Motel Nirvana

I have a friend, called Fergus, who lives in New York and is very dear to me. I cannot remember how we met, or where, so there can’t be much of a story to it. In any case, Fergus is one of four people I know who are currently living in the USA. Two have disappeared completely and the third always says he can’t talk whenever I call him. Fergus, on the other hand has promised to fly over and spend a weekend with me while I am in the southwest, but I don’t think he will. In some ways he’s reliable, but in others, he’s just another SOB.

‘Ferg, it’s me.’

‘You still in Texas?’

‘Santa Fe.’

Fergus, I know, does not approve of Higher Consciousness tapes and God Insight Boxes and psychics and angels, but I mention them anyway in the hope that I am wrong. I am not wrong.

‘Kooks.’

‘That’s easy to say,’ I reply, ‘but if enough people believe it, you can’t just write it off.’

A bitter laugh.

‘That’s the democratic principle, isn’t it?’ I’m wounded, ‘Anyway, how come you’re such a cynic?’

‘Don’t call me that,’ Fergus is wounded. ‘This is America, remember.’

‘OK, muddafukka.’

‘Much better.’

‘Fergus, I can change any thought that hurts.’ At that moment a voice comes on the line and asks for another $2.75. Then the phone begins ringing without my having hung up. ‘Hello?’

The voice replies ‘You owe $2.75.’

‘Yeah, I know, I’m just trying to find it.’

‘You owe $2.75,’ says the voice for the third time.

‘Look,’ I counter, needled, ‘I never asked for credit.’

The voice persists: ‘$2.75.’

I hang up. It rings, I pick up, a voice says ‘You owe $2.75.’ It’s still ringing ten minutes later, by which time I’m sitting in room 12 with the TV tuned into Oprah and a collection of compulsive eaters.

This is the start of my lost week.

Five days anyway. Five mornings at The Ark, five afternoons and evenings at the public library on East Macy Street. In between only Gita’s morning dirges – ‘Work?’, ‘Alone?’, muffins, coffee, Camels and a couple of unisom at bedtime. By the end of the week, I have conquered the astrological texts, esp and the paranormal, read interminable accounts of alien abductions, absorbed Tibetan reincarnation prayers, books on angels and Ascended Masters, followed recipes to make the body invisible, interpreted chanting records, xeroxed a chart indicating in diagrammatic form how best to hug a tree, taken advice on organising your own rebirth, skimmed guides to the millennium, noted apocalyptic predictions of the earth changes and begun the long preparation for a course in miracles.

At the end of the fifth day I compile a list:

PATHS TO SPIRITUAL FULFILMENT (NEW AGE)

1. Intuitive development

Chakras, auras, astrology, channelling, oracles, tarot

2. Creating your own reality

Transformational journeys, meditation, dreamwork, astral projection, brain machines, drugs

3. Transitions

Birth, death, reincarnation, past lives

4. Spirituality

Mysticism, Native American spiritualism, nature worship, the Goddess, the Crone, miracles

5. Consumption

Shopping

and resolve to make this my agenda.

DAY EIGHT

Awake at six, feeling elated. It’s sunny outside, but cool still. A rust-coloured hummingbird motors around the agave outside my room. In the shower I am overtaken by the uncomfortable but undeniable possibility that the longer I spend alone the lonelier I may become.

My God-Box insight for the day is:

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood

printed in soy-based ink with a picture of an ancient swinging in a child’s playground.

A woman at the juice bar in Wild Oats on Cordova Street recommends wheatgrass juice on account of its positive impact on prana. She doesn’t say whether it takes prana away or gives it to you, but at $3 a pop you’d have a right to expect it to do one or the other, surely. She directs me to the seating area, where, pinned up on the corkboard is a notice advertising a drum birthing workshop: ‘The second day of the workshop is spent in birthing teams ritually birthing both your drum and yourself. You will be guided in how to co-ordinate sound, breath, your body and the team’s energy in order to give your drum the best life possible. A properly birthed drum will pull tremendous amounts of energy from you in order to begin its life, just as a baby does.’

‘You here for Whole Life or just doing some work on your-self?’ asks the juice-bar attendant, with the dilute resignation of a person who finds that life in the periods between trips tends towards the crushingly predictable.

‘Bit of both, I guess,’ I reply in non-committal tone. She waves away an insect, suppressing a yawn with a flailing hand.

‘Have you been out to the desert yet?’

I shake my head.

She opens her eyes in mild surprise, as if offended by my unconventional behaviour.

‘You must go! The life force there! I mean, the whole desert energy thing roots you into this amazing consciousness of your interconnectedness with all beings.’

‘What,’ I suggest, recalling the texts of the lost week, ‘transformative at the soul level?’

‘We’re talking molecular.’

‘So you’re saying it acts as a kind of metaphor for the holographic universe?’ I persist.

‘Right.’

‘Biocosmic resonation?’

She smiles a smile a highway wide. ‘Hey, you’re into that too.’ Then leaning in close enough for me to be able to smell the tang of grease in her hair. ‘Tell me, did we meet in a past life?’

‘Uh huh,’ I reply, returning the smile.

‘I knew I’d seen your face before.’

I’m driving to Chris Griscom’s Light Institute in Galisteo, about twenty miles south of Santa Fe, for a ‘Knowings’ in which people gather ‘knowing’ from themselves and ‘apply it from a place of enlightenment’. I had always imagined wisdom to be an accumulated quality, only now I am told it can be taught in Knowings workshops.

South of Santa Fe, the sky unfurls to an artificial blue, scribbled over with cirrus. Last night’s roadkill still lies moist and filleted on the highway, as yet undiscovered by the ravens sunning themselves in the squawbush on either side of the road. It is the first day of summer heat. The sun is yellow now; by noon it will shine as whitely as magnesium flare.

The highway passes right through Galisteo then out onto the other side, across the Galisteo basin. At speed, you might pass the village of Galisteo altogether before your eyes had even registered it. The main street is little more than a strip of dry clay messed up into troughs by the winter rains. A black mongrel dog tied to a loop set into an adobe wall pulls at its chain and howls. Caboose draws up and slides into the verge, too early for the ‘Knowings’. On the pavement lies an old fake swiss army knife, handle picked at by ants, blade sound enough. Near to the place where the dog is tied, two hispanic women and a man in a straw hat sit in the shade of a mesquite tree still covered in the papery casings of its lost blossom. Across the road towards the Spanish church, the plastic honeycomb from a six-pack drifts in the breeze. A car runs over it, slows momentarily then flows south leaving its image slipping into the heat shine.

The patrona of the local store is stationed on a wooden chair outside brushing away the dust with a Spanish fan. A radio tuned into a Santa Fe station spits out part of the signal. She follows me into the store, lined along one side with Uncle Ben’s; she smoothes her hair, lifts the plastic cover from a plate of danish pastries, wipes off a fly and moves along the counter. Taking my five-dollar bill and making a little show of it, she opens a wooden drawer where there are five-dollar bills and one-dollar bills, fixed together with an iron bulldog clip and passes back some coins. I sit up against a wall hard from the sun, sip from a bottle of warm, sweet soda and watch the black dog shivering on its chain. A boy with worn down shoes comes by carrying a bunch of mint with the leaves dragging in the dust.

Over the wall in someone’s garden two cockerels are doing violence to each other, throwing pieces of flinty stone up into the air and a chestnut horse with a paper fringe over its head to keep away the flies rubs its neck against a little bothy built into the wall. The chickens don’t bother it, the dog doesn’t bother it. A man passes in a tow truck, makes a wide turn at the end of the road and cuts the engine. He sits and waits for something to happen, but nothing does. Around the town in each direction lies almost silent a fauvist bowl of bluegreen laterite edged in navy where the sky scrolls down onto its beginning.

The world headquarters of the Griscom global enlightenment enterprise is a collection of modest little buildings surrounded by cottonwood bosque up a remote and self-effacing dirt track to the east of Galisteo. By six-thirty, fifty people or so have gathered in a prefabricated building on one side of the main administrative building, behind an adobe barn. To the front of this building a line of cars waits to park: Mercedes estates, Mitsubishi four-wheel-drives, GM minivans, the odd station wagon. A waspish woman in linen tells me she makes the round trip (seven hundred miles or so) from Denver each week. It costs her $50 in gas, plus the $15 Light Institute fee. Chris Griscom is a very fine person, and a very famous person she says. It occurs to me that since my last visit to America celebrity has become a moral value as well as informing the predominant popular ideology.

We sit and wait in silence. Every now and then Wasp’s stomach chirps. An Institute assistant, also dressed in linen, begins setting up tape machines and microphones by the door, and after a wait of a few minutes Griscom herself hovers in, head-to-toe white silk robes with white silk hair and golden tan, smiling an abstracted, internalized kind of smile, and stands with arms outstretched for the assistant to wire her up. Fully wired, she processes to a chair at the front of the room, lowers herself into it and does something Hindu with her hands.

‘Enlightenment is really the recognition …’ Griscom pauses, regarding with indulgent modesty the microphone clipped to her breast. The chic assistant grapples with the connection, the tape rolls, the microphone picks up and Griscom begins again. ‘Enlightenment is really the recognition and acceptance of all energies and the capacity to be where they intersect, where those spin points are, where the negative pushes itself into the light, or is drawn into the light, so that there is a correspondent intersection between the doing and the being.’

Her audience shifts, then settles. The wasp leans forward and starts to take notes.

‘Enlightenment’, continues Griscom, voice creamy, sweeping long silver hair languorously from her face, ‘has to do with freedom of choice. When you are looking at the incarnations that you’re looking at this week you’re having an opportunity to be the killer and the lover at the same time.’

A man behind kicks the back of my chair, causing a cold rill of sweat to leave its source between my legs and begin a journey across the thigh. Others fan themselves with their hands and purses. In my row about three along, someone struggles against sleep.

‘So, once we realize that even if you are there in the place of wrong there’s still a spark in there, there’s still something that, if you can look at it from a witnessing position which is what you’re sort of doing here, you can see that you did what you could with the consciousness you had, and that being didn’t understand wrong the way you might now, and so through that experience they gained some recognition.’

‘Does that mean we can go away and do anything we like, and still get enlightened?’ I whisper across to my neighbour.

‘Shh,’ she replies.

‘One of the lessons that has stopped human evolution at this point is the incapacity to see the purpose of all experience and therefore to embrace and comprehend what we would call the meditative. Everything is there exactly as it needs to be in order to allow the motion to continue because evolution is a part of the pulse, it is the pulse, of the universe. So, if we can sit in that space, letting even a flicker of the master that we have been, that we can recognize, that comes from our recognition from our incarnations, just a flicker of that to sit with us …’

A toddler runs over to the Griscom throne and attempts to mount. Griscom smiles and pushes it off.

‘… then we can perceive in a totally different way. The difficulty with linear is that it’s always out in front or behind instead of here, right here now. And with that, the scope to see its purpose, because it either hasn’t come yet, or it’s already shut off, then we can’t recognise purpose. Purpose is a living thing, it’s life itself, that ecstasy, when it needs no more explanation, it just is.’

I turn to my neighbour who is trying her best to balance the demands of note-taking and staring intently ahead.

‘I’m completely lost. What was that about linear?’

‘After.’

My eyelids begin an inexorable downward progress. Half an hour or so later I’m woken by the voice of the woman next to me, who is explaining to the assembly how she was psychically attacked in a dream the previous night and woke up to discover red welts all over her body, and Chris Griscom is congratulating her on fending off the psychic invader and mentioning the undeniable increase in the number of aliens feeding on human energies in the region and pointing out that this is happening to test our strength and make us more whole. I wonder vaguely if the hungry alien argument was part of the reason for Shirley Maclaine’s conversion to the New Age. I think I’m beginning to grasp Griscom’s vision thing. It goes like this: we are all here for a purpose, we’re entitled to constant bliss, we don’t need to feel pain, we are in the inevitable process of evolution, we can be free of our bodies and inhabit the universe. That’s about it, simply put.

And all those hungry souls, with their unsatisfying, slipaway lives, the souls of the ones who are not Shirley Maclaine and never will be, all the ordinary ones, can rest reassured by a simple weekly payment of $15 to the Light Institute of Galisteo that there is a higher reason for it all. Whereas, of course, there may well not be.

The way I see it, a pile of money goes round in circles in the little community of Santa Fe, and every time it comes round to the Light Institute of Galisteo, a bit more drops off.

DAY TEN

A queue winds down from the ticket booth at the Whole Life Expo in the town centre, across West Marcy Street towards the public library. From up ahead comes the sound of drumming. A printed programme available at the door details the lectures and workshops for the day:

* ‘Is there an Alien-Multinational Connection?’

* ‘Learn how bone-headed misinformants are placed in UFO conferences as speakers to baffle and confuse you’

* ‘The Vampire and the Psychic Gatekeeper,’ talk given by Helaine Harris, creator of Psychoshamanism™

* ‘The Virtual Reality of MetaNeurological Genesis’

* ‘The Properties of Extraterrestrial Science and Tibetan-Andromedan Intervention in World Affairs during 1993’

* ‘Soul Triggering of the Brain’s Joy Center – Super Conscious Self-Technics to Save Us From Extinction’, by Orayna Orr, empath

The list continues: workshops on angels, astral projection, colonic irrigation, past lives, auric massage and discovering the wild woman within. It’s going to be a busy day.

From among the vendors of extremely low-frequency headsets, magic wands, colonic irrigation suppositories, copper pyramids and high energy gloves I select the Kirilian photography booth. A Kirilian photograph can produce an image of the aura. Now the existence of auras seems pretty plausible to me. How else could a person sense when another enters the room, without seeing or hearing them? What other explanation can there be for the ability to detect a mood or tension in the air? It doesn’t matter to me whether the aura is electromagnetic energy, sixth sense, sophisticated heat detector, lifeforce, or anything else, only that it exists. To be able to have physical evidence of it would be an assurance that some things are beyond the reaches of science. It would be a sign that mysteries still exist. I have a hunch that, once I know all there is to know about my aura, I’ll feel more attuned to the New Age altogether.

While we’re standing in line, a woman in an outsized orange beret solicits my opinion of the Mississippi floods. Pictures of broken levees and devastated homes are being shown on every news programme on the TV, and occupy the front pages of much of the printed press too. I say I think they’re terrible.

‘No they’re not,’ replies the orange beret.

‘Really?’

‘Of course not, they’re all part of the earth changes.’

Haven’t I heard? The planet is on the brink of an apocalyptic phase, during which storms and floods and earthquakes and all kinds of natural disasters will kill most of the world’s population – especially the unspiritual ones – leading those remaining to a new era of peace and higher consciousness.

‘The Age of Aquarius,’ she says, ‘you must have heard.’

‘Is that the same thing as the New Age?’

‘Aquarius,’ repeats the orange beret, sounding confused.

A Kirilian photograph looks very much like a regular polaroid, as it turns out, but at $15 a shot it has to be different. In any case, Kirilian photographs are taken by a highly complex Kirilian mechanism, requiring the subject to place his or her palm on a metal plate and visualize the auric field while the booth assistant shouts instructions from beneath a piece of black cloth. There then follows a soft popping preceded by an intense white light, and the aura photograph spools from a flap in the side of the machine. Mine is a chemical green, with two livid haloes floating above it like aerial ringworm sores.

‘Oh my,’ says the booth assistant, ‘this is interesting. See that green? That’s healing. And the red is passion.’ Passion and healing, I’m thinking, not bad.

‘You have a young soul, not too many lifetimes here, full of energy, adventuresomeness, you’re highly active physically, probably travel a good deal, veerrry creative. I’d guess you make your living by your wits. You’re fascinated by what goes on in the world, are you in the news? Something like that, I’m only guessing.’

And she’s on to the next in line, orange beret. I indulge my ego in a small self-congratulatory moment. Young soul, fascinated, adventuresome. Hotdamn! My aura is telling me I’m the person I always wanted to be.

‘Oh my.’ The booth assistant is speaking to orange beret now, holding the beret’s aura image, ‘this is interesting. See that green? A young soul. Veery creative.’

I call Fergus collect to let him know first that my aura is green for healing, red for passion and second that the earth is about to implode. He seems unimpressed, but then he is a New Yorker. As I’m leaving the phone booth someone presses a flyer into my hands and invites me to a lecture at 4pm given by a Princess Sharula Dux who will be demonstrating the tools and format to bring the planet into the Aquarian Age as prescribed by the Melchizedek Temple of Telos. Topics covered will include passing through the astrological doorway of 12:12, and the restructuring of the Melchizedek Priesthood, the spiritual warriors and world leaders of the Golden Age. Pretty comprehensive.

At some point in my lost week I read about Princess Sharula and her theories. The Princess Dux I read about is a 267 year-old Ambassador from a subterranean city called Telos which is in turn part of the ancient underground kingdom of Lemuria, sister civilization to Atlantis and Mu.

At four sharp she arrives at lecture theatre number three, blinking at the crowd, an immensity in a marine-theme catsuit, and makes her way to the front of the room with that rolling gait peculiar to the corpulent, closely followed by a young outdoors type with long hair tied back in a ponytail, who introduces himself as Shield Dux and asks us to give a big hand to Her Excellency the Princess Sharula Dux, his beloved wife and distinguished Ambassador from the court of Telos.

Sharula wants her public to understand that the world is in disarray, convulsed by greed, natural disasters, cancer, urban violence, tax evasion and cruelty to animals. She wants us to know that we are standing at a crossroads in the 1990s. A crossroads, every generation needs to hear it. In the 1890s our great-grandparents were standing at a crossroads. We were standing at a crossroads when Martin Luther King took the fatal bullet, when Reaganomics was in vogue. We have always, I fear, been standing at a crossroads.

In Princess Dux’s opinion the New Age is coming pretty soon now, about as soon as it takes for the gargantuan crystal matrix computers of the universe to receive a cosmic refurbishment. There’s good news for Americans, says Dux; the United States of America is programmed to become the world’s first crystal matrix paradise because it is in America that the current global cauldron of ills is bubbling away the hardest.

Eventually, question time comes round, and no-one seems to have much to say so I stand and venture:

‘One thing I’ve always wanted to know is whether it gets a little smoggy down underground, you know, without the benefit of the wind?’

The princess smoothes her pearl-grey hair and winds a thread around one of the anchor buttons of her catsuit.

‘You must have learned such a lot in your 267 years.’

‘I have had the occasional enlightenment, it’s true. Actually, all our power comes from an electromagnetic injection into the crystal matrix that harnesses the ethereal power and provides energy for a million years. It is completely clean and entirely without ecological consequences. So, you see, we have no smog at all. You have yet to learn such technologies. Earth people are remarkably backward in some respects.’

‘You know, your majesty or whatever,’ I continue, emboldened. ‘I sometimes feel confused and barely human.’ There’s a rustle of recognition in the audience. ‘I do have this weird little birthmark on my back. Suppose I’m Lemurian, like you. I mean, how could I tell?’

She looks at me darkly, smile faded away to a little flicker about the nostrils.

‘I don’t think that’s likely, you’re probably just an extraterrestrial.’

Sometimes I can be so cheap it gets me down.

In the coffee bar, a Californian called Talon invites me to a free demonstration of his Tachyon energy bodysuits. Now, in different circumstances nothing would have kept me from Talon’s Tachyon energy bodysuit, but I am committed to the Brad and Sherry Steiger lecture at 5.30. No matter, says Talon, why doesn’t he swing by after the lecture, and he’ll give me an individual session ‘with no obligations’, so we fix a vague time and Talon wanders off back to his Tachyon energy booth and I never do discover exactly what Tachyon energy is.

Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger are New Age celebs, which is to say, they have made appearances on The Joan Rivers Show and can afford a half-page ad in the Whole Life Expo catalogue. Their books include Hollywood and the Supernatural and Mysteries of Time and Space. The most recent, Strange Powers of Pets, was a Literary Guild selection. In addition Sherry Hansen Steiger is a licensed publicist while Brad once won the Film Advisory Board’s Award of Excellence. The Milwaukee Sentinel apparently says they have ‘a wonderful understanding of the forthcoming changes.’