Island - Aldous Huxley [120]
“It’s meditation in action,” she concluded. “It’s the metaphysics of the Mahayana expressed, not in words, but through symbolic movements and gestures.”
They left the gymnasium by a different door from that through which they had entered and turned left along a short corridor.
“What’s the next item?” Will asked.
“The Lower Fourth,” Mrs. Narayan answered, “and they’re working on Elementary Practical Psychology.”
She opened a green door.
“Well, now you know,” Will heard a familiar voice saying. “Nobody has to feel pain. You told yourselves that the pin wouldn’t hurt—and it didn’t hurt.”
They stepped into the room and there, very tall in the midst of a score of plump or skinny little brown bodies, was Susila MacPhail. She smiled at them, pointed to a couple of chairs in a corner of the room, and turned back to the children. “Nobody has to feel pain,” she repeated. “But never forget: pain always means that something is wrong. You’ve learned to shut pain off, but don’t do it thoughtlessly, don’t do it without asking yourselves the question: What’s the reason for this pain? And if it’s bad, or if there’s no obvious reason for it, tell your mother about it, or your teacher, or any grown-up in your Mutual Adoption Club. Then shut off the pain. Shut it off knowing that, if anything needs to be done, it will be done. Do you understand?…And now,” she went on, after all the questions had been asked and answered. “Now let’s play some pretending games. Shut your eyes and pretend you’re looking at that poor old mynah bird with one leg that comes to school every day to be fed. Can you see him?”
Of course they could see him. The one-legged mynah was evidently an old friend.
“See him just as clearly as you saw him today at lunchtime. And don’t stare at him, don’t make any effort. Just see what comes to you, and let your eyes shift—from his beak to his tail, from his bright little round eye to his one orange leg.”
“I can hear him too,” a little girl volunteered. “He’s saying ‘Karuna, karuna!’”
“That’s not true,” another child said indignantly. “He’s saying ‘Attention!’”
“He’s saying both those things,” Susila assured them. “And probably a lot of other words besides. But now we’re going to do some real pretending. Pretend that there are two one-legged mynah birds. Three one-legged mynah birds. Four one-legged mynah birds. Can you see all four of them?”
They could.
“Four one-legged mynah birds at the four corners of a square, and a fifth one in the middle. And now let’s make them change their color. They’re white now. Five white mynah birds with yellow heads and one orange leg. And now the heads are blue. Bright blue—and the rest of the bird is pink. Five pink birds with blue heads. And they keep changing. They’re purple now. Five purple birds with white heads and each of them has one pale-green leg. Goodness, what’s happening! There aren’t five of them; there are ten. No, twenty, fifty, a hundred. Hundreds and hundreds. Can you see them?” Some of them could—without the slightest difficulty; and for those who couldn’t go the whole hog, Susila proposed more modest goals.
“Just make twelve of them,” she said. “Or if twelve is too many, make ten, make eight. That’s still an awful lot of mynahs. And now,” she went on, when all the children had conjured up all the purple birds that each was capable of creating, “now they’re gone.” She clapped her hands. “Gone! Every single one of them.