Lesson I didn't Learn

 I wish I had learnt the art of nonbeing in my adolescence. 

This week's Indispire theme is: Things I Wish I Knew When I Was A teenager #Life 

There is a character in my novel, Black Hole, who seeks nonbeing. Jane Abercrombie is a Jewish woman born in Hitler's Germany. She sees her people disappearing into nonbeing. Standing on the shards of broken windowpanes of Kristallnacht, Jane tells her father quoting Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, "I am going on my way, not to seek another doctrine, for I know there is none, but to leave all doctrines and all teachers and to reach my goal alone - or die." 

"Go my daughter," her father tells her. "Maybe, the non-being in India will be less painful than the non-being which awaits us here in our fatherland."

Jane will learn yet another nuance of nonbeing in India. Quite different from Hitler's and Yahweh's. Totally different from the Buddha's. She will learn the nonbeing of sexual ecstasy, the egolessness of Kamasutra's climaxes, from none other than a godman in the making. The fraudulence of the spiritual guru explodes in her psyche echoing Hitler's Kristallnacht. She leaves the ashram and goes to Israel where she will be given a dream in that country's Declaration of Independence: The state of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions...

A page from 'Black Hole'

Dreams are sweet and free. The reality is a nightmare.

I did grow up from my adolescent self-centredness. A little. But only to long for nonbeing again and again. Life offers it too in abundance. In the form of the Eliotean death-in-life that is abundant all around. In the form of people who are kind enough to reform you, people who want to redeem your soul, those who want to teach you patriotism... 

I wish I had learnt the real art of nonbeing in my teenage. 

In the novel, Black Hole, Jesus chooses nonbeing. Standing before the governor who vacillates between two loyalties - to truth and to the mob - Jesus wonders what he is to say in defence of himself. "What am I to say? Jesus thought to himself. That I detest the human species? That man is God's biggest blunder? That I long for the cross?"

Jesus chose nonbeing. The Buddha had done that much earlier. I belong to an inferior race, one whose adolescent self-centredness refuses to yield to the cosmos's endless process of pulverisation and transmutation. But I wish I had learnt that divine art long, long ago.