my desk with a wrinkle of his nose as if it were a bag of shit he was cleverly and secretly discarding on a Subway platform.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I - INTRODUCTION
II - WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
III - THE EGO AGAINST THE UNIVERSE
IV - THE EGO AGAINST CONSCIOUSNESS
V - THE EGO AGAINST ITSELF
VI - TOWARD TOTAL CONSCIOUSNESS
VII - THE FOUNDATION FOR TOTAL CONSCIOUSNESS
VIII - THE DEATH OF THE EGO
IX - BEYOND THE DEATH OF THE EGO
X - TOTAL CONSCIOUSNESS
XI - TOTAL CONSCIOUSNESS VERSUS SOCIETY
Don’t know what, but there was something about that table of contents that ruffled the hair on the back of my neck. Overuse of words like Total and Against? Shit, knowing what I knew, I probably could’ve written what was in the book myself from that table of contents! But the what wasn’t what counted—what counted was the how. I felt almost as if I were dropping another cap of acid as I turned to INTRODUCTION:
You are not fully conscious. Few of us are. Down through the ages, mystics who have achieved a greater degree of consciousness than their fellow have proclaimed this truth and have been feared and reviled and persecuted, or worse, ignored.
Blah, blah, blah. No point in wading through that kind of crap, give it the old Dirk Robinson speed-read—and suddenly I found myself reading the book just like a fee-reader! Which, after all, I was. Weird—like turning one switch in my head on, and another one off. I skimmed the usual bibble to the end of INTRODUCTION...
... therefore, when I proclaim that this book contains not merely one path to consciousness but the path to Total Consciousness, the only path, I am not placing myself above the great minds of mystical thought, but I am walking in their footsteps, along the path of Gautama the Buddha, of Jesus, of the founders of Yoga, of the Zen masters. The Path to Consciousness is not a denial of their total insights but a rediscovery of the path to Total Consciousness that they trod—stated clearly and shorn of meaningless superstition for the mind of modern man.
Jesus! Now that’s what I call an introduction! Harvey certainly hadn’t fallen into the trap of false modesty—just the logical inheritor of the mantle of Buddha and Jesus, a simple, unaffected Savior of Mankind. And yet... yet if he were right—and I had plenty of reason to believe he was—he had every right in the world to make that kind of statement; it was the simple truth. Well anyway, it was certainly what we call in the trade a gangbusters narrative hook! I turned to Chapter II...
Consciousness is the ego looking at itself and proclaiming “I am therefore I am.” Consciousness is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Consciousness...
... is like an onion. So it’s not like an onion? Shit, I knew what Harvey thought consciousness was; no point in reading through this bilge. I flipped over to THE EGO AGAINST THE UNIVERSE, skipped the first couple of pages and read at random:
... man’s basic condition is misery. His desires are regularly thwarted, love is an illusion, the world is filled with hate, and death is the only certainty. A common paranoid delusion is that the universe is a vast conspiracy against the self, that the very forces of destiny seek one’s destruction, that the physical laws of the universe are designed for one’s personal persecution. Who has never felt the malignancy of Creation gnaw at his own heart? But is it paranoia?
Or do paranoiacs simply possess some terrible hyperconscious insight into the truth?...
Oh god, it can’t be! Harvey Brustein a closet paranoia-freak? Last thing I would’ve believed—Harvey was just too good at making things come out his way to believe that the Universe was a Bolshevik Conspiracy, the way the Mad Dentist did. Or was he...?
Is not the universe in fact truly stacked against us? Do not all men fear death? And do not all men die? In the end, we all lose our battle with the universe, all of us. The paranoiac is right: in the final analysis, the universe is a torture chamber for the ordinary human mind. We cannot win—we cannot not die...
There it was, the ultimate paranoid statement, pure as the driven snow. Completely paranoid—but also completely true. Death always wins. But who but a paranoiac admits it? Then... who but a paranoiac is right? Question then is, is it better to be right, or better to be sane? Is that what Harvey’s getting at? Something—perhaps some dread—made me skip into THE EGO AGAINST CONSCIOUSNESS:
... as seen in pragmatic terms, the external universe is against us: by our own ego definition, the universe is evil, since its blind and always-achieved goal is our death. But we must ask ourselves: what is it that we fear and what is the ‘I’ that does the fearing? What we fear is death. More precisely, our ego fears its own annihilation. Our ego fears the inevitable...
Etc., etc., blah, blah, blah... Something strange was building up inside me: everything that Harvey was saying was what I thought he’d be saying and all of it was logically correct; but my gut insisted that all of it was wrong, wrong with a wretched twisted sickness. Was my ego fighting the truth, scrabbling desperately for hand-holds in its fight against my decision? How could I trust my instincts when they were having a knock-down drag-out among each other in my belly? This was a heavy book; it was Harvey. In his own way, the fucker could really write...
... and so we must conclude that it cannot be sane to fear the inevitable. The inevitable is... inevitable. Our fear is useless. The universe is not against us; the universe is a blind mechanism. A mechanism without consciousness cannot be our enemy. Only consciousness can be hostile. Our egos are the enemy for they fight against the inevitable and deny us peace. Therefore, we must reach out for a new level of consciousness which will bring us peace.
A level of consciousness which will enable us to not merely accept the inevitable but to embrace it. We must learn to embrace death.
NO! NO! Something inside of me cried out: madness to embrace death! What was the point? When you were dead, you were dead, gone, cipher, zero, nothing. What could you gain by digging it? It was truth, but better a decent lie. Harvey couldn’t mean that. Had to be something else, sure, a metaphor for something else...
But a phrase that had been haunting me for days came back like the taste of old sauerkraut: “It is possible to desire anything you fear. It is possible to fear anything you desire.” Was Harvey turning it into something far dirtier and more unequivocal: “You should groove behind the thing you fear the most.” Could it be that Harvey really grooved behind death? Man, I didn’t want to read any more of this evil shit! But I had to—and not just for the five points. I flipped on into TOWARD TOTAL CONSCIOUSNESS and to hell with THE EGO AGAINST ITSELF—I knew all too well where that would be at.
... Lao Tze, Buddha, and the other mystics of the East taught that desire was the cause of all pain. Therefore, in order to abolish pain...
Hell, I didn’t need a lecture in Buddhism! I skipped through a ten page resume of Taoism, Buddhism, Zen and the paths to Nirvana...
... is Nirvana Total Consciousness? Perhaps we can never know; the mystics lacked a terminology congruent with our own. Clearly, Nirvana is believed to be a result of the annihilation of the ego; Total Consciousness is also a result of the abolishment of the ego. But are the egos that are abolished the same? Total Consciousness, unlike Nirvana, may be rigorously defined: the abolition of the tension-interface between the internal and external environments. In a very real sense, it is the entire mind, not merely the ego, which ceases to exist. More even than the mind, the personality, the very conceptual illusion of me-ness’ versus ‘it-ness.’ Total Consciousness is the annihilation of self. Total Consciousness is the psychic equivalent of death...
I felt synapses rearranging themselves in my gut. Man, this was wrong, this was evil, this was going too far! This was death-wish, or worse—death-love. This was what I had committed myself to? To the goal of death-in-life? To groove behind death?
And yet, damn it, there
were no logical holes in the argument so far. Harvey was right—but Harvey was sick, sick, sick. Sickness rose off the prose like a swamp stench. If Harvey were right, the universe was a sewer. But did that mean Harvey was wrong just because I wanted him to be wrong? I turned to what I sensed had to be the nitty-gritty: THE FOUNDATION FOR TOTAL CONSCIOUSNESS:
... and so, coming to the conclusion that men could not and would not face the ultimate reality of Total Consciousness alone, I created the Foundation for Total Consciousness. The Foundation for Total Consciousness is a social and psychological mechanism for the annihilation of the ego...
Something on the next page suddenly caught my eye:
... morality, in the conventional sense, is irrelevant to the work of the Foundation. Since Total Consciousness, the goal of the Foundation, is literally the ultimate good, any means necessary to achieve that end is totally justified. That is, in this case, the end does justify the means...
What? What? The world was starting to move under me; at this point in writing the book, Harvey must’ve shifted (or stripped!) mental gears...
... initiates into the Foundation suppose that it is an advanced form of psychotherapy, that is, that its goal is a healthy mind integrated into its environment. Actually, the goal is quite opposite: the total destruction of what psychotherapists consider the psyche. Neurotics come to the Foundation seeking hope, but it is hope which must be destroyed. Hope is illusion, hope is evil, for in a universe where death is the ultimate reality, hope is a lie...
Oh shit, oh shit, stench of decayed bullfrogs rising up out of the pages of the manuscript like the Devil’s farts! Oh Christ, how could I have let this crazy monster con me...?
... but once all hope has been destroyed by the Foundation, something beyond hope is possible: faith. Absolute total unreasoning faith born of absolute total despair. Faith, of necessity, in myself, not as a teacher or even as a prophet, but as someone who has gone through to the other side. Once faith is total and unquestioning, volition, self-motivation, even selfconceived drives are abolished and the Foundation becomes not merely a community of individuals but a single organism in which the constituents are mindless cells. At that point, the egos of the members die. For a time, my ego exists as the ‘brain’ of the gestalt organism, but when Total Consciousness of the organism is complete, my ego too may die...
Totally freaked out! Groveling at the feet of death! The Foundation wasn’t even a nice evil religious con; Harvey believed in his filth himself. He wants everyone to die, himself included! I had had just about all I could take... except... what’s beyond death? I looked into BEYOND THE DEATH OF THE EGO:
... a social organism, a gestalt of human bodies in which all mind has died. Thus, death is defeated: the individual cells die but the organism lives on forever, conscious, egoless, changeless and eternal. By embracing my own death before I die, I achieve immortality for myself and for the members of the Foundation. We create an organism that is greater than the sum of our parts and allow it to devour us. Thus, though we die, our essence lives on...
Jesus, that’s the hole in the bottom of Dope too! Let Dope devour you and groove behind the Cosmic All—death, is all. I had been right the first night I saw Harvey and his Foundation: Death was the trip.
Yeah, but I had come a long way since then: now I knew it was possible to groove behind the death-trip. I had done it. And swallowed it. But now I was puking it up, coming through the other side. Death was the ultimate reality, and something in me grooved behind it because if you accepted that as truth and let it carry you away, you were free, totally free: nothing mattered. Maybe nothing did matter. Maybe that was truth. But if that’s truth, I’ll take vanilla. Harvey grooved behind that truth, and he was out of his fucking mind.
And shit, for all his bullshit, he didn’t accept death either; he had to create a metaphysical torture-chamber to con himself into believing that the Foundation could be his immortality. Mind-fucking was Harvey’s Dope, his piece of the ultimate.
And now I really understood the reason for getting high: tasting it was a relief and an ecstasy. Following Dope down its ultimate sewer-hope was what did you in. Chasing anything to its ultimate termination was what did you in—Condition Terminal. A fancy name for the thing with more fancy names than anything else—Death.
But knowing it was better than not knowing it, because once you knew the Big Secret, you could taste anything as long as you didn’t let yourself get hooked. The Magic word was: maintain.
“One thing is certain and the rest is lies...”
But now I really picked up on what old Omar the Tent-Maker was really laying down: the ultimate end of any trip is a guaranteed terminal bummer; face that and groove behind the lies. Yeah, that’s why I dug old Omar before I knew what he was really talking about: he had the essence of Cool. And that was the goody inside Dope, if you were man enough to snatch it out of the fingers of the void: dig the ultimate reality and know in the end you can’t beat death, but you can face it down and win the one victory no reality can take from you—it can kill you, but it can’t make you blow your cool. Only you can do that. And knowing that is the soul of Cool.
But Cool could also be a cold steel cutting edge if you needed it. And I had it now; I had it all now. The Path to Consciousness, oh, yes, it was that all right! A weapon. The ultimate doomsday machine for the Foundation for Total Consciousness. The vote tomorrow night...
My god, it was all set up for me: Harvey thought he had me; I had the book. All I had to do was go home and find the sickest slimiest parts of the book and read them at the meeting. I’d blow everyone’s mind. Ted and Doris... Arlene... Yeah, I had the weapon that would make Arlene mine and wreck the Foundation...
“Well?” said Bruce.
He suddenly snapped me back to Dirk Robinson reality; I realized that I had closed the binder and was staring off into space.
“Well,” said Bruce, “has this cat really discovered the Secret of the Universe?”
I laughed from way deep down and said: “Ah, you were right, man. Another nut thinks he’s written the Bible.”
23 - The Emperor’s Tailors
Under my arm as I climbed the stairs to the Foundation on Thursday night was The Path to Consciousness in the proverbial plain brown wrapper (kind of bag you use to line your garbage can). I hadn’t the time or the stomach to read the thing word-for-word (which hadn’t stopped me from writing the usual four-page fee letter this afternoon), but having given it the professional Dirk Robinson once over, I knew what was in it and where the worst muck was, and I had slips of paper marking the choicer freak-outs.
I hadn’t found out till I took it home Wednesday night that some of the worst stuff was in the last chapter, TOTAL CONSCIOUSNESS VERSUS SOCIETY, wherein Gautama Brustein somehow managed the dialectical broadjump from his sucking at the teats of various death-gods to a brand of fascism so grotty it would’ve made Adolph Hitler puke. Near as I could make out (Harvey started to gibber a little in the last chapter), after he and the Foundation had devoured their own egos and become mindless cells of the Foundation ant-hill organism, other Foundation-things would be formed by converts who had read the book, until the whole human race consisted of nothing but these Consciousness-Communes (as he called them somewhere), and then the Harvey-Glob would proceed to gobble up the other Globs, until there was nothing left but one world-wide Thing, at which point Time, being an ego-construct, would cease to exist and the Uber-Glob would spend a timeless moment of eternity doing something nameless and incoherent which came out sounding very much like fucking itself.
Not that Harvey wanted to rule the world; all he wanted to do was eat the human race and become God.
Verily, it took a veteran Dirk Robinson fee-reader to understand how a cat who seemed to have all the fade-into-the-woodwork cool in the world could sit down at a typewriter and produce such an epic of insanity in the firm belief that it would convert the world. The Mad Dentist and assorted other fee-freaks were no different—exce
pt that the Mad Dentist filled teeth in real life while Harvey’s straight job was fucking minds. Not really schizophrenia, but the ability to erect a mask over gibbering madness—they were just sane enough to realize that they’d be candidates for the funny farm if they talked like the things they were. But somehow a typewriter and a ream of blank paper became an invitation to puke it all out, and once it was written, the very magic of The Word on paper convinced the Mad Dentists of the world that the world Had To Have The Truth...
When of course what the world would do was puke. Ted, Doris, Arlene, even the worst Foundation-freaks like Linda Kahn, would have their minds scoured out when I read them choice selections from old Harv’s magnum opus. The book he had written to convert the world would be instant turn-off to anyone who knew what was in it, even the marks he already had. Maybe especially the marks he already had, who couldn’t help but puke at the true face of the thing they had worshipped.
Yeah, in an aesthetic way, Harvey’s submitting the book to Dirk Robinson wasn’t chance, it was inevitable. The Dirk Robinson fee-desk wasn’t the cesspool of the universe for nothing, after all...
By the time I got to the old Foundation living room, it was already jammed. I could see Ted, Doris and Arlene sitting on the floor up front. Harvey was just sitting down on his little throne, and the animals were as quiet as a congregation in a cathedral, waiting for the Cardinal to speak. It suddenly seemed very eerie to have all those people sprawled on the floor at the foot of the dais—I became conscious of the yawning emptiness of the room above floor-level, as if the Void were hovering above them all, waiting to descend.
The Children of Hamelin Page 34
