On the Edge A Novel (21 page)

‘Exactly,’ said Adam. ‘I wrote a book claiming that this woman who is half crazy is the Divine Mother, simply because I was having real experiences which I was projecting on to her. It’s very hard to grow up, and most of us avoid it as long as possible, because then you have total responsibility, and you have to look at all the things in yourself which don’t want the real truth but want magical solutions.’

‘What made you realize that your guru was half mad?’ asked the Frenchwoman.

‘Well, simply when she sat down and said you’ve got to get rid of Yves, and become a heterosexual, and write a book about how the force of the Divine Mother has transformed you into a heterosexual, because homosexuals play no part in the future of the Divine Mother. It doesn’t reek of the holiest of wisdom, and I realized that she was mad and that she was vicious and controlling and very frightened of Yves because he’s very truthful and could see everything.’

‘Why do you think it took you so long to see that?’

‘Because I’m a fool, darling, and you are, and we all are,’ snapped Adam. ‘I think a lot of the relationship with the Master is a rewriting of the family romance,’ he continued more sweetly. ‘I had a disastrous relationship with my own mother which took me years to uncover. I thought I was choosing the exact opposite to her, but in fact I was choosing the same person.’

He’s so compellingly honest, thought Kenneth, so impressively passionate, but honest and passionate about what? It might just be the latest confusion, the latest defence against the delusion before last.

‘I think that what I went through is what the whole of the New Age is going through,’ said Adam. ‘I now believe that the guru system is over. The dribble of scandals about gurus is going to turn into a monsoon. We wanted transformation on the cheap – naughty us. I had a partial awakening through the power of adoration, but I was very lucky because at a moment when I was about to go round the world announcing my guru, the Divine Mother revealed to me that she was not real. If I’d gone forward I would have been locked into a system of my own creation. So the whole thing was broken by the real Mother at a very important point, to help me to get free and also to help me discover the direct path.

‘The New Age has been in some ways a good thing,’ Adam went on. ‘It’s opened people up to this whole new area, but it’s usually been done in the context of the old Western ego that wants to appropriate and wants to possess. Now that God is fashionable, everybody is talking about God, but as soon as God stops being fashionable in five or ten years, and Stalin becomes fashionable, everybody will be wearing Stalin jackets.’

Not everybody, thought Brooke proudly.

Not a bad idea, thought Kenneth. It just might work.

‘This is not a fashion,’ said Adam; ‘this is the final call to
wake up.
We have to travel through the narcissistic phase of the New Age, the absorption with beautiful bodies and living a long time, and having your perfect aura, and seeing visions and all the rest of it, very fast, because all that’s child’s stuff, and we have to get to being spiritual adults, real Divine children, who are seeing quite clearly, without any consolation, the desperation of a world hurtling towards catastrophe, the horror that we could be about to enter, the horror of injustice and the holocaust of nature, and seeing it without panic and without fear, because you’re rooting yourself, as Rumi suggests, in Divine Love.

‘I think it’s very important to look at how some people have acted in final situations, in Auschwitz for example. Unless we’re all armed with vitality and courage and heaven-may-care heartfulness, we’re going to be reduced to
screaming animals.
’

Adam shuddered to a pause and began to cry.

‘The whales have got AIDS,
the whales.
’ Tears flowed down his cheeks.

He was rehearsing this at my dinner party, thought Brooke. You get so much more than just Rumi in an Adam Rumi class.

‘If you’ve ever seen a whale up close, you know that you’re in the presence of God, you know that it is the representation on earth of the Divine Mother. They’re so incredibly beautiful and intelligent. To think that the whales are dying because we’re
so
selfish and
so
cruel and
so
stupid is so unbearable. And it should be unbearable, it’s properly unbearable.’

Adam paused, and resumed in a steadier voice. ‘We must let it become unbearable. Not because we’re pain queens, and hysterical, but because we’re slowly learning to become responsible.

‘We could say, like some of these fashionable gurus, that it’s all an illusion and so don’t let it get to you, but the whole point of the mystical path is
to let it get to you
,’ he roared angrily.

‘This is what it means,’ he said, his voice changing to pleading, ‘to arrive here, to let your heart break. There is no otherwhere that we’re going to; this is the Divine world, and we are the children of the Divine, and it’s because we haven’t recognized that, and because we’ve invented elsewheres and otherwheres, that we haven’t had the supreme beautiful experience that Rumi is talking about.

‘Rumi says there comes a point in the search when you’re not seeking, you’re
being hunted.
That’s the most wonderful moment of all, when you wake up to the fact that you think you’ve been seeking, but in fact the Divine has been appearing in your coma, shaking you, dancing around you, making funny noises, giving you the odd illness and heartbreak, hoping that you’ll wake up to its presence.’

What funny noises? thought Brooke.

Funny noises? thought Kenneth.

‘There’s a lovely story about a priest who went to see Ramakrishna,’ said Adam. ‘And he found a very peculiar-looking man leaping up in a field like a rabbit, surrounded by rabbits. And he thought, this is probably the village idiot, but he might be able to direct me, and he asked, “Where is the great swami, the illumined one, the child of the Divine Mother, Ramakrishna?”

‘And of course it was Ramakrishna, and he was actually lying in the grass, and he was talking in rabbit language to the baby rabbits, and what he was saying was, “You’re very silly baby rabbits,”’ Adam lisped, ‘“because over there are baby snakes and you think they’re rabbits, but they’re not rabbits they’re snakes. Don’t go and play with the snakes because they’re going to kill you. Do you understand?” And the rabbits said, “Yes.”

‘And then he lay down with the baby snakes and said, “I love you and you’re right to be snakes, Mother made you snakes, but you’re not to kill those baby rabbits. You’re cleverer than they are and you know they think you’re rabbits and it’s very naughty and you must stop it.”’

This guy’s got more voices than a jukebox, thought Kenneth.

‘There he was,’ Adam resumed in a voice which had discarded its copy of Peter Rabbit: ‘he wasn’t in the lotus position, he wasn’t emanating peace, he wasn’t collecting cheques for being enlightened. He was in the space of total love, and he was protecting the baby rabbits from the snakes, so he was honouring both of them.’

What were the snakes supposed to do, thought Kenneth, in a fit of compassion, become vegetarians? Or were the mice they ate not made by Mother?

‘When you hear stories like that you realize you’re having such a limited experience. Here we are trapped in our identities, in our clothes, in our vanities, in our plans, in our projects, in our disciplines, in our dogmas. But the Divine itself is extremely humble, that’s the point we always miss – the Divine is so humble that it appears in a ladybird. We’re so busy thinking about the sixteen types of emptiness that we don’t notice that this thing we’re brushing off our sleeve is God.’

In that case the sleeve it’s being brushed off is God’s, thought Brooke with relief, a bigger God’s.

‘Here is a poem that really speaks to this condition. Rumi is really giving us the neat vodka in this poem.

‘“In that moment you are drunk on yourself, you are prey to a mosquito…”

‘Everything is too much,’ Adam explained. ‘Oh, I’m feeling too neurotic to go into town today; oh, I’m feeling too desperate to go and feed the poor. “In that moment you leap free of yourself, you go elephant hunting…”

‘I love that line. Anything is possible.

‘I remember seeing a programme about Mother Teresa in Lebanon. LE-BA-NON. Everybody killing everybody else, because they’re all in such a drunken rage. Mother Teresa arrived and said, “Well, actually, across the valley there is an orphanage of spastic children, and tomorrow I’m going to get all those children out.”

‘And all the military authorities said, “You’re nuts! Do you realize that if you even walk out of that door you will probably be shot? Leave those children be, and if they’re all going to die, that’s fine. You’re going to walk through ten miles of enemy territory, and how do you even know that they’re alive?”

‘And she answered, “I’m going to ask God for those children, and I’m going to get what I want.” And the next day there was a ceasefire and she and a few old Lebanese ladies walked those ten miles and they took those spastic children out, and every one of them was saved, because she was mad enough to say, “
I don’t buy your logic.
”’ Adam shook with contempt.

‘“I don’t buy it,”’ he went on, calmed by his discharge. ‘There is another rule, there is another law, and there is another power than your pathetic little games. And that power is the Divine power, and love can call upon it, and she could, because she was humble enough and awake enough.

‘If you are on the side of love you can change the world – one person.’

The room became silent.

Brooke was crying. She didn’t quite know why, but all her other thoughts had disappeared and she was suddenly overwhelmed by pity and relief. Someone had gone in and saved the children. It was so moving.

Kenneth looked at the effect Adam had created. Life was complicated. Sometimes Adam could shift the whole room by invoking the perspective of an absolute truth, but he was such an unreliable witness to that truth. His slash-and-burn, rave-and-squabble progress filled the air with the smoky perfume of burning bridges. But then, Kenneth pushed his logic forward, he, Kenneth, was such an unreliable witness of Adam’s unreliability. And who was the reliable witness of his judgement of Adam? What was the value of these judgements we all spent our time formulating so carefully? It was like one raindrop trying to estimate the position of another raindrop as they fell together through space.

‘Last year I came to a moment when everything was falling completely apart,’ Adam resumed. ‘We were being persecuted and divided and had no sex for nine months. It was a horrible, horrific story. I had told the truth about my guru and I had the demonic force of all the disciples against me. I thought we’d be murdered, and then a voice said, “Even if you die, the fact that you are trying to bear witness to the truth of life will mean that in invisible occult ways anybody who stands for truth will be fed by you, even if you’re killed, even if people believe the worst of you, it doesn’t matter, stand for life anyway. Get annihilated…”’

Get annihilated? Is this still ‘the voice’? Kenneth wondered.

‘“… that standing, even if you’re defeated, puts you in the eternal order, not in the order of the world.”’

Oh, so standing is good, thought Kenneth, who was getting hungry. It’s just standing on one leg which is bullshit. Standing and kneeling are good. He’ll be walking next; a proud moment. And what about that ‘eternal order’, sounds like an ‘elsewhere’, an ‘otherwhere’? Is this a man looking at life ‘without consolation’? Kenneth’s blood sugar plummeted.

‘Christ was, after all, in wordly terms, defeated…’

‘Christ, now he thinks he’s Christ,’ muttered Kenneth.

Brooke smiled at him enquiringly. Kenneth smiled back obediently.

‘… defeated in this dimension, but the act of standing for what he believed really transformed our vision of life.

‘There’s an astonishing new discovery,’ Adam continued excitedly, ‘that, in Aramaic, Christ is punning with the last words he spoke on the Cross. They could mean, as they’re traditionally translated, “My Lord, my Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” But the very word which means “forsaken” in Aramaic could mean, wait for it, “My Lord, my Lord, why hast thou glorified me?” The pun gives us the clue to the whole inner nature of the Crucifixion. The ultimate dignity comes from the total embrace of that abandonment, that’s the paradox.

‘Real mystic alchemy is not a game, because you’re dealing with the fundamental powers of the universe. It’s very, very difficult, because what’s trying to be born between two people on that path isn’t Shams and Rumi, but Shrumi or Rams. That’s why Rumi often signs the poetry Shams, because he genuinely didn’t know, he’d crossed over, they’d done it, Rumi was transformed by Shams and Shams was transformed by Rumi, and Shrams wrote the poetry.’

‘Adam?’ asked a middle-aged woman in a grey tracksuit and thick white socks. ‘Is Yves your Shams?’

‘Yes,’ said Adam calmly.

Shall we call him Adamy or Yvam? Kenneth pondered. Or perhaps Jesus Shramdric? Or Mother Jesus Yvansham? Or The Gloriously Forsaken Mother Jesus Ramashramydam? Weak with hunger, Kenneth started to laugh silently but uncontrollably.

‘This is a new model,’ Adam resumed. ‘The tragedy of the guru disciple thing is that the guru isn’t implicated, whereas in this relationship both go to another stage of love and discover the non-duality which occurs when both beings are fused. And that’s what Shrumi is communicating.’

Kenneth had a coughing fit and had to leave the room.

‘The only comparable relationship is a young child,’ Adam confessed. ‘I mean, when you’re a mother and that child is in pain, all the therapists in the world can tell you to be detached but you can’t sleep: the suffering comes from this immense identification with the other person. You’re not in any kind of theatre in that love, you’re not on any kind of stage, you’re not posing, you’re deprived of all the normal games by which people control each other and control themselves.

‘Really, what goes on is that Shams says, “You fool, don’t you understand what’s at stake? Stop it.” And Rumi has a nervous breakdown which is exactly what he needs, because he has to have that breakdown to get to the next stage. And Shams then leaves because Rumi has to be broken by that leaving. This would look to a normal San Francisco therapist like madness. They have all sorts of fancy names like co-dependency and sado-masochism. They wouldn’t be anywhere near what was going on in the relationship, because what’s actually going on is atomic fusion, nuclear fusion.’