Island - Aldous Huxley [142]
But behind and around and somehow even within those flickering memories was the firmament of bliss and peace and understanding. There might be a few bats in the sunset sky; but the fact remained that the dreadful miracle of creation had been reversed. From a preternaturally wretched and delinquent self he had been unmade into pure mind, mind in its natural state, limitless, undifferentiated, luminously blissful, knowledgelessly understanding.
Light here, light now. And because it was infinitely here and timelessly now, there was nobody outside the light to look at the light. The fact was the awareness, the awareness the fact.
From that other world, somewhere out there to the right, came the sound once more of Susila’s voice.
“Are you feeling happy?” she asked.
A surge of brighter radiance swept away all those flickering thoughts and memories. There was nothing now except a crystalline transparency of bliss.
Without speaking, without opening his eyes, he smiled and nodded.
“Eckhart called it God,” she went on. “‘Felicity so ravishing, so inconceivably intense that no one can describe it. And in the midst of it God glows and flames without ceasing.’”
God glows and flames… It was so startlingly, so comically right that Will found himself laughing aloud. “God like a house on fire,” he gasped. “God-the-Fourteenth-of-July.” And he exploded once more into cosmic laughter.
Behind his closed eyelids an ocean of luminous bliss poured upwards like an inverted cataract. Poured upwards from union into completer union, from impersonality into a yet more absolute transcendence of selfhood.
“God-the-Fourteenth-of-July,” he repeated and, from the heart of the cataract, gave vent to a final chuckle of recognition and understanding.
“What about the fifteenth of July?” Susila questioned. “What about the morning after?”
“There isn’t any morning after.”
She shook her head. “It sounds suspiciously like Nirvana.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Pure Spirit, one hundred percent proof—that’s a drink that only the most hardened contemplation guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.”
“This is better,” Will insisted.
“You mean, it’s more delicious. That’s why it’s such an enormous temptation. The only temptation that God could succumb to. The fruit of the ignorance of good and evil. What heavenly lusciousness, what a supermango! God had been stuffing Himself with it for billions of years. Then all of a sudden, up comes Homo sapiens, out pops the knowledge of good and evil. God had to switch to a much less palatable brand of fruit. You’ve just eaten a slice of the original supermango, so you can sympathize with Him.”
A chair creaked, there was a rustle of skirts, then a series of small busy sounds that he was unable to interpret. What was she doing? He could have answered that question by simply opening his eyes. But who cared, after all, what she might be doing? Nothing was of any importance except this blazing uprush of bliss and understanding.
“Supermango to fruit of knowledge—I’m going to wean you,” she said, “by easy stages.”
There was a whirring sound. From the shallows, a bubble of recognition reached the surface of consciousness. Susila had been putting a record on the turntable of a phonograph and now the machine was in motion.
“Johann Sebastian Bach,” he heard her saying. “The music that’s closest to silence, closest, in spite of its being so highly organized, to pure, hundred percent proof Spirit.”
The whirring gave place to musical sounds. Another bubble of recognition came shooting up; he was listening to the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto.
It was the same,