Melanie McGrath - Motel Nirvana

Over the wall in someone’s garden two cockerels are doing violence to each other, throwing pieces of flinty stone up into the air and a chestnut horse with a paper fringe over its head to keep away the flies rubs its neck against a little bothy built into the wall. The chickens don’t bother it, the dog doesn’t bother it. A man passes in a tow truck, makes a wide turn at the end of the road and cuts the engine. He sits and waits for something to happen, but nothing does. Around the town in each direction lies almost silent a fauvist bowl of bluegreen laterite edged in navy where the sky scrolls down onto its beginning.

The world headquarters of the Griscom global enlightenment enterprise is a collection of modest little buildings surrounded by cottonwood bosque up a remote and self-effacing dirt track to the east of Galisteo. By six-thirty, fifty people or so have gathered in a prefabricated building on one side of the main administrative building, behind an adobe barn. To the front of this building a line of cars waits to park: Mercedes estates, Mitsubishi four-wheel-drives, GM minivans, the odd station wagon. A waspish woman in linen tells me she makes the round trip (seven hundred miles or so) from Denver each week. It costs her $50 in gas, plus the $15 Light Institute fee. Chris Griscom is a very fine person, and a very famous person she says. It occurs to me that since my last visit to America celebrity has become a moral value as well as informing the predominant popular ideology.

We sit and wait in silence. Every now and then Wasp’s stomach chirps. An Institute assistant, also dressed in linen, begins setting up tape machines and microphones by the door, and after a wait of a few minutes Griscom herself hovers in, head-to-toe white silk robes with white silk hair and golden tan, smiling an abstracted, internalized kind of smile, and stands with arms outstretched for the assistant to wire her up. Fully wired, she processes to a chair at the front of the room, lowers herself into it and does something Hindu with her hands.

‘Enlightenment is really the recognition …’ Griscom pauses, regarding with indulgent modesty the microphone clipped to her breast. The chic assistant grapples with the connection, the tape rolls, the microphone picks up and Griscom begins again. ‘Enlightenment is really the recognition and acceptance of all energies and the capacity to be where they intersect, where those spin points are, where the negative pushes itself into the light, or is drawn into the light, so that there is a correspondent intersection between the doing and the being.’

Her audience shifts, then settles. The wasp leans forward and starts to take notes.

‘Enlightenment’, continues Griscom, voice creamy, sweeping long silver hair languorously from her face, ‘has to do with freedom of choice. When you are looking at the incarnations that you’re looking at this week you’re having an opportunity to be the killer and the lover at the same time.’

A man behind kicks the back of my chair, causing a cold rill of sweat to leave its source between my legs and begin a journey across the thigh. Others fan themselves with their hands and purses. In my row about three along, someone struggles against sleep.

‘So, once we realize that even if you are there in the place of wrong there’s still a spark in there, there’s still something that, if you can look at it from a witnessing position which is what you’re sort of doing here, you can see that you did what you could with the consciousness you had, and that being didn’t understand wrong the way you might now, and so through that experience they gained some recognition.’

‘Does that mean we can go away and do anything we like, and still get enlightened?’ I whisper across to my neighbour.

‘Shh,’ she replies.

‘One of the lessons that has stopped human evolution at this point is the incapacity to see the purpose of all experience and therefore to embrace and comprehend what we would call the meditative. Everything is there exactly as it needs to be in order to allow the motion to continue because evolution is a part of the pulse, it is the pulse, of the universe. So, if we can sit in that space, letting even a flicker of the master that we have been, that we can recognize, that comes from our recognition from our incarnations, just a flicker of that to sit with us …’

A toddler runs over to the Griscom throne and attempts to mount. Griscom smiles and pushes it off.

‘… then we can perceive in a totally different way. The difficulty with linear is that it’s always out in front or behind instead of here, right here now. And with that, the scope to see its purpose, because it either hasn’t come yet, or it’s already shut off, then we can’t recognise purpose. Purpose is a living thing, it’s life itself, that ecstasy, when it needs no more explanation, it just is.’

I turn to my neighbour who is trying her best to balance the demands of note-taking and staring intently ahead.

‘I’m completely lost. What was that about linear?’

‘After.’

My eyelids begin an inexorable downward progress. Half an hour or so later I’m woken by the voice of the woman next to me, who is explaining to the assembly how she was psychically attacked in a dream the previous night and woke up to discover red welts all over her body, and Chris Griscom is congratulating her on fending off the psychic invader and mentioning the undeniable increase in the number of aliens feeding on human energies in the region and pointing out that this is happening to test our strength and make us more whole. I wonder vaguely if the hungry alien argument was part of the reason for Shirley Maclaine’s conversion to the New Age. I think I’m beginning to grasp Griscom’s vision thing. It goes like this: we are all here for a purpose, we’re entitled to constant bliss, we don’t need to feel pain, we are in the inevitable process of evolution, we can be free of our bodies and inhabit the universe. That’s about it, simply put.

And all those hungry souls, with their unsatisfying, slipaway lives, the souls of the ones who are not Shirley Maclaine and never will be, all the ordinary ones, can rest reassured by a simple weekly payment of $15 to the Light Institute of Galisteo that there is a higher reason for it all. Whereas, of course, there may well not be.

The way I see it, a pile of money goes round in circles in the little community of Santa Fe, and every time it comes round to the Light Institute of Galisteo, a bit more drops off.

A queue winds down from the ticket booth at the Whole Life Expo in the town centre, across West Marcy Street towards the public library. From up ahead comes the sound of drumming. A printed programme available at the door details the lectures and workshops for the day:

* ‘Is there an Alien-Multinational Connection?’

* ‘Learn how bone-headed misinformants are placed in UFO conferences as speakers to baffle and confuse you’

* ‘The Vampire and the Psychic Gatekeeper,’ talk given by Helaine Harris, creator of Psychoshamanism™

* ‘The Virtual Reality of MetaNeurological Genesis’

* ‘The Properties of Extraterrestrial Science and Tibetan-Andromedan Intervention in World Affairs during 1993’

* ‘Soul Triggering of the Brain’s Joy Center – Super Conscious Self-Technics to Save Us From Extinction’, by Orayna Orr, empath

The list continues: workshops on angels, astral projection, colonic irrigation, past lives, auric massage and discovering the wild woman within. It’s going to be a busy day.

From among the vendors of extremely low-frequency headsets, magic wands, colonic irrigation suppositories, copper pyramids and high energy gloves I select the Kirilian photography booth. A Kirilian photograph can produce an image of the aura. Now the existence of auras seems pretty plausible to me. How else could a person sense when another enters the room, without seeing or hearing them? What other explanation can there be for the ability to detect a mood or tension in the air? It doesn’t matter to me whether the aura is electromagnetic energy, sixth sense, sophisticated heat detector, lifeforce, or anything else, only that it exists. To be able to have physical evidence of it would be an assurance that some things are beyond the reaches of science. It would be a sign that mysteries still exist. I have a hunch that, once I know all there is to know about my aura, I’ll feel more attuned to the New Age altogether.