I. Introducción
1.1. Realidad Problemática
PG, Tuesday
Y ou cannot reasonpeople out of insanity. It took me a lot of heartache to learn that and a part of me never has.
“Are you telling me that for the past three weeks,” I asked Lorraine, “you have not existed in time and space?”
“That’s a funny way to put it,” she said.
“It’s a funny thing to do.”
“Josh, you read all these things, too. What’s the point if you don’t believe a word of them.”
“They are metaphors for our spiritual experience. They are to help us cope with the material world, not escape it.”
“Is life is about coping? What a horrible thing to think. What an awful thing to believe. Why bother just for that? The world of time and space is the escape. I don’t need or want an escape from God any more. Let me go, Josh, let me go.”
I walked over to Lorraine and put my arms around her waist. “No,” she said and knocked my arms apart.
I grabbed her right wrist and turned her until her right side faced me. She was not willing, but could not win a wrestling match. If it came to that, I was glad to talk to the police if she was.
Lorraine winced when I touched the bandage below her ribs. I released her wrist and stepped back. “It must be tender. Is it a nasty cut? Get that recently?”
“I need you to let me go. Will you?” She wasn’t going to answer my questions. I didn’t need her to.
“Women do what they like. For better or worse, that is the law.”
Lorraine smiled and waited. At least her insanity was the patient kind.
“Yes,” I said, “I will let you go if you wish. Wherever it is that you’re going. But I have to tell the police I’ve seen you.”
“Can you wait?”
The First Asking
“Wait?”
“They won’t do anything in the next two weeks. By then I’ll have taken care of things.”
The police would think I was lying unless I produced a live Lorraine.
Lorraine was not facing charges for anything and I couldn’t arrest her even if she was. The trespass at the Spencer House was a misdemeanor. A real kidnap is not a good way to beat the rap on an nonexistent murder.
My choice was simple. Give her two weeks. Or answer police questions about a story that sounded even hokier than my first one.
“I can’t promise anything,” I said. “If they put the screws to me, I’ll have to rat you out.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then you got two weeks. But please don’t stretch this out.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I should have taken more time to explain.”
She grabbed me and hugged me, firmly, but favoring her left. Then she stepped back and looked at me.
“You are the toughest thing for me to let go of.” Tears were back in her eyes.
Then she moved to the door and was around it and gone.
“Wait!” I hear nothing on the stairs. I ran out and looked down. It was astonishing she could be out of the stairwell that fast, impossible she had gone far. I ran down and out to the curb. Nothing in any direction.
There was only one direction in which she could have disappeared so quickly. I ran to the walkway alongside the building. Nothing. The walkway only led one place, Mermaid Lane. I ran back there and looked its length.
Empty.
Where had she gone? The light was fading. There were dark recesses all along the crowded, narrow alley. I walked a block in each direction looking around cars and trash cans. I saw nothing, which left only two possibilities.
Ignoring what the neighbors might think, I flattened myself to the pavement so I could see under the cars.
She’d have looked foolish hiding under a parked car. But she wasn’t hiding and she didn’t look foolish — I did. Foolish was just the right way to look when contemplating the one possibility that remained. Lorraine had dissolved into thin air.
However she’d done it, she was gone. I went back upstairs. My section of coast is now pricey real estate, but it was not always so. Early settlers rejected Pacific Grove as foggy, cold and dark. The first large community
∀
here was summer only. Even today, there are a lot fewer people here in the winter. Usually I prefer the quiet, but tonight it was gloomy.
◦ ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦
Taking this talk of entering the Action seriously for a moment, I didn’t think combining it with the Yoga of No Effort was likely to solve the problems of either one. The annoyance about entering the Action has always been that popping into and out of the Action is uncontrolled. You don’t do it, it happens to you. It’s a sign of high spiritual attainment, but sometimes damned inconvenient.
The Yoga of No Effort is a very controlled thing. You take your con-sciousness, pick a target, aim, and shoot. And it’s just plain bad news. Since the messy death of Young Teacher back in the eleventh century nobody else has dared to touch it.
That’s assuming these yogas ever existed. I’m more inclined to take the Tibetan scriptures at face value than most. Scientists say that nobody in a lab has ever entered the Action, or projected his consciousness, and that nobody ever will. They’re right on the first two and putting themselves way out on a limb with the third.
It’s a limb they’ve had sawed off. Westerners said that yogis who claimed to control their heartbeat were talking nonsense. That talk ended around 1939, when Krishnamacharya seems to have stopped his ticker cold for over two minutes while a team of French doctors monitored him. I say
“seems” because while nobody disputes this incident, I can’t find a journal publication for it either.
No matter. In 1970, Swami Rama let Elmer and Alyce Greene wire him up at the Menninger Institute. The Swami then stopped pumping blood for sixteen seconds. There is a publication on that and you can look at the EKG for yourself if you like.
Ditto with body temperature. Western science said that nobody could raise their own before some yogis chosen by the Dalai Lama let Herbert Benson hook them up to instruments. The journal article on that came out in 1982.
The record is pretty clear. Western science has bad luck when it comes to telling yogis what they can and cannot do. And yogis only make lab demonstrations when it serves their purposes. If someone knew the Yoga of Forceful Projection, why would he want to prove it in a lab? No reason I can think of.
The First Asking
Do I believe in these yogas? Not really. Am I sure? No. Some people can be proved wrong, make a quick fix to their theory, then turn around and announce with total assurance that they once again have certain knowledge.
I’m not one of them.