Melanie McGrath - Motel Nirvana

‘There’s no going back to the Garden of Eden,’ he says, ‘which didn’t even really exist anyway.’

In his living room he has an AppleMac fixed to a number of electronic gizmos with flashing LED displays and impressive monitors. From here he carries on his practice, assisted by his wife, Beth, who is also and incidentally a shaman herself, although not of the technological variety.

Beth fetches some coffee.

‘It all looks, uh, amazingly complex, but how is this Mayan grid business actually going to make a difference?’ I ask.

Pete the Technoshaman gathers himself, sweeps his hair back, double-clicks on his mouse, and says with casual authority, ‘Hey, I’m doing my bit.’

The coffee arrives, and we sit at Pete’s Mac staring idly at a notice flashing on the screen which reads ‘You may activate the program at any time.’

‘You know,’ says Pete with palpable sadness, sucking on his coffee cup, ‘I don’t have answers as to what can happen to the teeming billions, man, but at least I don’t have to wonder what I’m doing here anymore.’

His friend Carl, stationed on the sofabed reading a copy of National Geographic , looks up and interjects:‘Yeah, it sounds so cold-hearted to say that not a lot can be done, but you know, maybe that’s not so bad. I mean, we’re spiritual beings, right?’

‘You know,’ says Pete, bringing up a graphic of the solar system on the Mac, ‘we’re in a wrenching transitional period. Some people would say that because you’re not handing out sandwiches in Somalia you’re not doing anything. But McKenna’s right. The world’s salvation is in pushing the imagination.’

Carl throws down his National Geographic and shakes his head. McKenna, I happen to know, is a West Coast writer who thinks that magic mushrooms provide an insight into alien worlds. He’s become somewhat of a cult figure among men of a certain age.

‘The whole world’s on LSD,’ says Carl, randomly.

‘Information’s the thing, man,’ continues Pete, ‘The future of consciousness and the future of medicine.’ He clicks on his mouse and brings up a flowchart marked in Greek lettering. Then, taking up a phial he walks over to Carl, yanks out a lock of hair with a quick flip of his wrist, puts the hair into the phial, and inserts it into a larger tube connected with electrodes to a piece of metal, and also by some mysterious means, to the computer.

‘This, for example, is kinesiology.’

‘Wow,’ says Carl, evidently impressed.

‘I just place my finger, thus,’ placing his right index finger on the piece of metal, ‘on the electro-kinesiological reaction plate and there’s an electromagnetic disturbance created by the hair that my finger picks up, as it were, intuitively. Understand?’

I nod; Carl simpers.

‘It’s the same as if I touched you. Any live cell will do, you know, because they all react in unison. I don’t need a liver cell to know what’s going on in the liver.’

I mention in passing that I had always imagined hair cells to be dead.

Pete’s wife returns from putting the baby to bed and proceeds to settle down to some other domestic chore.

‘I am a biological scientist,’ replies Pete definitively. In the corner of the room his wife bites her lip.

‘So you know, I rub my finger on the plate and intuitively click the mouse on this list, so.’

He removes the hair phial and replaces it with a bottle of colourless fluid.

‘All the restitutive elements – crystals, colours, food, so forth – are stored in the memory banks of the machine as holographic references, each item is associated with thirteen Mayan numbers, which store enough information on each substance not to have to bother having the real things.

‘Take this bottle of water here. We simply …’ Clicks on the mouse, two doubles.

‘And the numbers are transferred into an electromagnetic pulse so the geometry of the water changes. Or the same information can be transferred to a lamp, or coded as a fractal type for psychoemotional problems or a sound with the information subliminally tagged onto it.’

‘You mean, you don’t need to see your patients?’

‘Uh-uh. They just phone right up, and we send them a tape with the sound on it, whatever …’ He’s picking out the bottle of water and putting back Carl’s hair. From another room the baby begins to howl.

‘Oh Lordie.’

‘What?’ asks Carl, looking a little worried.

‘Just checked the energy levels. Seems like your digestive problem is somewhat better already.’

‘Yeah?’ says Carl.

‘See,’ Pete points to a chart on the screen, which has changed from blue to yellow. ‘If this technology developed you could just grow body parts. Incidentally …’ He double-clicks, the screen shifts, blackens and the message ‘You may activate the program at any time’ blinks back. ‘Tim Leary is speaking at the Sweeny Center today. Do you know who Tim Leary is?’

I smile.

‘Only one of the most important minds of the twentieth century.’ He rises from his chair and lifts a paperback from a pile under the coffee table. ‘This is an original signed copy,’ he says, holding the book out to me, then thinking better of it, he replaces the volume under the table, lining up the spine against a magazine beneath.

‘You get many clients?’ I ask, changing the subject.

Pete considers the question, which has taken him a little by surprise. Finally he says ‘The thing with clients is that a lot of the work is just caring for them, which, you know, doesn’t appeal to me. But I have to fund my research so we …,’ gesturing towards his wife, ‘take on a few clients. There are funding sources for fringe technology like this, of course, but they all want something for it. Nothing, for free, man.’

‘Pow pow pow,’ says Carl, knocking out the funding sources with his finger.

‘This thing, you know, called my reality, is based purely on my own experience.’ Pete clicks on the mouse and brings up a screen with a pattern of stars upon it. ‘Expand my experience, and, man, you really turn me on.’

There is a bookstall in the foyer of the Sweeny Center selling guides to enlightenment, with a list of all the great teachers who have ever attained nirvana, and how they did it. Gautama sat under a Bodhi tree and waited, and, after seven days without food and water, he saw the morning star and was enlightened into formless bliss. Ming travelled for years looking for enlightenment and eventually found nirvana when Hui-neng asked him ‘What is your original face, which you had even before your birth?’ Neither of them had access to a computer. The process of their enlightenments was tortuous and thoroughly unscientific. We leave it to science, these days, to reveal the mystery of the everyday. Perhaps Gautama and Ming would have done better with Pete the Technoshaman’s Mayan program.

Science, they say, is the Moses of the twentieth century and heaven knows, we need one.

There are, incidentally, no enlightened women on the list. There are books on women who run with wolves, women who love too much, women who love men who love other women, universal mother-women, crone-women, angels, goddesses, all sorts of women doing all sorts of things, in fact, but no enlightened ones. Why is that? The sales assistant suggests I listen to Joni Mitchell, whom she regards as highly advanced. I promise to think it over and buy a little beginner’s guide to Zen containing this fragment, by Tung-shan:

The man of wood sings,

The woman of stone

Gets up and dances,

This cannot be done

By passion or learning,

It cannot be done

By reasoning.

A man with a beard the colour of baked beans walks across my field of vision carrying a child in a turban, smiles at someone ahead and is devoured by the crowd. Here they all are, the success stories of late twentieth-century capitalism – sophisticated consumers, moneyed but not dangerously moneyed, educated, but not threateningly so – passing the hours irrigating their colons, birthing their drums and squeezing their higher consciousnesses. Fergus once remarked ‘there’s the work ethic and the self ethic and those two together made America what it is. If you have any criticisms I suggest you take them elsewhere. We’re very protective of our ethics.’