Chapter 6
When we went back
inside, everyone was already beginning to gather for the first session. Galina
had already gone. Vera came up to us. She looked uninterested. Indeed, she had
looked uninterested ever since we’d met her that morning.
“Galina had to get some
things ready” she said. “She asked me to tell you that she’d gone on ahead. But
you know where to go, right?”
“I think so,” said David. “The big room up the
stairs.”
“That’s right.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“I’ll help out in the
kitchen. I’m mainly here for the company anyway. Why are you here?”
“I’m here to see Galina,” he said.
“Better say Garudi while you’re here.”
“As I said, I’m here to see Galina.”
We went up the stairs
and found what must once have been a sort of conference room, except now there
were no chairs. Around the edges there were some cushions and at the front
there was a slightly raised area that seemed somehow more luxurious than everywhere
else. There were some mats, a microphone stand a little table on which was some
bottled water and a glass. Beside this was another place, though not quite so
luxurious.
David and I sat down
next to each other. Galina was a little in front of us but there was no place
on either side of her. She glanced round to see that we were there. There was a
sort of smile on her face, but a frown, too that went with it. Too late she
seemed to say. Look what happens when you go outside to smoke cigarettes. A few
minutes later however she came back to us for a minute or two. At this point I
noticed that she had some markings on her face and especially on her nose. It
was quite pretty I thought, though rather odd looking. Makeup was out, but face
painting was in, but it didn’t matter: the whole effect still worked. She hadn’t done anything to her hair. There
wasn’t much she could do, but somehow the combination of yellowish markings on
her nose framed within the blackness of her cropped hair just worked
delightfully.
“We’ll talk some more afterwards,” she said to
David.
“That’s OK”, he said.
“It’s just I have to concentrate and focus during
the meeting. You understand?”
“Of course, don’t worry, there’s lots of time.”
“This is all very important to me. I wanted to show
you.”
“I’m very pleased I came.”
“You might find it interesting. I hope so.”
“I hope so, too.”
The room was filling up
and Galina returned to her place. She had given us each a little printed
pamphlet. It contained what looked like songs. I guessed they were in Sanskrit,
but transliterated into Cyrillic. It would be interesting indeed trying to
figure out which song to sing.
In the corner stood a
table with what looked like some dolls on it. At some point something sounded,
chimes or bells or a sort of mixture of both, and two or three people approached
the little table and lit some candles and said some words. A buzz went through
the room and at that point we were ready.
A man entered the room
from a side door followed by a woman. He was dressed in the sort of white loose
clothes that Indian men sometimes where. Many of the men in the room were
wearing similar clothes. The woman had on some sort of sari type clothing as
did many of those who had sat there waiting. Galina’s sari had looked
authentic, but somehow I had ignored the dark blue cloth with elaborate
embroidery because of how it had enhanced what the cloth had contained. It was
all a bit like dressing up, but I had noticed the effect that it had on David.
So, too, this woman who was now entering made a similar if rather different
effect. Her beauty was of a different
kind, her sari was pale and everything about her seemed light as if she were
about to play Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied. What she wore was all very
simple and quite austere. She looked modest, and it was as if she would always
walk one or two steps behind her man. But I could sense that she was proud of
her role and happy to be there on what amounted to a low stage. She was happy
to be part of the performance even if she was not the star. She knew that she
would get some of the attention and she did.
The man had some kinds
of marks of distinction that set him rather apart. The mark on his nose was
somewhat different and somewhat more elaborate. But it wouldn’t have mattered
what he had been wearing. He had a look that set him apart. His eyes were wild
and he smiled like he had recently smoked grass. Perhaps he had, but I doubt
it. His high came from a higher source.
He sat down in his
place and welcomed us, and mentioned who he was. He spoke English with quite a
refined southern English accent. The woman who sat next to him translated every
word into Russian. I instantly forgot his name, or rather didn’t bother putting
it into memory. It was one of those long Indian names. I didn’t try to store it
because I already knew his real name. It was a typical English name that was
far easier to recall. I was almost certainly the only person in the room
besides him who knew this name. So he was just the guru to me as indeed he was
so described by most of the acolytes. He was our guru. So that is how I intend
to describe him, too.
The woman was obviously
Russian and very beautiful indeed. She looked about twenty-three or twenty-four
and I found out later that she was the guru’s wife. Sex was usually discouraged
as tending towards acting as a barrier to enlightenment, but an exception was
made in the case of the guru. It made sense to make exceptions, otherwise the
tendency was to go the way of the “shakers” who died out because they banned
procreation. The guru had seen what he had wanted, a rather lovely blonde
Russian girl who was devoted to what he was saying and in a way devoted to him.
She was one of those Russians who looked as if she might have stepped off one
of the Viking boats that first sailed down the Dnepr. Even her eyebrows and eyelashes
were blonde as is sometimes if rarely, seen in Finland and Sweden. I knew a
little of the story. She had turned up at one of the guru’s meetings. He
discovered that she spoke rather better English than his translator at that
time, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she had spoken rather worse English. He
began giving her some private instruction in meditation and soon the previous
translator was dismissed. An added benefit was having married his translator he
now had all his translation done for free. But that was not why he had married
her. I could see exactly why he had married her.
It was hard to tell how
old the guru was. He had the sort of English, slightly aristocratic look that
ages well. He might have been thirty five, he might even have been forty. He
had blondish hair and a fresh complexion. He was just the sort who would have
been considered very eligible a century earlier.
He looked sincere, he
looked like someone you could trust. He had a certain charisma. Perhaps, he
even believed what he preached. There is always a certain double mindedness in
all of us. Matters of faith are never psychologically straightforward. How
could he have been so convincing if he did not himself believe? So yes, no
doubt when he talked, he did believe and yet it seemed to me even then that
there was something about the whole performance that was a masquerade. There’s
nothing so fair and false as a guru.
And yet I don’t want to
be overly critical of these people. What they experienced and what I experience
is not so very different. I, too, believe some odd things that I can in no way
prove. Worse than that, the central tenets of my faith I consider to be beyond
reason. They are contradictory or at least contradictory from the only
perspective I have which is my own. But what is the difference between
believing in a contradiction and believing that the moon is made of green
cheese or in a god who is painted purple. I may try in the pages ahead to show
the difference, but I’m not at all sure that I shall succeed in a way that is
not hopelessly circular. Insofar as I attack anyone else’s beliefs, I am fully
aware that as I thrust my knife I leave myself open to the same attack. Yet I
can do no other.
The meeting began with
some songs. People on either side of David and me helped us with finding our
place and we both began stumbling through the, to us, meaningless words. Most
of those there however sang with enthusiasm and with understanding. Galina told
me later that she had been studying Sanskrit and had the goal of reading these
ancient texts easily and even speaking with fluency. I told her that I had read
some of the Vedic literature in translation. She emphasised to me however that
it was necessary to be very careful as the stories could not be understood
directly but only through the mediation of people like the guru. I had probably
therefore gained a false impression. It all seemed rather pre-Reformation.
These were just the sorts of arguments used against people like Tyndale when he
wanted to translate the Bible into English. But then again, perhaps, she was
right. I had made nothing much of the stories I had read, beyond that they were
ancient stories from a culture that was strange to me. Perhaps, what had been
lacking in me, perhaps my lack of understanding had been precisely that I had
lacked a guru. We were about to find out.
After the songs the
guru proceeded to interpret some of these ancient stories from Sanskrit
literature. The songs had been enjoyable in a strange sort of way. After much
repetition they became familiar and even I with a little practice soon was able
to find the right place just from the first few rather strange notes. They had
a way of getting into your head so that a familiar tune and set of words was
greeted with pleasure at its repetition. I saw everyone including David,
including me, light up eventually as we got to sing one of our favourites
again.
But then would come the
lecture. The carpeted floor that had seemed rather lush in the beginning became
harder as the lecture went on for two, sometimes for three hours.
The guru rambled
through various sacred texts explaining stories, going on and on. He would
speak a sentence in English that was remarkably bad English, which was then
translated into even worse Russian. I gave up trying to understand him quickly
as there was nothing to understand.
I’d read quite a few of
the central texts of Hinduism, not in any great detail and not with any great
expertise, but I paid attention and my academic training was in this sort of
subject matter. I was familiar with the basic ideas of eastern religion. But I
couldn’t follow anything that the guru said. He’d take some minute little theme
and stretch it and twist it and all to no purpose. I began to wonder if he saw
his task as one of numbing us into boredom.
When I’d been reading a
few of the texts about Krishna in preparation for the trip, it struck me that
it was as if the religion of the ancient Greeks had continued to the present
day. The stories of Krishna’s exploits with his friends struck me as primitive.
They were rather similar to stories of Zeus and Aphrodite and so on, but rather
less interesting from a literary perspective. The Greek myths could touch me in
a way that these ancient stories about India simply could not. Perhaps, that was
simply because I am European and India is an unfamiliar culture, which does not
much interest me. Then again I didn’t think it accidental that the Greek myths
were rather better known worldwide.
I found polytheism hard
to take seriously. There was a god of this and a god of that. There were gods
who were monkeys, gods with many hands, gods who looked like elephants. This
was the sort of thing that we had chucked out when we chucked out paganism. I
know that it wasn’t straightforward paganism, I know that in the end the gods
were manifestations of the one god. But it struck me as if we could have
retained belief in the Greek gods in the same way by building on those
foundations the same structure of everything being one. In this way Zeus,
Aphrodite, Poseidon and so on could all have been manifestations of the one
god. I thought this was a way of having your polytheist cake while somehow
pretending to be a monotheist.
In the end, it was just
idolatry and no more worthy of serious consideration than the worshiping the
golden calf. They had Krishna on their little table, but it might just as well
have been Hermes. In this I’m afraid I sided with Nietzsche. Belief in the
Greek gods was a dead issue. I just differed from Nietzsche in the next step he
wanted to make. Perhaps, from his point of view I was still stuck with the
Greeks. But I never thought he had adequately shown belief in the Christian God
to be the dead issue he thought it was. He no doubt would simply say it was a
matter of time. But the point he was making about Greek Gods did not then and
does not now apply to the God of Christianity, at least not in my eyes. I
couldn’t take seriously anyone who earnestly claimed to believe in Thor or
Zeus. It would seem eccentric at best, comical at worst. The only argument
necessary would be to laugh. In just the same way I couldn’t take seriously
anyone who believed in Krishna. It was faintly ridiculous to believe in this
mischievous purple little naughty boy, playing tricks and peeking at girls
bathing naked.
There was a depth to
eastern mysticism especially in the Buddhist tradition, which was quite similar
to aspects of belief in Krishna. If you stripped away all the stories, you
arrived at the idea of losing yourself in the one or of finally merging
yourself with that one in Nirvana. There
was the idea that this world was a distraction, even an illusion and that, most
importantly, the self was a hindrance to enlightenment. The self was considered
part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Of course, this sort of
philosophical/theological tradition was a matter for serious thought and
consideration. Monism, or the idea that everything is one has after all a
serious place in philosophy and some of the greatest minds have advocated it in
one way or another. But I had rejected that path long ago.
For me the foundation
of everything was the self and to merge myself into Nirvana would simply be to
die and to cease to exist. I had long before arrived at the fork in the road
where one direction pointed to Hegel and nearly everyone else who came
afterwards. The other path pointed to Kierkegaard. That was eternal choice:
either Kierkegaard, or Hegel, either the individual, or the collective.
In this sense I could
take seriously the path these people all around me were taking, but I thought
it was profoundly the wrong path. The guru wanted his acolytes to lose the one
thing I thought they must above all other things retain. He wanted them to lose
their sense of self. That was the purpose of his interminable lectures, that
was the purpose of the songs; that was the purpose of the mantras that were
chanted.
But for me the loss of
self was the loss of the soul. If successful and the self was lost, there would
be nothing for God to grab onto, nothing for him to save. Even the one good deed,
such as the gift of an onion, which Dostoevsky suggests, might be enough to
save a soul, could not be efficacious if there was no soul to save. The onion
could be used to pull a sinner out of hell so long as the sinner was generous
and was willing to allow other sinners to be dragged out, too, but what if
there was no soul to grasp onto the onion? I shuddered at the loss of self. I
looked around me at the vacant eyes and the mouths silently repeating their
mantra. The guru had succeeded. All around me were minds that were blank. Even
David began to look blank, but that had more to do with his tiredness. I sat
there and wondered what would happen next, now that all minds were empty. The
guru stopped and began filling all the minds, and I saw that he had a power.
Now they would not just whisper their mantra they would sing in a sort of wild
release. I got up and found myself joining in. Not just as part of the role
that I was playing, but finding myself swept up into it all. I realised then
that I was up against a force that was very powerful indeed. I would need help
if I was to have any chance of succeeding. I would need David as he had with
him the only force that was more powerful than the one the guru had. He had
love.