Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Granny was scanning our faces for reaction to what she had said. Then her face hardened rather, as she added, ‘Bram Stoker was the one who wrote that story, you know, the one you both seem to enjoy so much. If television had existed in his day I dare say it would never have been written …’

She paused to let her words sink in. We were still at sea. ‘There is one point on which I must correct you, much as I hate to do so.’ True enough, Granny hated to correct people almost as much as she hated to breathe. ‘You have been saying Drác-ula ’ — she spat the word out as though it was a slug lurking in a bowl of consommé — ‘and I have held my tongue. Now I feel it only fair to tell you that the word is properly pronounced Dra-coóla . That is, if Mr Stoker is allowed to know something about a personage he made up. When I told you I would wince if I went to the cinema to see your film, I was not referring to the story, with which I am thoroughly familiar, but to the pain of having to hear that ghastly and ignorant mispronunciation.’

One-Up? She was a thousand up, now. We would never catch up, not even if the Compleat Angler betrayed her all over again by serving Milky Bars on the dessert trolley. Still, it had been fun while it had lasted, our little ascendancy over the Dowager Empress of One-Upmanship. For the rest of the evening she was in full control.

I tried to find spiritual instruction in my encounters with Granny. I even thought of telling her of my Hinduism — she was surely too much a woman of the world to be alarmed. On the other hand I’d rather she was alarmed than moved to deflate me conversationally, perhaps by remembering a hunt ball in her youth at which she had taught a dark young chap all he needed to know about what she called ‘passive resistance’, by the way she discouraged a persistent suitor. Mohandas Gandhi, she rather thought that was the dark young chap’s name.

One of the things I loved about Ramana Maharshi from the start was the way he could use anything as a text or an example. There was no gospel as such, just the warm imperative to realise yourself, refracted through the whole range of analogies waiting to be used. His teaching might take a simple gesture or a staple food as its starting point.

The unboggled mind a great hindrance

Once a presumptuous seeker after truth made the journey to Tiruvannamalai and insisted on seeing Ramana Maharshi, who refused, saying ‘Go back the way you came.’ The seeker after truth was very much put out by such uncoöperative behaviour from the guru, until his acolytes pointed out that far from being dismissed without what he had come for, he had received teaching of the richest, pithiest sort. ‘Go back the way you came’ — what could be more enlightening, properly understood? Retrace your footsteps, seek always the source, ask yourself not what is sought but who it is that seeks. The visitor went away greatly enlightened. Though the possibility remains that Ramana Maharshi really was saying Get lost, I can’t be doing with you. It’s a full-time job discouraging your own personality cult — and then the devotees did what they could to put a tactful gloss on what he said.

What instruction could I extract from this evening with Granny, on which she had got up to all her old tricks, and a few new ones? Perhaps I should be concentrating on the moment when she pounced, which always took me by surprise. At those moments I had the sensation that my thoughts had run into the buffers. When the mind boggles, enlightenment is just round the corner. If I could recreate that sensation at will, I would have made a real start. The unboggled mind is a great hindrance to self-realisation.

Simpler than stopping the mind in its tracks is unstringing it, by meditation. I was determined to open my mental apparatus to the things that underlay it, but I had no technique. I was making the usual beginner’s mistake of simply instructing the mind to suspend itself. Chop chop. I don’t have all day.

Meditating, at least in the noisy West, is like trying not to buy anything when you actually live in a supermarket. The trick is not to let yourself be distracted by the displays of bargains but to concentrate on your shopping list, which has THERE’S NOTHING I NEED written on it (even if the words are actually OM MANE PADME OM). With practice even these words disappear from the paper, and it becomes second nature to wander along the gleaming contemplative aisles, their shelves perfectly empty, the piped music replaced by a distillation of breathing.

My own yoga breathing was more or less instinctive, thanks to all the inadvertent practice I had put in during the bed-rest years, but I didn’t know what a mantra was, or how it would help me unfocus. Or perhaps I had found my own way to the idea. It seemed to me that I had come close to meditating, as a child, when I had repeated the words from the lid of a biscuit tin, draining them of meaning, or else filling them with the radiance of not meaning anything. Peek Frean Peek Frean . I tried it for some time, with fair results.

There’s nothing in modern life which remotely resembles meditation, except possibly making mayonnaise by hand. If you have the patient alertness to add the olive oil drop by drop in the early stages, you’ll probably get the knack of meditation quite quickly. Admittedly making mayonnaise was a two-person job as far as Mum and I were concerned — she did the beating and I concentrated on precisely that aspect of the process, regulating the thin dribble of oil. I really wanted to make mayonnaise out of fascination with the scientific aspect (behaviour of emulsions). Mum asked what was wrong with Heinz salad cream, and I had to say, nothing much. On the basis of his tomato ketchup, his baked beans and his salad cream, Mr Heinz didn’t miss a trick.

Heart-mortar, mind-pestle

With a little effort you could see meditation as an exercise in spiritual emulsification, suspending the ego in tiny dispersed globules. There’s licence for such flights of fancy in the Hinduism I follow, and plenty of precedent in my guru’s poems and conversation. In 1914 or so he wrote ‘Song of the Poppadum’. What could be more down to earth? It goes like this:

Make a batch of poppadums

Eat them and satisfy your appetite.

Don’t roam the world disconsolate.

Hear the word, unique, unspoken

Taught by the true teacher who teaches

The truth of Being-Awareness-Bliss.

1. Take the black-gram ego-self

Growing in the five-fold body-field

And grind it in the quern,

The wisdom-quest of ‘Who am I?’

Reducing it to finest flour.

Make a batch of poppadums … &c .

2. Mix it with pirandai -juice,

Which is holy company,

Add mind-control, the cumin-seed,

The pepper of self-restraint,

Salt of non-attachment,

And asafœtida, the aroma

Of virtuous inclination.

Make a batch of poppadums … &c .

3. In the heart-mortar place the dough

And with mind-pestle inward turned,

Pound it hard with strokes of ‘I’, ‘I’,

Then flatten it with the rolling pin

Of stillness on the level slab of Being.

Work away, untiring, steady, cheerful.

Make a batch of poppadums … &c .

4. Place the poppadum in the ghee of Brahman ,

Held in the pan of infinite silence,

And fry it over the fire of knowledge.

Now I is transmuted into That.

Eat and taste the Self as Self,

Abiding in the Self alone.

Make a batch of poppadums … &c .

How am I supposed to resist a guru who effortlessly combines such contrary literary forms — prayer and recipe? The answer is that I’m not. I had already enjoyed the idea in The Satipatthana Sutta and Its Application to Modern Life that there was no special time and place that needed to be set aside for the contemplation of the non-illusory. Now I was mad for the idea that everyday life actually supplied the material for its own dismantling, so that you could be plunged into self-enquiry even while you were cooking up a batch of snacks. Everything around me was a potential trigger of enlightenment. It meant that I could lower my little bucket into the ocean of contiguous moments at any point, and be sure of bringing up a sample that would yield the whole.