Island - Aldous Huxley [127]
“And that’s why you’re the man who won’t take yes for an answer?”
“How can anyone take yes for an answer?” he countered. “Yes is just pretending, just positive thinking. The facts, the basic and ultimate facts, are always no. Spirit? No! Love? No! Sense, meaning, achievement? No!”
Tiger exuberantly alive and joyful and full of God. And then Tiger transformed by the Essential Horror into a packet of garbage, which the vet had to come and be paid for removing. And after Tiger, Aunt Mary. Maimed and tortured, dragged in the mud, degraded and finally, like Tiger, transformed into a packet of garbage—only this time it was the undertaker who had removed it, and a clergyman was hired to make believe that it was all, in some sublime and Pickwickian sense, perfectly O.K. Twenty years later another clergyman had been hired to repeat the same strange rigmarole over Molly’s coffin. “If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.”
Will uttered another of his hyena laughs. “What impeccable logic, what sensibility, what ethical refinement!”
“But you’re the man who won’t take yes for an answer. So why raise any objections?”
“I oughtn’t to,” he agreed. “But one remains an aesthete, one likes to have the no said with style. ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” He screwed up his face in an expression of disgust.
“And yet,” said Susila, “in a certain sense the advice is excellent. Eating, drinking, dying—three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don’t live it and, if ever they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies—but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.”
“And rises again from the dead?” he asked sarcastically.
“That’s one of the questions the Buddha always refused to discuss. Believing in eternal life never helped anybody to live in eternity. Nor, of course, did disbelieving. So stop all your pro-ing and con-ing (that’s the Buddha’s advice) and get on with the job.”
“Which job?”
“Everybody’s job—enlightenment. Which means, here and now, the preliminary job of practicing all the yogas of increased awareness.”
“But I don’t want to be more aware,” said Will. “I want to be less aware. Less aware of horrors like Aunt Mary’s death and the slums of Rendang-Lobo. Less aware of hideous sights and loathsome smells—even of some delicious smells,” he added as he caught, through the remembered essences of dog and cancer of the liver, a civetlike whiff of the pink alcove. “Less aware of my fat income and other people’s subhuman poverty. Less aware of my own excellent health in an ocean of malaria and hookworm, of my own safely sterilized sex fun in the ocean of starving babies. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ What a blessed state of affairs! But unfortunately I do know what I’m doing. Only too well. And here you go, asking me to be even more aware than I am already.”
“I’m not asking anything,” she said. “I’m merely passing on the advice of a succession of shrewd old birds, beginning with Gautama and ending with the Old Raja. Start by being fully aware of what you think you are. It’ll help you to become aware of what you are in fact.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “One thinks one’s something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one’s merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy.”
“And that precisely is the first half of the Buddha’s message. Transience, no permanent soul, inevitable sorrow. But he didn’t stop there, the message had a second half. This temporary slowdown of entropy is also pure undiluted Suchness. This absence of a permanent soul is also the Buddha Nature.”
“Absence of