Waking Up Gilligan

Добавлено: Чт Авг 04, 2011 12:09 pm

Личный блог автора юморной книженции
http://www.jrmaclean.blogspot.com/

Prologue
The enlightenment of the Divine Bhagwan occurred, as enlightenments often do, under the most extraordinarily ordinary circumstances. Of course he was not yet the Divine Bhagwan, but a brilliant young professor named Akshat Bharadwaj Chandrashekhar, Sanskrit names which mean invulnerable lucky bird who holds the moon in his hair knot. He grew up on the banks of the Mutha River at the western edge of the Deccan Plateau. There, the mists of the morning cling to the great ghats like the innocent aura of a child soon to be burned away by the merciless sun of experience.

The enlightenment was presaged some ten years by an itinerant astrologer, a man named Arjun Qavi (Peacock Poet), who read twelve year-old Akshat's chart and saw the benign influence of many lifetimes of arduous meditation, including stints as extremely high ranking monks for the belly-laughing Bodhidarma as well as Rinzai, the Zen stick-wielding Master of insight. The child had paid his karmic dues. Thus, as a precocious and supremely loveable pre-teen, he teetered on the cusp of eternal radiance. The signs were so favorable, the disposition of the planets so benign, that the great event's occurrence was not a question of if, but when.

The astrologer went on to say, however, that though the enlightenment would be brilliant and supremely juicy, there was a flaw in Akshat's chart: a worrisome retrograde in Saturn which over-ventilated Jupiter's ascendant. A flaw which, were it magnified by the child being spoiled, might well cause him to become the most lazy and irresponsible Godhead-realized soul to ever grace the skin and air of this benighted Earth. The year of the reading was 1941. Well beneath the rickety, lantern-lit table where Akshat's father and the peacock poet sat, on the opposite side of the world, the morning sky over Pearl Harbor was being darkened by Japanese aircraft even as the ovens were fired up in Auswitch. The word 'benighted' applied as thoroughly as ever before or since. Akshat's father vowed that though Akshat was the only child of a beautiful mother from a wealthy family (she had married for love, well below her appropriate caste), paternal duties would not be shirked and the boy would learn the habits and value of a good day's work.

Akshat’s father worked for the British Raj, delivering cigarettes, whiskey and other crucial supplies to the garrisons manning the forts strung along the frontier formed by the Sayadri Hills. Young Akshat would often accompany him on the shorter runs, riding beside him in the cab of the old truck which would grind and groan up and down the steepest slopes in low gear while the child leaned out the window and drank in the fragrances of the roadside blooms. It was, alas, the very year of the reading that Akshat's father, on a longer run by himself, caught by an early monsoon rain, had a transmission gear slip at the wrong moment. His vehicle slithered down the bank of the road into a great chasm. His neck was broken as he hurtled through the windshield. Only one sigh escaped his lips as, half submerged, he died in the muddy waters of an overflowing creek bed. Thus it was that young Akshat was left in the care of his mother, whose great beauty was matched only by the generous indulgences she showered on her son as he continued to grow.

Her father, who had amassed a great fortune selling tea to the British, had, as every intelligent being should, devoted the latter years of his life to the study and practice of yoga and meditation. He had tutored his grandson in the practices as best he could while constantly being astounded at how effortlessly young Akshat mastered the most difficult asanas and pranayama techniques. Blessed with great physical beauty (albeit of a rather petite stature), a precocious aura of serenity, and prodigious mimetic and intellectual powers, the boy was, at the age of twenty one, gifted by his grandfather with one of the only thirty-seven Rolls Royce Silver Clouds extant in India in 1949. Two years later, after he had become the youngest professor of philosophy in the history of the great university at Spoona, roadside blooms. It was, alas, the very year of the reading that Akshat's father, on a longer run by himself, caught by an early monsoon rain, had a transmission gear slip at the wrong moment. His vehicle slithered down the bank of the road into a great chasm. His neck was broken as he hurtled through the windshield. Only one sigh escaped his lips as, half submerged, he died in the muddy waters of an overflowing creek bed. Thus it was that young Akshat was left in the care of his mother, whose great beauty was matched only by the generous indulgences she showered on her son as he continued to grow.

Her father, who had amassed a great fortune selling tea to the British, had, as every intelligent being should, devoted the latter years of his life to the study and practice of yoga and meditation. He had tutored his grandson in the practices as best he could while constantly being astounded at how effortlessly young Akshat mastered the most difficult asanas and pranayama techniques. Blessed with great physical beauty (albeit of a rather petite stature), a precocious aura of serenity, and prodigious mimetic and intellectual powers, the boy was, at the age of twenty one, gifted by his grandfather with one of the only thirty-seven Rolls Royce Silver Clouds extant in India in 1949. Two years later, after he had become the youngest professor of philosophy in the history of the great university at Spoona, India, Akshat was turning the key in the vehicle's ignition just as the first monsoon rains of that year came crashing down.

Nothing happened.

The engine was still.

In that moment, instead of trying the key again, as anyone else would, Akshat Bharadawaj Chandrashekar realized a full and perfect enlightenment. He became the Rolls Royce; he became the turbid sky piled high with thunderheads, the pelting rain and the foliage that thrashed in the wind behind the Philosophy Building. Interior space and exterior space melted into one, he felt and knew the Godhead in all things, including every quantum particle of his physical body. He was consumed, buoyed, and exalted by the silent bliss out of which all things arise.

It is said (and written—as were many things, though not the astrologer's prediction which was known only to Akshat's father— in the great tome The Sound of One Teabag Steeping) that the Divine Bhagwan (as he later came to be called by his sannyasins, or disciples) remained in that Rolls Royce for many hours, letting the enormous ordinariness of what had happened sink in. Despite his achievement, the culmination of many lifetimes of meditation, the vehicle remained in stillness when, at a point later in the evening, he turned the key again. So it was that Cheerstha, the proud owner of the only tow truck in Spoona at that time, summoned at six o'clock and appearing on the scene a mere three hours later, became his first sannyasin and lifelong mechanic.

But this is not Cheerstha's story, nor is it that of the Divine Bhagwan though he is certainly a key figure. It is a story that occurs many years later, in 1982 and 1983 in Ronald Reagan's America. It came to pass that besides Cheerstha, over the years as many as a hundred other Indians recognized the achievement of Akshat Bharadawaj and became his disciples. There may have been more in another age, but India, emerging as a nation from the dominance of the British Raj, was in the nineteen fifties and sixties far more interested in material than spiritual gains. Enlightenment was out. Cars and toasters were in. It was only in the sixties and seventies when more and more Westerners, inspired by Kerouac, Ginsburg, Leary and Watts began hitting the 'Dharma trail' to India that the Divine Bhagwan's career as a guru really began to take off. Young people who'd had their fill of cars and toasters, of the war in Vietnam, Kent State, the military industrial complex, who'd heard and seen and sensed that God and conventional religions were indeed dead moved from West to East in a steady stream, seeking to fill a spiritual vacuum with the essential wisdom of a living enlightened Master. So successful was the Divine Bhagwan in attracting such disciples that his ashram in Spoona overflowed. When the Master went into a period of prolonged personal silence, a decision was made by certain unscrupulous power-mad disciples to build a new commune in the wealthy West, on an enormous Ranch purchased in the Oregon high desert. Thus the clean, clear waters of enlightenment flowed to a country where a spiritual thirster is born every minute.

It is in that commune that our story begins; the story of what happens to a young Canadian named John Price and renamed Satyam Gilligan by the Divine Bhagwan. John Price Jr. is an ordinary fellow, though more intelligent, sensitive, repressed, horny, adventurous and unhappy than most. He has become a disciple (sannyasin) of the Divine Bhagwan through the mail and fortuitously avoided the heat and diseases of India by timing his disciplehood to coincide with the Master’s coming to America. He did not avoid, however, the so-called ‘sitcom stage’ in the Divine Bhagwan’s naming of his sannyasins. This was a product of the Master’s love affair with Western TV shows and movies, a love enabled by the new VCR and video cassette technology that his disciples happily provided him with. Gilligan’s journey from Toronto’s Cabbagetown to Oregon was via California. He is with a somewhat older woman named Bala. Both are about to meet the Master for the first time.

some pages more on http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/63019/1/waking-up-gilligan