Island - Aldous Huxley [141]
“Did you know that Murugan and the Rani were conspiring against you?”
“They make no secret of it.”
“Then why don’t you get rid of them?”
“Because they would be brought back immediately by Colonel Dipa. The Rani is a princess of Rendang. If we expelled her, it would be a casus belli.”
“So what can you do?”
“Try to keep them in order, try to change their minds, hope for a happy outcome, and be prepared for the worst.”
“And what will you do if the worst happens?”
“Try to make the best of it, I suppose. Even in the worst society an individual retains a little freedom. One perceives in private, one remembers and imagines in private, one loves in private, and one dies in private—even under Colonel Dipa.” Then after a silence, “Did Dr. Robert say you could have the moksha-medicine?” she asked. And when Will nodded, “Would you like to try it?”
“Now?”
“Now. That is, if you don’t mind being up all night with it.”
“I’d like nothing better.”
“You may find that you never liked anything worse,” Susila warned him. “The moksha-medicine can take you to heaven; but it can also take you to hell. Or else to both, together or alternately. Or else (if you’re lucky, or if you’ve made yourself ready) beyond either of them. And then beyond the beyond, back to where you started from—back to here, back to New Rothamsted, back to business as usual. Only now, of course, business as usual is completely different.”
15
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR…THE CLOCK IN THE KITCHEN STRUCK twelve. How irrelevantly, seeing that time had ceased to exist! The absurd, importunate bell had sounded at the heart of a timelessly present Event, of a Now that changed incessantly in a dimension, not of seconds and minutes, but of beauty, of significance, of intensity, of deepening mystery.
“Luminous bliss.” From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface, and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids. “Luminous bliss.” That was as near as one could come to it. But it—this timeless and yet ever-changing Event—was something that words could only caricature and diminish, never convey. It was not only bliss, it was also understanding. Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of known and knowable things. But here, behind his closed lids, there was neither spectacle nor spectator. There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with Oneness.
In a succession of revelations, the light grew brighter, the understanding deepened, the bliss became more impossibly, more unbearably intense. “Dear God!” he said to himself. “Oh, my dear God.” Then, out of another world, he heard the sound of Susila’s voice.
“Do you feel like telling me what’s happening?”
It was a long time before Will answered her. Speaking was difficult. Not because there was any physical impediment. It was just that speech seemed so fatuous, so totally pointless. “Light,” he whispered at last.
“And you’re there, looking at the light?”
“Not looking at it,” he answered, after a long reflective pause. “Being it. Being it,” he repeated emphatically.
Its presence was his absence. William Asquith Farnaby—ultimately and essentially there was no such person. Ultimately and essentially there was only a luminous bliss, only a knowledgeless understanding, only union with unity in a limitless, undifferentiated awareness. This, self-evidently, was the mind’s natural state. But no less certainly there had also been that professional execution watcher, that self-loathing Babs addict; there were also three thousand millions of insulated consciousnesses, each at the center of a nightmare world, in which it was impossible for anyone with eyes in his head or a grain of honesty to take yes for an answer. By what sinister miracle had the mind’s natural state been transformed into all these Devil’s Islands of wretchedness and delinquency?
In the firmament of bliss and understanding,