“When I was twenty,” Vijaya now volunteered, “I put in four months at that cement plant—and after that ten weeks making superphosphates and then six months in the jungle, as a lumberjack.”
“All this ghastly honest toil!”
“Twenty years earlier,” said Dr. Robert, “I did a stint at the copper smelters. After which I had a taste of the sea on a fishing boat. Sampling all kinds of work—it’s part of everybody’s education. One learns an enormous amount that way—about things and skills and organizations, about all kinds of people and their ways of thinking.”
Will shook his head. “I’d still rather get it out of a book.”
“But what you can get out of a book is never it. At bottom,” Dr. Robert added, “all of you are still Platonists. You worship the word and abhor matter!”
“Tell that to the clergymen,” said Will. “They’re always reproaching us with being crass materialists.”
“Crass,” Dr. Robert agreed, “but crass precisely because you’re such inadequate materialists. Abstract materialism—that’s what you profess. Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely—materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands. Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism; it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible. Sampling different kinds of work in concrete materialism is the first, indispensable step in our education for concrete spirituality.”
“But even the most concrete materialism,” Vijaya qualified, “won’t get you very far unless you’re fully conscious of what you’re doing and experiencing. You’ve got to be completely aware of the bits of matter you’re handling, the skills you’re practicing, the people you work with.”
“Quite right,” said Dr. Robert. “I ought to have made it clear that concrete materialism is only the raw stuff of a fully human life. It’s through awareness, complete and constant awareness, that we transform it into concrete spirituality. Be fully aware of what you’re doing, and work becomes the yoga of work, play becomes the yoga of play, everyday living becomes the yoga of everyday living.”
Will thought of Ranga and the little nurse. “And what about love?”
Dr. Robert nodded. “That too. Awareness transfigures it, turns love-making into the yoga of love-making.”
Murugan gave an imitation of his mother looking shocked.
“Psychophysical means to a transcendental end,” said Vijaya, raising his voice against the grinding screech of the low gear into which he had just shifted, “that, primarily, is what all these yogas are. But they’re also something else, they’re also devices for dealing with the problems of power.” He shifted back to a quieter gear and lowered his voice to its normal tone. “The problems of power,” he repeated. “And they confront you on every level of organization—every level, from national governments down to nurseries and honeymooning couples. For it isn’t merely a question of making things hard for the Great Leaders. There are all the millions of small-scale tyrants and persecutors, all the mute inglorious Hitlers, the village Napoleons, the Calvins and Torquemadas of the family. Not to mention all the brigands and bullies stupid enough to get themselves labeled as criminals. How does one harness the enormous power these people generate and set it to work in some useful way—or at least prevent it from doing harm?”
“That’s what I want you to tell me,” said Will. “Where do you start?”
“We start everywhere at once,” Vijaya answered. “But since one can’t say more than one thing at a time, let’s begin by talking about the anatomy and physiology of power. Tell him about your biochemical approach to the subject, Dr. Robert.”
“It started,” said Dr. Robert, “nearly forty years ago, while I was studying in London. Started with prison visiting on weekends and reading history whenever I had a free evening. History and prisons,” he repeated. “I discovered that they were closely related. The record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind (that’s Gibbon, isn’t it?) and the place where unsuccessful crimes and follies are visited with a special kind of misfortune. Reading my books and talking to my jailbirds, I found myself asking questions. What kind of people became dangerous delinquents—the grand delinquents of the history books, the little ones of Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubbs?
What kinds of people are moved by the lust for power, the passion to bully and domineer? And the ruthless ones, the men and women who know what they want and have no qualms about hurting and killing in order to get it, the monsters who hurt and kill, not for profit, but gratuitously, because hurting and killing are such fun—who are they? I used to discuss these questions with the experts—doctors, psychologists, social scientists, teachers. Mantegazza and Galton had gone out of fashion, and most of my experts assured me that the only valid answers to these questions were answers in terms of culture, economics, and the family. It was all a matter of mothers and toilet training, of early conditioning and traumatic environments.
I was only half convinced. Mothers and toilet training and the circumambient nonsense—these were obviously important. But were they all-important? In the course of my prison visiting I’d begun to see evidence of some kind of a built-in pattern—or rather of two kinds of built-in patterns; for dangerous delinquents and power-loving troublemakers don’t belong to a single species. Most of them, as I was beginning to realize even then, belong to one or other of two distinct and dissimilar species—the Muscle People and the Peter Pans. I’ve specialized in the treatment of Peter Pans.”
“The boys who never grow up?” Will queried.
“‘Never’ is the wrong word. In real life Peter Pan always ends by growing up. He merely grows up too late—grows up physiologically more slowly than he grows up in terms of birthdays.”
“What about girl Peter Pans?”
“They’re very rare. But the boys are as common as blackberries. You can expect one Peter Pan among every five or six male children. And among problem children, among the boys who can’t read, won’t learn, don’t get on with anyone, and finally turn to the more violent forms of delinquency, seven out of ten turn out, if you take an X ray of the bones of the wrist, to be Peter Pans. The rest are mostly Muscle People of one sort or another.”
“I’m trying to think,” said Will, “of a good historical example of a delinquent Peter Pan.”
“You don’t have to go far afield. The most recent, as well as the best and biggest, was Adolf Hitler.”
“Hitler?” Murugan’s tone was one of shocked astonishment. Hitler was evidently one of his heroes.
“Read the Führer’s biography,” said Dr. Robert. “A Peter Pan if ever there was one. Hopeless at school. Incapable either of competing or co-operating. Envying all the normally successful boys—and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings. Then came the time for puberty. But Adolf was sexually backward. Other boys made advances to girls, and the girls responded. Adolf was too shy, too uncertain of his manhood. And all the time incapable of steady work, at home only in the compensatory Other World of his fancy. There, at the very least, he was Michelangelo. Here, unfortunately, he couldn’t draw.
His only gifts were hatred, low cunning, a set of indefatigable vocal cords and a talent for nonstop talking at the top of his voice from the depths of his Peter-Panic paranoia. Thirty or forty million deaths and heaven knows how many billions of dollars—that was the price the world had to pay for little Adolf’s retarded maturation. Fortunately most of the boys who grow up too slowly never get a chance of being more than minor delinquents. But even minor delinquents, if there are enough of them, can exact a pretty stiff price. That’s why we try to nip them in the bud—or rather, since we’re dealing with Peter Pans, that’s why we try to make their nipped buds open out and grow.”
“And do you succeed?”
Dr. Robert nodded. “It isn’t hard. Particularly if you start early enough. Between four and a half and five all our children get a thorough examination. Blood tests, psychological tests, somatotyping; then we X ray their wrists and give them an EEG. All the cute little Peter Pans are spotted without fail, and appropriate treatment is started immediately. Within a year practically all of them are perfectly normal. A crop of potential failures and criminals, potential tyrants and sadists, potential misanthropes and revolutionaries for revolution’s sake, has been transformed into a crop of useful citizens who can be governed adandena asatthena—without punishment and without a sword.
In your part of the world delinquency is still left to clergymen, social workers and the police. Nonstop sermons and supportive therapy; prison sentences galore. With what results? The delinquency rate goes steadily up and up. No wonder. Words about sibling rivalry and hell and the personality of Jesus are no substitutes for biochemistry. A year in jail won’t cure a Peter Pan of his endocrine disbalance or help the ex-Peter Pan to get rid of his psychological consequences. For Peter-Panic delinquency, what you need is early diagnosis and three pink capsules a day before meals. Given a tolerable environment, the result will be sweet reasonableness and a modicum of the cardinal virtues within eighteen months.
Not to mention a fair chance, where before there hadn’t been the faintest possibility, of eventual prajnaparamita and karuna, eventual wisdom and compassion. And now get Vijaya to tell you
