Buried Alive - Part 1

n a shrine room in a barn in a village in the Pyranees, it was 8 o’clock at night. The air was cool. On the floor were six or eight antique Persian rugs, and eight pillows arranged in an oval. Sitting cross-legged in the meditation position were the six of us who would be buried alive. Ten minutes passed. People shifted. Some of us eyed each other, others kept their eyes down. Two girls taught a boy how to fold his legs into the lotus posture. He tried it, winced, and returned to Indian style. More time passed, and Bharat entered, the guru from England, Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. He had a shaved head and was always beaming. He wore a shaman’s outfit: black djini pants and a shirt that folded closed like a kimono. He asked me how my French was, and when I told him it was so-so, he shrugged. “I’ll do it in both languages.”

He said something like this: “The story of the angel. Does anyone know this story? The story of the angel? Have I told you this one…?

“There is a family. The grandmother is blind, the mother is barren, and the father is poor. An angel comes to them, and the angel says, ‘I will grant you one wish.

I want the one among you who is the cleverest to make it.’

“Since there are mostly women here, we’ll say it was the mother: She gets one wish. Let’s say you were her. What would you wish for?”

He looked at each of us in turn: “What would you wish for?”

“For sight,” Katherine said.

“Sure, OK. For sight. For the grandmother. OK. Anyone else?”

He filled a small brass bowl with incense, and spoke as he lit it. “Anyone else? What would you wish for, if you had one wish?” He used an ostrich feather to fan the smoke from the incense over a pretty young French woman’s head. “What would you wish for?”

He fanned incense smoke over the next student, who murmured, “Peace for all beings.” “Peace for all beings, sure, good. Good. Why not. Anybody else? You have one wish.”

He stood behind each of us, fanning smoke over our heads, and when he’d made the full circle, he said, “Do you want to know what she wished for? She wished that her grandmother would see her baby in a cradle of gold.”

Everyone smiled.

“We can’t all be that clever. But that’s what I want you to be thinking now: ‘Why am I here.’ Right? ‘Why am I here?’ Anyone? What are you doing here?” He said we’d meet again the next morning at 10 AM.

t 10 AM, we headed up the mountain. France had been rainy all summer, so the path was slick with yellow-brown mud. The grade was steep, and those parts of the mountain not on the path were, for the most part, completely unpassable, just patches of blackberries and reedy brambles. Several of us fell over.

A quarter-mile up the hill, we came to an oval-shaped, muddy clearing on a steep grade. In its center, sticks and tree poles were arranged in a pile about four feet high and six feet long. The pile was graded, with the left-most side holding twigs, and the rightmost branches. Ordered around what had been a fire pit in the clearing’s center were six grave mounds, washed out but unmistakable, each one small, oval-shaped, the size of a body.

We walked in a circle until Bharat told us to stop. Where we stopped was where we would dig our holes. Our heads would all point in, toward the center. I was at four o’clock.

We started to dig. I had to get about two feet down before I was working on level ground. At this point, we hadn’t been told anything— how deep we should go, how we would lie in the dirt. I didn’t know if I would be able to move or how I would breathe. I dug. My grave was full of roots. One passed over where my chest would be. Two were at my feet. One emerged from the grave’s center, basically between where my legs would go. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to saw them out or lie beneath them, so I left them and I dug.

At 6 PM, we covered our graves with plastic tarps and went back down the hill and ate. I’d opened up a blister on my hand, and my back and arms were tight and unpleasantly sore. At 8 PM, we met again in the shrine room.

Bharat talked about renunciation. He talked about eliminating our passions and desires. He said whatever our problems were, they were bullshit. But for the devoted, he was offering a trade: a night in a grave, and your problems would go away. It was criminal.

He told the story of himself, how at 10 years old, his mom had come into his room and seen him crying. She asked him why he was sad, and he said he really wanted a miniature James Bond car. She said, “You can have it,” and he burst into tears. He said, “I think at that moment I learned that our sadness is not connected to anything in the phenomenal world. But the human mind is a reasoning, logical organ. If you give it a problem, it will search for a reason. Of course, it took me a lot of work, a lot of years, to really learn this.”

He talked about our devotion. He said we needed to question him, but once we’d made a decision, doubt was a hindrance. He told us the story of the two camels.

“A guru said to his two students, ‘The one of you who walks his camel up the 15-foot stone walls of the city tonight will be my student.’ The first student, after several minutes of thought, went to the teacher and said, ‘Listen, I get it. You are trying to see which one of us is stupid. I am not stupid, and I am not going to do that. It’s impossible. I will be your student.’

“The teacher said, ‘Come with me,’ and took the first student to the city gates, overlooking the second student, who tried all night to lead his camel up the wall. In the morning, the guru said, ‘The test is not to see who is smart, but who is devoted.’ The second student became his student.”

Bharat told other stories. He laughed gleefully. He beamed. He said we could work with our problems like gum in our hair, and pick them out slowly, hair by hair, or just cut it all off in one go.

Coincidentally, he himself was bald.

TO BE CONTINUED:

BURIED ALIVE!

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