Beyond the Beyond
Hari Om...
Daniel already knew what would transpire upstairs over the next half hour. While closing the drapes to ensure it would be impenetrably dark in the room once they turned out the lights, MacGill would begin to provide a spiritual briefing for those who were about to be initiated into the secret rite for the first time. But several minutes in, frustrated by having to correct him continuously on the details, Cecilia would commandeer the lecture. After all, it had been she who had first brought chanting to the group, and she remained the most enthusiastic of them about it as a spiritual activity.
Cecilia's mother, a born-again Methodist who insisted that her daughter attend church and Sunday school each weekend, had signed her up for a field trip to see the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. During the trip, a group of college-aged Hare Krishnas had descended on the church group's picnic on the Mall, where they cajoled a small donation from Cecilia in exchange for a copy of A. C. Baktividanta Swami Prabhupada's Chant and Be Happy: The Power of Mantra Meditation. Much to her pastor's consternation, Cecilia had read it on the bus home and was deeply intrigued by it, particularly the interview with George Harrison, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono. The book had soon joined a few other books on spirituality by Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Hermann Hesse, and Benjamin Hoff in her friends' collective reading pool; since then, quotations from Prabhupada's works had comprised the better part of Cecilia's contribution to the Blue Book.
Having himself been raised outside the direct influence of religion and given the fact that most of his friends treated their families' religious backgrounds either with indifference (Rudy, David, and Scott) or outright contempt (MacGill and Adam), Daniel had always been surprised by Cecilia's devotion to her faith. Not that she was a zealot, but she seemed to have no trouble accepting her mother's beliefs. And yet there seemed to be something about chanting that attracted her by being forbidden. In fact, her discovery of chanting marked the beginning of a move away from her mother's Methodism to a more liberal Unitarianism. She would later credit Chant and Be Happy and the several other books it had inspired her to dig out from the "Esoterica" stacks at Wonder Book—Coming Back, Beyond Birth and Death, and The Science of Self-Realization—with opening her eyes to the universality of God. But since they were contraband in her mother's house, Cecilia kept these books hidden beneath her mattress the way a teenage boy might a stack of Penthouse Letters.
Her hasty introduction to chanting usually included a summary of Chant and Be Happy's central premise that, as a sequence of transcendental sound vibrations, the maha-mantra (the Great Mantra) brings the mind to God-consciousness, and thus to happiness, no matter what one's religious background might be—that the sound "Krishna" and Krishna were one and the same, and that Krishna, Rama, Christ, Allah, and Jehovah were all facets, all just varied human interpretations of the singular, eternal, and unchanging Godhead. Dismissing any doubts about these arguments, Cecilia would briskly move on to citing from the book's expert testimony regarding the benefits of maha-mantra meditation for one's psychological wellbeing. She would then explain that one could either chant alone, which was referred to as japa (she had gotten a set of japa beads by making a second modest donation to one of the bald hippies, who had touched her honey-colored locks and informed her blissfully that "Hair is only an accessory"), or in a group, a practice called kirtana.
The previous summer, she had led them in many a spirited kirtana session along the banks of the sinuous rill at Grantchester Meadows. Under the elm tree, they had rattled a tambourine or two and sung pure honeysuckle love into the moist, warm air:
But by autumn they had invented their own kirtana ritual, one that was calmer, quieter, and decidedly less Hare Krishna–like. This was the ritual that MacGill was arranging for them to perform in Adrian's bedroom that night. They would form a circle on the floor around their sole source of light, the glowing cherry at the tip of a smoldering stick of incense. MacGill would instruct the initiates to stare at the minute red dot and to rid their minds of all thoughts, and then Cecilia start them off on incanting the decidedly simpler mantra Hari Om.
Given that Cecilia's religious beliefs had been the cause of more than one tearful argument with MacGill the Materialist regarding the physio-spiritual fiber of the cosmos, it might have seemed surprising that Jack was an enthusiast of such an atavistic rite. Even Nick, a card-carrying, void-embracing atheist, and Adam, a devout agnostic-hedonist, took part. (Only Rudy categorically refused to partake: "Jews don't chant," he said. "Well, we do, but in Hebrew—so it all sounds like the Klingon ja'chuq ceremony.") And yet as MacGill removed his pants—"It's important to be as comfy and as free as possible"—he would once again take the reins of the evening's kirtana session by recounting his own positive experiences with chanting: the wonderful floating sensation he got several minutes in, the inner calm that slowly filled him, the expansion of his consciousness, and even, during particularly intense sessions, the visions that he'd seen against the darkness. Daniel had no doubt that MacGill experienced these phenomena: he had experienced them himself in one form or another. But regardless of whether these sensations were caused by the sounds' manifestation of the energy of Krishna, as Srila Prabhupada maintained, or, as Rudy would have it, they were merely the psychosomatic effect of the hypnotic repetition of mind-numbing gibberish, the boys' openness to chanting probably had less to do with a search for enlightenment and more to do with the fact that, as any number of mock gurus will attest, the spiritual angle had proven to be a singularly spectacular way to get girls. Indeed, chanting was its own brand of psychoactive substance: real or imaginary, its transcendental vibrations were as good a solvent for inhibitions as alcohol or even cough syrup. Thus, almost without fail, a kirtana session would turn into the Game.
From the first—and not merely because MacGill had taken of his pants (he did so at some point during every party anyway)—there was a sexual charge to the activity. Any conscious resistance against it would cause things to heat up even faster, building up to a critical moment when consciousness itself would melt down and with a great release their young bodies would suddenly become superconductive. (What better—indeed, what other—conduit for spiritual energy than the flesh?) It took so very little to get them to coalesce. Their identities were already molten and prone to mixing, and it was as if there was some subtle force of attraction, some secret magnetism pulling them together. Like drops of living quicksilver, it took only the slightest jolt for them to join, and the magic conjunction of the ego-obscuring blackness, the overpowering aroma of the incense, the thought-erasing rhythmic drone of the collective chant provided that jolt. Once the incense had burnt out, the chanting would grow faint and a deep silence would fall over the circle. They would breathe with mindful care so as not to disturb the placid surface of that stillness, a pure quietness broken only the soft swish of fabric as they shifted in the dark, the faint shush of sweaters, shirts, or jeans that in ceasing made the silence seem all the more profound. Succumbing to their intense sensations, they would begin to grope across the darkness, becoming entangled in one another with the slowness of creeping vines. With no discrimination, they would reach out blindly across the mass of other young bodies flush with their first thrills, snake through the steadily pulsing massa confusa of limbs, none of them ever quite knowing who was who. Like animals reliant on instinct, they would have only the intuitive sensexuality of touch and scent as a guide through the purblind blackness. Though at times pairs fell from the mixture, kissing and fondling two by two, they never entirely separated from it and would soon dissolve again—even when they split apart they remained strangely inseparable, intertwined, a throbbing whole gyring around an impalpable hub. Then a moan would escape from someone, like an echo from the bottom of a well. Like a bacchanal in slow motion, the others would wheel inward to envelop the eager sacrifice of their tantalizing sparagmos—tearing off his or her remaining clothes and devouring the now-naked offered flesh in the mock-omophagia of soft kisses and caresses. From that point on, at every instant the sole aim was to focus their energy on the avatar of their united yearnings and desires. That person, the solar plexus of their collective body, would absorb their energy and roll it all up into one ball, which would explode with a release of pleasure. The others, blasted back from the center, would coalesce again into pairs or triads, and the cycle would begin anew.
Even after the kirtana segued entirely into the Game, it retained a spiritual intensity. There remained something prayerful about it, as though they had continued to chant the mantra on each other's bodies, as though each of them were a japa bead. And all of it just seemed to happen of its own accord—not one of them could have willed it. Indeed, had anyone partaking for the first time been asked, "Do you want to go into a dark room and make out with a bunch of people?" he or she would almost assuredly have said no. But once involved, young men who might have been embarrassed to change in the locker room in front of others would allow their unseen cohort to strip them down and tantalize them; even girls who had been trained by their parents and Sunday school teachers to guard their innocence would submit to being undressed and kissed and fondled. But during the experience, they were not entirely themselves; they had melded into the enthusiastic selfless mass. While some may have been initially motivated to take part by spiritual curiosity and others by sexual titillation, all of them would ultimately be subsumed in a kind of accidental syncretism, a synthesis of sacred yearning and physical desire that was more than the sum of its parts. Together they would explore the span of experience that extends seamlessly between the profound and eternal Om and the explosive, orgasmic Ohmygod. They had burned countless sticks of incense, and countless nights, lighting their way down this joy-seeking path. Sometimes it led to a realization about their connection to the universe, other times to just a handjob (which for a teenager can be just as world-changing, just as illuminating). But regardless of whether or not they lifted the veils of Maya, in removing each other's clothes they were at least delivered from the seemingly endless repetition of their everyday existence, from the samsara of school and family and mundane experiences, and delivered unto an ecstasy that mixed exhilaration and titillation, fear and bliss, in a way that shocked them out of themselves for as long as it might fleetingly last. A slight jolt was all it took to put them in this ecstatic state. And another—a parent knocking on the bedroom door or someone flipping on a light—was all it would take for them to scatter again. But during that moment, however long it lasted, they flowed together as one, in as much a mystic union has they had yet encountered.