Edward Aubyn - On the Edge

‘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.