My Guru & His Disciple Read Free Page B

words in their medical sense. The intentional life required not only long meditation periods—he insisted that his own six hours were an absolute minimum—but also an attempted moment-to-moment vigilance over one’s every thought and action, since every thought and every action helps either to create or to remove the obstacles to union with “this thing.” No thought or action, however seemingly unimportant, can be regarded as neutral.
    What were these obstacles? Gerald, who had a tidy mind and an inclination to think in trinities, would tick them off on his long, expressive fingers—addictions, possessions, and pretensions. Addictions included their opposites, aversions. They therefore ranged from, say, a lust for blonds, heroin, or toffee to a disgust-fear of cripples, gangrene, or lizards. Gerald regarded addictions as the least harmful of the three categories. Pretensions were the worst, he said, because there is one of them which can outlast all other obstacles. You may conquer your addictions and unlearn your aversions; you may unload yourself of your possessions; you may resign from your positions of honor and retire into humble obscurity. But then, and only then, the most deadly of all the pretensions may raise its head; you may begin to believe that you are a spiritually superior person and therefore entitled to condemn your weaker fellow creatures. (Was Gerald himself in danger of yielding to this final temptation? Yes—if only because he did seem capable of overcoming all the other obstacles along the course which led to it. I could imagine that Gerald might one day begin to take himself too seriously as a religious teacher. But, surely, not for long. He was too much of a comedian not to become quickly aware of the funny side of his holiness.)
    As a concept, “intentional living” fascinated me. I saw how immensely it would heighten the significance of even the most ordinary day, how it would abolish boredom by turning your life into an art form. Indeed, it was related to the attitude which a novelist should have, ideally, toward his work on a novel. With one huge difference, however. The novelist is involved only with his novel and only during work hours; the intentional liver is involved with his whole life experience, and throughout every waking moment of every day until he dies. The finality of such an involvement scared and daunted me. To Gerald’s austere temperament, it strongly appealed. The negative side of his involvement was his hatred of space-time, and he gloried in his hatred. “It’s only when the sheer beastliness of this world begins to hurt you—like crushing your finger in a door” (here he winced, miming the physical pain) “that you’re ready to take this step.”
    Gerald accepted the Hindu and Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation—that life within space-time is a cycle of birth-death-rebirth; you are born again and again, whether you like it or not, as a consequence of your past deeds (your karmas ). You can only free yourself from this cycle by achieving union with your real nature and thus breaking your bondage to space-time. That was why Gerald was working so hard to make sure that this life would be his last.
    I simply could not share Gerald’s feelings, much as I respected his beliefs. How could I hate space-time when it contained so much that was lovable and beautiful, including Vernon? Admittedly, my feelings for Vernon were hotly sexual and possessive. I found nothing essentially evil in this, but it was an entanglement with worldly life—an entanglement which was growing more extensive, for now we needed a home and at least one car; transportation in the sprawling Los Angeles area being as much of a problem then as it is today. Chris Wood had guaranteed our security for the next few months by lending me two thousand dollars. But I should have to pay them back sooner or later by going to work, and I