Walking in the Shade (50 page)

I am sure there was not, anywhere in the world, a communist who did not prepare, in fantasy, for interrogation, torture, imprisonments, the camps, and this in countries where revolution was nowhere on the agenda. ‘There is just one thing, Comrade Investigator'—a sarcastic drawl. ‘We all know about the interrogator who is kind and friendly, to be replaced by a sadistic swine. You forget, we live in countries where there is freedom of information. Yes, of course I shall confess to everything. Everyone knows that no one stands up to torture. But what you don't seem to realise is that no one outside this country will believe a word of it. Everyone in the world knows how you [the Soviet Union, China, and so forth] torture people into confession. Really, you oughtn't to be so naive, so ignorant.' If this kind of fantasy was in millions (many millions) of minds, what kind of effect did it have on general thinking?

It is a strange business, changing your mind about what you think—rather, having your mind changed for you. You wake up one morning and think, Goodness, I used to think like that, didn't I?—but you hardly know how it happened. It is a process that goes on all the time, whether you have put yourself in the way of ideas and beliefs or not.

The package had come to seem thin, gimcrack, superficial, and above all blown together most arbitrarily, shreds from the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, orts and fragments from Cromwell's time or the industrial revolution, articles of faith from Marx or from Lenin. I knew exactly the moment when I had shed religion and God: it was when my mother, upset that her child had a crush on the Virgin Mary—that is what it amounted to—recited a list of the misdeeds of the Roman Catholics, all of which could be matched by the Protestants; and with what relief I heaved the whole itchy and uncomfortable burden off my shoulders for the brave stoicism of atheism. I knew that I had accepted the Marxist package for no deeper reason than that the communists I met in Southern Rhodesia had actually read the books I had, were in love with literature, and because they were the only people I knew who took it for granted that the white regime was doomed. But if I had been born in another place, at another time, I would with equal ease have accepted whatever ‘package' was the correct one there and then.

And there was another thing. I had experiences writing the book which did not fit in with tenets of the package. I hate the word ‘inspiration', distrust all claims to elevated experiences, but had written things not in my personal experience, which were coming true. I don't want to list them, because people's hunger for strangeness is so strong that the most modest claims become exaggerated into whole cosmologies.

Many writers have the experience of describing events or thoughts which they have invented but which later come true. To put me well beyond the possibility of being taken seriously by people who still regard the package as the only possible way of looking at the world, I think that enveloping our level of thinking, apart from it but sometimes penetrating it, is a stratum of thought or being, a wavelength, and that writers often ride along on it, perhaps only for moments. This is the explanation, I believe, of that common phenomenon when several writers come up at the same time with the same theme or title or idea, believing they are unique and original and no one else can possibly have thought of it. This has happened to me more than once. Somewhere close to us is a sea of ideas, a finer level of vibration, and this makes itself felt, no matter how much this is denied by conceited materialists.

It seems to me that when I wrote
The Golden Notebook
I had so thoroughly reached the end of a whole spectrum of ideas, thoughts, and feelings that the world I had excluded as ‘impossible', as ‘reactionary', was surrounding me, pressing in, making its claim.

I began a systematic search for something different. I did not know where to look or how. Because that excluded world is represented in our culture by dubious practices and beliefs, like séances, horoscopes, fortune-telling, and so forth, I was again and again put off, but persevered, and followed up every lead I could—a reference in a book, something overheard, a remark on the radio. For instance, Yeats led me to the Golden Dawn, but Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley led me out again. That, I knew, was not what I was looking for—magic and mystery and bizarre behaviour. All this went on for months, and parallel to my ordinary life; there was no one I could discuss it with, for everyone I knew clutched tight to the package, whether on the left or, even, the right. I described this search in the person of Martha in
The Four-Gated City
, but shortened it, neatened it, simplified it—you simply cannot put the untidiness of life into a novel if you don't want people to yawn and throw it aside. I was again in the situation I had been in as a girl: I had to keep quiet about what I was thinking.

I was at once struck by one basic, overriding fact—that here was a world of ideas and belief that I had scarcely even heard of, let alone been seriously introduced to. Though I had not had anything like a good education, I had read widely, been part of the intellectual ferments of the time, met a wide range of people, but nowhere had there been even a hint of what I was discovering now—that is, if I wanted to exclude the sickly ‘spiritualism' of the last days of the communist group in Southern Rhodesia.

Nowhere in our education, our culture, was there so much as a whisper about the great religions, the great spiritual traditions, of the East. In our own culture, at its heart, is the inner spiritual tradition of Christianity, writers like St. John of the Cross, or Mother Julian of Norwich, with books like
The Cloud of the Unknowing
, but these were surely unusual individuals, with a particular temperamental endowment, shared, I think, by very few, and it is mostly religious people who know about them.

I think that this lacuna at the heart of our education—absolute then, but things have changed a little—was the reason young people brought up on the jaunty, cocky, conceited, shallow intellectualism of the West had no defences when they encountered an Eastern tradition and even the most deteriorated form of it. In the sixties, just dawning, again and again we saw highly educated youngsters suddenly succumbing to charlatanism and gurus and cults of all sorts, to the astonishment and despair of their parents, but it was because whole areas of their minds had been left uncultivated, ready to give root room to any old weed. As I said in my story
The Temptation of Jack Orkney
.

I read first of all the various traditions of Buddhism. Very soon Buddhism was to become attractive to large numbers of people, and it still is. (At the time, we had scarcely heard of it. It is really hard to convey the absolute general ignorance and the sterility of our ideas just before the sixties.) Buddhism is attractive to the violent and warlike West. Then, various aspects of Hinduism, to me appealing because of its polytheism, its heteromorphism, just like Roman Catholicism, absorbing gods and saints into itself according to the culture it finds itself in. But I am not an Indian. I know that this is no barrier to the numbers of souls putting on lungis, saris, red forehead spots, and so forth, in ashrams in India and elsewhere. But I was reading all the great Eastern classics—the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the various Zen scriptures; I was reading for information, and with enjoyment and pleasure, and above all for guidance, but for ever came out by the same door I went in. There was, however, one fact that emerged from all this, a basic one, and it was that one needs a teacher. No teacher, no guide, and you may be sure of trouble. At that time, it was merely the one solid thing I was clutching on to in a sea of differing voices and paths, but since then it has become far from theoretical, because for years I was to watch rash people exploring these dangerous regions without a guide and coming to every kind of grief, going mad temporarily or permanently being the most common.

If there is one thing we pride ourselves on in the West, it is our independence. This was not something I was even aware of, until I challenged myself over it. It comes hard, surrendering precious self-reliance, particularly when your life has been that—fighting for it, defending it, struggling to regain it when it is lost, temporarily, as when you become a communist. If you are a woman it is particularly hard, because the pressures on you are so strong, particularly internal ones, emotional ones, more insidious than the external pressures.

The ‘gurus' offering themselves in the late fifties and early sixties were not persuasive reasons to surrender. I did in fact sample one, partly from curiosity, and found myself sitting opposite his local representative, who offered me what amounted to psychotherapy, on such a low level that I retrospectively admired Mrs. Sussman. Psychotherapy then was very ‘far out', ‘way out'—phrases just coming in—very distant from our present conditions, where every second person you meet is a counsellor, and particularly those (it is hard to refrain from pointing out) whose own emotional lives have been particularly disastrous.

I decided to keep my eyes and ears open, and continue my search. Meanwhile an unpleasant truth about myself—the first of very many—was knocking at the door. It was that these Paths, or Ways, I was investigating were sometimes called Disciplines. And I had no self-discipline—yes, I was exaggerating, in those days when the enormity of what I was confronting overcame me—apart from one: I did have the self-discipline to set myself to work every day, and I knew that some people found that hard. I had been able to adapt my life, my work patterns, to accommodate my son: I could say that at the centre of my life had always been his needs, his patterns of school, holidays, comings and goings. But what else? Well, nothing, when I looked at myself coolly.

Food preoccupied me, whether I was going to eat it or not eat it. That is hardly unusual in our lavish times, but I was becoming increasingly aware of just how much time I spent thinking about it. And besides, you may be on a diet yourself, but if you are a good cook, and enjoy making feasts for others, that is still thinking about food.

I was not drinking as I had for that short time, but wine was part of my life, and I could hardly say I denied myself.

I smoked fifty or sixty cigarettes a day and could not have believed that one day soon I would simply stop.

(All the Paths I had investigated till then assumed the necessity of asceticism.)

I was physically out of shape. It wasn't very much, I knew that, but I decided that at the very least I would exercise every morning, and I have done so ever since. I certainly was aware of the bathos of it, doing physical jerks and hoping this might be a step on the road to higher things.

The thought was beginning to nag at me—only just beginning—that my behaviour since I had left childhood, my ‘life-style', was one that at any other time in history would have been described as corrupt, decadent, even degenerate. Yet it was this behaviour that I had taken my stand on, fought painful battles to gain and keep, actually felt defined me. (And all my generation too.) But the trouble was that if the balance swung too far the other way (as can always be seen going on, the swings from one extreme to the other), then the danger must be a reversion to the most bigoted and barren puritanism. And if so many of us had gone so far in the direction of sexual and every other kind of freedom, then the point of balance was surely already far into the regions of indulgence….These thoughts and others like them were so difficult—and as usual not to be shared with anybody—that I simply postponed them all.

Now I find it painful, embarrassing, how I thought about the ‘Search', the ‘Path', and yet I know that for a child of our culture, nothing much better could have been expected, that I was one of many.

We in the West, and in cultures permeated by Western values, expect everything. We have been promised everything, implicitly or loudly and openly. We believe we deserve everything good. Our reaction to being told that there is something there, a desirable thing—a great hidden treasure—is that we must have it. As a right. When I knew that there was this other world, the spiritual one—though using that word comes hard, for it is so debased—I had two strong reactions. First was scorn for my own culture, because it had so ignored this other world—but scorn came easily to me, and I was a long way off recognising that. The other reaction was a powerful grasping need, a secret exultation. It was greed, but I didn't know it, thought it was laudable, that secret ‘Gimme, gimme' that I was hugging to myself. Worse even than ‘Gimme' was ‘I
will
do this, achieve this.
I
will.'

It is a common experience of people following a ‘Path' that they look back at their first steps with shame, and regret that they can have been so very wrong.

And now I have a real, a serious difficulty. From now onwards—that is, from the end of the fifties—there was a main current in my life, deeper than any other, my real preoccupation. A few people will understand, because they have lived through something similar, but most I think will be indifferent or bored. And so I shall simply state it: this was my real life.

There is a tiny story from the Sufis and from a book called
The Sufis
, by Idries Shah. But I had not encountered Sufis yet.

A certain man is a prisoner on an island, but he does not know he is a prisoner and that there is more to life than prison life. A rescuer offers him an escape, on a ship, but he says, ‘Oh thank you, thank you, I'll come, but I must bring my ton of cabbage with me.'

When I first read it, I thought,
I
could never be so stupid as to want to take a ton of cabbage—but alas, that ton of cabbage is hard to rid oneself of. In those early days I was saying far too often, ‘Of course I would never be so stupid as to…,' whatever it was. And that brings me to another difficulty. If you are good at one thing, you unconsciously assume you are good at others too; if you have succeeded in one area, then you assume that that success ‘counts' as good marks in another.