The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [27]
“Aye indeed” and later that night as Alvah slept I sat under the tree in the yard and looked up at the stars or closed my eyes to meditate and tried to quiet myself down back to my normal self.
Alvah couldn’t sleep and came out and lay flat on his back in the grass looking up at the sky, and said “Big steamy clouds going by in the dark up there, it makes me realize we live on an actual planet.”
“Close your eyes and you’ll see more than that.”
“Oh I don’t know what you mean by all that!” he said pettishly. He was always being bugged by my little lectures on Samadhi ecstasy, which is the state you reach when you stop everything and stop your mind and you actually with your eyes closed see a kind of eternal multiswarm of electrical Power of some kind ululating in place of just pitiful images and forms of objects, which are, after all, imaginary. And if you don’t believe me come back in a billion years and deny it. For what is time? “Don’t you think it’s much more interesting just to be like Japhy and have girls and studies and good times and really be doing something, than all this silly sitting under trees?”
“Nope,” I said, and meant it, and I knew Japhy would agree with me. “All Japhy’s doing is amusing himself in the void.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I bet he is. I’m going mountainclimbing with him next week and I’ll find out and tell you.”
“Well” (sigh), “as for me, I’m just going to go on being Alvah Goldbook and to hell with all this Buddhist bullshit.”
“You’ll be sorry some day. Why don’t you ever understand what I’m trying to tell you: it’s with your six senses that you’re fooled into believing not only that you have six senses, but that you contact an actual outside world with them. If it wasn’t for your eyes, you wouldn’t see me. If it wasn’t for your ears, you wouldn’t hear that airplane. If it wasn’t for your nose, you wouldn’t smell the midnight mint. If it wasn’t for your tongue taster, you wouldn’t taste the difference between A and B. If it wasn’t for your body, you wouldn’t feel Princess. There is no me, no airplane, no mind, no Princess, no nothing, you for krissakes do you want to go on being fooled every damn minute of your life?”
“Yes, that’s all I want, I thank God that something has come out of nothing.”
“Well, I got news for you, it’s the other way around, nothing has come out of something, and that something is Dharmakaya, the body of the True Meaning, and that nothing is this and all this twaddle and talk. I’m going to bed.”
“Well sometimes I see a flash of illumination in what you’re trying to say but believe me I get more of a satori out of Princess than out of words.”
“It’s a satori of your foolish flesh, you lecher.”
“I know my redeemer liveth.”
“What redeemer and what liveth?”
“Oh let’s cut this out and just live!”
“Balls, when I thought like you, Alvah, I was just as miserable and graspy as you are now. All you want to do is run out there and get laid and get beat up and get screwed up and get old and sick and banged around by samsara, you fucking eternal meat of comeback you you’ll deserve it too, I’ll say.”
“That’s not nice. Everybody’s tearful and trying to live with what they got. Your Buddhism has made you mean Ray and makes you even afraid to take your clothes off for a simple healthy orgy.”
“Well, I did finally, didn’t I?”
“But you were coming on so hincty about—Oh let’s forget it.”
Alvah went to bed and I sat and closed my eyes and thought “This thinking has stopped” but because I had to think it no thinking had stopped, but there did come over me a wave of gladness to know that all this perturbation was just a dream already ended and I didn’t have to worry because I wasn’t “I” and I prayed that God, or Tathagata, would give me enough time and enough sense and strength to be able to tell people what I knew (as I can’t even do properly now) so they’d know what I know and not despair so much. The old tree brooded over me silently, a living thing. I heard a mouse snoring in the garden weeds. The rooftops of Berkeley