The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 80

My third life.

I have told you that I wandered for a while as a priest, monk, scholar, theologian–call it what you will–idiot in search of answers, whatever. I have told you of my meeting with Shen, the Chinese spy who respectfully hoped I wasn’t there to overthrow communism. I have told you of being beaten in Israel and scorned in Egypt, of finding faith and losing it as easily as a comfortable pair of slippers.

I have not told you of Madam Patna.

She was an Indian mystic, one of the first to realise that the most profitable way to be enlightened was to spread her enlightenment to concerned Westerners who hadn’t had enough cultural opportunities to nurture their cynicism. I was one of those Westerners for a time and sat at her feet chanting empty nothings with the rest of them, for a while genuinely convinced–as I was genuinely convinced of most things in that life–that this chubby, cheery woman did indeed offer me a path to enlightenment. After a few months of working for free–which I considered a necessary part of becoming closer to nature and thus myself–in her extensive plantations, I was granted a rare interview with her, and, almost shaking with excitement, sat cross-legged on the floor before the great lady and waited to be wowed.

She was silent a long time, deep in meditation, and we devotees had learned long ago not to question these deep and presumably profound pauses. At last she raised her head and, looking straight through me, declared, “You are a divine being.”

As statements went, this was nothing very new for our mandir.

“You are a creature of light. Your soul is song, your thoughts are beauty. There is nothing within you which is not perfection. You are yourself. You are the universe.”

Chanted by a crowd in a large room, all this could be rather impressive. Now, with this one woman breathily intoning it, I was struck by just how contradictory so much of it appeared to be.

“What about God?” I asked.

This question seemed a little impertinent to Madam Patna, but rather than disappoint an avid follower with a casual dismissal, she smiled her trademark cheerful smile and proclaimed, “There is no such thing as God. There is only creation. You are part of creation, and it is within you.”

“Then why can I not influence creation?”

“You do. Everything about you, every aspect of your being, every breath…”

“I mean… why can I not influence my own path through it.”

“But you do!” she repeated firmly. “This life is only a passing flicker of the flame, a shadow. You will cast it off and soar to a new plane, a new level of understanding, where you will realise that what you perceive now as reality is no more than a prison of the senses. You will look, and it will be as if you see with the eye of the maker. You are within creation. Creation is within you. You are an aspect of the first breath that made the universe, your body is made of the dust of bodies that have gone before, and when you die, your body and your deeds give life. You, yourself, are God.”

In later months I grew rather tired of such empty aphorisms, and when a dissatisfied disciple whispered in my ear that our austere, ascetic leader in fact lived a life of wealthy luxury some three miles down the road, I threw down my straw hat and hand scythe, and left to find a better philosophy. Yet, all these lives later, I still wondered exactly what it would mean to see the universe with the eyes of God.